Fragment: Prologue
Tales of Three Worlds
By ColumbusGuy
Prologue: Dreams Crashing Down
The Age of Industrialization...a lot of images come to mind from those words: steam-ships driven by huge paddle-wheels and tall smoke-stacks; soot-covered brick factories belching smoke from giant chimneys to spread across narrow-fronted terraced houses where people eked out their lives for a meager wage; women and children laboring in crowded factories among clattering looms; the blackened faces of men and boys emerging from deep coal shafts, squinting in the light of a smoky day, grateful for living to see the surface once more.
Decades later, sprawling, crowded cities teeming with automobiles without number, putting out their own noxious fumes into air, which Nature had intended to be pure and refreshing for all her creatures. The growth of slums teeming with countless souls with no hope of work, clean water, adequate food or safe housing...or any chance at an education leading to a way out. The growth of Man's fields and towns to support increasing numbers while woods and wilds steadily declined, their hidden treasures, which might have alleviated some misery, lost before it could be found.
Progress, the Curse and the Hope of Mankind...in a grim age where deserts are spreading and ice is almost unknown in the remote reaches of the struggling world, Fate brings forth not one, but two men who have the power to alter things for the better, if Society will listen, and be willing to follow a new drummer.
Those men are Ernst-Karl Hallbach and Jakob Sommers...and things will be different if they should meet; one the scion of an Industrialist clan, the other a driven Eco-Engineer.
Mankind is about to reach a Turning Point, but it hinges on these two meeting, and what they feel about each other...