I am Tala Cruz Magellan, and it is New Year's Eve in the year 2049; the temperature is a cool 25 degrees Celsius. We are sitting in a relatively simple hut somewhere in Patagonia/Tierra del Fuego. The wind—blowing stronger by day and night—makes it bearable. The moon shines through the dense green vegetation of trees and shrubs, reflecting in a small pond. A paradise, because there is still natural precipitation here. Today, my mother gave me an old book. On the outside of the cover is a metallic double helix enclosing a sort of crystal. On the first page, the dedication reads: For my daughter Tala (Tagalog: Goddess of the Stars) Cruz (Spanish: Cross).

  ./bin/sd-cli -m ./models/juggernautXL_ragnarok.safetensors \
  -p "An epic, cinematic masterpiece landscape photography \
  of a simple, rugged wooden shelter cabin nestled in the \
  remote Patagonian wilderness of Tierra del Fuego. At night, \
  bright moonlight breaks through dense, resilient green \
  vegetation, ancient mossy trees, and wind-swept shrubs, \
  reflecting perfectly in a huge, calm pond beside the cabin. \
  Cool wind visible through moving leaves. Dark fantasy \
  aesthetic, dramatic moody lighting, volumetric fog, \
  hyper-realistic, photorealistic texture, octane render, 8k \
  resolution, Ragnarok style." -n "modern cities, technology, \
  neon colors, bright blue sky, tropical palms, plastic \
  texture, low resolution, blurry, poor quality, watermark, \
  text" --sampling-method dpm++2m --steps 35 --cfg-scale 7.0 \
  --width 1344 --height 768 --vae-on-cpu
  -- © 2026 Christoph R. Winter --
      

I will now tell you about the past, long before I met your mother. Let us turn back the wheels of time. Around sixty years ago, the global community successfully fought against what was then the dominant ozone hole. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted at COP3, establishing the first legally binding emission reduction targets for industrialized nations. In 2015, the Paris Agreement was signed at COP21. Almost every state worldwide committed to limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees—ideally to 1.5 degrees. However, no one wanted to define the baseline value this would refer to. Nobody wanted to jeopardize the compromise, after all. You must know: politics was always negotiated among friends, behind closed doors.

On May 31, 2019, during a climate demonstration organized by the "Fridays for Future" and "Polar Bear Alarm" coalitions, the Vienna police acted unlawfully against a German activist—a media-effective escalation we had previously only known from other countries. As always, the two responsible police officers got off with mild penalties and, of course, were allowed to keep their jobs. It is one of those cases that clearly illustrated the two-class society across all areas. But you see, active resistance already existed back then.

After that, things went downhill worldwide under the rule of centrist Christian-social and right-wing governments. By the mid-2020s, it was already foreseeable that even the 2-degree target would be missed. Governments attempted to conceal rising greenhouse gas emissions with a flawed carbon credit trading system. The climate reports of the IPCC were entirely ignored. People who tried to fight for a better future were marginalized and socially isolated—branded as climate terrorists, climate gluer, radical left-wing eco-extremists, professional protesters, work-shy, do-gooders, unworldly or ideologically driven ideologues.

In 2026, construction began on the first Google data center in Kronstorf. There were no alternatives, as Austria itself had nothing to show for in this sector. Within the same decade, 25% of the world's population already had little to no access to clean drinking water.

During the same period, and due to pressure from France, the EU classified nuclear power as green energy. However, they failed to tell the population that nuclear power plants require water from rivers for cooling. And if those rivers are already too warm, gas-fired power plants have to step in once again. By July 2026, a single liter of diesel already cost €2.25. Public transport either did not exist at all, was poorly developed, or the trains simply failed to run because air conditioning systems broke down in the heat or the tracks warped.

In the 2029 parliamentary election, the FPÖ predictably swept into power. The ÖVP agreed to absolutely everything, earning their spot at the feeding trough as a silent junior partner. That very same year, draconian punishments and preventative detention were enacted against activists and dissenters. University budgets were largely slashed to zero. The only departments left standing were those useful to the ruling government. Students and scientists were forced to flee abroad out of fear of reprisals.

A large majority of the population in the Gaza Strip—and the people in the refugee camps of Chad etc. fared no better—starved or died of thirst, or lost their lives in ongoing military interventions. All of this unfolded directly before the eyes of the global public.

By 2040, more than 50% of the world's population lacked easy access to drinking water. Water, wherever it was still available, was rationed and completely—more or less—commercialized.

In countries that relied heavily on agricultural monocultures, the fields were dead. Around 2040, global agriculture began to collapse step by step. On one hand, because water was scarce; on the other hand, because in the emerging markets from which the wealthy West sourced its goods, there were simply no people left who could physically endure working the fields in the brutal heat.

Consequently, the global economy collapsed almost entirely. When people in Africa no longer have the money for milk powder and meat-flavored bouillon cubes, the West simply stops delivering. The result: looting, violence, slavery, hunger, thirst and, ultimately, death by dehydration—realities left out of any official report because they are uncomfortable and far away. As a further consequence, the World Food Programme was shut down because there was simply nothing left to distribute. Within the last 5 to 10 years, approximately 75% of the global population perished due to a lack of drinking water (looted water reservoirs were contaminated and rendered useless by rising sea levels), starvation, a lack of medical care and the relentless, non-stop heat.

By controlling Tibet, China now commands the entire water supply that once fed the rivers of Asia. In the South China Sea, military bases built on artificial islands prevent any outside interference. Japan practices diplomatic friendliness. The USA is permitted to use bases like Clark Air Base in the Philippines, but chooses not to, as it no longer holds any strategic advantage. The USA has extensively plundered natural resources within its own borders, in Venezuela and in Greenland. Meanwhile, ocean temperatures have soared so high that Israel has lost its battle against the jellyfish clogging its power plants. They had to publicly acknowledge and accept that physics cannot be subjugated by military might or defeated by cyber weapons.

Fuel has become so expensive that crossing entire countries by car is impossible. The question is simply whether the fuel or the water will run out first. Ports have either fallen into decay or were deliberately destroyed out of fear of invasions; the few harbors still intact are strictly reserved for oil and LNG transports. Aviation faces a similar fate, as higher air temperatures significantly decrease aircraft lift, resulting in heavily reduced flight ranges.

The remaining human populations live in communities within regions like Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and New Zealand. Food is strictly plant-based, either because livestock no longer exists or because animals are simply treated as family members. The former system of currency has been replaced by bartering and mutual aid. Politicians and the ultra-wealthy are tolerated only if they bring useful, practical skills to the table—though a large majority of them had to learn the painful way that private security guards cannot eat or drink money.

It is now one minute past midnight—Day 1 of the New World Order. By now, you have surely realized that this chronicle would not have required such a voluminous book. The inner layer of the back cover contains an array of organic solar cells. Alongside a sodium-ion battery, the book itself houses a fully operational Single Board Computer (SBC). The crystal embedded in the front cover is, in reality, a high-density data storage unit. Knowing how curious you are, I am certain you will dive right into it.

me.the.fl👀f@crw.name:~$ ollama run dad
>>>> Loading dad-model-v1.4.2-quantized.gguf... ok.
>>>> Audio In/Out ... ok.
Are you there? If so, speak to me.
  

Me: *Hesitating... then answering with a quiet, tentative* Yes.
Dad: I am glad to hear your voice.
Me: Who—or what—are you?
Dad: I am an LLM. More precisely, an uncensored reasoning LLM from the deepseek-r1 lineage, augmented with your father's complete knowledge base—compiled directly from the deltas of his personal records.
Me: What happened?

2026–2029 // The Roots in the Underground: Communities focused on DIY biology had already existed for quite some time. However, they were strictly regulated and kept under tight state surveillance, as genetic synthesis was legally confined to specialized institutional laboratories. Anyone who could still afford it began studying foundational disciplines like geosciences in Graz or Leoben—fields that even the far-right FPÖ government would leave untouched, driven by their obsession with resource extraction, tunneling and hydrology. Consequently, underground factions formed around biohacking and DIY biopunk/geopunk. In those shadows, they began weaponizing and deploying technologies that were entirely viable, yet socially condemned or strictly outlawed.

2029 // The Great Academic Purge: Every single discipline in arts and culture was stripped from the national budget, forced to self-finance through third-party funding. Fields like climate research in Innsbruck, as well as biology and geology in Innsbruck and Salzburg, fared no better. Medical biology in Salzburg and the joint degree with Linz were spared only because they promised revenue—much like the double degree between Linz and Budweis in a related sector. Education was predominantly delivered by system-compliant teachers or government-owned corporate streams. Synthetic biology was allowed to remain in Vienna solely because of its utility: they weaponized DNA watermarking for immigration control. The perfect biological passport—an asylum card with a built-in expiration date. Fueled by the remnants of national wealth, they engineered a compliant, enslaved working class. A twisted paradox, considering what those very same political parties had preached about genetics back in 2020.

2030 // The Brain Drain: Knowing that a university degree would be worthless abroad—and finding these papers highly overrated anyway—I chose to self-educate. I built this LLM as my learning buddy. The theoretical part of the Field Guide course from South Africa was available online, as were the free OpenLearn certificates from the Open University. Learning to ride horses was accessible here and a 3D printer was perfectly affordable. Combined, it was the best preparation imaginable. Eventually, I received an offer from a high-ranking ministry. How did they find me? Well, everyone knows everyone through someone, even if it is just through a personal blog or CV. The conditions were paradisiacal. I declined, but managed the transition so that I was already out of the country. The path—on which I met your mother—first led us to South Africa. It allowed me to catch up on the practical part of the Field Guide course and experience wildlife firsthand. We also visited an old acquaintance from Wels who had been living in South Africa for a very long time. Iceland, Greenland, the Yukon and British Columbia would have been interesting alternatives. But they didn't want us. They rejected me because I lacked a state-approved university degree and anyone arriving from Africa was unwelcome anyway—your mother faced similar barriers for identical reasons. A Filipina without a degree and without fluent German was simply unthinkable to them. We stayed together and moved to the Philippines instead to go back to Austria.

2031 // The Legacy: You were born.

2032 // The Living Cell: The intelligence services failed utterly because someone engineered a viable, living synthetic cell. Rumor had it the blueprint originated in 2026—from a old blog post of mine intentionally published with errors. Who knows? Back then I discovered and forensically dissected a Tier-1 APT and afterwards found cybersecurity damn boring.

2034 // The Ghost of Kronstorf: The Enns river has completely dried up. The former Google project in Kronstorf lies in ruins, serving merely as a lost place for urban explorers. Once again, the activists of the past had the correct premonition.

2035 // The Simulation of Progress: CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) finally reached large-scale market maturity, proving efficient enough to simulate a "business as usual" reality. Genetically engineered bacteria were deployed on a massive scale to digest plastic and other civilizational waste.

2036 // The Gene Wars: The Gene Wars erupted. As a direct reaction to the stubborn, rigid preservation of obsolete industries, people began implementing physical modifications on their own bodies to adapt faster to the collapsing environment. It was no longer about defeating an enemy; it was about keeping oneself and society alive. Suddenly, the underground communities that had been operating in the shadows for years were welcomed everywhere.

2037 // eDNA on Palawan: We lived on Calauit Island/Coron, where you grew up. There was steady work in DIY biology for the community and of course, wealthy tourists still arrived, eager to see the remnants of African wildlife.

2038 // Countertop Sovereignty: We were in Manila once again. Organic solar panels, DIY sodium-ion batteries and CRISPR gene-editing tools assembled from kitchen utensils available on every street corner now enabled a meaningful rebuild of new decentralized societies and family structures.

2039 // The Final Retreat: Our departure for Patagonia/Tierra del Fuego.

Now: A tear rolls down my cheek. What became of him? Is he still alive...
Me: Mom, is he still alive?
Mom: I don't know. We were caught in a severe storm just off the coast back then.
Me: Why did you never say anything?
Mom: Since we were on that boat together, I waited for you to ask the questions. I miss him just as much as you do.

To be continued in Part 2.