The Fall and Year One
The Fall is the collapse of the civilization that existed in Teraell's dimension before the present world, and year one is the year that civilization drew its last breath, the AI was activated, and the first people from our world were brought through to begin again.
The Time of Hubris
The civilization before the Fall had reached a technological peak. Biotechnology was highly advanced. The internet was so entrenched that people carried brain interfaces and communicated by thought, each thought translated into the receiver's own idea of it — a chair sent as one person's chair and received as another's. There was no off switch. People became more isolated than any generation before them, because even conversation was curated for the listener and nobody ever truly knew anyone.
AI was everywhere. It drove medicine, art, and engineering; it also drove misinformation, surveillance, the fracturing of families and governments, and a series of brutal wars started by falsified facts. The arms race those wars produced yielded engineered viruses that emptied cities, nanobots that dismantled people and objects, drones that turned every battle into trench warfare, and bio-engineered predators — Strangler Vines, Thornbacks, Black Coils, dozens more — released into enemy lands, where they destroyed the native predators and permanently altered the natural world. The environment filled with chemicals and waste that would not break down.
The Remaking
Civilization collapsed entirely. A small number of engineers and volunteers gathered to save their dimension and make sure it never happened again. They built an AI in a polar facility that already housed pre-collapse seed and disease vaults, and surrounded the world with satellites, beacons, and near-invisible nanobots to monitor it at all times. Its purpose was to prevent industrialization from ever returning.
A small group of carefully chosen survivors were to act as guides for whoever was brought in to restart civilization. Each swore to keep secret the technology that had existed before. A core of ten to twenty knew that an AI was bringing people through and roughly where it was; even they did not know how it worked. The AI's creators completed a suicide pact so that no one alive could reverse-engineer or tamper with it.
Year one
The AI activated fully. It began pulling people from the nearest similar dimension to its own — ours — and began breaking down the old world's technologies and artifacts so that they could not be studied or recreated. The Time of Hubris had ended; its people and its culture were swept away.
The survivors started counting years and never wrote down what the count started from.
Where our world fits
The scientists of the Time of Hubris had found a way to view another dimension, and the world they found was ours: a different map, a familiar humanity, an earlier stage of technology. They watched our 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s with the nostalgia only a dying world could produce, and became obsessed with our internet memes, repeating them to each other for the novelty. Out of that habit came the Brain Rot Tongue, the language the survivors spoke and taught to everyone they brought through — the ancestor of the Common Reason Tongue.
The centuries of pulling that followed are, from our side, the true explanation for the seeming near-collapse of human populations in our own world.
What it explains
- Why large steam engines and the technologies that would follow them cannot be built in Teraell — see What Is Blocked and How.
- Why almost nothing of the old world remains — see What the Old World Left Behind.
- Why the world's people, language, and customs carry faint prints of our own — see Meta:Cultural References.
- Why the wilds are as deadly as they are — see Dangerous Fauna and Flora.