the sur·face
/T͟Hē,T͟Hə/ /ˈsərfəs/
The Surface is the physical plane of existence encompassing Earth and all visible matter across the universe — from planets and stars to the very ground beneath your feet.
The Truth They Hide From Your Eyes
You think you know what’s real…
You think you understand the ground beneath your feet, the stars above your head, the very air you breathe.
But truthfully you know nothing…
WE know nothing…
They call it The Surface — a name so simple it mocks and conceals the cosmic scale it represents. To the blind masses, The Surface generally means Earth or “Not The Etherverse” — their precious “real world.”
And humanity? Humanity is slowly abandoning it.
97% of human existence has hemorrhaged into The Etherverse, leaving behind a world transformed beyond recognition…
Let that number burn into your consciousness. Ninety-seven percent…
The Great Emptying: Ninety-six Billion Souls, Smoother Streets
Humanity hasn’t disappeared — it’s multiplied.
Cities once teeming with millions now pulse with a different rhythm. New Manhattan’s towering monuments to capitalism still stand proud, but the daily crush of commuters has vanished. The highways still carry travelers, but traffic flows like swift peaceful currents where once raged torrents of bumper to bumper traffic.
Twelve times population of your days walks The Surface, yet the streets feel almost peaceful. Most movement happens through fast travel tethering points, minds and consciousness zipping between locations while bodies remain stationary. The morning rush hour? A quaint memory from ancient times when humans physically trudged to offices now existing only in The Etherverse or accessible via nearby proxies.
When Greed Saved the World (With Mysterious Help)
The irony cuts deep: corporate greed, that ancient demon of environmental destruction, became Earth’s unlikely savior. In their rabid pursuit of digital profits, the tech titans of the world accidentally engineered the beginning of humanity’s greatest ecological revolution with proxies.
But the true transformation came with the An’jels — beings of ethereal wisdom of tethering technology, whose knowledge elevated human consciousness and technology beyond mere profit.
Their arrival marked the turning point: The greenhouse effect that threatened to strangle the planet? Halted and completely eradicated within a century. The pollution that choked the skies? Vanished. All because humanity, guided by An’jel’s uncanny wisdom of Tethering, found something more valuable than destruction — The Etherverse’s infinite possibilities merged with cosmic understanding.
The environmental crisis that once seemed apocalyptic? Reduced to a footnote. Eons from now, humanity’s far distant descendants scoff at our climate panic. “Global warming?” they sneer. “Our planet was simply awakening from its ice age slumber. What did you expect?”
This revelation transforms everything: was our environmental crisis just cosmic growing pains? Or does this dismissal hide darker truths about corporate salvation and An’jel intervention?
AetherPoint: Where Paradise Goes to Die
But paradise comes with a price, and that price has a name: AetherPoint.
South of Neo Manhattan, where the reclaimed lands meet the eternal seas, AetherPoint festers like an infected wound. This floating city of dry-docked megaships, decommissioned cruise liners, and ancient prison infrastructure has evolved into humanity’s greatest contradiction. Once designed as a massive detention facility centuries ago, it now serves as sanctuary for those fleeing the Surface world’s perfect order.
Here, in this unholy nexus where The Surface and The Etherverse collide, corrupted data bleeds into physical reality. While the rest of Earth breathes clean air, AetherPoint’s Seven Slums choke on the concentrated filth of a billion virtual worlds.
Crime doesn’t just thrive in these floating districts — it evolves. Reality itself becomes negotiable in back-alley servers where the desperate trade flesh for pixels, where gang territories shift with the tides, and where the boundary between digital and physical dissolves into chaos.
The Map of Questions
Travel The Surface now, and you’ll find a world carved into territories both familiar and utterly transformed. America — anciently whispered as “West Amexem” — sprawls with reimagined cities that defy your understanding.
But questions haunt every horizon: What secrets pulse beneath Los Demonios, where even angels fear to tread? Why does Xi’Cago hum with frequencies that make proxies malfunction? What experiments unfold in the territories whose names vanish from public records the moment they’re uttered?
Asia transforms under Qin’a’s evolved leadership, yet entire regions shimmer with uncertainty. What lies beyond the Great Firewall’s physical manifestation? Which powers control the lands that satellites can’t photograph? Why do some maps show continents that shouldn’t exist?
New island chains emerge from the oceans like summoned leviathans. But who summoned them? And why do their coordinates shift with each tide?
The questions multiply: Where did the missing continents go? What rises from the spaces between known lands? Why do cartographers who map certain regions never return to complete their work?
Beyond the Sky: Humanity’s Silent Expansion
Above Earth’s atmosphere, humanity’s reach extends in whispers and shadows. Luna’s craters hide more than meteor impacts. Mars pushes boundaries of more than just terraforming. Stations orbit in spaces that telescopes can’t see, testing technologies that physics says shouldn’t exist.
But ask yourself: If these are the settlements we know about, what floats in the darkness between? What builds itself in the cosmic void where Earth’s instruments dare not look? And why do astronauts returning from “routine” missions refuse to speak of what they’ve seen?
Time: The Ultimate Prison
So far, interstellar travel on The Surface is a cosmic joke. Ships carry cargo between neighboring worlds, but human passengers? Time itself becomes your executioner…
Journey to a distant planet for a few months, and you could return to find your children grown old, your world transformed, your entire life stolen by relativistic mathematics and celestial mechanics. The Surface keeps its prisoners through the cruelest warden of all: time dilation.
Yet whispers persist of those who’ve transcended these limitations. Beings who teleport across The Surface as easily as avatars fast-travel through The Etherverse. No proof exists — but in AetherPoint’s shadowed alleys, where reality wears thin, believers swear they’ve seen the impossible performed by members of The Seventh Order…
The Infrastructure of Flesh and Need
Physical infrastructure persists with evolved purpose.
Manufacturing facilities produce the quantum processors and bio-neural interfaces that keep The Etherverse running.
Vast server farms cooled by ocean depths maintain the digital realms.
Protection services guard these critical installations from those who would weaponize the divide between realities.
Recreation centers offer experiences impossible in purely digital space — true physical sensation, chemical cuisine, gravitational sports.
Religious sites become pilgrimage destinations for those seeking meaning beyond code.
Food production utilizes vertical farms and synthetic biology.
Shelter evolves into living spaces that seamlessly blend physical comfort with digital access.
Clothing becomes programmable matter, responding to both environment and Etherverse status…
The Surface only provides the very few elements The Etherverse cannot: the irreplaceable foundation of biological existence, the anchor point that keeps humanity human.
The Many Names of This Place
Multiple names mask The Surface’s true nature: The Real World (a lie), The Surface World (a simplification), The Manifest (whispered in fear), Reality (disputed), The Universe (incomplete). Each name reflects the speaker’s distance from the truth.
But the Adepts of The Seventh Order believe a fundamentally different truth: The Surface (which they call The Plane of Things Made Manifest) stretches across infinity itself. To them, every planet spinning in the void, every sun burning in distant galaxies, every fragment of matter your mortal eyes can perceive — it’s ALL The Surface. (Furthermore, they believe man is ordained to be Lord of all The Surface…)
Your Choice: Ignorance or Illumination
And you? You stand at the crossroads of understanding, teetering between comfortable ignorance and mind-altering knowledge.
The Surface beckons with its secrets: the classified territories, the off-world experiments, the truth about AetherPoint’s digital-physical bleeding, the reason 3% of humanity still clings exclusively to flesh when promise of paradise awaits in pixels.
The coordinates remain classified. The settlements evolve in shadow. The crime capital of the world guards the gateway between realities. And somewhere in the spaces between known and unknown, the reason for humanity’s transformation waits to be understood.
The Surface isn’t just where our bodies live. To a few, it’s still home.
Only they can see the storm that’s coming — while the rest will miss it until it’s too late.
The question is: are you already too blind to miss it too?
