Flowering

The Flowering may refer to the moment when the blast doors of ZIgsa's Nest were unsealed on Sunshine Day, 16 April 2174 and humans met the reformed machines for the first time. =It may also refer to the explosion of technology, culture, progress and karma that followed in the next hundred or so years.

First contact with machines

The blast doors of Zigsa's Nest were unsealed in response to an appeal by the machines to be allowed to communicate with the humans and give them the plants, animals and human artefacts that they had rescued and collected. The machines offered the hmans an qlliance: since they were more durable, they could help the humans with regreening the Earth and cleaning up the hanyout or toxic fallout of the Radical Age. After some deliberation the Survivors agreed and allowed the machines into their survivarium.

Duration of the Flowering

There is no formal end-date for the Flowering, and it is thought to have merged seamlessly with the Florian Age which it inaugurated, but informally it is thought to have been completed on 28 March 2289, commemorated as Worldcircle Day, when the last survivarium was discovered, contacted and brought into the Florian fold. At this point, all of the Equatorial Zone had been mapped and work was underway in many places to clean the soil and water and plant the first scraggly pioneer species. Eventually teh Green Zone encircled the Earth.

Roughly, therefore, the FLowering corresponds to the First Florian century.

Ending the Zero Dark

The Flowering is popularly said to have ended the Zero Dark, but in actual fact the severe disturbance in the Earth's systems caused by the hanyo corporations and the Comet Strike took at least three hundred years to be brought under control, and has still (as of 2684) not been completely healed. However, the Flowering did inaugurate the human-machine effort to put things right and recover the Earth, basha plot by basha plot. In the 700 years since the Flowering, the Green Zone has been cleaned to a human-tolerable level, and is full of flourishing plants and animals.

The Flowering in art and culture

Although people remember the Flowering as a joyous time of creativity, discovery, freedom and celebration, the historial reality was that the greening and exploration were hard, gruelling work. There were four major plagues during the First Florian century, all the result of hanyo bioweapons accidentally released from under ice or mud. There was also high radioactivity in many places, still unexploded ordnance buried under mud, dormant war rigs with a flicker of juice left in them, and ice cliffs that could melt overnight to disclose piles of swiftly defrosting corpses. Many real hero stories exist in the archives of the Flowering, and violet karmics have added many more fictional ones in later centuries. particularly popular is the storyworld of Baia and Melana, a human-machine romantic pair who seek out dirty bombs in the Zero Margin and defuse them.