Utopia

Prolouge

This is a story which starts before I was born. Before my parents were born. But it's one that I need to tell you for the rest to make sense.

My grandparents, and all the humans before them, lived on a planet called earth. All of the historical documents describe it as being a really pretty place. I've seen photos. Most of the planet was covered in water, which made up some called 'the ocean'. It sounds so beautiful. I wish I could have seen it.

You see, here there's no such thing as an ocean. We have rivers. Larger rivers than the ones on earth, but nothing as wide as the ocean.

So that was where all of the humans lived. For thousands of years.

After a while, the people develop this technology to power everything they had. It heated their houses. It let them communicate. It even powered some of their transportation. It was called electricity. The only problem was, to make electricity, you had to burn fossil fuels.

Those are these things that you could take from the ground. You could burn them to make electricity. I don't really know much else about them.

But anyway

The humans in Earth burnt too many of them, which made the temperature there increase. Lots of ice melted into the oceans, which covered the land in water. The flooding killed millions of people on the first day and more in the later weeks. Whole settlements were destroyed as the waters rushed in. It must have been terrifying. Luckily, my grandparents lived in a place called Bavaria, which was far from the ocean, so the flooding didn't reach them.

The governments of all of the different states of the world, which were called countries, created shuttles to carry the people away from earth to another, habitable planet. And those shuttles were what brought humans here. To this planet. To the planet which I live on.

This planet is called Utopia. It's roughly 5 times the size that Earth was. I live in the centre of the great forest, which covers 1/5 of Utopia.

The Forrest has a mild climate compared to the rest of the planet. My grandma compares it to something called Autumn at home in Bavaria. There's no such thing as seasons here.

To the north of the forest, there are enormous plains of grass and rolling hill. To the south, are the frozen plains. To the west, there are great, scorching hot expanses of desert and to the east, there are the badlands. It's made up mostly of dry, rocky expanses of nothingness, inhabited by bandits and scavengers, however if you managed to cross it alive, you could find the only city on the planet. It's called Earth, after the planet we left behind. I've never seen a city before. Apparently they have enormous buildings made from stone. I don't think that I'd much like them.

The part of the forest where I live is called the Black Forest, after a small forest in Earth. We left the planet behind but brought the names with us, because the first people to come here wanted something like home.

My settlement has 2 families living in it. We live in a network of houses up in the treetops.

I was born here, in the forest.

My community speaks a language called German, however my family speak English to each other.

And here, begins my story.