1.1 - apocalipse
This is month five of 147 AA. Annus Apocalypsis. The zero hour of our time. There used to be different year counting systems then, but they were all abolished for their relation to diverse religions. Our forefathers resolved to try and remove the differences that led to the events that almost erased mankind by doing things that seemed to reduced the importance of religion in peoples lives. They wanted to create a more rational society. It didn't work. Religious fanaticism rose even stronger out of the rubble. Difficult times, radiation, hunger, pandemics and death made it easier for rabble rousers everywhere to use the name of whatever God they misrepresented in order to lead their followers in campaigns of hatred that justified the fight for resources that followed doomsday.
(Image: Diegolopeztr, Wallpaper Cave)
It is said that, when nuclear war occurred, mankind was long overdue for it. This world had lived a full century under the menace of total aninilation. Everybody knew it was inevitable and tried to pretend it wasn't. One day, it happened. Some say the first bomb was launched in Asia, others insist the first missile was fired from America. No one really knows precisely what happened, as everything went so fast the newscasters had no time to report on the event. What is certain is the colonization efforts in the Moon, Mars and Titan had removed all the stops from the equation. The main decisors were off planet and were fairly sure that mankind would no longer be extinguished in the event of a global war on Earth. We had gone multi-planetary, and that, made it ok.
What the politicians didn't expect was the outcome. Half the weapons they fired weren't in working order and out of the ones that were, many were intercepted by advanced land and space based systems. The warheads were too many for all to be stopped. In the end, the ones that effectively hit their targets could be counted in dozens, instead of hundreds, and, surprisingly, the biosphere stood up to the challenge and did not collapse under the weight of such aggression. What collapsed was the order that ruled the world for the couple of thousand years that preceded the event. Everything changed in ways that the people who had found necessary to unleash the war didn't predict, and it started by the overthrowing of governments wherever they still stood and the lynching of politicians by mobs of angry survivors. The war didn't kill mankind, but it killed politics as they knew it in the twenty first century of the last era.
The ones that pressed the buttons were the first to meet their demise, as their basis of support was reduced to dust. The only structures of power that remained on the planet were multinational corporations that had their tentacles spread so far and wide, they still held control of positions in the places that weren't directly affected by the bombs. The dust hadn't even started to settle and those corporations had already started to join into consortiums and those into worldwide cartels. Taking control wherever they could, these cartels established a worldwide organization that was led by nominees selected by the corporations from within the ranks of CEO's, CFO's and CTO's. Even though this goes by the misleading name of Earth Government, it was far from ruling over the entire planet for the first fifty years of global civil wars and even now, large swathes of land and ocean remain out of their reach.
The corporations are practical and economic. Not to waste resources, they decided to only assert control over the areas that had economical interest or were important for their security. Every place that was too contaminated for human life, too far away, too dificult to explore or too poor to be of use was surveiled but not acted upon. An efective anarchy was maintained in those places as drug lords and tribal leaders were supported by this or that consortium and played against eachother. That was enough for the corporations to maintain an outlying black market to dump their surpluses and to keep the rabble from organising and from ever trying to take the control of the planet out of their hands. It also provided for the supply of a number of articles that made their way into many of the corrupt elite's lives without disturbing the social order in any visible way. Valuable antiques found within the ruins, drugs and disposable sex slaves constituting most of the inbound products of that operation.
Even though the huge terraforming engines that were supposed to be sent to Mars never left the Earth and were set in motion to speed up the recovery of the atmosphere, the full process is still expected to take a few thousand years. No one knows exactly how many. The nuclear winter wasn't as bad as expected, still, a century after doomsday, the sky had become a dull orange grey, due to the proliferation of algae that turned most of the water on the planet's surface somewhat reddish in tint. In a very good day, in the middle of the sky, we can still see a little bit of blue. All the rain in the planet is radioactive and this has had the corporations establish their centers of control in the spots where it rains the least. It was decided that the major center of operations would be established in the Kik plateau where Morroco used to be and that became the world's capital city, New Constantinople.
Two hundred million people live in and around the capital, but they are probably more, as the census doesn't consider the outlying illegals that occupy the slums that pop up like mushrooms on the outskirts of the outer cities. Inside an armed wall, lies Center City, where the technocratic elite lives. Around it, a sprawling metropolitan area of liguistic and ethnical guettos interspersed with the huge industrial complexes that exploit their inhabitants for the glory of the Earth Government. Three other such centers grew over the last century. The city of Olmeca, in the Atacama Desert, concentrates the population of South America and is the hub for the mineral exploitation of the continent. Bagdad, became great again and rules over the Middle East and the fields of fossile fuels that keep on being explored all over the region. Alice Springs, in Australia, is the shiny new example of the Earth Government control over the planet. Founded fifty years ago, it's expected to reach one billion souls in the next decade, as ever more and more droves of East Asian survivors of the nuclear holocaust arrive in search of the comforts of civilization.
North America, and most of Eurasia, including the Indian sub-continent and China, were the most affected by the bombs and, with the exception of the high mountains of Tibet and a large part of Siberia, are too contaminated for human life and have been devolved to being wastelands where gangs and tribes kill eachother for whatever remains of the once thriving 21st century civilization. Directly or indirectly, three fourths of the population of the planet died in the first ten years after the bombs fell, but the human species was fast to recover and the worldwide Earth Government now rules over three billion people, while some six hundred million are outliers, living in the wildlands and in the wetlands, where the radioactive rain reduces their life expectancy to half of that of the city dwellers. And then, there are the ones that got away and are part of the thriving spacefaring colonies. And those, were the lucky ones.
-To be continued
17.01.25 - @hefestus
Disclaimer:
"Just a little bit of blue" is a work of fiction. Every event, character, planet, continent, country, city, street, building, corporation, institution and product mentioned in this work is totally fictitious and has absolutely no relation to reality or real events, persons, planets, continents, countries, cities, streets, buildings, corporations or institutions. Everything is derived from the author's own imagination and no AI products were involved in the planning, writing or revision of this work. Additionally, the story happens in the future, in a time that has not yet come, so, any considerations about the possibility of the occurrence of facts or release of products mentioned herein, in the years to come, are due to mere coincidence and in no way derive from the author's inside or 3rd party knowledge of any country, organization or person's plans to implement actions or release said products into the market.
Just to be clear: All that's written here is fictional and originated by the author's own toughts about what may happen to come in the unknown future.