"Strange - game; the - only - winning - move - is - not - to play. How - about - a - nice - game - of -chess?" I remember the one time in my life I legitimately won a tic-tac-toe game. It was right after my father had died. I was playing my mother. She was crying, so was I. It was supposed to be our little way to honor him, watch his favorite movie, make his favorite dish, play tic-tac-toe when the characters on screen did. I almost five, old enough to understand.
Of course, funerals had been banned due to the sheer size of the mountain of bodies. About a quarter of the world's population had died of what amounted to nerve gas inhalation. Members of the Christian Remnant, including my mother, and a few others, saw a host of demonic horsemen delivering the blow with swords made of smoke. There was a conspiracy theory about the world's stockpile of chemical weapons, which Nicolae's Peacekeepers had rounded up and were destroying, having itself been Raptured, and then returned to humanity in this most cruel way. Christians called it the Sixth Trumpet Judgement; most everyone else called it the Second Event. It was more destructive than the Rapture, if nothing else because there were a billion rotting bodies to get rid of.
This probably warrants another aside. After the plague of demon locusts had turned up to be a bust, with essentially no casualties - courtesy of God's mercy according to the Remnant web forums, and of Tesla coils and efficient quarantine protocols according to the news on TV - people were about ready to believe that modern tech an logistics could take on the end times itself. The Second Event was a gigantic wake-up call; for a while there was even a rumor that Carpatescu had been among the dead. I think people are arguing to this day whether the demonic horsemen targeted those who could have stopped the madness. You can still go online and read on old CellSol nodes - those things are pretty damn near indestructible, big surprise, right? any number of conspiracy theories about scientists and engineers getting smoked while regular Joes kept on living.
I was four years old at the time; me and the other kids were, as much as possible, sheltered from this. I did not lose any close family - an uncle who gave me artisanal socks one Christmas, a few relatives who I barely remember - and this time around, children and pregnant people were spared. Even so, security measures around us increased. In retrospect, it's weird that Carpatescu - who by all account had become erratic by this time - didn't forbid abortion; logically he should have been worried about a population crunch. Not really a concern anymore, I guess, but I have to admit that for a few years after all this, after the Tribulation, I became a bit of a political science wonk. I was trying to make sense of what had happened. I doubt that it's possible to apply logic to it, now, but then, I figured that it had to be sorted out by reason, since faith had failed me.
On that note; my mother, Linda, had been raised Christian, and was as simply genuine about it as she has been genuine about everything else in her life. She didn't push her faith on anyone, preferring, as she still does, to quietly live it. The Tribulation did not change that. Some took to the streets proclaiming that submission to God was the only way for humanity to survive; others, a majority, wanted revenge on the supernatural being who had snatched their children away. My mother just... became even more quiet about it, I suppose. My father would go to church once a month, out of love for her more than out of love for God, I think. After all that, she'd show up for sermons less, and for volunteering more. A few years ago - after all this had already ended, after Armageddon, you understand - she told me that she blamed herself for my father dying. I think she still does. That's why she never remarried; she's still in love with him. I hope we can do something about that some day.
When I beat my mom at tic-tac-toe, she stared past me. I think she was seeing my dad trying to do math at his desk. That's the day I learned that some games should not be won, some victories should not be celebrated. Not even five years old is a little too early for that. It's a little too early to hug your mom trying to comfort her, rather than vice versa. But it's how it went.
The recruitment letter came a week later. Zevo Toys was reopening, courtesy of a mammoth Peacekeeper grant, and they wanted what they called beta testers. Strange, but to my mother it felt like normalcy, like hope. She was asked to go back to work; the company was endowing the elementary school due to reopen that fall, and it'd work out perfect for her schedule. Of course, they were approaching former employees first. The company representative insisted on talking to my father - chalk that to old-fashioned-ness, my mom thought at the time - but was extremely understanding when she was told what'd happened.
The program was in its infancy; I was interviewed by General Zevo directly. He didn't really know how to deal with kids, and pushed me too hard with questions, and five minutes later I told him the story I just told you, in tears. He told me I should hate God for what happened to my father. I looked at a General's face and said "No". Thinking back, it's one of my proudest moments. "No" I said "I don't hate God. I don't care about that."
A psychologist made a note on a stenopad - at the time they looked a lot bulkier, like cut-up laptops - and the General shook my hand, not a death grip, but firm enough to hurt a five year old, a little. "Well, that's refreshing honesty! Welcome aboard!" he said; "Now go wash up, that's an order!" So I did.
My beta tester welcome package included a bunch of paperwork for my mom to sign, and for me, a tin soldier. It looked old timey, like the ones in fairy tales, but it wasn't; I later learned that with tech being what it was at th time, it cost about as much as a small car. It could walk, the musket blinked out a laser dot, and it had a serial port for reprogramming it, and a camera in the head for steering...