To @daHob’s prompt “creation.”

They started with the earth and the sky.

They had a hemisphere, a blank, seven miles in radius, of force-shield, set upon one of the most blasted places, where the air, the ground, even the stone was blasted and useless. They set the hemisphere there, and they sent in their radiation-scrubbing nanites and their rubble-breaking-down machines and their chemicals, until the ground was level dirt, arable and fertile, and the air in there was breathable.

The sphere had been opaque; now they made it transparent, to let in the light. They set their machines to digging up a lake and a river, creeks and streams, to funnel the water of the sky in. And they set into all these tributaries filters, so that the water would be potable.

They sent in new machines, to plant seeds, carefully-picked to imitate the land that had been here once. There were grasses and trees, bushes and flowers, so many flowers. And there were bees and other pollinators, before there was anything else.

And they allowed the rain through the sphere, so that the plants could grow.

They lived in their safe places, their towers and their bunkers, while the machines worked, and they did this not once, but seven times, because, while not many had survived, they hoped to grow again.

When the seven were ready for animal life, they began again with seven more, cleansing the blasted wasteland that had been their grandparents’ homes. While the first spheres took on wild animals, as carefully picked and cultivated as the plants had been.

A generation had passed when they allowed the first humans into the first spheres. A generation since they began, and so many generations since the war that none remembered its beginning.

They stepped into their Edens, careful places with a few careful buildings set upon their careful rivers. They set foot in their creations, and rejoiced.

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