Year 2207, Earth.
Ilha Grande was no longer green… certainly no longer paradisiacal. What had once been a dense oasis of vegetation interrupting the monotonous uniformity of the Atlantic Sea had been overwritten by something else entirely. Many wouldn't just call it ruined or destroyed, but plain heresy: an environment repurposed against its own logic, where growth had been replaced by accumulation, and beauty by functionless endurance.
The wind came off the sea carrying salt, rust, and particles too fine to be seen. The ground was no longer soil — it was a bunch of layers of broken concrete, metal sheets, buried cables, and layers of contaminated earth that no one bothered to distinguish anymore. Some areas groaned under weight. Others crackled. Others simply gave way.
Leon walked attentively. Not out of caution, but out of habit. On the Island, survival meant learning where others had already stepped and survived before.
It was between two semi-buried structures, resembling old technical platforms, corroded by time, that he saw the glint. A reflection too clean and regular. Technology that had not yet learned how to look like trash.
He pulled it free with relative care. It looked like one of those compact energy-storage module they used by the end of the last century. Heavy. Sealed. Thick industrial connectors, partially corroded but intact. Old, but not useless. Valuable as a resource if dismantled patiently.
It had not been made there.
Nothing on that damned island had been made there.
Leon knew this without ever having studied history. All it took was looking at the markings, the industrial standards, the faded seals, the different languages. Almost everything came from elsewhere. It always had.
He repositioned the module to examine it more closely and, through carelessness, touched the exposed terminal…
KRAK! "AAAAARGH!"
The discharge tore through his body like a blunt strike. His right arm seized instantly, muscles locking, pain rising in a clean, burning line with no warning. Leo was thrown backward, slamming into the scrap-covered ground as the module slipped from his rigid hand and struck the metal below.
The smell came afterward. A mixture of ozone, burnt insulation and scorched flesh.
He lay still for a few seconds, breathing too fast, fingers numb, heart out of rhythm. When he managed to sit up, he saw the dark mark on his palm. The pain lingered, deep and persistent, as if the arm no longer fully belonged to him.
The module had suffered as well. One of the connectors had snapped on impact and the seal was compromised.
Leon closed his eyes for a moment.
"Idiot," he muttered, seeming more tired than angry.
Still, he pulled the module closer and examined it more carefully. The core was intact. Part of the lateral circuitry as well. Secondary capacitors, control boards, rare alloys. Things that could be sold separately. Not for full value, but enough to justify the weight in his pack and the back pain that would come in the near future.
On Ilha Grande, nothing was ever wasted entirely. The Angra project had somehow taught the Island that even poison could be reused.
Angra was a far too old story to frighten anyone his age. Angra I, Angra II, Angra III — names inherited rather than understood. What they had been, most people no longer bothered to remember: nuclear plants, built to power cities and new warfare technologies, to sustain a civilization that believed it could manage forces far greater than itself.
What mattered was not the reactors and weapons, long decommissioned or quietly failing, but what began to be done with their failure remains in 2088, after a big brazilian project to increase energy production and tech development — when the government decided that certain byproducts of that campaign were too inconvenient to exist on the mainland. Materials that could not be neutralized, dismantled, or publicly acknowledged given the obscure research methods they used.
They were not called waste. They were given a classification. A long, bureaucratic phrase designed to make danger administrative.
[ Provisional technical storage on isolated environment. ]
In the beginning, there were still residents on Ilha Grande. Fishermen. Families. People who believed it when they were told it was safe, temporary, controlled. Then came the irrefutable invitations to leave. Abusively low compensations attached to short deadlines. And for those who hesitated, the fish began to taste different. The plants sickened. The water left a metallic trace.
The Island, in the end, was not just forcibly evacuated… It was made uninhabitable.
Once the last traces of recognized human habitation were gone, then government stopped maintaining appearances. In 2133, the Island's role was not altered but officially acknowledged through monetization.
By then, Brazil had already begun pushing beyond its borders, occupying neighboring territories under the language of unification — a claim that South America needed to consolidate or remain permanently subordinate to larger powers.
Within this political climate, the Island proved useful. Other nations quickly grasped the logic: Brazil's appetite for resources made it possible to export their technological failures than to deal with them at home. Ships began arriving at night. No clear flag. They unloaded sealed containers, defective modules, unstable energy systems. They paid well. They paid in silence. Then, most of the brazilian paradisiacal islands began to look like abandoned isolated landfills for the sake of money.
Leon stowed the module in his pack, ignoring the persistent pain in his arm. He would dismantle it later, more carefully. Sell what hadn't been ruined by his stupid decision to touch where he shouldn't have.
On his way back, he passed a fallen sign, half-buried in unstable ground. Most of the paint had been eaten away by time, but the words were still legible:
[ Isolated Technical Area — Restricted Access ]
He stepped over it without looking back. To Leon, Ilha Grande had never been a lost paradise. It had always been this: a territory rented for old failures and a place where people like him learned to survive by dismantling the remains of decisions no one else wanted to take responsibility for.
He didn't know the entire world was about to follow the same path.
But he had been living, for a long time now, inside the draft of the end.