When Jack conferred with Moira and Zeb, recently rescued from a Dark Planet, he didn’t expect to be returning them to a wall-enclosed cell of forced labor. Yet in this timeline, cells like the one he gazes upon near Washington D.C. are all over the planet. Surrounded by dying forests, citizens filled with nanobots walk the streets like robots.

Jolene Ashberg works in a biolab to restore distressed ecosystems, with a robot who claims not to be one. Their reclamation project rapidly loses ground against William Doors, the aspiring god of Earth who relentlessly dispatches planes to rain from the skies trails of poison lethal to living systems.

Moira and Zeb’s revelation of trafficked children here, including their own, stalls Jack’s plans to return home. In this dismal, locked-down timeline of Earth, Stella Lumina and her crew may offer the children held in tunnels beneath the streets of Washington D.C. their only hope for rescue.