“The rain hasn’t stopped for months. Choose your shelter from these three locations...”

Did you think you’d fallen down another rabbit hole of AI doomsday survival dramas?

Maybe you’ve also been stuck indoors on some sweltering afternoon, writing your own disaster movie in your head. What if this maddening weather never lets up? How would we live?

But when another anxious stretch of extreme weather passes, life goes on.
Until the next wave of dread arrives...

In fact, over the past year or so, we’ve been running a small experiment with Dreams & Disruptions, a futures thinking card game. About 200 people from China and Southeast Asia sat down in groups of eight to ten. Each table began with a climate anomaly or ecological disaster and opened the story the same way this post did: “What if... happened? What would the world around you look like, and what would you do?” Then cards for global drivers (political, economic, social, technological, cultural and natural) turned up at random. Players accepted whatever came and took turns carrying the story forward. Together, they summoned more than 20 futures.

Doom fiction tends to compete over which ending is bleakest or most thrilling. These futures were different. Some were places you’d want to run from. Some were wonderful enough to look forward to. Some were stranger than anyone expected. Every table started from a disaster, yet different people and different social forces opened paths to very different futures. Along the way, the stories revealed the participants’ intuitive feel for complexity and the decency at their core.

Abundant Climate and the Futurist Circle co-organized this series of “climate futures” game workshops. The series is both a small social experiment and a growing collection of narrative data. What we wanted to learn was this: if the conversation starts with climate,

“When people who care about the climate gather and shine a light together into the sea fog where monsters may lurk, what futures will they see? And what might that glimpse tell us about today?”

Across the workshops, participants worked through the chain reactions set off by disasters, resource scarcity, social divides opened by technological leaps and more. Many drivers circled and intertwined, so where future societies ended up was never settled. As facilitators, we saw several things in the stories. The storytellers expected climate disasters and crises, and they showed resilience in facing them. They had a quiet optimism that AI could help solve global ecological challenges. And they held a deep hope that people would pull together to get through hard times. In May, we shared these early impressions at an online session.

Now a long, rainy summer is behind us. A super El Niño is building in the eastern Pacific, and the turbulence it stirs up will sweep across the globe over the next year or more.

This week, the UN Climate Change Conference COP31 opens in Antalya, Türkiye. Once a year, it draws more people’s attention to global challenges and humanity’s shared fate. That makes it a fitting moment to put our imagination to work exploring what the future could hold.

So here we share Nine Stories with you. These are the nine futures that stayed with us most from the many workshops held across 2025 and 2026. They include The Fluid Dao from Shanghai, about an AI that attains the Dao; The Lost Dome from Beijing; and The Boundless Abyss from Bangkok. Artist Liu Suya worked with AI to develop the raw spoken stories into an illustrated graphic novel. It shows these futures with elegance and force.

Unlike AI doom fiction, imagining the future together is fun, but entertainment isn’t the point. The point is to find clues for how we think and act today. What do we care about? What do we hope for? What can we do?

The stories aren’t finished. They stay open for you to continue and co-create with us. Stories connect us and bind us together, and the future holds endless possibilities. Enjoy the read! If you’d like to start your own journey of unlocking imagination and embracing uncertainty, get in touch.