Age of Rust: Fragments of Civilization

Three thousand years in the future, human civilization has entered the “post-prosperity era.” The Federation’s rule spans the globe, and technology has built a false façade of prosperity. Resources are monopolized by the ruling class, and history has become putty in the hands of power. A low-level archivist inherits encrypted historical records left by his grandfather and accidentally uncovers the buried truth of the “Great Decline”: the catastrophe whitewashed as a “civilizational upgrade” was in fact the consequence of power struggles and corporate greed.

He tries to use his pen as a blade to restore the falsified chronology, but faces pursuit by the Federation’s History Revision Bureau, betrayal by his colleagues, and the apathy of the lower classes. Technological surveillance leaves no blind spots, propaganda warps people’s understanding, and those who stand by the truth are branded “heretics.” Amid the rusting framework of civilization, he moves between slums masked by neon, heavily guarded archives, and resistance strongholds rife with intrigue. He witnesses humanity warped under the pressure of survival and exposes the deep-seated ills caused by a rigid system.

This record of an individual resisting an age offers no heroic anthem, only a struggle through the mire. Can he preserve the remnants of civilization for posterity before it is destroyed? The target of its criticism is not technology, but the power that abuses it; what it questions is not human nature, but the system that twists it. At the end of false prosperity, truth is the only spark, and the heaviest of chains.