Things Fall Apart

The Prologue--
         
         Earth 2123:
         
         Humanity had reached its final mountaintop. War had ended in the Middle East, the last bastion of conflict in the modern world. Man now lived in a perfect world, a utopian society. Famine and poverty had been eliminated. Crime had been nonexistent for decades. Corruption and treachery no longer plagued the human mind. Every nation was ruled by the benevolent democracy of the United Nations.

         It was in May of that year when, as it invariably does, something went wrong.
         
         Theorists disagree on the source or the cause, but everybody knows its affect on the earth. A plasma beam slammed through crust in North America, refracted in the core, and shattered landforms all across the planet. Earth began spinning in random directions; magma poured freely all over the surface; continents and oceans shifted. Only those who lived in the climate-controlled underground cities survived the cataclysm.

         Hundreds of years later, when the survivors managed to dig their way out of their subterranean prisons, they discovered a new planet. The axis had rotated, the orbit had shrunk, land and ocean had taken new places, and days had lengthened. Man's perfect world had ended before it began. Anarchy reigned over everything.
         
         Communication was nonexistent. Each group of survivors knew only of themselves. They concerned themselves only with surviving and defending their colonies against the mutated and vicious animals now roaming the planet.

         The mutating effects of the plasma beam had left humans strangely untouched. Once mild communication using archaic radio waves was established, scientists in each colony began to study the radiation left by the beam. Combining this unique energy source with state-of-the-art bio-crystalline technology, they created supercomputers that would power and control their communities for generations to come. But there was one thing they didn't know about their crystals, one thing they could never have predicted.

         The crystals were sentient.