The ride smoothed as we traveled beyond the steep rise. A vast valley bloomed into view, its depths obscured by a dissipating early morning fog. For several minutes we hovered above the gray mist—until the sun cracked the horizon and lifted the veil and my eyes widened in wonderment.

I suppose one could describe the habitat as a forested city, but that would be as fitting as defining a computer as a glowing rectangular box. Materializing out of the haze was a living, breathing, self-sustaining entity—combining the biodiversity of the redwood canopy with a futuristic environmentally birthed metropolis a million years in the making.

Still battered by the crater’s magnetic interference, ABE nevertheless managed to flood my brain with undulating waves of information—a mind-numbing play-by-play of scientific theory that boggled my consciousness even as it threatened to drown me in the abstract. If the Great Die-Off had exposed a major weakness in human society it was modern man’s dependence on transportation in order to feed the masses. For decades, America and other nations had relied on industrial farms to grow and transport food, sacrificing nutrition for preservatives, compensating a lack of soil quality with fertilizers and pesticides—all of which required oil, so much so that it took ten calories of oil to produce and deliver one calorie of food. When the oil ran out, the inevitable happened.

In an attempt to prevent the inevitable, scientists in the early 2000s turned to genetic engineering. By altering, replacing, or resequencing pairs of genes within strands of DNA they discovered they could enrich or improve on nature’s original design. This led to an exciting new field—synthetic genomics. Though it couldn’t prevent the death of four billion people, the GDO survivors did manage to develop bio-fuels with reduced carbon imprints, designer foods enriched with cancer-preventing nutrients, smart-clothing made from genetically altered fabrics, and aero gels like the ones used to construct Oceanus.

The intellectual agenda on display below our hovering transport dwarfed all that.

Instead of altering the DNA of an existing life-form, the habitat’s designer had used synthetic biology to combine the genetic attributes of many different life-forms with building materials to create an entirely new “living system.”

Rising out of the fog-enshrouded waters of a sparkling azure lake were monstrous genetically enhanced redwood trees that towered hundreds of stories high and several square miles wide. Synthetic biology had transformed the bark and barn door–size leaves into organic photovoltaic composites that used the sun’s rays to power the trees’ glowing hives. These biosphere habitats were budding directly out of the redwood tree trunks, each pumpkinlike growth as large as Oceanus.

Far from stopping there, the trees’ highway of limbs had been engineered to sprout vertically stacked food depots. Dozens of these organic greenhouses grew like wild mushrooms from every limb—each structure a genetically enhanced ecosystem, nourished by the trees’ innate water distribution system.