The Havens

Rabbitkind lives in the Havens: airborne cities floating high above the Blur, now treated as the ordinary, permanent world. They were not built as a permanent world at all. They began as emergency shelters, thrown up in the immediate aftermath of the Anomaly, when some of the first Symmetry Break team sacrificed their own Value and life energy to protect as much of Rabbitkind as they could from the newly unstable world below.

Four thousand years later, that origin has been almost entirely forgotten.

Safe on the Surface, Stagnant Underneath

The Havens are meant to feel safe at a glance and stagnant underneath: risk-averse, historically amputated, technologically comfortable but spiritually and culturally narrowed, saturated with mediated entertainment and online life, and organized almost entirely around avoiding the Blur below. They are quietly provisional despite genuinely believing themselves permanent.

Historical Amnesia

Rabbitkind does not remember that the Havens were built through sacrifice, or that a first Symmetry Break was ever attempted at all. That amnesia is not simple forgetting. It likely involves some mixture of trauma, cultural drift, myth replacement, institutional decay, and possibly active or automated suppression, though exactly which of those forces did the most damage remains an open question.

Youth Restlessness

The online AR-game testing culture that eventually finds and recruits new Symmetry Break teams works precisely because Haven youth already crave mediated escape from that stagnation. A personality test disguised as ordinary entertainment barely has to disguise itself at all.