Foreward

There is a moment—just before dawn—when Earth’s sky turns the color of tarnished silver. In the hush between the nights retreat and days stirring, you can almost hear the planet breathe. I wrote the first notes for this book in that gray hush, knowing the world I loved was slowly forgetting how to breathe. Zild grew out of that ache—out of the question that haunts every age of collapse:

If we cannot repair the ground beneath our feet, can we at least carry forward the story of who we were?

The pages that follow are not a simple chronicle of survival. They are a reckoning with the shambling ambitions that carried humanity off its own world and the equally feral hopes that refused to die along the way. You will meet a scientist who mistakes obsession for salvation, a soldier who has trained his heart to march in lockstep with silence, an idealist who refuses to let the dark vacuum steal
her young light, and a hybrid mind that remembers everything and therefore understands nothing. Together they form a living mosaic–each shard bright with talent, clouded with contradiction–reminding us that humanity’s real beauty lies not in uniform perfection but in the kaleidoscope of our differences and the cracks that let borrowed light escape. Their fates intertwine beneath Zild’s twin moons—one
pearl-white, the other bruised indigo—where the soil itself seems to dream of strangers.

I ask you, reader, to treat this tale like an artifact recovered from a future dig site. Hold it gently. Rotate it in the light. Notice the
hairline fractures in its optimism; run a finger along the serrated edge of its sorrow. The people of the Ark did not set out to be heroes, nor were they villains fleeing a righteous apocalypse. They were simply the last custodians of a great, unruly story—our story—and they could not bear to let it die unspoken.

You will hear echoes of familiar warnings: that ecosystems are not checklists to be balanced but symphonies to be heard; that technology without humility is merely hubris with brighter LEDs; that leaving home does not absolve us of the ghosts we pack in our carry-on luggage. Yet you will also find wonder here: bioluminescent forests singing in colors unnamed, storms that carve cathedrals out of atmosphere, and a night sky so wide it makes grief feel, for a heartbeat, 3 like another form of worship.

Some will read this book as cautionary prophecy, others as fuel for their own star-bound dreams. For me it remains a love letter scrawled in the charcoal of extinguished worlds—to the fragile, reckless brilliance of being human. We fail, we fracture, we flee, and still we look up. We design arks, be they wooden, steel, or algorithmic, and we dare the void to silence us. If you feel the weight of that daring in your chest by the final page—if the twin moons of Zild linger behind your eyelids when you close the cover—then the voyage these characters undertook, and the real-world anxiety that forged them, will have found its echo in you. And so the story will ripple forward, one reader at a time, like radio waves crossing cold vacuum toward some listening ear we can’t yet imagine.

Take a deep breath, step aboard, and listen closely. The Ark still hums,its engines wound by hope and regret in equal measure. The moons
are rising. The echoes are waiting.

• KBS