She watched the numbers climb. And for the first time, she understood the slogan. Help us build Earth wasn’t a metaphor. It was a job description. Six months in, Maya was promoted to . That meant she no longer handled dead soil. She handled the living networks that grew from it. Her new station was a climate-controlled dome the size of a football stadium, filled with shallow pools of water and shelves of germinating seedlings. The air smelled of wet moss and fungus. It smelled like a forest after rain—a smell that had become rare on the surface.

Darnell smiled. It was a tired, genuine smile. “Exactly. We’re not building a new Earth. We’re rebuilding this one. Brick by brick. Or in our case, ton by ton of carbon-negative aggregate, mycelial foundation mats, and reforestation drones that plant fifty thousand trees a night. But the machines don’t work without hands. And the hands don’t work without a reason.”

Maya sat down across from her. “Then we scale.”

One night, after a sixteen-hour shift, she found Darnell sitting alone in the cafeteria, staring at a global map on a wall-sized screen. The map was color-coded: green for restored land, red for actively collapsing, yellow for in progress. Most of the planet was yellow.