Earth 132

This world was destroyed, and it was our fault. It was our hubris, our stubborn insistence that we knew best. My name is Calvin Ellis, and I am here to tell you the sad story of our world. 
It was a century and a half ago today when it all collapsed. My ancestor, George Ellis, warned them. The scientists of that day wanted to build world-engines, machines that tap into the energy that binds the universe together. In that day there was an ecological crisis--a need for non-polluting energy. So when a way was discovered for one to generate sustainable energy from the force that binds matter, then it was adopted rapidly. George Ellis was one of the researchers in that field, a brilliant climate scientist and engineer, and he discovered that the technology was unstable, that it had the potential to destroy reality. He was right. It was but six months after the world was totally powered by World-Engines that the meltdown happened. The machines began to rend the cities and towns around them into mush. Any place that was powered by the machines began to melt into shapeless, colorless goo.
A few wiser members of the scientific community, among them George Ellis himself, managed to avert the worst of the catastrophe, managed to shut down the biggest Engines and save the world itself from total collapse. Still, the vast majority of the world died, melted into small puddles of goo. Those that managed to escape had to reinvent settlement, had to build ad-hoc floating cities in the ocean or great flying zeppelin fortresses. Some built across canyons or dug deep underground. The only constancy was that the places and ways the settlements were built had to avoid the places where the world was most settled before, as they are still areas where entering is to put one's very molecular integrity at risk. My father, Ross Ellis, estimates that it will take another thousand years for those old lands on which the old settlements were built to be able to be lived on again. So we persevere, living in our makeshift homes, waiting for reality to congeal.