Great storms
announce themselves with a single breeze..
and a single random spark can ignite the fires of
rebellion.
That's a line from one of my
favorite films. I think of it when I think of how this all began. A stored
cache of weapons which disappeared from a country that was in a state of flux, a
new strain of flu and two small groups of terrorists. And the ease of
international travel which aggravated the situation. And Nature's cyclical
nature.
The flu came that first year, and it was like most others of it's kind, it didn't kill great numbers and it passed on, only those in the medical field that had encountered it or had reason to watch for it's re-occurrence made note of it. And as most flu's do it returned the following year, but it got some assistance this time from the first group of terrorists ; a mere handful of activists and one scientist. They didn't realize that their modified bug would combine with the natural one, creating a particularly virulent strain of flu that would move too swiftly to be fought. They released their bug in a financial center in Topeka during an international convention, knowing that several of the conventioneers would be returning to their homes the next weekend, carrying their little passengers along. Except that one of those conventioneers had the flu, that one that had come along the year before. The two bugs liked each other. And by the time the convention was over several of the attendees had the hybrid flu.
It decimated populations all over the globe, and thanks to frequent and largely unmonitored air travel it made it's way to many less populated areas as well.. people don't stop travel when they have a cold. By the time the hybrid ran it's course most governments had collapsed, the few so-called super powers still clinging on had stumbled badly. And then the cache of weapons made their reappearance in the hands of the second small group of terrorists. Detonated at high altitude they proved to be more devastating than ground strikes might have been. Released in a chain, they created a series of electromagnetic pulses that brought nearly all electrical activities to a halt. The governments that had survived the flu and the diseases which had followed them collapsed. And the atmospheric detonation of those weapons had an unexpected result. There had been much discussion of 'nuclear winter'.. but no one had actually thought about a 'nuclear summer'. It was short-lived, but unprepared for it more died and we lost much of the planet's wildlife as well. And there the written records stop. For the rest, well, it's mostly conjecture, there were few scientists remaining to be able to explain what Nature did.
Or might have
done, no one really knows. The planet shrugged. Flipped it's axis. We
don't know. The face of the planet must be very different today. We don't
know all of that either, travel is difficult within countries, let alone outside
of them. Some land is gone, there are seas where none existed before. And
the cities that remain are all empty, eerily silent. It is science fiction
written real, speculations proven truth. And not, some
surprises.
Today,
in this new life, I am a historian, it's my job to write the new records, and
try to join them with the old.
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