Leon set down the assault rifle he had been carrying the last hour-and-a-half before sitting down among the debris.\u00a0 He still had another hour to go, judging by his map.<\/p>\n
At the moment, he was in some kind of dam control structure on the Nile, left over from the Golden Age.\u00a0 Outside, it was lush; the sound of the river being funneled by the dam filled the air.\u00a0 It was also dangerous out here.\u00a0 Leon was in Fallen territory; a needless accident – his drop-ship had crashed after being hit hard by Fallen air defenses.<\/p>\n
Leon was a Titan, one of the Guardians who served as the backbone defense of the human remnants.\u00a0 He had been on a mission to rescue a detachment of other Guardians from the Fallen, but on the return trip, they were able to position walkers with anti-air cannons in the jungle, catching the drop-ships by surprise.\u00a0 Leon’s drop-ship, along with another one in the group, was shot down.\u00a0 Leon had bailed out and gone into armor lock, but everyone else had been killed.\u00a0 Taking supplies from the wreckage, he had elected to walk all the way back to base.<\/p>\n
For the moment, Leon was safe.\u00a0 He had encountered several Fallen patrols on the way here, but now there was just the sound of the river to console him.\u00a0 As he looked about the room, he saw more and more left-overs from the old days:\u00a0 scraps of paper lying everywhere, a few broken glass bottles, circuitry so rusted and broken it was doubtful one could even budge any of the buttons or levers.<\/p>\n
As Leon looked about, his eyes lighted upon one scrap of paper more interesting than any of the others.\u00a0 At the top was a hole, probably for a pin to attach it to a bulletin board.\u00a0 Centered on the paper was a picture of a tiny nano-chip on a finger.\u00a0 Below, a caption read “Ever thought something this small could hold a terabyte?\u00a0 Now it can.\u00a0 Introducing the NC-5000 Superchip by Arcosk, Inc. – Life Will Never Be The Same Again.”\u00a0 Leon reached over and picked up the small paper scrap.\u00a0 Looking closely, he could see a date near the bottom, in light grey font:\u00a0 2552 – the height of the Golden Age.<\/p>\n
The Golden Age was not well-known to people in the 28th century.\u00a0 There were artifacts all around, if you bothered to look for them.\u00a0 In all truth, though, things had fallen apart so fast that much of the real history was lost.\u00a0 Humanity survived, though beaten.\u00a0 The past, on the other hand, was stuck on life support – and while things were starting to look up, the old history would never return fully.\u00a0 Leon did have a general idea, though.<\/p>\n
As humanity took to the stars, colonizing the distant regions of the galaxy, social changes continued.\u00a0 Democracy and capitalism had spread quite far by the 21st century, and it continued to spread for the next three centuries.\u00a0 Capitalism was particularly virulent, taking hold of much of human kind.\u00a0 Unlike democracy, it not only spread quickly, but it also became engrained in the roots of society more deeply than anything else.\u00a0 As the disparate nations of old gradually clustered together to form even greater nations – the European Union, the United Nations of America, the Republic of Africa, and so on – capitalism took an even greater hold over society.\u00a0 Capitalism became the backbone of colonization.<\/p>\n
When nations became defined not by territory, but by the planets, capitalism became even more entrenched – commerce became the tying element between Earth and Mars, between Beta Lyrae and Tau Ceti.\u00a0 This importance did not fade when humanity became united under the Confederacy of Man in the early 26th century.\u00a0 Prosperity became ubiquitous.\u00a0 But when there is no danger in sight, society of course naturally wanders straight into it; for the reforms of Magnentius in the 2560s gave more freedom to the markets than there ever had been previously.\u00a0 When the corporations become unrestrained, they cannot be trusted – after just two decades, more and more companies realized they could go a little bit outside the bounds of what one might say was moral.\u00a0 After another three decades, poverty had spread like a plague all throughout the core human worlds.<\/p>\n
So when They came, there simply was no contest.\u00a0 Man was looking to solve his own internal problems – war seemed impossible, but destitution was already there.\u00a0 War did come, though, in the form of the alien hordes.\u00a0 The colonies were crushed one by one, until only Earth was left.\u00a0 Had it not been for the Traveler, mankind would have been destroyed.\u00a0 No-one remembers what the Traveler was, or even what exactly destroyed the colonies.\u00a0 All that anyone knows is that the Golden Age was brought to a close by the combination of an economic collapse and a massive invasion of aliens.\u00a0 By this stage, numerous other species had inhabited Earth and the colonies:\u00a0 the Fallen, the Hive, the Vex, among a whole host of others.\u00a0 What relation, if any, they had to the first wave that decimated the colonies, it was unknown.<\/p>\n
Leon didn’t have any longer to think of the past – he had to get moving, fast, if he was to have any chance of reaching the base before nightfall.\u00a0 He checked to see that all his weapons were ready, and walked out the door.<\/p>\n
He took the paper scrap with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leon set down the assault rifle he had been carrying the last hour-and-a-half before sitting down among the debris.\u00a0 He still had another hour to go, judging by his map. At the moment, he was in some kind of dam control structure on the Nile, left over from the Golden Age.\u00a0 Outside, it was lush; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[63,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":538,"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531\/revisions\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/destiny.bungie.org\/fanfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}