Lumen Universe · Illustrated Short Story
The Great Gridlock
Vol I: Empire of Ash
War Memoirs of Three Emperors
Pre-Cataclysm Era · 2658–2800 AD"I wasn't a monster by accident. I was a monster by design. And every drop of blood I spilled was a calculated investment in humanity's future."
— Emperor Damian Steele, Final Entry, March 15, 2745
The Story
Three emperors. Three deathbed confessions. One dynasty bleeding out across a century of absolute power.
The Steele family forged the North American Empire through calculated brutality, perfected it through technological horror, and watched it die through paralyzed conscience. Each ruler wrote his final testament in the hours before death—assassinated, poisoned, or simply broken by the weight of watching civilization's infrastructure hemorrhage into the streets below.
This is the autopsy of a world that built heaven ninety stories high—and forgot that everything beneath it was still burning.
Damian the Forge-Master saw warfare as symphony, composing campaigns where every death was a calculated note. Marcus the Consolidator perfected his father's system until citizens forgot how to think unapproved thoughts. Alexander the Last understood everything his predecessors built was monstrous—and spent eleven years too paralyzed by that knowledge to change anything.
On July 15, 2796, an unknown attack severed the neural networks connecting half a billion vehicles. The wealthy watched from quantum-locked skycars as the masses plummeted. The Great Gridlock killed Pre-Cataclysm civilization; the Yellowstone eruption four years later merely confirmed the death certificate.
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Where This Fits
The Great Gridlock is the first domino in a cascade that would kill 99.9% of humanity. Four years after Alexander Steele watched his empire's infrastructure collapse, the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupted—followed by the Cascadia Megaquake, the Canary Islands tsunami, and seventy-seven years of geological catastrophe that merged Earth's continents into UniTerra.
The seven refugia that survived—Svalbard, the Andes, Appalachia, Polynesia, the Kalahari, and others—would rebuild. Their descendants would uplift six animal species to sapience. Those Uplifted would eventually transcend their creators, spreading across nine galaxies as the Lumen Coalition.
But none of that was inevitable. It began here, with three emperors who each believed they were saving humanity—and each proved that certainty, cruelty, and paralysis can be equally destructive.
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