Chapter One - Before the Mold

CHAPTER ONE

Before the Mold

OKAY, SO PICTURE this: it’s a few hundred years ago.
You want a chair? You carve that sucker out of wood.
Need a bowl? Clay.
A cup? Maybe glass, if you’re feeling fancy.
A sword? Metal, if you can afford a guy who knows how to beat rocks into murder.

Everything came straight from raw, natural stuff.
You could point at a tree and say, “That’s gonna be my dinner table.”
There was a straight line from nature to thing.

It wasn’t convenient, but it made sense.

Those materials had personalities.
Wood warped. Clay cracked. Glass shattered if you sneezed too hard.
Metal? Great stuff. But rust never sleeps.

Still, it worked. Humans made do.
We built whole civilizations using the junk we pulled out of the ground or off of trees.
And yeah, maybe it took a village to make a teapot, but the teapot meant something.

Then the world started speeding up.

We got trains, telegraphs, and steam engines.
Cities started growing like mold on bread.
Suddenly, we needed a lot more stuff, a lot faster.

Like, “Hey, can we make a thousand buckets by Thursday?”
No, Karen, we can’t. Gerald’s still out back forging a nail.

So what happened?

We hit a bottleneck.
Not of brains, we had ideas out the wazoo.
The bottleneck was matter itself.
Nature just wasn’t moving fast enough for us anymore.

That’s when some clever gremlins in labs started wondering:
What if we didn’t have to wait on nature?
What if we could just make our own stuff… from scratch?

Boom. That’s the seed. That’s where this story begins.
The moment we got tired of real things and started dreaming of fake ones.

We weren’t looking to poison the oceans.
We just wanted more forks.

And the universe, being the chaotic little bastard it is, gave us exactly what we asked for.