The year was 2179. The sky above Berlin glowed faintly red from the reflection of the city's endless neon holo-ads, digital cathedrals, and pleasure domes stacked like mirrors of desire. The air carried a hum that never ceased: drones sweeping trash, floating markets playing synthetic hymns, and the murmuring static of ten billion screens whispering promises of happiness.
Noah Veihend walked among it all like a man moving through a graveyard of light. He was thirty-two, tall, with the posture of someone who had once carried conviction but now bore only its shadow. Once, he had lectured on comparative theology at the University of Uppsala, studying the decay of faith across cultures. Now he lived alone in a converted library, surrounded by broken glass tablets and the ashes of forgotten books.
He watched a man steal food from a street vendor; the vendor didn't chase him. Everyone around simply looked, half-smiling, as if theft had become a polite transaction. Nearby, a group of performers reenacted public adultery as an "art installation," broadcast to millions. No one blushed anymore there was no such thing as shame.
Billboards projected new commandments for the modern era:
"Pleasure is truth."
"Desire is freedom."
"Faith is obsolete."
Noah read them and felt a pressure inside his chest, not anger just a quiet, gnawing disbelief. He remembered his wife, Eva, and their little daughter, Mari. They had died five years earlier when a mob burned their housing complex during the "Festival of Liberation," a celebration where citizens destroyed anything considered "oppressive tradition." The police called it an accident of emotion.
That night, something broke inside him. He stopped teaching. He stopped believing that data could save morality. But he couldn't stop asking the question that had defined his entire field of study: What happens to a world that no longer believes in anything greater than itself?
Two months later, while sorting digital archives of forbidden texts for an independent research project, Noah came across a corrupted file labeled: "Antarctic Field Expedition – Project Helix (2057)". Its encryption was primitive by modern standards. Within it, he found scans of an old researcher's journal handwritten, shaky, possibly delirious.
"We found it beneath the southern aurora… a living column, rooted in ice. It reaches beyond the atmosphere. The locals call it the Primordial Tree. The myth says the one who ascends it will speak to Elyon the voice that shaped the first conscience."
The journal included geolocation data near the Vostochnaya Trench, a region declared off-limits since 2098 due to magnetic anomalies and lethal storms. The more Noah read, the more the logic in his mind rebelled. But the world around him soulless, collapsing felt far less rational than the idea of a tree that could touch God.
That night, a rare blackout swept the city. For the first time in decades, Berlin's sky went completely dark. In that silence, Noah saw the stars again faint, trembling points of light fighting through the smog. And in that moment, a realization struck him: If humanity could forget the stars, it could forget God too.
He wrote a single line in his old notebook:
"If Elyon still exists, I must find him. If not, then mankind must remember what he once meant."
From that point, Noah began to prepare. He sold his last possessions to fund a private passage on a freight vessel bound for the southern colonies. He studied old climate maps, flight restrictions, and satellite decay zones. According to scientific data, the Antarctic continent had warmed by four degrees in the last century; much of its ice was gone, revealing mountain ranges and subterranean forests formed by geothermal vents.
Reports from deep-scanning drones described anomalies heat signatures that defied explanation, magnetic fields that distorted time measurements, and, in some instances, faint bio-luminescent structures reaching into the clouds. The public dismissed them as optical glitches. Scientists ignored them.
Noah didn't.
He packed lightly: thermal gear, solar rations, a pressure tent, a worn photo of his family, and the journal he had printed from the archive. On its final page, the original author had written in trembling script:
"When you stand before the tree, you will feel it watching. Not as God watches, but as truth does."
The next morning, before dawn, Noah left the city. He walked through the silent streets of Berlin, past the glowing temples of pleasure and the digital billboards still whispering their false commandments. The air was cold and smelled faintly of ozone.
As the first train toward the southern airport roared past, he whispered a line from an ancient psalm he barely remembered:
"From the ends of the earth, I will cry unto thee."
And though he didn't yet believe, he hoped that somewhere above the clouds or buried beneath the frozen soil of the Antarctic something still listened.
The journey had begun.