The Society ruled Earth, a benevolent power in charge of a united world on the verge of transitioning from a Type 0 to a Type 1 Civilisation. The governments and religions of old no longer held the planet's population in their treacherous, coercive, insidious and violent grips. Freedom of belief was accepted as an individual preference, released from the overbearing, binding structures of monopolistic institutions. Politics and religion, as partisan rivalries, did not exist. Peace and tolerance held sway.

The Society organised production and distribution for every need worldwide ensuring quality of life for all. Wealth measured by personal fulfilment throughout careers chosen by a combination of aptitude and enjoyment created lives of satisfaction and achievement never before known in Earth’s history. Those who opted to retire after a life's work wanted for nothing and infirmity barely existed, eliminated by predictive and preventative medicine. Lifespans of one and a half centuries with mental, psychological and physical health were easily reached and choosing to die when one wished to had become normal, socially acceptable and celebrated.

However, improvements to life and many other responsibilities made The Society a huge, complicated machine relied upon by the entire world’s population for their daily needs – and subsequently slow to react to an emergency such as the approaching Catastrophe. Its main purpose and all its efforts involved global administration as humanity moved to its next stage of existence and almost its entire economy, resources and social efforts were focused on that one event. Interplanetary travel and exo-planet colonisation would be part of the world’s Type 1 stage of social and technological evolution. Major space projects such as rapid terraforming of the Moon, Mars, colonisation of the outer planets and indeed, with the development of star travel tech, human expansion into the galaxy was scheduled to blossom after the transition. Therefore there was no hope of evacuation to neighbouring planets – an unfortunate result of humanity having finally learned to comfortably co-exist with themselves and the planet.

A colossal rogue magnetic iron asteroid weighing two billion trillion tons raced through space at immense speed. Everyone understood the potential calamity approaching from outer space several years before collision and that it was unstoppable. The planetary phase-shield might be strong enough to reduce the effects, but missiles and energy weapons would be useless. The Society spoke the truth as they knew it, informing the people of the world that this would be a glancing blow but would still devastate a large arc of the planet. Most people had no other recourse but to reorganise their day-to-day existence as far away from the calculated impact zone as possible and live in hope.

The whole world saw the threat growing bigger in the sky day by day, night by night. The Society issued the date of the event and its projected area of damage – a full third of the planet’s surface across the northern hemisphere. Ancient mines were reopened and burrowed out into deeper caverns with the potential to hold millions of people if necessary around the area that would be worst affected. They knew it wouldn’t be good enough and advised their citizens to move to the other side of the planet. On the day, the phase-shield was strengthened by focused power beamed from a ring of fusion stations under the closest point and supported by standby stations further around the world...

The collosal asteroid crashed across the planet, dragging a two thousand mile wide, five thousand mile long superheated wound through the atmosphere at twenty thousand miles per second, ripping the atmosphere and magnetosphere to shreds and flinging the ozone layer away like feathers in the wind. The phase-shield did in fact reduce the surface effects but to no real effect. The atmosphere still burnt and boiled; the magnetic poles were sent spinning crazily around the world. The asteroid’s gravity drew millions of tons of debris into orbit, uplifting a third of the planet’s crust killing the citizens in the shelters who hadn’t moved away and those over a still vaster distance half a world away. Magma spewed into the sky from broad, deep fractures across that entire area of the planet’s surface. Then came the pressure blast as the tortured, compressed hot air surrounding the asteroid exploded, slamming the crust back down crushing what was left of the burnt underground shelters and the few terrified people on the area’s fringes who were still frantically trying to draw their last scorching breaths. The resulting vacuum caused huge clumps of the crust to burst back up into space. Most of the oceans flashed into thousand foot high tsunamis before also being dragged out to space steaming in the wake of the asteroid. The ocean water left hanging in the atmosphere fell to the surface in a massive swathe of destruction, causing more misery and death as it roiled back into its basins, trailing millions of tons of salt to poison the new landscape.

Partly deflected by the Earth’s phase-shield and whipped around by each other’s gravitational effects, the asteroid tore off into deep space pulling a tail of rocky and organic debris behind it, leaving huge peices in dangerous orbits while the planet itself was left in utter turmoil.

The misery was only just beginning. Infrastructures were gone, four billion people had died in seconds, now storms of unprecedented rage coursed across the wrecked surface killing millions more. The planet had been dragged from its orbit – eventually it stabilised, but closer to the sun. 

The Society was stunned and wept for a future that could have been so bright but now was dead. They could see beyond the world’s immediate disaster; its reversion to barbarism, stagnation and all-out war. They knew that war had become inevitable in the face of smashed resources in a smashed civilisation and, sadly, they also realised that culling and suppression by an army of light was preferable to the murder, torture and oppression that would be imposed by the self-serving madmen they knew would rise from the ashes.

Here is a man, a bionic man enhanced and augmented to fight or educate as necessary. Before the terrible event he had been a teacher. As the wars loomed the altruistic Society, while providing as much disaster relief as possible, quietly searched out volunteers to be altered in a programme lasting only weeks. They redesigned the teacher and the other volunteers as soldiers but also imbued them with a broader sense of the humanities, compassion and learning than any of them, even the teacher, had known in their previous lives.

The Society’s prognosis was that the race would survive and knew that what was left of the living when the war was over would need people such as the Teacher and many others like him. Missionaries. These bionics had been given thousand year lifespans in which to guide, teach and protect the remains of the race through the dark years and help them become better fitted to live, thrive and expand into the new reality, to discern right from wrong and defend sane communities from the inevitable despots. They were storehouses of truth, knowledge and records of the social and technological progress made before the disaster and the war. They were equipped with more than enough means to repel attacks from any and all enemies of the new civilisation with maximum prejudice and to protect themselves from the changes in the environment that were expected over the following centuries.

Then the Weather War started as predicted. Small battles escalated rapidly into a bloody global conflict over ownership of the miserly amounts of usable land, a volatile and turbulent atmosphere, world-wide solar radiation, food instability, outright famine and diminishing fresh water supplies. Sometimes rocks rained down from their unstable orbits. The war lasted only four months – during which short time civilisation’s remains collapsed completely and the world’s population fell drastically to less than one billion, the rest obliterated by both the new nature’s storms of a violence few dare dream of and the nuclear fire of mankind’s hastily re-invented weapons. The bionic army tried their best to fulfil their remit to detect and remove the enemies of progress but could never stop nuclear attacks. However, supplies of the hastily prepared nuclear weapons were limited and many failed. Although some damage had been done – people killed, hotspots of radiation lurking for the unaware – the Weather War ended with a whimper.

A new Dark Age followed. The bionics roamed the land for two hundred years, searching out the good and the bad. Instances of cannibalism were discovered and declared a moral outrage as they concentrated on gathering people together, re-establishing and protecting communities, re-educating the enemies of light and if that failed, disintegrating the worst lunatics and their followers. The raging storms gradually subsided, leaving a tense quietude in their place. The rocks from space became rarer and stopped falling.

Time, nature and human warfare had further degraded the planet’s gas envelope which had never recovered from the asteroid. The seasons merged into a constant heat, winter ceased to exist. Years could only be counted by variances in the moon, which had been dragged into an eliptical path around the planet’s new solar orbit. Any upstart institutions, deity-belief based cultures or thrown-together governmental systems lost their grip, failed and were forgotten. The Teacher and the other bionics gave aid in as many ways as they could, occasionally still delivering judgement to those who murdered for power and their twisted cruelties and would revel in the killing – after all, they had been designed in part to judge. The remaining global population dropped to five hundred million through a combination of the thinner atmosphere and the endless solar radiation. The civilisation of the Teacher’s birth, the Society, had melted away in grief.

However life always tries to fight back. Babies were mostly born alive and new generations struggled through. After the Dark Age came the Unity, fuelled by an agrarian society which realised the need to work together to make a future with potential, taught by the bionics how to use the new vegetation and improve life partly aided by a range of technology from the previous age. With the help of the bionics the people rediscovered ancient forging methods to make building blocks and tools to use with the remnants of older building materials.

There were no pets. All bovine and avian species had died out, leaving the tough new vegetation as the only food source. There were hardly any pests to ruin the plantations as the crops were hard-living mutations of their ancient cousins. Many insect varieties had become extinct but that didn’t matter, the population of this time had barely heard of those things.

Nature began to assert itself in an inimical way and the environment changed worryingly although slowly. Desert began to encroach upon the flora and rainfall stopped everywhere around the world except for the Stormband – a series of clouds stretching from pole to pole as one hundred mile wide patches of intensely heavy, thunderous and drenching rainfall which occurred three, sometimes four times a year. Somehow it transcended the equator; strange global weather patterns and the heat there worked with the still wildly fluctuating magnetosphere and the wandering magnetic poles to push upper atmosphere strata in a north-south direction; closer to the ground winds were west to east propelled by the sun’s radiation from the heat of afternoon to sunset. There must still have been enough free water somewhere to create the Stormband. The Teacher and his fellows worried over the environment knowing they could do nothing about it. While most people, heavily shielded, could only just survive crossing the equator only the bionics could cross constantly with no effects on their health.

The global population which had stabilised and enjoyed modest growth began once again to fall. Survivors migrated to the Stormband area. There was room for all and what was left of the entire world’s population eventually gathered under or within easy reach of it.

With the Weather War a distant fractured memory and as the centuries passed, the army of bionics came to believe the co-operative Unity would be better off without war machines, however benevolent and helpful, a belief that led them to suicide by donating their components and memory displays to the living for whatever they could make of them. But this one bionic, Teacher, his mind still alive with memories of youth and the joy of living in a once beautiful, technologically and socially advanced world, considered his life to be important. He maintained himself and protected his organics as best he could, for they were the outward manifestation of his soul.

Since war had been made unnecessary during the Dark Age and the Unity had taken hold, the Teacher allowed his humanity to dominate. He decided to become a trader, reasoning that he could do best by travelling from village to village, town to town so he could pass on his knowledge and memories to new teachers who would carry on educating their children in his absence. A messenger between the communities, sometimes a valued companion and friend, he towed a cart of tradeable goods backwards and forwards along a north-south route following the Stormband. He discovered much of his techware in the tangled uninhabited spaces to west and east where people no longer ventured. Items not needed in one village were recycled in another. He became very fond of his simple cart, he could always find some widget or other to help people or recharge power cells in the tools reclaimed from the outlands. He became well known, respected and liked in the communities along his route, using his ability to repair and maintain old-era tech and swapping items from his cart for water and the edible items he could scavenge from the strange flora in the places where only he could survive. Most of the towns had smallholdings feeding their communities and sometimes there was surplus to barter for, which he delivered to the people in most need.

There was no polar ice. He found the last seas of free water in the far north where the land had sunk and cooled in the aftermath of the cataclysm and in the far south – they were poisoned, lifeless and receding. He watched for two months as a giant spout sucked up water for two days to provide the Stormband which he guessed was feeding the sea in the north with whatever was left after drenching the land every now and again. There was little to halt his journeys; in the harsh environment mountains had eroded to huge, smooth hills and their debris had powdered to fill the chasms. Still each walk took him a year, although they gradually shortened by days, then weeks as the far north and far south villages withered and vanished. If there had been anyone to interpret his demeanour at discovering dead villages where he had once served the inhabitants, they would surely have called it human despair. The Stormband was getting thinner.

Over the centuries, against the hopes and expectations of the Society’s original projections, the population diminished to a few hundred thousand, then to a few tens of thousands. The birth rate continued to fall and many live newborns died within days. Solar cancers along with the left-over effects of the Dark Age nuclear strikes took their toll. On one of his journeys across the equator to the end of his southern route he discovered his time was wasted, there was no-one living below the equator anymore. The solitary cloud above was thin and in a different position from that remembered.

Since he’d started north again parts of his organic flesh had succumbed to a breakdown, symptomatic of the sun’s radiation blasting through the almost non-existent ozone layer. Some of his mechanical moving parts squealed a little as his cancerous, useless organics broke away. He’d never really needed his flesh anyway, it was only there to help him make friends.

Eventually crossing back over the equator he moved past the settlements that he’d visited on his way south several months previously. There was no reason to stop anywhere, there was nobody left to trade or interact with, no children at play. He missed the interactions with people, he’d grown to enjoy that aspect of friendship over the course of his hundreds of years, conversations about everything and anything.

Many of the tiny villages above and below the equator had been abandoned although occasionally there were desiccated bodies in repose, as if they’d just settled down and given up, stopped living. Mummified already in this environment. Some of the bleached cadavers had obviously been children. The Teacher was saddened, they’d all been his friends. Flesh and bone dehydrated to powder if left untreated, there hadn’t been any bacterial activity for hundreds of years. The body fluids had drained into the ground, there’d been no-one left in those villages to reclaim the water for the living, as was their usual way.

The Stormband that was believed to be a fixed part of the sky had started moving eastwards some years back, its downpours becoming shorter, infrequent and less punishing. The strange mutated flora to the west had withered almost to nothing, very ugly and useless now, subsumed by the ever increasing yellow dust. Everywhere there seemed to be more yellow than green with each passing day. He went on, feeling a loneliness bleeding his soul, something puzzling to him after the company he’d enjoyed with generations of his fellows in the villages. He was still as much a man now as he was eight centuries ago before he was altered. Maybe even more so. He continued to march on northwards hoping to find a recent eastward trail leading to the new settlements, the ones which had supposedly moved east with the Stormband. The storms must have moved away swiftly, he hadn’t seen any in the distance for a long time. Not a wisp of a cloud. Every now and then the wind from the west, getting hotter and hotter, blew drifts of sand across his path. After six hundred years of nurturing his people through the Unity, he knew there would soon be no-one left along his old north-south trail.

The weeks drained away as he trudged on, his long-range sensors detecting no signs of life, migration trails or clouds. Yielding to the logic of his situation he abandoned his precious cart, once a conveyance of future possibilities but now nothing more than a symbol of futility, leaving its contents to decay in the yellow dust. He felt that quite likely they might not be needed now.

So many weeks of walking until he didn’t really know where he was except that by the position of the sun and stars he calculated it to be the far north. The sea had vanished, it had dried to rock now and everywhere was the same yellow. He noticed that even in daylight the horizon was in darkness and stars showed clearly in the sky above in spite of the blazing sun. The horizon had looked very different in daylight when he was a boy. He’d played helicopters with Sycamore seeds, run wild in meadows, swum in streams, climbed trees surrounded by deep rich air and the sky was always bright blue. Nature was what made him want to be an educator, to teach the next generations how best to respect their world.

But now, all these centuries later in the harsh radiation of the incessantly blazing sun a deep purple darkness buried the horizon, a result of the depleted atmosphere. Once again he extended his sensor range as far as possible, bouncing it off the upper layers of the atmosphere as far around the planet as possible – but still no men, no women, no children.

After eight hundred years his life, his humanity, had outlived its purpose and his people. His journey had ended in utter failure.

Gripped by intense sorrow for what had been lost, the Teacher could not face the final two hundred years of his extended life alone; there was no possible reason to go on. In the pain of his ultimate loneliness, he initiated the suicide sequence to burn out his solar collectors, destroy his life support systems and send his fusion power source into meltdown. In the last seconds of his life he tried to cry but his mechanical eyes had no way of making tears. Then the last true human died and burned into the yellow.