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==Setting==
This event happens at the actual beginning of the story timeline: year 2234.  At this time, there are three world powers: The United States, the European Union, and the Soviet Union.  For the most part, the media has been speaking of low amounts of renewable resources, and what is to be done about it (using less resources in one's everyday life, etc.).  

There is also much talk about a machine (more details later) that the U.S. is developing, which has the task of resource restoration. However, nothing has been constructed for this purpose and at such scale, the only way to see if it worked would be to test it. Some of the top degree researchers from all three unions met at the testing ground for the resource restorer in the United States, so they could record what they saw, or suggest a fix for a minor problem, etc.  ((No prizes for guessing what happens next.))

==Happening==
When they ran the machine for the first time, being tested with a nearly used-up car battery, a log of rotten wood, and a deceased cow (all of which theoretically being supported for some degree of "restoration" from the machine).  The machine finished its work after forty minutes, leaving the cow unchanged, the log completely renewed, not to mention twice its original size, and the car battery at 75% charge.

Naturally, everyone was pleased, and immediately tested it on a larger scale.  They transported an exhausted hybrid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power solar power] harvester/[[Dark Energy|dark energy]] reactor (which broke down after thirty years of use) to the side of the restoration machine.  Everyone on the science team agreed on their readiness for a savior--a quick end to desperation.

They ran another test, bathing the reactor in the energy that emitted from the restoration machine.  Dark energy that was still inside of the reactor was amplified around twenty fold, and escaped its resting chamber as a sphere that quickly "flattened out" mid-air, creating a hollow, spherical shell around most of the planet (its final thickness being a hair's width) which swallowed a lot of types of energy forces.  As well, it killed such a vast amount of people, only around 3800 were left on Earth.  The research area was also converted into a 120-mile-in-diameter magma-filled crater.

Destroying almost everything led to a brief [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dark%20age dark age] that lasted until 2237.  Thus, scattering knowledge of technology, making it so that, for instance, only some countries know how to manufacture automobiles, and others' weapon knowledge being reset to the weapon technology of the middle ages.