2007
International Tiberium Convention / ADAM Threat assessment / GDI Formation Committee
GDSS Philadelphia
He looked down upon a poisoned world of red and green.
His name was Doctor Ignatio Mobius – one of the few scientific voices in the world outside of the Brotherhood of Nod and it's various funding groups and nations who understood at least, the true threat of the two poisons threatening to destroy the world.
But the truth he understood without having to class the "invaders" as poison, the planet known to it's original inhabitants as "Earth" was in the middle of a three way war between it's original Biomes and their inhabitants and the two new-coming ecological systems and the conflict they brought with them.
Life would have survived in some form if the turn of the galaxy and the hundreds of Tiberium infused meteorites that the endless revolutions of the milky way had brought together with the Earth had been all the poor planet had to deal with.
Impact sites on every continent. The mutations of flora and fauna. The birth of Tiberium Gyres and the endless crawl of the insidious green crystal as it slowly evolved itself and everything else around it into forms not seen on this Earth.
Watching as the world was slowly infected over the five years since the ethereal cancer was unleashed upon the skin of the planet was bad enough.
Then Second Impact and the four Adams ripped the world asunder.
Somehow a relic of another ecosystem had been intertwined with the Tiberium seeds raining down upon the planet.
September 13th 2000 would be another one of the many dates that would forever change the fate of the human race.
The Kitsuragi Expedition had been at ground zero of a GDI expedition of the south pole, exploring the effects of the deep cold environment on the spread of Tiberium when a massive meteorite struck the Antarctic ice and the four beings known as "Adam" went through their birth throes after landing on the surface of a suitable world.
Before the Kitsuragi Expedition gave their lives forever to knock the four alien beings into slumber, the alien quadruplets had shifted the orbit of the Earth – forcing the North/South revolutions of the Earth into a more direct line with the rest of the solar system and removing the turn of the seasons for all eternity.
At the same time, the four Adams melted an enormous portion of the Antarctic ice and infused it with alien LCL which created Tsunamis and Tidal waves that ripped the world apart – almost every coastal city was wiped off the face of the planet within the next twelve hours.
The oceans where sterilized, but the worst was yet to come.
The previous state of the oceans where due to the Salt content of the planets seas, which combined with the lower temperatures and global tide flows had once impeded the growth of Tiberium.
With the exception of the pollutants of human existence. Plastics and waste components of industries had formed a number of Gyres on the seas of the world. With Tiberium being spread in the atmosphere by even this age, the spread of the element had been contained on these floating islands, unable to spread to the majority of cut off Island nations through a mixture of tidal flows and human intervention.
Until the four Adams struck the Earth and sterilized the seas, and the tidal waves from their arrival struck almost every coast on the planet and the two threats combined killed 2 billion people in less than a day.
And another billion survivors died from particulate Tiberium poisoning in the months that followed – the crystal had been battered and ground into a powered form that had been seeped into the LCL oceans of the entire planet and had struck almost every single Man, Woman and Child who had survived the original event.
With no sea life left alive, no salt in the oceans able to contain the spread of Ocean borne Tiberium and a world that had been seeded beyond all compare with the seeds of one Ecosystem that had infected the original due to the arrival of another – the chances of survival had been handed over to the remaining forced of the Global Defense Initiative from the United Nations as many original nations who had formed the special forces organisation no longer existed and someone, some how needed to regain control and bring forth order.
GDI had forced massive evacuation orders combined with a combing action to try and save what remained of the other half of the human race.
Almost 2 billion humans moved from zones deemed at risk of the now massively overwhelming extraterrestrial damages caused by the Malignant but undirected Tiberium and the Immense but unknown threat of the Adams forced mankind to build new fortress cities to try and contain the damages caused by these eldritch foreign influences as the Brotherhood struck out in a few but devastating guerrilla actions to undermine the efforts to save the species without their expired messiah.
Wall after wall built around cities that in turn where built upon ruins – designed to slow down possible invaders from the possible Brotherhood of Nod, Tiberium and it's mutations and the new threat from the skies in the forms of the Angel classified life forms . . . but out of the few that where built . . . even fewer managed to hold their own as the Earth itself seemed to turn against them.
All the weapon systems in the world.
The tallest of walls.
These did nothing to turn away the spread of Tiberium in it's airborne form, spreading and growing upon the very walls meant to stem the growth of the crystal.
They also did nothing when the very people the walls where meant to defend where hiding in their numbers the already mutated. People, innocent people desperate to hide their changing bodies in the chance, the hope of safe harbor ended up being the end of many of the nascent fortresses come metropolises as the lack of health care in the right time or space would result in another corpse – another node for the dreaded material to take root within. By the time the body was found, sometimes in an alleyway, sometimes an abandoned apartment or house then the only was to stop the spread was to abandon entire city blocks and burn everything down to the bedrock.
And sometimes even those drastic measures proved to be useless. London 2 was proof enough of that. The entire United Kingdom was one of the worst affected Red Zones on the planet – now resembling an entirely alien ecosystem where no terrestrial life survived.
In the end, the only real solution was a combination of defenses, fortresses, retreats and perpetual scorched Earth actions to burn away anything that Tiberium could use to grow before it could take root.
Near endless salting of the Earth, combined with a repeated foundation of other sterilizing contaminants that rendered even more portions of the planet dead forever more.
Eventually however, Human ingenuity held firm and some form of safe ground was forged between the lifeless soil, LCL seas and Tiberium poison.
The GDI defended blue zones.
Washington 2. Moscow 4. Hamburg 2. Tokyo 3. Detroit 2. A short list among a dozen others.
With their links between the ground and GDSS Philadelphia linked with the GDI prototype Kodiak mega-shuttles and various other projects needed to at least provide some form of infrastructure to this post-dual-apocalypse world the remnants of mankind managed to force their way into producing clean fusion power with Tiberium based technologies, alongside orbital skyhooks, sonic based technologies and the beginnings of Military application based Walker and Hover based vehicles.
As always, the threat of war drove the wheels of technology and innovation.
Which is why he was here today, with almost a hundred other scientific minds from around the world to take the elements of various other projects known as GEHRIN and the Artificial Human Laboratory together under GDI supervision to devise a new weapon system to defend against the Angel class beings that would as all the evidence suggested, arrive in 8 years time.
Apparently vast stretches of progress had been made, Mobius had seen the reams of paperwork and digital evidence pass through from his secretary and interns, broken down into usable, digestible chunks and them turned into almost after action report style documents for the GDI generals and their underlings to digest as a workable concept.
Tiberium based life forms could be killed with conventional weapons – although in some cases considerable effort would need to be used.
Angelic life forms operated beyond any and all knowledge of conventional biology, seemingly telling the laws of time and space, thermodynamics and the square-cube law to go and fuck themselves sideways to next Sunday as far as human understanding could comprehend.
So a new sub-division would be assembled from these smaller organisations and placed under direct GDI supervision in a chosen fortress city, the organisation was under the provisional name of "NERV" and was using the combination of multiple schools of science and warfare for an entirely new creation known as "PROJECT EVANGELION" under various descriptive titles as "ARTIFICIAL HUMAN WEAPON SYSTEM" alongside other more esoteric research into something called "AT FIELDS" and their manipulation as well as a dozen other documents, research sections and future objectives. Some of which laid inside his field of expertise.
Many of which didn't.
Apparently his own direction within this project would be the use of applied Tiberium Sciences to created advanced battery and energy storage systems on a scale that had never been built before by human hands – even with Fusion power or Thorium reactors, Lithium cells lined with Graphene and Liquid salt storage batteries – the scales of energy this project seemed to require was an entire order of magnitude higher than anything that had ever been seen on the Earth before with the exception of the GDI Ion Cannon system.
To utilize those kinds of levels, something close enough to put mankind on the Kardashev scale on par with using all the power available in the solar system for an entire "Unit" in this project – and the higher-ups wanted to build at least three?
The prospect was terrifying.
As he looked down onto the bloodied and cancerous Earth, he had wasted enough time in thought at the window. Time was marching ahead regardless of his input, but at least here – in the birth of this organisation known as NERV he could have an impact beyond the mere theoretical again.
Since the arrival of Tiberium and the first war.
Brushing the wild blonde and gray aside he prepared himself finally for the meeting of minds.
A moment from Scythe himself
Well uhh – again I'm plundering world-building but I'm still typing away without turning the history of the story into a bullet point checklist so I'm counting this as progress.
Nuff said.
I'm still tip-tapping away with both this project and Of Avatars and Harbingers . . . trying to nibble away at writers block so hopefully I can work my way into the meat of the story in the next chapter.
Until then –
Tarrah for now.
