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SUPER PROLOGUE – THE LONG AWAKENING


THE ANCIENT SPARK


In the steam-wreathed corridors of the ancient centre of learning, the Library of Alexandria, long before the first combustion engine or silicon transistor, a man named Hero devised a machine that harnessed vapor to create motion. A toy, they said. A curiosity. But it was the first breath of modern power some two thousand years ago — smothered by fear and priesthood.


Beside him stood advanced thinkers like beautiful Hypatia, a brilliant woman who, as a teacher in ancient Alexandria, calculated the movements of the heavens only to be torn apart by mobs wielding ignorance as justice. Knowledge, it seemed, was dangerous—unless controlled.  In 1633 Galileo Galilei , an astronomer, physicist and engineer, was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.


Across centuries, in every corner of empire and republic, sparks like these ignited briefly and were stamped out. The clockwork of invention never stopped ticking—but its hands were held still by those who preferred obedience to illumination.


THE ENLIGHTENMENT INTERRUPTED


The Enlightenment promised a rational future. But the revolutions it inspired—French, American, Digital—were often co-opted by new hierarchies. Scientific elites replaced monarchs, but the outcome was the same: power nested where it could reproduce itself.


In the 20th century, the atom was split and the DNA code of life deciphered. But breakthroughs led not to emancipation, but to the Cold War, to bio-surveillance, to a marketplace where truth was priced in advertising slots and encrypted by algorithms.


The dream of liberty blurred into the fog of permission. And humanity began to forget what freedom ever felt like.


THE AGE OF FEAR


By the early 21st century, centralized systems ruled every major domain: finance, energy, food, data. Promises of convenience were traded for surveillance. Entire generations came of age believing that privacy was archaic, and that control—over information, biology, thought—was natural.


Technologies that could have decentralized abundance—, Nanotech, Artificial Intelligence , Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM) , a key technique that involves the direct control of atoms in order to manufacture products or components of products. —were either throttled, captured, or buried in endless research.


Neo-Tech thinkers warned of this: that knowledge without ownership leads to stagnation. That reason without individual sovereignty is just another form of collective programming. But their warnings were relegated to the fringe.


THE RISE OF PROMETHEUS


In this climate of repression, a seed took root.


Inspired by the work of Drexler and the dreams of countless forbidden thinkers, Prometheus emerged—not as a single technology, but as a system of liberation. Molecular assemblers, open-source AI, decentralized power grids. A thousand revolutions packed into a single idea: that human beings should no longer depend on permission to thrive.


Its early architects were ignored. Then ridiculed. Then targeted.


Until Adam Lister appeared.


A brilliant outsider, forged in the labs of Cambridge and Stanford and tempered in the crucible of a spectacular failed venture, Lister didn’t just build a system. He built a movement. He revived the Hero Engine—this time not as steam, but as sovereign technology.

 

THE DEATH OF DEATH


Prometheus’ most controversial promise wasn’t energy or food. It was time.


Through bio-nanotech, it opened the possibility that aging itself could be slowed, halted—perhaps reversed. The implications were seismic. Institutions founded on life’s brevity—retirement, inheritance, even religion—wavered.


The Continuum, a secretive cadre of post-biological thinkers, whispered of a future where consciousness could persist indefinitely. Not uploaded into clouds, but scaffolded within engineered biology.


Many called it madness.


But others called it the next logical step.


THE RECKONING


Into this converging storm stepped a journalist, summoned by a cryptic editor to find a vanished tech mogul.


That journalist—Matt Rowland — thought he was chasing a ghost.


What he found was Adam Lister.


And what Lister revealed was not a company. Not a start-up. But a manifesto in motion—a war not fought with weapons, but with truth, code, and courage.


This is the story of Prometheus. Of the Hero Engine.


And of what happens when humanity stops asking for permission—and begins to remember what it was always meant to be.

​© 2025 by The Hero Engine. 

 

​The Hero Engine: A powerful vision for the future. Enjoy this Super Prologue before the release of the book.
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