Building an operating system for Earth

How we went from an architecture of collapse to a simulation for survival

This is a piece of short fiction by

stephen marshall

, author of

speedrunning spacetime

. It is part of TERRAFORM, an online essay collection on the future of our planet. Support the collection by purchasing the digital or print edition 👇🏻

i. the reef

[mexico city – august – 2032]

the room is silent except for the hum of the hologram: a sphere, floating mid-air, vast and slow-spinning, the planet Earth rendered in perfect fidelity

then something happens
chairs push back. rapid steps across the floor. lenses lower over eyes to summon pinpoint display that will identify the problem

a reef, massive and teeming off Western Australia seen from above

within the projection, the water warms by degrees. whole sections bleach white, and then, as they watch, are erased. the death is not local. an entire biome begins to unravel—fisheries collapse, heat stress detonates across the food chain, supply chains fracture, Australian markets reel. the display recoils to the globe, simulating the downstream impacts—coastal economies shifting, migration patterns accelerating, geopolitical pressure points appearing like heat blooms across the planet

the system is not issuing an alert
it is showing the next decade

one of the operators speaks, her voice sharp and clipped. “what’s the directive?”
intervention scenarios and response chains unfold across the interface. recommendations adjust in real time
the team moves, each directive is assigned, executed – mandates ripple outward

the future has been adjusted.

---

---

ii. forever fires

[los angeles – january – 2025]

when the fires finally came, it was as if the entire city and its billion-dollar emergency response infrastructure was caught off guard

the winds shifted overnight. the containment lines failed. embers rode the air like insurgents, crossing highways, leaping neighborhoods. the evacuation orders were too slow. water ran out

the models had predicted a fire season—not a fire siege

by the time the smoke cleared, it was not just los angeles that had burned
it was an entire paradigm
the entertainment industry, the digital economy, the tech corridors that had defined the city were in retreat, scrambling to relocate to safer places

a city that had been the epicenter of information culture suddenly blind to its own future
except one thing:

the rebuild was inevitable. but they would not build back what had failed
so the old guard — climate prophets and their failed systems — were put to pasture

in stepped the new: a polymathical mix of data architects, day traders, indigenous wisdom keepers, blockbuster film directors, immersive interface designers. all working in concert to answer a single question:

how do you see the signals of a fire before it burns?

---

iii. signal becomes system

[taipei – months later]

on the 47th floor of a glass tower, the system came online
not a dashboard
not a warning siren
but a real-time rendering of the Earth as it lived and shifted

it tracked biospheric stress like a stock ticker
temperature deltas, water scarcity, soil depletion, extinction curves
except this wasn’t for hedge funds
this wasn’t to price risk
it was to prevent collapse

because when the LA fires torched some of the most prized real estate in the country
and the insurers defaulted and migration corridors ignited
the math was no longer abstract
and the models built to watch climate risk
were retooled to outpace it.

---

iv. the living sphere

[geneva – november – 2026]

they built a replica of Earth
not symbolic
not theoretical
but alive

a full-scale, spherical hologram
fed by billions of sensors
tracking every car, cloud, wave, trout, turbine
a real-time signal of the living system
rendered in perfect fidelity and updated moment to moment

from wind corridors to shipping lanes
crop moisture to atmospheric instability
it didn’t approximate — it revealed
what was happening
where it was going
and what it could become

it began as a pulse
green when stable
amber under strain
red when collapse loomed

but the signal wasn’t just a warning
it was a body
responsive
aware
generative

the sphere was not a metaphor
it was a memory engine
a live rendering of cause and effect
a system that could remember, respond, and adapt.

---

v. planetary governance upgrade

[addis ababa – february – 2028]

once the simulation proved it could show not just events,
but outcomes, it became the meeting place
the room filled up
scientists, engineers, climate modelers
but also urbanists, narrative designers, complexity theorists
tribal chiefs, heads of state, religious leaders
even old rivals—oil magnates and ecological radicals—
united in the planetary governance over the same sim layer

no more debates over ideology or ethos
only impact
no more arguing if one input or practice or industry
was ‘good’ or ‘bad’
only: what did it do –
and what would it do next?

a mining ban in chile
an emissions cap in riyadh
a policy tweak in EU agriculture

each input reran the globe
lit up supply chains
unlocked or triggered feedback loops

they weren’t just watching the Earth
they were negotiating with it
through cause
through code
through consensus.

---

vi. intelligence becomes interface

[osaka – september – 2029]

the first time they ran it live
they watched a typhoon cross the pacific
then slam into the philippines
rerouting supply chains
triggering grain collapse in sub-Saharan markets
starving entire cities

and then — they took action
adjusting a single parameter
and watched the future reassemble
on a new timeline
where the storm still hit
but the downstream collapse never came

this was the hinge
where planetary intelligence became operational
not as theory
not as policy
but as interface

the signal became the system
and the system became the OS.

---

vii. the fork

there is another timeline
one where the signal was ignored
the simulation never scaled
and consensus never formed

in that version
we kept mistaking data for action
archives for agency
models for wisdom

and now the reefs are gone
the forests smolder
the rivers have run dry

adaptation becomes an epitaph
that world stayed in the old operating system
mistaking visibility for control

we could have stayed there
but we didn’t

a new generation said enough
and built what the old world could not:
an intelligence that could see
and act
before collapse

this was the break
the fork in time
between a world that still had a choice
and a world that ran out of them

we are in that moment now
the signal is live
the future unwritten.

---

author’s note:

while this story leans speculative, much of what it imagines is already deployable. the most immediate need is to evolve static climate models into live ecosystemic signals — meaning models that actually mimic the ‘living’ nature of Gaia.

below is a video about the ongoing campaign to upgrade the Planetary Boundaries framework from a 2D - 19th century graphic to a modern generative interface that doesn’t just picture collapse, it premeditates it and guides us back to optimal resilience: