Fueled by the Past

She stared at the data scrolling across her screen, the irony so sharp it could cut glass. The very substance that had ended the Permian—carbon dioxide, methane, the atmospheric cocktail of death—was now being pumped skyward again, but this time by intent rather than volcanism.

She pulled up the geological timeline on her second monitor. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, the Siberian Traps had belched poison for millennia, turning the oceans acidic and the atmosphere into a furnace. Ninety-six percent of marine species vanished. The Great Dying, they called it.

Now humanity was burning the compressed remains of that very extinction event. Coal seams laid down in the aftermath, oil formed from the decay of vanished organisms—fossil fuels were literally the carbonized corpses of the Permian’s victims, and humans were setting them ablaze with unprecedented efficiency.

Her phone buzzed. Another message about Bitcoin hitting new highs, about AI data centers coming online, about the energy demands of the digital revolution. She closed her eyes and saw the feedback loop clearly: ancient death fueling modern death, the carbon cycle completing its most macabre circle.

Outside her office window, construction crews worked around the clock on another server farm. The lights never dimmed in this city anymore. Somewhere, coal plants fired up to meet the endless hunger for electricity, for computation, for the digital dreams that would outlast the dreamers.

Mars glowed red in the evening sky—a cautionary tale written in rust and thin air. She wondered if some Martian scientist had once sat in an office like this, watching their world’s last sunset through the haze of their own making.

The data kept scrolling. The planet kept warming. And somewhere in the depths of Siberia, ancient permafrost began to thaw, ready to release the next breath of the long-dead Permian world into an atmosphere already drunk on its own ghosts.