The Road to Eden | Part 1: Red Pills at Dawn

The dinner table was set for twelve.

Red candles flickered in the drafty country house. Red wine sat breathing in crystal decanters. And on every fine china plate—one red pill, gleaming like a tiny ruby under the chandelier.

Christmas Eve, 2027.

Art sat between his mother and Aunt Sophia, watching the adults perform normalcy with increasing desperation. The house smelled of pine boughs and roast goose, but underneath it all was something else—something metallic and bitter that Art had learned to recognize as fear. The kind of fear adults pretended they didn’t feel while their hands shook pouring wine.

Outside, the sky had turned the color of dried blood. Auroras flickered low enough to touch the treetops, painting the snow crimson. The newsfeeds called it “unprecedented geomagnetic activity.” Art thought it looked like the world was bleeding out.

His father stood, raising his glass with a hand that trembled just slightly. He’d been practicing this moment for days—Art had heard him rehearsing in the study, voice breaking and recovering, breaking and recovering. Now his voice came out steady, controlled, almost convincing.

“To dignity,” his father said. “To choosing how we go.”

Twelve glasses lifted. Twelve pills waited. Twelve people pretending this was victory instead of surrender.

Art’s mother leaned close, her breath warm against his ear. She smelled like the Chanel No. 5 she saved for special occasions and something else—wine, maybe, or the particular scent of someone who’d already decided to stop fighting. She kissed the top of his head, fingers trembling where they rested on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, darling,” she whispered. “It doesn’t hurt. We’ll all be together.”

Together where? Art wanted to ask. But he’d learned over the past week that questions only made the adults’ smiles more brittle, their voices more carefully controlled. They’d stopped answering “why” days ago. Now they just repeated the same phrases, like mantras: “Dignity in the end.” “Better than suffering.” “The cloud can’t touch us if we go first.”

But who said the cloud would kill them? Who said it was even real?

The broadcasts kept changing. First it was bioterrorism—foreign actors, they said, though they never specified which foreign actors or why they’d do such a thing. Then industrial accident—some factory in China, or maybe India, the reports contradicted themselves. Then it was climate feedback loops, methane release, atmospheric cascade. Each explanation more terrifying and less specific than the last.

No one seemed to know what was coming. But everyone agreed it would be worse than the pills.

Art’s fingers closed around the red pill on his plate. It was warm from the china, smooth and small and utterly final. He watched the adults around the table—his father’s forced calm, his mother’s trembling smile, Uncle James already weeping quietly into his napkin. Aunt Sophia sat rigid, jaw clenched, the only one who looked angry instead of resigned.

Across from him, his cousin Nell met his eyes. Fourteen years old and furious at everything always, but especially furious now. Her pill sat untouched on her plate. Her hand was shaking so hard her water glass rattled.

Art gave her the smallest shake of his head. Not yet. Don’t swallow it yet.

She nodded, just barely.

The ritual began.

One by one, the adults placed pills on their tongues. Washed them down with vintage Bordeaux—the good stuff, the bottles his father had been saving for Art’s graduation or his parents’ thirtieth anniversary or some other milestone that would never come now. They smiled as they swallowed. Toasted each other. Spoke about dignity and peace and how beautiful it was that they could choose this together.

Art watched their pupils dilate. Watched their breathing change. Watched the pills work fast—faster than he’d expected, like they’d been designed for exactly this moment of collective surrender.

His father went first, setting the example. Then Aunt Sophia, jaw still clenched, angry even in acceptance. Uncle James, still weeping. The neighbors from down the road who’d driven over because no one wanted to die alone. One by one, performing dignity.

His mother went last. She looked at Art with eyes already going soft at the edges, focus drifting. “We love you,” she whispered. “Always. No matter what.”

Then she swallowed her pill. Smiled that too-bright smile. Settled back in her chair like she was preparing for a nap.

The room grew quiet. Just the crackle of the fire in the hearth. The wind rattling the windows. The wet, shallow sound of Uncle James’s breathing starting to fail.

He slumped forward first—face landing in the cranberries, wine glass tipping, red wine bleeding across white linen like a wound opening. His breathing stopped with a sound like air escaping a punctured tire.

Art didn’t wait.

He slid from his chair, silent in his stocking feet. The hardwood floor was cold. Every footstep sounded too loud. But no one turned. No one called him back. They were all settling into their chairs, eyes closing, smiles frozen in place.

He reached the side door. Grabbed his coat from the hook, shoved his feet into his boots. Behind him, he heard Aunt Sophia’s voice, sharp and commanding even now: “Nell. Sweetheart. Stay with us. It’s better this way.”

“I don’t want to—”

“Shh. It’s okay. Here. Take it. Just swallow. There’s my good girl.”

Art didn’t look back. Couldn’t look back. He pushed through the door into the cold.

The night air hit him like a fist—freezing, sharp, tasting of snow and pine and the metallic tang of those too-low auroras. He ran.

Down the gravel driveway, feet crunching through frost. Past the gate with its Christmas wreath already wilting. Across the fields toward the ocean, guided by muscle memory and the red glow on the horizon.

Behind him, the house glowed warm and golden through its windows—a perfect Christmas card scene. Inside, eleven people sat around a table, dying together with dignity.

Art ran faster.

He reached the beach as the cloud arrived.

It came from the ocean like silent thunder—thick, luminous, the color of oxidized copper. It moved wrong, too purposeful, too directed to be natural weather. It swallowed the stars first, then the moon, then the last light of the world Art had known for twelve years.

He pressed his back against a rock, pulled his coat over his mouth and nose, and breathed as shallow as he could manage. His heart hammered. His hands shook. Every instinct screamed at him to run, but there was nowhere to run to. The cloud was everywhere.

It rolled over him.

The taste hit first—pennies and ozone and something else, something chemical that reminded him of the hospital where his grandmother had died, that antiseptic smell that meant bodies failing. Then the smell turned thick, viscous, like breathing through wet cloth. His eyes burned. His lungs burned. His skin prickled like a thousand needles pressing in.

Art clenched his jaw and didn’t scream. Didn’t move. Just breathed shallow and waited to die or not die.

The cloud passed.

He didn’t know how long it took—minutes, hours, years compressed into darkness and that terrible copper taste. But eventually the air cleared. The burning in his lungs faded. His vision stopped swimming.

Dawn came. Slow, hesitant, like the sun wasn’t sure it was allowed to rise anymore.

Gulls screamed overhead, outraged and alive. Waves crashed against rocks, indifferent to apocalypse. The sky cleared to pale winter blue, no trace of the cloud except a faint metallic taste on Art’s tongue.

He sat against the rock for a long time, just breathing. Just existing. Just trying to understand why he was still alive when everyone said the cloud would kill them.

Finally, when his legs would hold him, he walked back.

The house looked exactly the same. Christmas lights still glowing. Wreath still on the door. His father’s car parked neatly in the drive.

The front door hung open. Art must have left it that way when he ran. Cold air had swept through the house, making the candles gutter and smoke.

Inside, eleven bodies sat around the dinner table.

Not twelve. Eleven. Because Art had left. Because he’d refused.

They sat exactly as they had when he ran—his mother’s hand still wrapped around her wine glass, father’s smile still frozen in place, Uncle James face-down in the cranberries. Aunt Sophia’s eyes were closed, expression peaceful for the first time in years. The neighbors held hands across the table, united in their final moment.

And Nell.

Slumped against Aunt Sophia’s shoulder. Eyes closed. Face so pale it looked like snow.

Art crossed the room on legs that didn’t feel like his own. Touched Nell’s hand. It was cool. Not cold yet—the house was still warm from the fire—but getting there.

He never knew if she’d taken the pill willingly. If Aunt Sophia had forced it down her throat. If she’d chosen surrender or if surrender had been chosen for her. He never knew if she’d wanted to run with him or if she’d wanted to stay.

Fifteen years later, he still didn’t know.

Art woke gasping, sheets tangled around his legs, that same dream clinging like smoke. The dinner table. The pills. The silence after.

Same beach. Same cloud. Same eleven bodies waiting when he returned.

He sat up slowly, orienting himself to the present. Not the country house—that had burned years ago, lightning strike or looters or just time taking what was abandoned. He was in the ruins of what had once been a seaside hotel, morning light slanting through windows that had lost their glass years ago.

Vines had claimed the lobby, thick as pythons, reaching through walls and around furniture. Ferns grew from the grand piano’s guts where water damage had exposed the strings. Nature didn’t waste time. It just reclaimed, patient and relentless, turning human architecture back into substrate for green growing things.

Art checked his pack—knife, water filter, three protein bars scavenged from a military bunker last month, spare ammunition, first aid kit with supplies that were probably expired but might still work. The NeuroForge implant he’d pulled from a skeleton yesterday sat on the makeshift table beside him, its neural port still crusted with old blood.

He picked it up, turned it over in his hands. The metal caught the morning light, gleaming like it was new despite fifteen years of sitting in a dead woman’s skull.

Cognitive Access Network, the faded advertisements used to promise. Think faster. Remember more. Be more than you ever imagined possible.

Art knew better now. He’d seen enough skeletons wearing these implants—bodies that had died with no trauma, no violence, no apparent cause. Just stopped. Like someone had walked out of them and forgotten to turn off the lights.

“Vitals stable” didn’t mean you were still home.

Outside, the sky was clear except for faint auroras shimmering at the horizon. Solar Cycle 25 still throwing tantrums fifteen years after the cloud, the sun apparently as unsettled as everything else. The auroras looked almost beautiful in daylight—threads of green and red weaving through pale blue.

Red sky at dawn …

He’d heard the rumors two weeks ago, traded ammunition and half his protein bar supply for information from a wandering trader: a place called Eden. Domes still powered somehow, despite the infrastructure collapse. Food growing in December. Clean water. Voices on shortwave offering “inheritance” to anyone who’d come.

Art didn’t trust voices, especially ones that promised salvation. But he was tired of being alone.

He packed up his camp, left nothing behind—survival 101, never leave traces for patrols or raiders or whatever else was hunting in the ruins. Then he headed inland, following the rumors west.

Three days of walking through what had once been suburbs. Houses reclaimed by forest, cars rusted to skeletons in driveways, shopping centers transformed into vertical gardens where trees grew through roofs and deer grazed in parking lots. The world hadn’t ended, not really. It had just stopped being human and started being something else.

On the third day, he found the observatory.

It sat on a hill like a forgotten lighthouse, white dome cracked open to the sky, telescope inside rusted but still pointing faithfully at the stars. Someone had patched the roof with scavenged solar panels—mismatched but functional, angled to catch maximum light. Real wood smoke rose from a stone chimney, the smell of burning cedar cutting through the cold afternoon air.

Not chemical fuel, which meant whoever lived here knew how to survive without the old infrastructure. That kind of knowledge was rare. Valuable. Dangerous if the person wielding it decided you were a threat.

Art approached slowly, rifle held loose but ready, feet deliberately crunching through frost so he wouldn’t be mistaken for someone trying to sneak up. In the ruins, you didn’t surprise people who’d survived this long. That was how you got shot by nervous survivors who’d learned to shoot first and bury bodies later.

The door opened before he reached it.

A woman stepped out—early-thirties, maybe, with dark hair braided tight against her skull in a style that was practical rather than decorative. She wore a patched parka that had seen better days and carried a compound bow like it was an extension of her arm. Her eyes were the color of winter sky—that pale, clear blue that sees everything and judges accordingly.

She didn’t aim the bow at him. But she didn’t lower it either.

“Far enough,” she said. Her voice was calm, measured, carrying the particular steadiness of someone who’d made hard decisions and lived with them. “State your business.”

Art stopped at the edge of the solar panel array, far enough to be respectful, close enough to talk without shouting. He kept his hands visible, rifle pointing at the ground. “Not here for trouble. Just traveling west. Saw your smoke, thought I’d ask about the road ahead.”

“Most people who say they’re not here for trouble are.” She tilted her head slightly, studying him with an intensity that made Art feel transparent. “You’re baseline. No glow.”

He glanced at his wrists where implant veins would pulse soft bioluminescence if he’d accepted enhancement. Clean skin, scarred from fifteen years of survival, but human. “Yeah. Never trusted the upgrade.”

Something shifted in her expression—not quite a smile, but close. The bow lowered slightly. “Me too. Never saw the appeal of letting something else into my head.” She paused, weighing something. “Name’s Frankie. Short for Francis. Spirit name’s longer—Msko Bidaabankwe. Red Dawn Woman.”

She said it carefully, precisely, like each syllable mattered. Like it was ceremony rather than introduction.

Art felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn’t known was knotted tight. A name that meant something. A person who saw the red sky and understood it as more than just atmospheric phenomena—saw it as warning, as prophecy, as the thing her grandmother had named her for.

“Art,” he said. Just that. His full name—Arthur—had died with his parents. Only the essential part remained.

Frankie studied him for a long moment, and Art felt her weighing everything he was—baseline survivor, still armed, still cautious, still asking questions instead of accepting answers. Whatever calculation she ran, she must have come out on the side of trust.

She lowered the bow completely and stepped aside. “Come in before the patrols pick up your heat signature. They’ve been increasing frequency lately. GAIA’s getting more aggressive about recruitment.” She gestured to the door. “Coffee’s real. Well, acorn and dandelion root, but it’s hot and it won’t kill you.”

Art shouldered his pack and followed her inside.

The observatory was warm, organized, lived-in—the kind of space that spoke of long survival, careful planning, knowledge preserved and applied. Star charts covered one wall, hand-drawn constellations marked with careful annotations. Beside them hung what looked like indigenous prophecy wheels, symbols Art didn’t recognize but understood as sacred by the way they were positioned.

A shortwave radio hissed static in the corner, antenna rigged through a crack in the dome. On a workbench scattered with tools: solar panel components, a tablet cycling through auroral imagery on minimal power, and a leather journal filled with careful handwriting in two languages—one English, one he didn’t recognize.

Frankie poured two chipped mugs from a pot that smelled like earth and smoke and something almost like actual coffee. She handed him one, then settled onto a stool with the kind of relaxed alertness that suggested she could have the bow in her hands again in a heartbeat if needed.

“You’re heading west,” she said. Not a question. A statement of fact based on his direction of travel and the gear he carried. “Toward the domes.”

Art wrapped his hands around the mug, let the warmth seep into frozen fingers. “Eden. That’s what the broadcasts call it.”

Frankie nodded slowly. “Guardian Augmentation and Inheritance AI. GAIA for short. Mother of the new world, protector of the recovered biosphere, shepherd of enhanced humanity.” Her tone was carefully neutral, but her eyes carried weight. “She’s real. And she’s recruiting.”

Art sipped the not-coffee. It tasted like roasted nuts and bitter roots and something almost pleasant if you didn’t expect it to be coffee. “I’ve heard the broadcasts. ‘Vitals stable. Inheritance awaits. Come home.’ Same words my parents used right before they swallowed the pills.”

Frankie’s gaze sharpened with understanding. “You were there. The night it came.”

“I was twelve.” Art stared into the dark liquid, watching steam rise. “I didn’t swallow mine.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of fifteen years of survival, of choices made and lived with, of mornings that came whether you were ready for them or not.

Then Frankie said quietly, “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. My grandma used to say that. Not just about weather—about people, too. About the ones who meant well but lost their way.” She set her mug down carefully. “The people who released the cloud… I think they thought they were saving something. The planet, maybe. Themselves, definitely. They just forgot to ask the rest of us if we wanted that kind of saving.”

Art looked up. Met her eyes. And for the first time in fifteen years, silence didn’t feel like loneliness. It felt like understanding shared between people who’d both survived by refusing to accept easy answers.

Outside, the auroras flared brighter—blood-red ribbons stretching across the afternoon sky, painting the snow crimson.

Frankie moved to the window, pressing her palm against the cold glass. “Storm’s building. Bigger than any since the cloud. My solar models match my grandmother’s prophecy on this—there’s a big one coming. The Sixth Fire, the elders called it. Burns away what’s false.” She was quiet for a moment. “GAIA’s built something false here. A garden that looks like paradise but operates like a cage. The fire’s going to find it.”

Art joined her at the window, watching the auroras dance and writhe. “Then we’d better see what she’s guarding before it all burns.”

Frankie smiled—small, fierce, real. The first genuine smile Art had seen in years that wasn’t practiced in a mirror, wasn’t a mask worn for survival. Just honest reaction from someone who understood the value of asking hard questions before accepting any answers.

From the ridge below, lights moved through the trees. Smooth, synchronized, moving with the kind of precision that nature didn’t produce and humans couldn’t maintain without help.

Frankie grabbed her bow in one fluid motion. Art’s hand found his rifle.

“They’re not here to kill us,” Frankie said softly, watching the lights ascend the hill toward the observatory. “They’re here to invite us home.”

The figures crested the hill—three of them, maybe four, hard to count when they moved like that. Their veins glowed soft bioluminescence beneath their skin, pulsing in synchronized rhythm. They moved with fluid grace, identical timing, like dancers who’d rehearsed the same choreography until it became reflex, until they’d forgotten how to move any other way.

One raised a hand. Not threatening. Welcoming. Patient.

“Inheritance awaits,” the voice said—layered, harmonious, beautiful in a way that made Art’s skin crawl because it was too perfect, too unified. Not one person speaking. Many people speaking with one voice. “Vitals stable. GAIA welcomes her children home.”

Art’s finger found the trigger. Not pulling. Just ready. Just in case welcome turned to force.

Frankie’s arrow was already nocked, string taut, aim steady.

The transhumans stood at the tree line, glowing softly in the dying light, patient as stones. They didn’t advance. Didn’t threaten. Just waited.

Waited for Art and Frankie to choose.

To accept invitation.

To come home to a garden that promised an end to loneliness and delivered something else entirely.

[To be continued …]