After the Culling

The world is dust.  A muted landscape choked by the Blight, where humanity huddles in towering agri-blocks — self-contained vertical farms piercing the toxic sky.  Controlled by GenTech, these metal and glass behemoths promise sustenance, but deliver only sterile control.  Beyond their walls, in the sprawling wild zones, Reclaimers like Mateo Draven scratch out a living, scavenging for fragments of a lost past. Mateo isn't just surviving; he’s searching for a way to defy GenTech and reclaim the earth, driven by the ghost of his family, lost in the Blight’s chaotic beginnings.
Deep within the skeletal remains of a buried metropolis, Mateo stumbles upon a pre-Blight bunker, a forgotten sanctuary holding the secrets of Dr. Aris Thorne, a scientist whose name is barely a whisper on the wind. Inside, he finds Thorne’s journal—a cryptic collection of scientific observations and equations that hint at a cure, a cure GenTech has deliberately suppressed.
This discovery ignites a spark, not just for Mateo, but for the whispered network of Reclaimers who dream of a world beyond the agri-blocks.  But this hope is a dangerous weapon.
Inside Agri-Block Nine, young botanist Kristin Foster grapples with her complicity in GenTech’s lies. A chance discovery shatters her world, revealing the corporation’s long-held secret: they knew about Thorne’s research all along.  Haunted by this betrayal, Kristin makes a perilous choice: she defects. Guided by fragmented messages from the Reclaimers, she escapes into the wild zones, her scientific knowledge a fragile shield against the dangers lurking beyond the walls. Her path converges with Mateo’s, a collision of two desperate souls seeking redemption in a broken world.
Cheyenne Stephens, GenTech’s ruthless Head of Security, is a woman wrestling with her own ghosts. Once an environmentalist, she now enforces the system she once fought against, driven by a twisted belief that GenTech’s control is the only path to stability. Thorne’s research threatens that control, a truth she buried long ago.  She unleashes her genetically engineered Enforcers to retrieve the journal and silence Mateo permanently.