It was not just Beijing that moved indoors; the phenomenon was global. Coastal cities that had not been inundated suffered from increasingly worse acid rain, while inland, dark pollution clouds covered the sun for days at a time.

Humanity was ill-suited for a long-term life indoors, however. Mental and physical health plummeted, new strains of disease ran rampant, and within a generation, age spans had shrunk by a decade. Beijing, and other population centerslike it, became so focused on basic survival that the global economic and political systems, which had both been under strain for some time, had all but collapsed.

Something had to be done. The world’s remaining leaders of state and industry did their best to respond, but driven by short-term self-interest, their efforts were band-aids on a gushing artery.

What good were efforts in FPRC, if across the Acidic Pacific, the government of the Independent States of America continued to deny, let alone address, the realities of climate change? The FPRC and others could implement all the mitigating measures in the world — and, sometimes it seemed, were doing so — but even divided by the Acidic Pacific, these two civilizations could still not change the fact that they shared the same air and the same planet.

Of course, a small contingent of the wealthy had tried to change this fact by establishing moon colonies and even permanent space stations, but from all accounts that made it back to earth, these were never as glamorous nor comfortable as pre-Collapse sci-fi movies promised.

Meanwhile, many more of the world’s wealthy were holed up in remote, off-the-grid homesteads built in the hey-day of survivalism, but those bunkers were designed for apocalypses in which humans were the main threat, rather than the air that they breathed.

Many believed that the spirit of these ventures was right: the ‘global commons’ was obsolete. It was just that mankind had not yet found a way to geographically or environmentally sever ties between societies.

At the time, Dr. Eva Wu was working at a small biotech lab in the deserts of the Pacific Northwest, where her team, funded by a space-obsessed billionaire, was building infrastructure for the moon colonies that would allow them to manufacture and maintain their own self-contained natural environments.

Eva had no interest in settling on the moon, despite the guaranteed spot on the lunar colony that came with her employment package; she was interested in applying her findings to help terrestrial civilization.

And she believed that she had the answer: her team had successfully created atmospheric bioshields that could completely seal off an interior climate from an exterior one, not only in the air (this was the easy part, relatively speaking) but also deep into the ground as well. With the poisons in the earth contaminating the little groundwater that remained, this was a game-changer.