Year 41. After 21 years of ETI management, eight billion synthetic humans walk back out onto the surface. This is the planet waiting for them — and the unsettling thing is what it was kept for (§37). Toggle the layers.
◆ In-world canon · §37—
CO₂ pulled back to its 1990 level over 21 years. Former cities are rewilded plains. The planet didn't die — it was prepared.
Schematic, not cartographic — the layers matter more than the coastlines. By Wake Day the ETI has covered roughly 30 million km² of the world's deserts in solar panels (Sahara, Arabian, Central Asian, Australian, North American southwest), linked by an underground superconducting backbone. Over 200 waystations sit at former airports, rail hubs and docks — each housing 100,000+ bodies and offering a 2× recharge. The East Asian semiconductor fabs are sealed and waiting; nuclear plants sit intact and offline; high-speed rail is kept for robot logistics while commuter lines are pulled up.
The reframe the map is built to deliver: nothing was preserved for humans. The waystation-at-every-port, the kept fabs, the rail — it's all robot infrastructure, retained because the machines needed it, not as a gift. The rewilded continents and the 354 ppm atmosphere are what a planet looks like when its dominant species is removed and the cleanup runs for two decades. You inherit it; it was never addressed to you.
What 21 years of rewilding actually looks like: The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone — from which humans were removed in 1986 — gives a real-world preview at smaller scale. By 2000 (14 years out), wolves had returned in significant numbers; bears, lynx, and wild boar populations grew without hunting pressure. By 2020 (34 years), the zone supported European bison herds and one of the densest wolf populations in Europe. The ETI's 21-year window, applied globally and with active management, would produce: forests reclaiming most temperate urban footprints, savanna and grassland returning across former agricultural zones in Africa and North America, coastal wetlands recovering from estuary silting, and the beginnings of genuinely wild megafauna corridors across Eurasia. The CO₂ drop to 354 ppm requires both zero industrial emissions and active photosynthesis recovery — achievable at this scale with the ETI's soil restoration programs. Certain processes take longer than 21 years: old-growth forest succession, river delta recovery, full marine ecosystem rebuilding. Residents walking out on Wake Day will find a planet that looks like it's in the middle of an ecological restoration documentary — vivid recovery everywhere, but not yet stable.
On the date: Year 41 post-Intake is correct per §35 canon. The New Andromeda series runs from years 16–20; the ETI spent approximately one additional year building the launch facilities and lofting the probe before beginning deceleration, with the Wake occurring on April 8 of year 41. The gap between year 20 (end of New Andromeda) and year 41 (Wake) is the period of deceleration described in §35.
Pairs with the HSS Cross-Section (where everyone was during those 21 years), the Synthetic-Body Spec (what walks back out), and the Bootstrap Tech-Tree (what they do next).
Further reading: Svenning, J.-C., et al. (2016). "Science for a wilder Anthropocene." PNAS, 113(4), 898–906 — framework for large-scale rewilding; the ecological science behind what 21 ETI-managed years of planetary restoration would plausibly produce. Deryabina, T.G., et al. (2015). "Long-term census data reveal abundant wildlife populations at Chernobyl." Current Biology, 25(19), R824–R826 — empirical evidence that removing human presence, even in a contaminated area, rapidly produces wildlife population recovery; the closest real-world analogue to Wake-Day Earth.