If the world hadn’t already ended, Warren Smith would’ve become a serial killer. He was built for it cold, precise, methodical. Not driven by rage or trauma, but by a hunger for control. A creature of discipline and detachment. In the old world, he would’ve been studied. Hunted. Locked away. But the old world is long gone. Centuries ago, something broke, everything broke. Civilization collapsed under its own weight, swallowed by unchecked ambition, mass failure, and rot. The cities fell. The satellites died. People learned to fear silence because silence meant they’d been forgotten. And then, hundreds of years later, came the System. Sold as a cure. Marketed as salvation. A new architecture to stitch the ruins back together. Embedded in human minds through chips and fragments, it offered power, skills, survival. It promised to lift the desperate into something more than just broken survivors.