Some notes on the end of the world

⚠️ This article is archived, and should be considered non-canon.

A single hiss, the heavy door rolls back, and it derails into sandbags. A gas piston grinds, an engine ignites, and a roar sends flames pouring fifty feet high out of the silo as a sleek missile emerges and climbs towards hunting altitude.

This missile will strike Lanzhou, China. The larger cities, swollen with people, are protected by antimissile laser batteries. But China is very big, and there are not enough lasers, nor enough power, to shield the entire country from missiles. This missile will extinguish 42,000 people instantly, in a ball of hot fire, and kill anywhere from 250-750,000 moments after as the city is ripped up like paper. Along with other missiles from the U.S., Vekllei, and Europe, this missile will irradiate the Yangtze and set fire to great swaths of farmland. Lanzhou will be a crater, her neighbouring villages will be on fire, and the scraps of her people that survive will drift elsewhere, this land scorched. Famine will set in, radiation will poison her children and ensure that future generations living in the great land that was once China will be primitive and factional for hundreds of years.

The Chinese, too, will do good work destroying America. Where missiles are zapped out of the sky, bombs are sent into freefall from jets, and they erase the heart and culture of American cities and industry.

By the end of it, three hours later, 1.4 billion people will be dead or taken ill, ash will rain from the sky as huge fragments of earth cycle across the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere, and the thyroids of the global youth will get to work soaking up radiation in the vast wastes of North America and East Asia.

Vekllei, as it had always known it would, emerged flustered and unharmed. It had lost 23,000 people to bombs, one in the city and one near Montre, but her food stock was secure, her population was underground, and so her diplomats set to work resuscitating the U.N. and organising relief to the globe. Such remarkable attempts to save face, hands still warm with Chinese blood.

And future generations would condemn the use of missiles in the last great war of the 21st century — from the defunct U.S., from defunct Red China and the Warsaw Pact, and especially from Vekllei — but it made no difference to how things played out. With one stroke of a match, the world’s great civilisations had collapsed and petticoat society was on that global horizon. Like how Vekllei had known it would be, and like how it was meant to be.

Hey folks, let me know if you have any questions about this or anything else! Cheers.