Man had long since abandoned their designs on the stars, but not without making great advances in technology. Through their efforts to terraform other worlds they discovered the means to renew the one they had all but destroyed. Nano technology was the key to the future of Earth, and it would become a new Eden. Man could now take waste, alongside other unwanted, unneeded, materials and use them to create miracles. They were now able to repurpose matter on a molecular level, using colonies of hive like atomic sized robots called Zero, which could collectively create the conditions necessary to breakdown and reforge molecular structures. With these tools they could clean the air, the water, and recycle the refuge of countless eras of civilization, restoring the world to something beyond pristine. Using the reclaimed matter, they enriched the soil, rebuilt the reefs, and reforested the continents. They created new materials for building, alongside new plants and animals for their modern Ecosystem. With this new Ecosystem came new super-foods, packed with proteins and nutrients which would make feeding the overwhelming population of the world a simple task. It had even become possible to rewrite the genetic make-up of a living adult human being. Before long, nothing on Earth was as it was. A new world with a new man had been borne, and everything was thanks to the colonies of Zero which inhabited every single artificial structure on Earth.

The Zero allowed every structure on Earth to continuously repair itself and became Earth’s maintenance system, or perhaps its life-support. The Zero even found their way permanently into select human hosts, those with skills and knowledge deemed too valuable to lose. The Zero were the miracle that man had searched and waited for, they were the greatest creation of a race nearly doomed by their own arrogance and self-centeredness, desperate to escape the consequences of their decisions. But it was in that desperation that they found their salvation, for had man’s desire to create a new Earth not been so dire the one they already had could not have been reborn.

Of course, after the Zero, man prospered and made many other discoveries, and though many were only possible because of the Zero, others were independently miraculous in their own right. One such power was the ability to travel between dimensions. This was accomplished by transferring the human consciousness into an energy construct, a feat made possible by a virtual reality project called Ego Gate. The constructs would be aptly known as Ego Spheres, and were the only way to safely travel the other realms. It would be these other realms which would become man’s final destination, for though they had abandoned their efforts to colonize the stars they had not stopped observing them. Although by the time they discovered the coming threat they had only enough time ahead of them to abandon their world to its fate.

Unfortunately, even with the Zero they did not have enough time to develop and build the ships necessary to evacuate to a neighboring planet and complete terraformation before they all perished. With such an impossible task at hand, they instead chose to rely on their newest technology to serve as their life boat, and brave the uncharted extra dimensional realms. It was so, that in the days to follow they evacuated the world population through the Ego Gates to places unknown, before Earth was bombarded with exotic particles from an oncoming gamma world. Among the gamma waves, the planet sized body emitted cosmic radiation which could only be speculated about. Before it ever even collided with Earth it would all but decimate life on this planet.

However, it would not be man’s legacy to simply be erased from existence. Before they left they created a type of time capsule, one which would carry the memories, history, and knowledge of mankind. Each one was a nearly indestructible capsule, a Zero Capsule, containing a syringe. Within the syringe was the combined genetic data and memory of everyone who had become hosts to the Zero. Anyone who took the serum would effectively become a human of the 51^st century. Their genes would be rewritten, their bodies would become host to the Zero, and their minds would be inheritors of man’s last will and testament.

This is the story of such a recipient, a 21^st century man named Hiro Redfeather, and a Zero Capsule which slipped through time. Hiro was the culmination of what man would one day become, a multi ethnic man whose race appeared ambiguous to most. Part Japanese, part Caucasian, part Latin American on his mother’s side, part Indian, part Native American, part African American on his father’s side. The future had been filled with such people, the heirs of the human race, Neo humanity. Neo humanism, was the rallying call for humanity, the “One People” movement. It allowed people from all walks to band together against inequality and oppression. Ultimately it put a rest to racial exploitation and divisiveness, and allowed the wounds of the past to begin to heal. Hiro was also about to become something else, he was about to discover a window into the future, he was about to become… Future Man.

For Hiro it was an ordinary day. He was a maintenance man in his building, and he was down in the basement to check on the fuses for the elevators. Several tenants had complained about flickering lights, including the instrument panel, during transit. He’d check the bulbs, but he thought it strange that it affected multiple components at once across both elevators, so he wanted to start at the fuse box. As he approached he noticed a strange light coming from the area, from some sort of small container sitting atop the box. In a way it resembled a fuse itself. The capsule had two tiny prongs sticking out of one side. He gently brushed his finger across them to get a better sense of the object. But when he did so, the capsule stopped glowing. His thumb felt strange, it was suddenly extra sensitive, such that touching anything caused a tickling sensation. Before long it subsided, but he didn’t quite feel right. He dropped the capsule as he found someplace to rest. Before he knew it he was unconscious, and having the most vivid dreams about a world he had never known, and lives he had never lived.

When Hiro finally woke up, he found that he suddenly knew things, things he shouldn’t have known, things that hadn’t yet happened. He didn’t understand what was happening to him, or rather if it was real, and perhaps he thought he might actually be losing his mind. Sudden onset Dementia, he had read about that somewhere, once… hadn’t he.