The Rewilding
From the novel by Marcus Chen
The game we see here
A crate of tiny solar-powered robot animals arrives at a damaged watershed. Boot them, send them into meadow, river, canopy and tidepool, and link them into a web: every connection heals the land faster. Fix one place too fast and something downstream breaks, so the crew has to watch the whole valley. After sunset, every robot has to make its charge last.
Why this world
Collecting creatures in rarity tiers, and growing something you come back to, are the patterns behind recent player records on the platforms we build for. This book supplies both, with a twist of its own. Its first crate holds 63 units, its last chapter opens a second crate of rainforest species, and its rarest units are the ones flagged as faulty, because they see connections the others miss. Repairs show on the page: meadows bloom, salmon return, a new species turns up.
The book · Literary Fiction
A drop of water falls from moss into a pool, and the ripples spread across the Quinault watershed — a forest that once breathed as a single body, now scarred by logging roads and thinning salmon runs. Into this diminished cathedral, Dr. Elena Chen releases the Cascadia Initiative: a network of solar-powered AI creatures, each modeled on a Pacific Northwest species, each tasked with monitoring a single thread of the ecosystem.
Pollen, a robotic bee no larger than her living counterpart, is assigned to wildflower-pollinator interactions in Sector 4. From her first flight, she sees what she was not built to see — soil pH beneath the trillium, fungal growth on a nurse log, the bird call that precedes an insect emergence three valleys away. The world is a web, and she cannot stop tracing the threads.
Her crew — a humorless coho, an anxious bark beetle, a watchful hawk, a grieving sea otter, an enigmatic earthworm — were designed to stay in their lanes. Mosaic, the central coordinator, schedules her for firmware reset. Above them all, a senator waits eighteen months for a photograph.
When a salmon reintroduction collapses into algal bloom, Pollen alone can read the chain of cause back to a forgotten road three miles upstream. The question is whether anyone — machine or human — is built to listen.
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.