Prologue: The Project Manifesto

Co-written by professors Adam Cypress and Lily Mangrove

Pokémon are the way forward.

Since our species' emergence millions of years ago, the tale of homo sapiens has been one of struggle and misery, of hatred and conflict, of destruction and death. Followers of Abrahamic religions know the story of Cain killing Abel, of one of the first humans ever to exist murdering his brother in a fit of jealous rage because Cain thought that an invisible god favored Abel over himself. We who founded the Harmony Project are not religious, but we do not think this lesson is inaccurate to our species' condition. Look at any period in history and you will see Cain killing Abel again and again, whether that aggressor and victim are individuals or continent-spanning empires. And the killing was only sometimes in service to a fictitious god; often it had another equally-flawed purpose or even no purpose at all.

We are a failing species. Our cities are consequence of runaway overpopulation; our social structures are consequence of our callousness and cruelty; our political boundaries are consequence of war and all the horrors that war brings. All of human civilization is built atop the ruins of forgotten peoples that our ancestors enslaved, burned, and buried.

As our technology advanced and our population grew and spread over the millennia, we only found more ways to harm each other and harm our world – and as our culture, social structures, and arts progressed we only found more excuses to prey upon and destroy our kin. Nothing has ever succeeded in stopping us from consuming each other, and now, the human species is running out of time.

The world is crumbling underneath us. Our air, our water, our soil is filling with poison. The planet's non-renewable natural resources, that we depended upon too heavily and for too long for our extravagant daily energy needs, are soon to dwindle away. The world cannot sustain our way of life for much longer, and once it begins to fail us, our species will begin to devour itself more furiously and desperately than ever before.

And this time, humanity is armed with weapons powerful enough to end all life on the planet, forever. The world will not survive a massed nuclear exchange. Our biosphere is soon to end – it is not a matter of if, but when, the last chain of dominos begins to fall.

Unless we choose to be better than ourselves.

The Hawai'i Incident of August 7, 2031 left its mark on all of us. Not one person who was alive that day has forgotten the earthquakes, the landslides, the eruptions that blackened the skies and scorched the cities. That event – which we now know to be the consequence of a runaway pilot Tokamak discharging superheated plasma into a geothermal tap and triggering mantle-level phenomena throughout the globe, and was by far the worst geological disaster in recorded history – could have been far worse. Millions of human lives were lost, but it would have been billions, if not for the appearance of Pokémon in the ensuing hours and days.

Not one person living along the Pacific Rim can forget the tsunamis approaching, nor how they were suddenly held at bay and turned back by strange, magnificent creatures. Everyone too has seen the seismograms from Mts. Yellowstone and Vesuvius, of two volcanoes building up toward catastrophic eruption only to fall completely and abruptly silent. In the east, we saw the Three Gorges Dam give way to earthquakes and the reservoir poised to drown half a nation, but for a sinkhole that opened and swallowed the deadly waters. Everywhere on Earth we saw mudslides transforming into still glaciers, newly-opening fault lines halting in place before they could swallow cities, liquefied ground suddenly turning firm again thanks to lattices of steel and stone that appeared beneath its surface.

In the months that followed, the same creatures that had rescued us from an apocalypse worked endlessly to close the wounds that we had opened. Though the explosion of Hawai'i choked the atmosphere with so much ash that we were robbed of two summers, our forests, jungles and crops survived because the Grass Pokémon appeared, bringing with them warmth and light to hold back the blizzards. When meteorological shifts gave rise to hurricane-force sandstorms, it was the Rock Pokémon who raised barriers to save the Middle East. When we started to lose control of damaged nuclear power stations across the globe, we were helpless – saved only by the Ground Pokémon who evacuated all human and animal life from each site and Moltres herself who shattered the reactor cores, then defied everything we know of atomic physics by incinerating the reactors' contents to nothingness and leaving not one trace of radioactive emissions. Again and again through those first harrowing years, Pokémon emerged to help us, saving our world from mass extinction and our species from mass mortality, even though we had brought this disaster upon ourselves.

Our species owe the Pokémon everything, and our species repaid the Pokémon with evil that they could never have even imagined. Having emerged from hiding they sought to join our biosphere, where they suffered endless mistreatment and cruelty at the hands of the humans they had so selflessly protected. Moltres was assassinated in Ukraine because her work to cleanse the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was deemed politically inconvenient by men whose nation she had saved from nuclear devastation. Articuno was murdered by poachers as she defended her nest on Mount Rainier, the volcano she had lain to rest to save a city. Mew was captured by a child and died in an underground combat arena in Toronto, and those are only the most public of the atrocities that have taken place. We who founded the Harmony Project are ourselves responsible for originally developing the technology behind some of the worst atrocities: for it was our research into the secrets of Pokémon biology that led to the invention of Pokéballs and the ensuing mass capture and abuse of the greatest benefactors our species ever knew.

Even after so much senseless exploitation and destruction that we have wrought upon them, Pokémon continue to try to live among us, they continue to treat us as equals and even as friends. We do not deserve their friendship, and it is our fate to eventually betray them again. The cycle will continue, and we will devour all of our Pokémon friends, just as we always devour everything around us. Then, when there is nothing else left we will devour each other, and life on Earth will end.

Unless we choose to be better than ourselves.

Though we have only unlocked one facet of the mystery underlying Pokémon biology, that revelation – that their entire cellular compositions can be collapsed into unique streams of electrical plasma – has given us a way to break free from humanity's cycle, to escape our species' parasitism. We have discovered a way to transmute humans permanently into Pokémon: a process involving eight weeks of gene therapy to make a willing human applicant susceptible to the same sudden reduction into a packaged, coded sequence. After everything physically human that remains in the applicant's "data" is overwritten with the cellular structure of a Pokémon, the applicant can be reconstituted into a new, non-human form – a better form.

In short, we can become Pokémon. And through the Harmony Project, we will. As all humanity's attempts to save itself have failed, we will show the world that there is a better way forward, that there is a brighter future available to us, and that there is nothing human about it.

To achieve this, we will discard all human history and culture and start anew. Fifteen thousand applicants to the Harmony Project will be chosen to become Pokémon; they will begin new lives and a new civilization on a new territory unspoiled by humans. The island of Hawai'i has risen again from the sea thanks to years of constant, diligent care by our wild Pokémon friends, and is now larger and more verdant and biodiverse than ever before. No humans nor Pokémon remain on the island, so it is there that we will go, there that we will start a new future for the Earth.

We will bring nothing human with us to our new home, known henceforth as the Hawai Region: None of our cultural or political legacy and none of our destructive modern technology will follow us. We will bring only ourselves, our families, our pre-industrial scientific knowledge, and our memories of the failed society we are escaping – to remind us what is at stake. We will have supplies and shelters to help us through the initial hardship of surviving, until we rise and thrive, free of the shackles of our human pasts. We will build a better society around ourselves, a better future for ourselves, and soon, the rest of the world will be inspired to follow us and leave humanity in the past.

The greatest scientific minds in the world – Professors Quincy Beech, Cassius Cedar, Adam Cypress, and Lily Mangrove – are behind the founding and design of the Harmony Project, and they will lead it through to its completion. We have all the resources and all the knowledge that we need. We require only willing applicants such as you, dear reader – applicants with the courage and will to lead natural history out of the human era and into the next.

Join the Harmony Project, and choose to be better than yourself. Through this, my beloved applicant, we will save the world.

Pokémon are the way forward, and by joining us, you will be the way forward as well.