Earth was abandoned long ago, as we learn from a series of interesting and all too plausible essays by Lydia Heliosmith, aged 17, for her Terrestrial Anthropology class. In 2387, the eruption of a supervolcano in the Phlegraean Fields annihilated Italy, Greece, Slovenia and Western Turkey, darkened the skies worldwide, brought the Holocene to an end, and saw the glaciers return, but the population of Earth had been in long-term decline ever since the Corporate Age. Half a million lucky people escaped to the ringstations, while the population of Earth continued to dwindle, from a peak of eleven billion down to ten thousand.
