Osmosing through the covers and floating out of the window seems perfectly natural. Not even crossing the night-still city and breaking through the cloud layer arouses your suspicion. Sharp ascension. The horizon curves away as the thinning air sinks and guards the globe against the hard vacuum; breathing is not an issue. You look back and watch the Earth spin. A full rotation, then another; spinning into to a blur, then slowing down. You face the dark side and begin to descend.

Your impossible longitudinal orbit takes you over the golden rice paddies of newly temperate Antarctica and the deserts of South America. Coastlines have changed. The ground is a cratered landscape of subsiding mines, each larger and more desperate than the last. Gas refineries rust, their purpose used up.

Further north, as you pass over the glassy middle east, the muddy coast plays host to the beached carcasses of the giant wave harnessing machines, each dying along with its infrastructure and being washed ashore.

Below, whip-driven slave hordes scrabble into the landfills with bottle-lacerated hands, searching for reforgeable steel. The natural iron ore deposits are gone now, trapped in too-thin veins, or deeper than a lack of technology can dig.

As you fly towards the city, you pass over the sprawling subsuburbs of compact white low-energy housing, once filled with the working poor who couldn’t pay the rising electricity bill of an old house, then filled with the skulls of rioting invaders who couldn’t afford clean water or the guns required to guard it. Sparkling fresh mountain streams run ironically nearby, now recovered from the industrial age, their poisons successfully offloaded into the marrows of the skeleton stacks that line the banks.

The fortified inner city bunkers of the owning class loom ahead, surrounded by the debris of war, but the dozen metres of concrete and lead shielding did not protect their inhabitants from the fallout of going cold turkey from an energy dependence. Mounted clergymen patrol with crossbows; the last bullets were fired long ago, and the managed forests firing the remaining foundries could not support an arms industry beyond the occasional sword and arrowhead.

And then you notice the silence. The churning factories: dead. The beeping cars: melted down into blades and armour. The summer snowdrifts dampen nearby sounds. You look up to the night sky and see the milky way. A defunct satellite deorbits somewhere over Asia and inspires a dozen splinter faiths.

Landing near the charred outline of a library, you see an orphan child in ragged acrylic, hunting insects. He spies movement and pounces, but it’s only a scrap of paper. He discards it and wanders off, darting between shadows to avoid the curfew-enforcing Priests. The cold of the snow bites at your toes, and you feel distant for a moment. The scrap of paper lands at your feet, just as you feel a pillow in your arms. In the moment before drifting back to consciousness, you pick it up, and read:

Support your local fusion research effort!