Worldfall

by Thuktun Flishithy

An epistolary work that documents the Race and Fithp Invasions of 2020. Included within are interviews with survivors of the war on all sides, as well as key documents.

2. Chapter 23

Tarpey I

Found in the small town of St. Johnsbury in Vermont, the subject of this interview lives a rather secluded life, writing sociology papers and the occasional science fiction awards-sweeper. For the sake of a degree of anonymity, they have requested that I use their birth name, rather than their famous pen name.

Q: Thank you for agreeing to the interview. I understand that this is a rarity.

A: As it should be. I was never very enamored with celebrity culture, especially before the war. Too toxic, too demanding. I only agreed to this because it's not about my books for once, and because it's you. I'm quite fond of your work on the rainforest standoff and the HESTIA project, so when I heard you were making an account of the war, I knew it'd be good.

Q: Then I'll get to it. What social factors, do you believe, played into the role science fiction authors served in the wartime think tanks?

A: I bet you gave me such a big question so I'd go on all sorts of tangents untangling it, huh? I like you already.

Anyway, I wouldn't call a lot of those think tanks 'wartime'. The vast majority were formed and disbanded before the war technically started. In fact, the first ones, including the first one I was in, started up as soon as the Flishithy was discovered. Those were probably the widest ones, in terms of what sci fi authors participated. Almost entirely civilian, formed on their own by excited scientists, authors, or even just enthusiastic people. Most were barely above the level... hell, most of them were just like your normal internet chat rooms and forums.

They snort.

Also about as well-moderated.

Q: What think tank did you join at the time?

A: It was just called the Special Circumstances Committee. Y'know, little nod to a sci-fi series just about all of us had read and adored growing up. It was largely writers of social science fiction. Focused more on how things like interstellar travel would change our lives and society as a whole, rather than on the specifications of technology that actually wouldn't work in real life. I was invited to join because the moderators liked a story I had written that year, which'd been nominated for a Hugo. Probably would've won if it wasn't for those fucking puppies.

Aaaaanyway, Special Circumstances was pretty laid-back. We talked about updates on the Flishithy's position, reasons why they might've come, what kinda people might've been inside. A few thought it might have been a Von Neumann probe, that thing people said should've been everywhere if aliens existed. You know what I'm talking about, right? A probe that goes to a system, explores, then makes copies of itself and sends them to other stars so they can explore and duplicate? The argument got bigger when it started heading to Saturn, since that's a good place to go if you need a lot of resources to make duplicates.

A lot of us, myself included, thought it was a colony ship. The size was about right for a huge generation ark, big enough to hold a viable colony. I mean, we still argued incessantly about what was inside, or where they were going to settle down. Some thought there was nothing but a few robots and the galaxy's biggest sperm bank inside, or maybe a million cryopods, or even that the crew had died long before and it was like the Flying Dutchman, carrying on its duty because the computer didn't know.

None of us seriously thought it was going to be a warship. Like, c'mon! We figured no one in their right minds would try to conquer a planet with a slow generation ark. It's just too big a gamble. The only thing that worried us back then was the ramscoop going into the sun.

Q: Why?

A: Well, one author, who was a total fucking asshole that shouldn't have been there, kept on jabbering about how it was a sign they were intending to stay. Kept on comparing it to the Mayflower taking down its masts to help set up houses. I mean, that's factually incorrect since the Mayflower got taken apart in England, and he was only accidentally right if you ask me. Anyone settling, peacefully or not, needs to dump something like that. It's too big to lug around as dead weight. There were still so many possibilities, and an invasion was at the bottom.

...at least until it suddenly jumped to the top. Twice.

Q: You mean with the Conquest Fleet, and later Cassini's images?

A: Yep. As soon as saw the images, we almost unanimously agreed that it was an invasion fleet. We figured -and I still don't know how this wasn't the case- that anyone who can build photon rockets would be able to know of our civilization. Like, think about the fuel costs alone. It was, what, a few hundred billion tons of hydrogen? You don't make an investment that big unless the reward is even bigger. As in, securing a habitable world and untapped solar system big. Taking out a future competitor big.

Lemme tell you, not a good time to be anyone back then. Like this town has about as many people in it as some high school in California, and half the pent up sexual tension. I remember it being such a huge scandal in town when someone wanted a store to paint over a Chinese dragon they had on the side. Then we find out about the Conquest Fleet, and suddenly some guy literally blew up train tracks here in the hopes it'd "appease the lords". You couldn't get away from the panic.

And it wasn't like other panics, either. No other panic, no matter how bad the cause, had the same scope or the same dread. Why wouldn't it, either? I mean, this wasn't a normal disaster coming our way. This was fucking existential, my guy. Not a vague, hard to imagine threat like global warming, or something that'd only ruin us like nuclear war. We felt like a bug about to hit a windshield. The end of everyone and everything, from the Sistine Chapel to memes to our fucking memories. As far as we were thinking back then, honest to god Doomsday was coming.

If you ask me, that first month of panic was probably the real make or break for us. I'm not sure anyone who wasn't around or old enough back then can really understand how fragile basic social order was, how easily even the biggest nations could've just gone toppling down. After all, the governments and the agencies meant to enforce the peace -quiet, if you ask me- were also having the same mental breakdown. Honestly the anarcho-syndicalist part of me would've been really happy if there wasn't the threat of extinction by alien causing it.

We, and I mean we, needed something to give us hope. Even if it was false hope in our eyes. We needed plans, we needed action.

Q: Was that when you were recruited to the military think tank that came with War Plan Teal?

A: Yep. I was sleeping next to the toilet when I got the call at 6am, coming right from the Pentagon. You should've seen my hungover panic- I thought they were coming to round me up as a thought criminal or something under a new defense law they slipped through Congress to "preemptively root out potential fifth columnists". Turns out they wanted to hire me, which was only less weird in my head. I mean, I'm an anarchist who'd once said that the current president needed to go to the Hague over the drone strikes, and here they were offering me a cushy 90k a year to throw shit at the wall and see what stuck.

Eh, at least they were nice enough to ask and use the carrot. If I recall correctly, China declared their think tank members special conscripts, so they were legally obligated to at least come to Zhongnanhai for vetting, lest they wanted a big ass fine. So I agreed, since something told me I was going to need the income. Sci fi's still climbing out of the mess the contact and war brought.

I was actually driven over to frickin' NORAD of all places, since they decided on having the think tank meet in person. I guess the worry at the time was that the aliens might've had some sort of hi-tech surveillance scanning our airwaves. I definitely hated having to wear pants to work, and to be honest I wasn't very comfortable there. Almost no one from my prior group was there.

Q: Why was that?

A: Because they wanted "useful" authors. People with actual backgrounds in appropriate fields. Engineers, physicists, computer tech, vets, and sociologists like me. And lemme tell you, old STEMlord sci fi writers tended to be colossal assholes, especially when they had to talk to "soft" scientists like me. There was this retired colonel who thought he was the hottest shit, because he had the "best of both worlds". He used to stare intently at me like he thought it'd be intimidating, probably because of his "special eyes". Hugely bigoted, tried to act like he was in charge. Everyone called him the "SPESS MAHREEN".

Man, you should've seen his face when he got booted and I got to stay. As it turned out, they needed sociologists more than they needed crusty old vets like him- any points he made were either being expanded upon by much smarter people, or they were so batshit insane -and obsessed with fanaticism- that no one took it seriously.

Q: Did you have any major contributions to the think tank before the war?

A: My biggest contribution was pretty early, and I made it with a few other sociologists, so actually I'm not very comfortable calling it "mine". Basically, we argued that the very nature of the fleet, while announcing hostility, also meant that this was probably more geared towards conquest than extermination. After all, if they just wanted to kill us, they could had one starship and had it not decelerate as it hit Earth. Maybe even scuttle so it'd create a cone of relativistic shrapnel and ensure impacts. That would be even worse than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, enough to ensure that we wouldn't survive.

A fleet meant that they likely wanted to either get rid of us while preserving the planet, or they wanted us. Maybe they wanted a client race, maybe they needed our intimate knowledge of Earth to help them ease into living on the planet. Either way, it meant that they couldn't just scour us from orbit. Even if they just wanted the planet, we're so inextricably imbedded into the ecology that anything capable of killing us off would ruin the Earth.

It wasn't completely watertight. China's think tank actually argued against ours, stating that there could've been fundamental leaps in science and technology made by the aliens, which could ensure they could kill us off without ruining the biosphere. Their biggest series had something like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if the author had made the case.

Still, the government latched onto that and made sure to pump it into the media as much as they could.

Q: Why?

A: Because if the public's been told that the aliens can't exterminate us to get whatever they want, it inspires hope. Hope that maybe we can get through this, if we stick together and make ourselves too hard to get rid of. It also reminds the public that even a higher tech power is not invincible. Not us, and not these aliens, because even they have all these hard limits when dealing with us. They could be as far above us as we are above bugs, and they still might not win. Anyone who's seen a dumbass hit a hornet nest can attest to that.

Things started calming down after that. I mainly think it was due to War Plan Teal giving them something to focus on, but sometimes I'd like to think that I did my part.

-/-\-

Yeager I

Ret. General Jonathan Yeager greets me at his home in Upstate New York, and sits down with me at the porch. His wife, Karen, offers me a glass of sweet tea as she comes out and sits beside her husband.

Q: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview, sir. I know this is far from your first.

A: Eh, what's one more? As long as it keeps future generations from forgetting the important things, I'm down for it.

Q: Alright then. Let's start with War Plan Teal. That was originally your idea, wasn't it?

A: Ideas aren't formed in a vacuum, kid. I made it with help from a few others, including some science fiction authors we invited over as part of a think tank. We spent the first three months after the Conquest Fleet's discovery working on the plan, refining it, seeing what could and couldn't work. We had to consider the capabilities of the invaders, their mentality, and what we could do to defend ourselves. Considering the amount of unknown variables, it wasn't easy.

Q: Could you go into detail?

A: Of course. First thing first, we had to throw out half the pre-existing defense plans for the US. Most of those involved invasions from other countries, or alliances of nations. Russia and China were the main ones, but we also have plans for invasions by a suddenly-hostile NATO, Mexico, and even Canada. I've had to read hundred-page documents on how we'd respond to an invasion by Russia with a new superweapon, or orbital platforms. Hell, I know how we'd handle a war with Iceland.

Thing is, those are pretty well-known variables. We know what weapons Ivan's packing, and a good idea as to how he'd use it. We know the logistical capabilities of China, and the manpower they can field. Catch my drift?

The document for alien invasion was six pages long, and started with 'Find God'.

Q: Did we think we were that seriously outmatched?

A: Well, the paper operated on the assumption that the aliens would have weapons that matched their other technological capabilities. After all, if a civilization can travel between stars within reasonable timespans, then they had a lot of material resources, and a lot of energy at their disposal. The amount of hydrogen fuel a single Race starship goes through when flying from Home to Earth is measured in tens of millions of tons. Do you seriously understand what kind of energy requirement that is? That's enough fusion fuel to power the pre-war world for thousands of years.

The fithp were closer to the initial tech estimation, though thankfully their manpower was lacking, considering it was just the Flishithy. If it was an invading species with the fithp's tech and the Race's numbers...

Q: Did you have that in mind while drafting War Plan Teal?

A: Not as much as one might think. The plan was more than just a contingency against alien invasion; it was a way to calm down the populace, to give the impression that we had things under control. If we'd gone and said 'There's no way in hell we're gonna win', then there would've been full-blown anarchy. Already there'd been riots and looting all over the country. Death cults committing mass-suicide, people attempting to murder politicians in order to 'appease the alien overlords'... we needed to calm things down, and War Plan Teal was the key to that.

Q: What were the central tenets to the plan?

A: First, we decided to operate under the assumption that the aliens would use orbital bombardment against us. Not enough to plunge us into nuclear winter, but something that would cripple our infrastructure. That meant we had to deal with the possibility that all of our missile silos, bases, roads, and ships could be hit near-simultaneously, in a surgical strike. One of the authors actually developed such a system a while back, called Thor.

So, how do you protect yourself against orbital bombardment? That was a question we had to answer in War Plan Teal.

Q: What did the plan dictate, then?

A: First, we had to deal with the likelihood that our navy would be neutralized; they'd be sitting ducks out there. We scrapped plans to build the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers, and decommissioned a few of the older ships. We instead focused on producing more submarines. After all, what's a better shield from orbital detection than a mile of water?

Still, we needed ships for transportation and force projection, so we kept those. If the enemy wasn't capable of hitting them, or we hit them hard enough to neutralize their orbital superiority, then we could roll them out at a moment's notice.

It's part of the reason why we recommissioned the Iowa-class battleships. Despite their limited force projection when compared to carriers or destroyers, they were much more heavily armored than any modern ship, and their guns would be able to punch a hole in all but the most durable alien equipment we'd projected.

We also made plans to shut down any and all bridges in the country, should the aliens bombard us. The highway overpasses we considered, but it would've been far too costly, especially considering what other preparations we needed to make.

Q: Which were?

A: So many things, from the Ow Guns to the R&D, but I'll focus on what was my specialty- logistics. That's the lifeblood of any army, and without it even the mightiest war machine dies. With the Fleet coming our way, we were presented with logistical issues never seen before, as well as old problems exacerbated to unprecedented levels.

Q: Such as?

A: Well, lemme give an example of the new problems we were facing. Back in the Cold War, when it was my country against the Soviets, there was a lot of media dealing with Soviet invasions of the US. Movies, books, games... all of it fearmongering bullcrap. There was no way in hell the Soviets could have ever invaded us. Sure, they had the largest land army on Earth, with expert mechanization, tech pretty close to ours in most areas, and lots of experience from the Nazi invasion, but they never seriously considered putting boots on American soil, and that's because of logistics.

You'd have to cross thousands of miles, by land or by sea, just to get here from the USSR. The costs in fuel alone to get an army large enough to invade the US to the US would be horrific, and then you have to maintain that thousand-mile supply chain in the middle of what would easily be the biggest war in history. If that chain broke anywhere, anywhen, you'd be FUBAR. The same went for us as well, even though we easily had the best logistics of any nation.

Q: But the Race and Fithp wouldn't have to worry about supply chains, at least in that regard.

Yeager claps his hands.

A: Bingo! My country would've been hard-pressed to get twenty million men across twelve thousand klicks with a safe supply chain. The Lizards alone managed to carry three times that number across twelve goddamn light-years. All the other obstacles to invasions- oceans, mountains, coastal defenses, everything... they meant nothing. What's a mountain range or the Pacific to an honest to god starship? With that kind of transport, they could land anywhere they wanted, bypassing defenses that would chew up any earthly army, and deposit troops before you could respond.

Part of War Plan Teal was to deal with the orbitals problem, but the other part, my part, was how to handle our own logistics. How to prepare the world for war, in both the conventional ways and the unconventional ways. We needed to look at our advantages- time, and industry.

Q: What do you mean by conventional ways and unconventional ways?

A: I'm talking about the difference between getting a country ready for a war with another country, and fortifying the entire planet against an outside invader. It means new advantages along with the disadvantages I mentioned earlier, and it means different assumptions about supply chains and the like.

Time was obvious. No country has ever been able to prepare for a war unmolested in one way or another. There'd be sanctions, or embargoes, or outright attacks, even if the war hadn't started yet. The US was left without most of its rubber while gearing up its industries pre-WWII because the Japanese withheld on that, and so had to develop synthetics.

Here, however? We had six years to get ready however we wanted, because the Race and the Fithp couldn't do anything until they actually arrived. We didn't have to worry about submarines sinking our cargo ships as they zipped supplies across the ocean, or the Lizards encouraging suppliers to sanction. Every country was in on it- even if they couldn't or wouldn't help, they'd do nothing to hamper either. If our allies in Europe wanted special anti-orbital weaponry, we could bring it over without a problem. If the Russians needed to use the Black Sea to bring in computers, even the Ukrainians would allow some wiggle room.

Six years of uninterrupted preparations is a long time, especially if you're on an emergency total-war footing. Even with the Nazis killing millions of their people and entire cities destroyed, the Soviets managed to build tens of thousands of tanks within four years. Now imagine what more advanced and populous nations could accomplish with more time and fewer hampers.

And that ties into the second major advantage of industry.

Q: You've discussed a great deal about that already. Was there anything else different about it compared to terrestrial conflicts?

A: In all the ways that count. For one thing, we had the ultimate home field advantage. The Race and the Fithp only had what they brought, and we knew that from the start. Their supply chain was light-years distant, meaning that reinforcements or resupply were impossible. Even assuming they had bullshit replicating tech like from Star Trek, they could only bring so much of that, and it'd take significant exponential growth to rival our own industry. Meanwhile, we were living on our industry. Everything on Earth, from the factories to the crops to the air we breathed was our supply chain.

If we needed more troops, we could open up recruiting pools. If we needed more material, we could build it in our own backyard. If we needed more factories to make the material, we could build them.

Not to mention that this time, our industries had cooperation never before seen. It was no longer one nation or a group of nations against another, but every nation working together in one way or another. It meant us pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Russians pulling out of Crimea, and China and India shutting up about Kashmir. Sanctions we had on each other were lifted, and tight-knit trade agreements were made. Groups that had hated each other's guts- hell, still hated each other's guts, were now palling up, because they knew the alternative was worse. That kind of global synergy was never heard of before.

He shakes his head in disbelief.

You know it's serious when goddamn Pakistan and India were sharing designs with each other. Israel even went back to the '48 borders to secure a proper mutual defense pact with Palestine, though I imagine the Arab guns going in also played a part.

So yeah, those were the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of prep. War Plan Teal laid 'em out, and talked about how to exploit the former and fight the latter.

Q: What sort of logistics preparations were made during that time, stateside and elsewhere?

A: Well, aside from everyone pulling their fingers out of each other's asses so they could help each other pass the ammunition? The first big thing I talked about was industry overhaul. Optimizing the means of production in ways that'd help us fight back. That meant ripping apart "frivolous" industries like cosmetics and toys and the like, so their parts could be given to the war effort. It meant redirecting the youth who'd been studying to work in those industries to apply their skills and education in other ways. Engineers, analysts, the like.

There was also the huge reforms we needed in things like food production. Pre-war, the world at large only had enough grain reserves for two months. For all we knew, we might've been facing years of famine, because of one reason or another, and so we needed to ensure we could feed the populace. Every country implemented something like that, encouraging or enforcing the agriculture industry to grow efficiently.

Food wasn't the only thing we needed to preserve. We needed petroleum, and lots of it. Did you know that tanks using the M1 chassis had fuel efficiencies measured in gallons per mile, instead of the other way around? If the aliens knew of our dependency, it'd be too easy for them to cut us off from the oil, and so we needed to preserve what we had in addition to extracting the resources. That meant finally cranking out the gas ration cards we'd made during the crisis of '73, while China expanded and intensified the license plate lotteries, where you could only drive that day if your license plate began with the selected number. India actually made every other day in major cities car-free days.

A lot of these preparations also had the benefit of helping combat the damage we'd been doing to the environment. And that ties into what I was talking about with unconventional fortification, because when it's a war of Earth vs an outside foe, the biosphere itself is an asset... and a potential target. We had no idea if the Lizards or Fithp were going to engage in some manner of strategic hostile terraforming, making our own planet less pleasant to us while improving their own performance, or if they might just damage the ecology deliberately to hurt us. When faced with that possibility, healing nature has wartime strategic importance.

Q: What were reactions to the plan when it was unveiled?

A: Mixed. Some called it 'hyper-aggressive' and 'paranoid', saying that we technically still didn't know if the aliens were coming with hostile intent. They criticized the idea of putting the US in total war economy, since that meant giving up a lot of creature comforts, and even those who agreed on the idea of a defense plan said that it wasn't a good plan, that it was too defeatist.

Q: Why was it considered defeatist, or a bad plan altogether?

A: Well, they felt we were focusing too much on the likelihood of getting our asses kicked. We called for only defending the most important parts of the country. We knew it'd be impractical to defend the whole US; it's too damn big. Why waste lives and equipment fighting for some sparsely populated bit of Kansas, when you could better use it defending the missile silos or major population centers?

We also made many evacuation plans, dealing with what would happen if New York was gone, or if the enemy captured Washington. We also had to contend with the possibility of losing all our satellites and other methods of modern communication. We had plans for using carrier pigeons and honest-to-god telegraphs, since it'd be hard to disrupt that, when compared to satellite or radio towers. Can't use an EMP on a dove, after all.

I must commend the President for selling the plan to the people. I know a lot of people didn't like him at the time, but he was an intelligent man, and he knew that the plan was our best hope.

When other countries praised the plan and started adapting it to their own defense policies, people started quieting down. Of course, we made some changes. People liked the idea of Ow Guns, so we got a higher budget for making them, and we also diverted some money to EMP hardening of civilian hardware. I still disagree with the cyber-warfare countermeasures we made; the odds of aliens hacking into the Pentagon was absurd, even if they were high-tech.

Still, I knew the plan wasn't a solve-all.

Q: Care to explain?

A: Whoever controls the orbitals, controls the war. That much was clear from the get-go. Even with the proposed Ow Guns, the enemy would still have a firm grasp on the ultimate high-ground. And the reports about the ship near Saturn had me very concerned, if what some of the writers and scientists said meant anything.

Unless we could get control of orbit, I felt, there was no way of winning the war.

But how would you get weapons into orbit? I knew we wouldn't be able to repeal the treaties against putting weapons in orbit, especially nuclear ones. Good luck trying to convince Russia to let us put nukes in orbit.

So, that was when we decided to propose Project: Archangel. We knew it would be the key to victory.

If we stood a chance, that is. All we could do was get ready, and endure that long wait to armageddon.

-/-\-

Hundessa I

The small farm by the Dechatu River is one where anachronisms prove as abundant as the potatoes it grows. A repurposed Race prefab adorned by local graffiti sits in the center, where the subject of my interview spends his days when not working the farm. An octogenarian Oromo man, Zerezghi Hundessa stoops over noticeably as he sits on his doorstep, a worn krar by his feet. Patting the stoop, he has me sit next to me as we begin the interview.

Q: Good afternoon to you, Ato.

A: Enh? Am I under arrest, young'un? I swear, officer, I thought it was just some tumeric!

He cackles.

You don't have to call me that; just call me Zerezghi.

Q: Then a good afternoon to you, Zerezghi.

A: Much better, young'un. Now what's it you want to ask me? I can't say I have any special stories about the house, unless kids these days have low standards.

Q: I actually wanted to first ask about how the pre-war preparations impacted agriculture, especially in regions where cattle and cash crops were dominant.

A: Looks like the kids these days do have low standards. Well, I guess I should start where I was at the beginning, since I can actually talk about that. Lemme think...

He picks up his krar and absentmindedly drums his fingers along it.

Back then, I had the same land as I do now, more or less. Probably more. Yeah, it was actually a fair bit bigger, but work didn't feel as rough back then because I was a spry sixty instead of the old fart you see now. I was a cowherd, and so were lots of folks around here, and all over the country. I had... five heads of Arado? Naw, it was six; Red Butt just had a calf. Alright cows, those Arado. Not as nice as Horro, but they were good oxen. I'd sell them to the neighbors growing cereals, and I'd sell milk at the local market.

It wasn't the best work. Didn't make a lot of money out of it, since Arado didn't make a lot of milk, but they did eat a lot of grass. Most of the money I made went into maintaining the pasture, or paying the young neighbor's boy who helped me out. He didn't get much, but it did mean he could have lunch with my granddaughter.

Q: What was the homestead like pre-war?

A: Much more crowded. The house was smaller than this here thing, including the stable where the cows would sleep during the night. Me and my wife would sleep in the stable next to the cows, since they were nice and warm during the cold nights, while my son and his children slept in the house, on the thatch floor. My son worked at a school, but the money didn't help here much because my grandson needed medicine, and that ate money like Red Butt would eat grass.

Still, it was a nice city compared to other parts, since the people who could read were a bit more numerous than normal. The real benefit of that job was making sure the kids knew how to read, which meant maybe they could also get work in the city. Lots of people in the country couldn't read back then, 'specially if you were poor country bumpkin like me, or a lady. Neither me or my daughter knew how to read.

Things were picking up a bit, though. My boy was teaching me to read a little, his boy was doing better, and my granddaughter and the neighbor boy were getting close.

Then the lizards and elephants showed up, and that went bad pretty quick.

Q: How early would you say the discourse over agriculture reform reached here?

A: Hell if I know! My son was the only one who paid attention to the news, and he never read a lot about what other places were doing to get ready. He told me the Americans and other big countries were talking with each other, but I didn't think about that too much. I figured the aliens might just leave a cowherd in the middle of nowhere alone, and if they were going to kill me, I couldn't do anything about it, so why worry?

All I knew was that about three months after the big news hit, we got visited by a man from the government who told us we had to give up the cows.

Q: Why?

A: He told us something about that war plan the big countries came up with, about how we needed to make reserves in case the aliens destroyed our farms. The reedy-looking fellow had to read from a card as he explained that cows took too much water, too much land, and didn't give enough food to be worth it. And that if we wanted to win, we had to be ready to make sacrifices like that.

I asked him what I was supposed to do without my cows. He told me to grow one of the approved crops, like potatoes. I told him I didn't know how to farm potatoes. He told me I'd have to learn. I told him where he could stick the card, and left it at that.

Q: What happened afterwards?

A: My son started arguing with me, saying that we shouldn't make trouble. He told me about the crackdowns that happened in other places, and that they might just take the cows anyway. The reedy-looking government man was just standing there, watching us.

He sighs.

The boy won. I blame his eyes. They reminded me too much of my wife, and she would always get me to change my mind. So I told the government man that if I had to get rid of the cows, I'd do it myself. He agreed, telling me that we were encouraged to sell the meat at the market and use the money to switch to crops.

So, by the next day I marched Red Butt and the others to the market, and put 'em all down. Damn shame, and it didn't even get me much money.

Q: Was it because of competition?

A: Smart young'un. All the other cowherds were doing the same at the markets, and people were going crazy over the sudden flood of beef. I must've made only a tenth of what I could've gotten normally. There must've been only two or three oxen left in the entire town after that day was done(1). I didn't even have enough to buy good tools, so I decided just to give the money to my son. I figured that they should get out while they can, maybe go to somewhere they could be safe when the aliens came. So they did, leaving just me and the worst potato farm in the world.

Didn't even have potatoes.

Q: How did that change?

A: Well, the evening they left, the boy came over. I didn't know why, since I didn't have cows to take care of anymore, and my granddaughter left with my son. But that boy...

He tears up, then wipes his eye.

That beautiful boy came over with a good hoe and some potatoes, right from his family farm. He told me that he had five brothers to help his folks on the farm, but since I didn't have anyone to help me, he'd do it. He told me he'd help teach me to grow 'em, and we'd take care of 'em together. I asked him why he'd do that for an old man.

He said, "Because it's what a good neighbor does."

He chuckles.

And then he said, "And when Feiven finds out I helped her grandpa, she'll be really impressed."

(1) While an exaggeration, stastistics show that as much as 95% of Earth's cattle were slaughtered within six months of the Discovery, leading to the chaotic months of scarcity and inflation known in the English-speaking world as "Dairy December" and "Jerky January".

-/-\-

Machado I

It is a quiet day on the Amazon, save for the gentle paddling of the canoe I find myself sitting in. Across from me is Victoria Machado, world-renowned wildlife biologist and author of Seeds of Hope: Ecological Restoration after World War Three. She is an older woman, with silver hair pulled into a tight ponytail, and deep wrinkles cross her tanned face. Still, she proves a very energetic talker, gesticulating wildly as we move down the river, fithp interns providing the rowing.

Q: It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Machado.

A: The pleasure's all mine. I greatly enjoyed your piece on the Great Barrier Reef Protection Act, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to have this interview. It's important that people understand what we do, and why we do it. Far too many people take what we have for granted, without knowing about the work we put in.

Q: Now then, let's begin at the very start. When did ecological preservation enter discourse in the build up to the war?

A: Very soon, actually. I'd say it was about six months after the discovery of the fleets that I received the special commission, and I was just a junior biologist at the time who'd only graduated from UFRJ a year before. Back then, I was primarily tagging caimans and collecting data on ratios of male to female hatchings for green anacondas, working out of a very small research station that didn't even have proper plumbing. And then suddenly... I and thousands of others were thrust into a race against time.

Q: As in, before the invasion arrived. Would you care to explain what exactly the race was for?

A: It was a race to... well, I guess you could say it was a race to fortify the planet. Not the countries and people living on it- there were plenty of other groups handling that. My country crimped a lot from the American Plan. Two of my brothers got drafted, and my father got a factory job making tanks.

But that's a digression, my bad. Where was I? Ah, yeah. I'm not talking about building literal forts for us, but fortifying the planet. Not getting humanity ready for the invasion, but getting Earth ready. After all, it was facing a shock it had never quite experienced before, and we had no idea if it could survive that one.

Q: Weren't there more drastic impacts to the biosphere in prehistoric times? Some of them literal.

A: Well, those drastic impacts led to mass extinctions. Those aren't exactly good things.

She laughs, then slowly frowns.

Life... the ecology is an odd thing. It's simultaneously incredibly rigid, and deceptively fragile. Life on Earth can continue after the entire planet freezes over, or after a colossal asteroid impact, and then something as seemingly small as increasing acidity in the oceans can trigger mass extinctions. We were seeing that in action before the war, thanks to our own stupid abuses of the environment. Just three hours' walking from my research station there were massive logging operations tearing up the forest, which if you ask me is about as short-sighted as selling your organs for drugs.

An alien invasion brings entirely new factors in when it comes to environmental issues, stressors never encountered before. We could've been facing use of weaponry that would pollute the Earth with chemical compounds and radioactive elements that literally never appeared before on this planet, just like what our own nuclear weapons introduced. Outside of some trace amounts on the outer edges of uranium, all plutonium on Earth is man-made, did you know that? And that started back in the forties, a time when we couldn't even leave the atmosphere. Who knew what kind of horrifying pollutants could be produced by a starfaring people?

That's not getting into other unique stressors they could bring, like deliberate targeting of our biosphere. That could take so many forms, as far as what both experts and crazies said. It could've been simple things, like bombing out forests or starting massive wildfires in grasslands, or it could've involved scouring radiation from those photon rockets, which is something life on Earth never had to deal with, even in the most chaotic natural disasters. And that's not even counting the crazier ideas, like bioweapons that affect everything with our nucleotides, or hostile terraforming producing conditions that our kind of life couldn't endure.

That ties into yet another unique problem no other ecological crisis had- truly invasive species. Invasive species have wreaked havoc on us for as long as remember, from rabbits in Australia to triffid plant in West Africa, and those are still Earth life. What kind of problems could invasive species from an entirely different origin point cause? Something as simple as alien poop could lead to ecological devastation.

Even if they didn't have unique pollutants, and they somehow didn't introduce invasive species, we were still facing potential ecological devastation never seen before. For all we knew, they could turn the Serengeti to glass, or perhaps this very rainforest would be nuked in an attempt to drive them off the planet. We are completely dependent on this biosphere for survival- it provides us our food, our water, the air we breathe. If deliberately targeted, it could cost us the war, and our very existence.

And that's what I mean by fortifying Earth. In a war of us versus a force completely outside of our world, nature itself is a strategic war asset, and it was an asset we had been destroying. The leaders of the world realized that quickly enough.

Q: I was under the impression that conservationism was a controversial topic pre-war.

She snorts.

The governments knew the importance of ecosystems, even during the pre-war ecological crises we were making. They usually just didn't care, because the consequences would be long after they died, and the money they got from companies was very much in the now. But now, they were looking at devastation that'd be in their lifetime, and now suddenly they wanted to go green. Fucking self-centered pricks, all of them, but even pricks have survival instincts. They realized that healing the environment and preserving samples could be the difference between "it took us fifty years to recover the economy" and "we'll never leave the New Stone Age".

To make that difference, we needed to gather seeds and sperm and eggs and all other sorts of genetic material. Not just from crop plants and pasture animals, but from wild species that we might need to reintroduce into the wild. And not only did we need to gather this genetic material, but we needed to understand the ecology as much as possible, to ensure we could restore it to the best of our abilities.

Problem was, our biosphere is big. Like, really big. Do you know how many animal species we knew about back then?

Q: Er... a hundred thousand?

A: One and a half million, which we knew even back then was far from all of them. We may have been wiping out quite a few each year, but that still left potentially millions more we needed to discover. That wasn't counting plant life, either. It was a daunting challenge, and I still remember how hopeless it felt when I first got the commission. I thought to myself, "If we end up needing this, it won't be enough." That was good ol' Long Wait doom showing itself.

Thankfully, we still had six years to do it. And with all the money flooding into wartime preparations, there was plenty to spare for ensuring we had a functioning biosphere if we won. It was honestly amazing how much money could be spared for protecting the planet if we weren't spending it on making sex dolls and novelty keychains. There was money pouring in from civilian government programs, various militaries, philanthropists... I think the budget for the first year alone was in the neighborhood of a hundred billion dollars...

Q: What did you do in particular during that time?

A: I was hired by the UN special commission. Most of my time was spent here, in the Amazon, though with dozens of other wildlife experts. It made me feel a bit useless, when you had giants of the field setting up shop next to my crappy station. I got a spiffy UN uniform out of it, but I still felt like a kid dressing up when people whose papers I had to read for my thesis were giving me commands.

We were like... ever play Pokemon? I felt like a Pokemon character, you know? Gotta catch em all. We were collecting eggs, seed pods, sperm, spores, and any other useful piece of genetic material that could be used for conservation. I was in charge of herps, as that was my specialty. I actually found six new species of tree frog and four species of Dactyloidae... I mean, anoles.

Everything we found was examined six ways to Sunday, cataloged, and sent off. Gene banks were cropping up all over the planet, made specifically for post-war conservation. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was expanded, and a few clones of it were sprinkled about the Arctic and Antarctic. Research labs began dedicating more money to figuring out a way of cloning organisms without need for a female, in case no specimens were left.

Q: Would you say that these programs had a significant impact on pre-war ecological issues?

A: Oh yeah! That was what honestly helped me out of the gloom the Long Wait put over me like a heavy blanket. All around us, as the years went on, nature was visibly healing. The logging at the Amazon stopped overnight, and all the pastures that'd been eating away at the forest began to disappear, being converted to farms or just getting plain abandoned. I remember social media having a field day when animals we thought extinct in the wild started showing back up, and some people started doing artsy photos of the abandoned machinery and stuff being reclaimed by nature.

I know some organizations decided to capitalize on that, starting huge campaigns to plant trees in areas that'd been deforested. There was plenty of territory to do it in, too- I think the amount of land reclaimed by nature was almost the size of Africa, which is an odd unit of measurement. Definitely billions of acres of land returned to the forests and savannahs. For the first time in God knows how many years, the majority of animal life on Earth wasn't cattle. Hell, the air tasted better.

It was honestly astonishing, how much we did during that time. Still, there was a sense of deep worry. Worry that we would actually need to use all of these gene banks, worry that the aliens would destroy them or pervert them into something worse... and worry that what we did was not enough.

And God Himself knows, that we were in for a long wait.

-/-\-

Audio Transcription - Convening of the Shiplords, December 2nd, 2014

[Fleetlord Atvar]: Gathered Shiplords of the Third Conquest Fleet, as ordained by the 127th Emperor Hetto, after whom this bannership was gracefully named, in Year 101,982(1), and sent forth by the 42nd Emperor Risson in Year 103,537(2), I have called for this convening of the Shiplords a full twelve years early, unconventional as it may be, for we face unconventional obstacles.

[Shiplord Horrep]: Exalted Fleetlord, Chosen of the Emperor, what is it that you mean by "unconventional obstacles"?

[Shiplord Straha]: Unconventional is the proper term for it. We are still years away from Tosev Three! What matter could it be?

[Shiplord Tpanak]: Fleetlord Atvar, is calling a meeting at this time wise? The consumption of power and resources underway at this moment due to our premature awakening means that we may be forced to cut our observation time short.

[Fleetlord Atvar]: The matter at hand is far graver than pre-emptive use of life support and rations, gathered Shiplords. It is one that may throw the course we follow to victory into unknown territory. To hear it from past my jaws is insufficient, and so I will forward to you the same data I was faced with.

A few minutes pass in silence between the Fleetlord and his subordinates, though some Shiplords begin in heated communication with each other on private channels.

[Shiplord Hattiz]: By the Emperor. Exalted Fleetlord, is this data correct?

[Fleetlord Atvar]: Yes. Those tiny doppler-shifts indicate that the only source of these radio waves can be Tosev Three. They were inadvertently detected by our own radio systems. Though I am unwilling to lunge at wild conclusions, the data plainly shows that these radio waves fall outside of any known natural source, and were not detected by the probe survey that visited the system all those centuries back. They are clearly artificial in nature.

[Shiplord Psinil]: Exalted Fleetlord, how can this be? Tosev Three's native sentient species is pre-industrial, lacking even the ability to produce gunpowder weaponry. Sixteen hundred years is far too short a time for such advancement. Could these be emanated by our probes? Perhaps they did not deorbit as predicted and have malfunctioned, producing these?

[Shiplord Kirel]: Doubtful. Though orbits of that stability are possible, telemetric data from the expedition indicated that the orbits of the probes were too eccentric to last even a tenth of that time. And even if they managed to stay in orbit, the RTGs(3) serving as auxiliary power sources only have life expectancies of two hundred years.

[Shiplord Ttish]: Then perhaps the Tosevites found some radios from probes that failed to properly self-destruct, and have figured out crude methods of maintaining them as a form of, ssa, object-worship? They may see them as otherworldly gifts.

[Fleetlord Atvar]: No. These signals do not match any codes used by our deep-space equipment, and are of too great a density. However unlikely it may seem, it appears that the inhabitants of Tosev Three have managed... an unusually swift technological development.

[Shiplord Straha]: An unusually swift technological development, o Exalted Fleetlord? That is what you wish to call it? That's not development. That is an explosion! They've managed to industrialize in an impossibly short time!

[Fleetlord Atvar]: Check your tone, Shiplord. This is not a call to panic.

[Shiplord Straha]: Then how should we go about this? They have radio, and therefore it is possible they possess other technologies that can only come with industrialization, up to explosive metal bombs themselves! Such development in such a time frame implies that the Tosevites accomplished radical advancements within individual lifetimes. Who knows what developments they could make in response to us? Perhaps they have already detected us, and shall greet our landings with their own great armies! I say that such a species is too dangerous to leave alive.

[Fleetlord Atvar]: Silence, Shiplord. Such baseless speculation only accomplishes a diminishment of our morale. There is much we do not yet know about the Tosevite situation. It is entirely possible that this explosion was an anomaly, and their development has once again slowed to a more natural pace. Millennia passed between our invention of radio and our development of the explosive metal bomb, and so to assume that the presence of one on Tosev Three precludes the other is foolish. I shall not make a radioactive graveyard out of such a prized world and deny it to the Race because of such idiocy.

[Shiplord Kirel]: Then what are we to do, Exalted Fleetlord?

[Fleetlord Atvar]: We shall do what we were sent across the stars to accomplish at the behest of our Emperor. We are not terrified hatchlings, gathered Shiplords. We are esteemed soldiers of the Race, greatest in the cosmos! We will do what it takes to conquer the Tosevites and bring them into the fold of the true culture under the Emperor. To do that, I shall instruct our top-ranked scientists to research into the issue, operating in half-year shifts, with scientists from twenty ships operating each shift. Each year, we shall reconvene and overlook the data procured, so we are able to revise our plan of conquest.

We have received a great shock today, gathered Shiplords, and I doubt it will be our last. But the Race has faced obstacle after obstacle and has conquered them all, crossing the stars themselves to do so. Tosev Three will merely be another such obstacle, and like all others it will fall. With that I dismiss this convening.

(1) Approximately winter of 1220 CE.

(2) Approximately spring of 1998 CE.

(3) RTG stands for radioisotopic thermoelectrical generator, a type of battery that uses radioactive materials to provide low levels of power for decades on end. RTGs are primarily used for unmanned spacecraft of human, Race, and fithp make, when conditions make solar power untenable.

-/-\-

Pāk I

A natural seaman, my current interview subject insists that we go out in his personal hydrofoil, the Thai coastline diminishing in the distance until only water surrounds us. Powering off, he pulls out of the cooler a bottle of some unlabeled sweet drink and hands it to me, before procuring his own bottle and sipping from it.

Q: Thank you for the drink, Khun Sornram-

A: Please, only my superiors called me Sornram. Call me Pāk, like everyone else does.

Q: Doesn't that mean 'mouth'?

A: Yeah. That's because I have a big-ass mouth, enough it made my dad use those words when he first saw me in my mother's arms. I once managed to stuff five raw eggs without cracking them for a bet while I was in basic. But you aren't here for the wondrous exploits of my fat mouth, now are you?

Q: No, I didn't. I'm here to ask about the trafficking situation here, pre-war and during.

He frowns.

A: I don't pretend I was being a good samaritan back then. I wasn't in the business out of the goodness of my heart- the money was good, and I could be my own boss, sailing the seas with the salty wind in my hair. The only thing I can say was that I wasn't a monster to them. I saw them as customers in desperate need of a commodity I could offer, not the commodity itself, unlike so many others in the business.

Q: How large was the human trafficking business here in pre-war Thailand?

A: Huge. My country was basically a pitstop for all the lanes of traffic, from China to Indonesia to Japan to anywhere touched by the Pacific. You had people who wanted to get in, and people who wanted to get out. About a million of my countrymen were overseas working before the war, according to something I read in the newspaper, but I'd bet my left testicle only a tenth of them were actually documented. So many of them, and so many of the foreigners brought into the country, were not in for good work. You had kids from Myanmar working on fishing boats, making less money in a day than this...

He looks at the drink in his hand.

I honestly don't know what this is. The writing's in that scrawl the elephants use. But anyway, they wouldn't be able to buy this shit with a day's wages, even assuming they were paid. And that's not getting into the girls- not women, girls, who had to engage in sex work.

I didn't do that sort of business. My business was immigration, specifically Rohingya.

Q: A Muslim minority group in Myanmar.

A: Yeah, and when you hear "Muslim minority", it's suddenly no wonder they're leaving their homeland. The government in Myanmar was never friendly to them, stretching back decades. They couldn't travel, couldn't get education, couldn't get citizenship. Hundreds of thousands of them were refugees in their own fucking country. Who wouldn't want to leave that kind of shithole? They'd pack into rafts and hug the coast as they came to my country, risking starvation and dehydration just to get to somewhere safer.

That's where I came in. I worked in a harbor in the west of my country, near a place that refugee rafts containing them often would stop. Sometimes they'd try to find places in my country, which... let's just say all too often the navy would just push them back to sea. I'm more ashamed of serving on a boat like that than I am doing what I did on my own.

I'd roll up in my fishing schooner and show up where the cops and navy find the rafts, which I knew about because I had some old friends left in the force who loved accepting gifts. Then I'd offer to take them to Penang in Malaysia, after they show me what they'd had. I never used a flat rate- I'd just see what they could offer and go from there. Then I'd cram them in the schooner under some tarps, and race to Penang. Sometimes I'd have them help me pull some fish I could sell if they didn't have that much to offer.

Q: What if they didn't have enough?

A: Then I'd just go find another. They'd be mighty upset, but as far as I cared, it wasn't my problem. I remember seeing a fistfight break out on one boat when a man offered to have his daughter suck my dick to make up for the exchange, which wasn't very popular with her or a few others. I just left that mess alone. Even if I was the kind of bastard to do that, I like my women so fat I can hide my hand in her rolls. And believe me, I literally saw a fucking alien in the flesh before I saw a fat Rohingya.

Q: How did the Discovery impact your, er, business?

A: Well, I didn't see the immediate changes because I took the time off to get absolutely shitfaced with some of my friends. But by the time I got back into the groove, there was no more groove. First thing first, there were a lot more people coming in on rafts. Not dozens, or hundred, but thousands. So many boats stuffed to the brim with scared and scrawny Rohingya that it fucked with shipping.

You'd think that'd be good for business, but it wasn't. If you stopped to talk with one, the others would start swarming, and sometimes they'd get impatient. It attracted too much attention, the kind that the normal bribes wouldn't cover. And it wasn't just Rohingya anymore, either. It was the, uh, I guess I can say normal Burmese? The citizens, you know? Buddhists packed in with the Muslims they'd been harassing. That was when I knew things were getting serious, you know? When the threat of the fleet became tangible instead of just some picture of lights.

I remember asking one boat what the fuck was happening. I thought it was because Burma was falling apart, which it definitely was at the time. I think there were uprisings and clashes all across the country, from people who thought the military junta wouldn't cut it to fight the invasion, who thought there needed to be a stricter junta, and all that shit.

But they didn't give that as the reason they were leaving. Know what they told me?

Q: What?

A: "It'll be safer from them."

That was like a cold splash of water to the face. It made me think. These people were no longer just fleeing genocide or the unrest. They were fleeing because we were all at war, not with each other, but with a kind of foe that we had never dealt with before. Every country was going to be a target. Nowhere would be completely safe, because there was no neutral ground to go to.

Can you imagine living in a small country, or living in a country going through the shit, and knowing in a few years you'd be invaded by some army from a distant star, wielding weapons that could potentially exceed ours in every way? You really think you could trust your country's military to protect you, especially if they already hated your guts? It was a kind of vulnerability most people had never fully sensed before.

Lemme ask you- where would you rather be when the aliens came? In some tiny country with an army small enough to fit in a school gym, or in a stable country with nukes and millions of soldiers armed to the teeth?

The answer was clear to those people.

Q: Did that impact where you'd take them?

A: No shit. Fuck Malaysia, they were probably thinking. Thailand was one of the best-armed countries on the planet, at least as far as smaller ones went. We didn't hold a candle to the United States or China, but we were pretty good in the eyes of people from "developing" nations. Same went for Indonesia and Vietnam. India definitely accepted the brunt, though I only know that from some reports made by both the news and old colleagues.

When I did take people on my boat, I'd end up taking them to Banda Aceh, a city in Sumatra. I couldn't do as many trips because of what I was saying earlier, and something later on, but at least they had more money to offer since it wasn't just Rohingya anymore.

Q: What do you mean by "something later on"?

A: Well, one day when I went to pick up some refugees, there was a standoff between a Thai destroyer and a Burmese patrol boat, with refugee rafts between them. Almost turned bloody. I knew there was no way in hell I was going to jump into that. Then the problem became that the standoffs became more frequent, making it harder and harder.

I eventually found out that the Burmese wanted the refugees back. That threw me for a loop, you know? They had hated these people, kicked them, spat on them, raped them... they hadn't given a shit when they left, and probably cheered that the scum was leaving. But now? Now was a different story. Because the higher-ups knew the logic of the refugees, and they needed them.

Why? Because now they needed soldiers, and factory workers, and all these other things vital to preparing for the apocalyptic war coming our way. And suddenly, all those Rohingya you were kicking out become useful for something. Other countries had the same realization, because at that point the issue was getting bad. It was a vicious cycle, you know? The people felt their country was not going to be ready for the shitstorm, so they started leaving, and that in turn made the country even less ready, and so even more people were leaving.

That was the case all over the world. You had people in the Caucasus running to Russia, you had people from the smaller and more fucked up countries in Africa fleeing to places like Egypt and Nigeria, and people from all over fleeing to Europe and India and China and the United States. I can only imagine what kind of chaos was going on at the border between Mexico and America. It seemed like entire countries were going to be abandoned by the time the aliens arrived(1).

I remember reading into it, because I needed to know how it'd affect the business, and because of genuine curiosity. Myanmar kinda reminded me of an abusive ex trying to get his girlfriend back. "No, no, we didn't mean those things! We love you, Rohingya. See, see, we're gonna give you citizenship! We'll give you good jobs in the military if you come back, okay? Just come back and save your country from the aliens, please?"

And of course the Rohingya and the other marginalized in other countries didn't fucking bite. Their logic was probably like "Yeah, well you probably won't exist in six years, so fuck off."

When that don't work, that's when it gets coercive. Hence the standoffs. Myanmar was furious that my country and others were either accepting refugees or getting rich off of sending them on their way. Some countries told them to stuff it, since those same refugees could be used to bolster their defenses. Others were getting antsy.

Q: How did they resolve it?

A: They didn't.

He sips his drink.

Oh, they tried. They made mutual defense pacts, gave each other guns and ammo and food, did joint training exercises... but the people still kept on coming. It led to informal trade offs, I suppose. You know, giving them guns to "make up" for the depletion in manpower, that sort of thing. Some countries tried to crack down, but it looked ugly in the news, and there was talk of how some of the bigger countries might try to "stabilize" regions to ensure there wouldn't be easy beachheads for alien landings, so it didn't solve the problem.

It did get me out of the business, however. My country cracked down on the trafficking to try and appease the wider world, though they still accepted refugees for the manpower. Got me "caught" by a navy patrol, and then they made me an offer I couldn't exactly refuse. I was an honorable discharge, after all, and they needed as much manpower as they needed to revamp the military. So I became an instructor, teaching landlubbers how to become proper sailors. Didn't pay as well, but it was better than prison.

He pauses, looking out to the water.

I remember when I got my first class, full of fresh young faces, boys and girls. Couldn't discriminate after all, not when you needed as many warm bodies to throw at the aliens as possible.

And wouldn't you know, sitting at the front of the class was a certain girl I had met in my previous line of work.

Talk about awkward, huh?

(1) This statement is not as great an exaggeration as it may seem. According to a UN study, as many as two hundred million people fled to other nations in the build-up to the war.

-/-\-

Traoré I

Moussa Traoré greets me at the door to his home in Bamako, Mali. Ushering me in, he has me sit down with him and his family at the dining room table. We hold our interview over plates of Jollof rice, boiled eggs, and steaming green mint tea.

Q: Thank you for the meal, Professor Traoré.

A: You are quite welcome. It is always good to share a meal with a guest, especially an amiable one. Care for some more tea?

Q: Perhaps later. Let me first ask you about the translation project.

A: Very well. Where would you want me to start? How I became a member of the project, or simply my work on it?

Q: Perhaps the former would be best.

A: It is more interesting to start there, I feel. As you may know, Mali is a diverse country, with many languages. Bambara is the most common, but there is also Arabic, French, Maasina Fulfulde, and dozens more. What's more, many of the languages are from different families. Bambara is Mande, French is Indo-European, Arabic is Semetic, and Maasina Fulfude is from the Niger-Congo family. This means there are considerable differences in syntax, morphology, and phonology. Monolingualism is a rarity, here.

I suppose that was considerable help to me in becoming a linguist. Even as a child language fascinated me, how I would speak one tongue with my parents, then use another while I bought vegetables at the market, and used another altogether to read the news. That dance, of going between wildly different ways of expression, pulled me along. My natural talent at the dance made it clear to me that this was what I would pursue as my career. I was already a translator for the United Nations when I was requested to join a think tank, in order to decipher the language of the coming invaders.

Q: Could you describe that in detail?

A: Yes. The think-tank consisted of twenty-three other translators and linguists, from all over the world. They came from China, from Egypt, from America, and ten other countries. In addition that core team, there were also numerous mathematicians, cryptologists, and the like. That's not even getting into the technicians operating the supercomputers, and all the people loaned over from various countries' Deep Space Networks. You know what I mean by Deep Space Networks, yes? You know that scene in that really old movie with Jodie Foster, with all the massive antennae in the background as she's sitting her car and listening with headphones? That was the old Deep Space Network used by the Americans.

Q: What use did your translation think tank have for supercomputers and equipment meant to direct space probes?

A: Some of the most vital purposes, my friend! Those antennae had been designed to communicate with piddly little machines with weaker batteries than my phone, across billions of miles. Now, the Conquest Fleet was far farther away from us than even the most distant probe, but their ship to ship transmissions were also much more powerful. Enough that, if we turned their way and strained our ears, we could eavesdrop on their discussions.

That revelation alone was a blessing from God. I don't know if it was an accident, or if they had deliberately turned the networks their way to see if they could pick up communications. All I know is that we were quite fortunate that they did not use laser communications between ships in the fleet, instead blaring it openly across the hydrogen frequency. It was a far cry from the fithp, who were as silent as the grave. After all, they were only one ship, which meant they could hide their secrets within their steel shell.

The think tank was assigned to listen to those transmissions coming from the Conquest Fleet, and attempt to decipher their language for two main reasons. First, to see if we could gleam valuable information for the intelligence agencies, and secondly, to attempt diplomacy.

Q: I thought it had been agreed at that point that the Race had hostile intent?

A: Yes, that was the general consensus. However, we decided that if there was any chance, however small, of averting a war, that we would take such a chance.

Traoré's eldest son, a translator in his own right, pours me some tea. I watch the foam rise, then take a sip.

Q: How difficult was it to translate the language of the Race?

A: Very. All languages on Earth have connections to each other, forming families and superfamilies. There are all similarities amongst the Romance languages, for example, and there are broader commonalities between the Romance languages and other Indo-European languages. The same can be said for Niger-Congo languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, and every other possible group. If you knew one language, it would be easier to decipher the languages related to it.

However, the language of the Race had no relations to our languages. It evolved in a completely isolated environment, and was spoken by an entirely different species. There were no related languages that would have made translation easier, and no speakers with whom we could attempt simple dialogues. Even something as simple as a Race male pointing to a rock and saying his word for it would've made things easier.

To make it even worse, much of the data was not verbal chatter between crew, but computer to computer chatter, using codes developed in complete isolation from ours. In that regard it was even harder to decipher than the languages.

Q: Is this where the supercomputers and non-linguistic specialists came in?

A: They were also useful with the verbal language, but overall yes. We had what must have been thirty supercomputers engaging in parallel processing- I remember one of the computer specialists telling me they had five hundred petaFLOPS being used to brute-force Race coding. There was also networking between much smaller computers around the world, and much was put in public so amateurs and freelancers could take a crack at the matter.

The core team and I contented ourselves with the audio transmissions. Simply knowing that they communicated verbally, and with a somewhat similar vocal structure to us, made things much easier. Almost immediately we'd decided that they must've had a word order that includes subjects, verbs, and objects. Not necessarily in that order, of course; only forty percent of languages are SVO.

Q: What order is the Race language in, then?

A: It is an OSV language, similar to many languages found in the Amazon rainforest. That alone took eighteen months to determine. Thankfully, once that was done, the rest of the deciphering became much easier. We swiftly discerned that the Race language was polysynthetic, meaning that there is a high amount of morphemes. This often leads to them having long words that can act as a sentence on their own. For example, the word ssuvatalsvabeerts means "He has not yet returned home".

It's also a very logical language. Not meaning that the speakers are inherently more logical than us, but meaning that there are fewer linguistic ambiguities. One lesson that stuck with me when I entered college was an example the professor said, stating that the English phrase "I never said she stole my money" can have seven different interpretations depending on inflection and context. In contrast, the Race's language would have seven different sentences for each interpretation.

Q: How long did it take to decipher the language to the point of intelligibility?

A: Three years. By the end, six of the linguists and translators had left the program due to a perceived lack of helpfulness, and three others suffered nervous breakdowns from the stress of the work. Newer and much more powerful supercomputers were being devoted to the task with every year, including some that were custom built for the issue, which helped a little, but it was still incredibly difficult work. It would've been all to easy to simple aspects of the language ass-backwards, considering how... well, how alien it was.

Still, I remember that day when I was reading a transcription of a conversation between two technicians on separate ships- as a side note, I do not like the official Romanization of Race-tongue. If you never heard it spoken, you'd think it flowed like a human language for certain terms, or that the writing presented looked like a cat jumped on the keyboard for others. Race-tongue pronounces consonants you see clustered together on paper individually. It's not Atvar, it's Ah-tuh-vah-re. Or "at'.va.ɻ" in IPA if you're being technical.

Where was I? Oh yes. I remember the first time I was reading a transcription, and suddenly it was making sense to me. Not some puzzle to crack, but something I'd read like anything else. I remember jumping out of my chair and letting out a little scream when that happened. We'd finally done it. The greatest endeavor in linguistic history had finally paid off, and I had been a part of it.

I still have my Nobel prize around the house, as well as a copy of that issue of TIME where me and the rest of the team are on the cover, with the title Meet the Team Who Cracked An Alien Language.

Q: What happened after that?

A: The team had done its job, and with that many of us were given the boot, as English speakers say. The skillsets and resources required to decipher an alien language are quite different from the ones required to teach it, or to use it for intelligence purposes. I was actually barred from further examining Race communications, as they feared it could result in security breaches. Instead, I was shuffled into another team, meant to create language courses and to teach other linguists how to speak it, so that they could in turn teach others.

At first, the language courses were directed towards intelligence officers, so they could better analyze ship to ship communications, as well as key government officials around the world. After all, we were still striving to the vain hope of negotiation, and if that were the case we needed ambassadors who speak the language.

It was at my suggestion that the language had public courses on it, including online applications. Many cited it as a wartime contribution- it could allow civilian partisans to intercept Race communications, or to better ingratiate themselves on their occupiers and make their activities less suspicious. However, I did not view it that way. I simply wished for others to share in the joy I had the privilege to experience, speaking a language from another star.

That was two years before the war began. I remember reading that some app... Duolingo? Yes, Duolingo crashed within thirty minutes of Race-tongue becoming available. I think there were five hundred million people using the app to study the language, though most only did it out of initial curiosity. Still, I remember a study that claimed that, six months before the war, there were more L2 speakers of Race-tongue than there were of Russian. I don't know how accurate that was- they probably counted anyone who could form basic sentences.

Regardless, I have no doubt that the work our team did was crucial to what happened next.

-/-\-

Ttomalss I

Regarded by many troopmales as the best expert on human psychology, Ttolmass spends most of his time at Yale University, where he offers special elective classes in Race history and culture. It is, as he has claimed in prior interviews, the best way to bring us into the 'right culture'. What he means by that has been the subject of much controversy, in both human and Race circles.

He invites me into his office, which is lined with various human books and essays, ranging from psychology to history to plays. "Reading is one of the few things I have aside from work", he explains as we sit down.

Q: You served as the chief xenopsychologist aboard the Conquest Fleet, but much of your work was overshadowed by the more visible elements of the war. What were the specifics of your job?

A: As a xenopsychologist, my job was study the human psyche, in order to determine how well your species would integrate into our society. Things such as reproduction and child-rearing, as well as regard for authority. I was expecting fairly easy work in that regard.

He swivels an eye turret towards the window.

Clearly, I was mistaken.

Q: I am informed that the Fleetlord commissioned the Fleet's xenopsychologists to study the "Tosevite situation" during the flight through the solar system.

A: Indeed I was. The memory of waking up to be informed of the, er, situation is crystal clear, despite the fog that comes when you emerge from coldsleep. As soon as I was informed that your species had advanced in an incredibly short time-frame, I knew that I was going to deal with something outside of my expectations.

Nevertheless, I was a male of the Race, chosen for my position by the decree of the Emperor, and I was going to do my job.

I first began with what information I had on my hand- the findings of those first probes we sent to your system centuries ago. Over the course of approximately twenty-five thousand of your years, we have methodically sent probes to every star within eleven light years of Home. Much of that time is due to minimizing of energy expenditures- our probes move at a mere five percent of light-speed, rather than the fifty-five percent our starships accomplish. It took four hundred of our years for the probes to arrive in the Tosev system, which had been the most recent discovery at the time.

Q: What information did the probes have on humanity?

A: Not as much as you may think. The probes were more concerned with ascertaining the planet's habitability, as there is only so much you can gleam from distant telescopes. About two thousand years before Tosev, there was another prospective habitable world that was later found by probe to be too cold for our tastes, though your own species may be better suited to its climate. It is still viewed as a holding of the Race, much like every other star we have visited.

We dropped dozens of rovers and landers and even airborne probes all over the planet, taking temperature readings, chemical analyses of the soil, examining biological samples... but most encounters with Tosevites were incidental, scant. I'm sure we accidentally seared ourselves into the memories of some witless peasants from the waning Maya to the Silk Road, and I know for a fact that some were destroyed, but our study of your species was largely confined to matters like "do they exist?" and "what is your basic biology like?".

We didn't care to know about your societies, or your armies. Victory over you was taken for granted, not worthy of reconnaissance.

Q: They still must have uncovered some information.

A: Yes. We knew that you were the most biologically distinct sapient species we had encountered- so large, so ugly. The probes had found that Tosev Three was a rather lush world despite being so cold and wet, and that the fecundity of your people was astonishing. And though we did not try very hard to study your technology, your possession of steel and primitive mills showed that you were the most advanced species we had encountered, compared to the Bronze Age Hallessi and copper-wielding Rabotevs.

Between your numbers, large size, and comparatively more advanced technology, it had been determined -quite correctly!- centuries ago that you were going to be the most difficult conquest yet, and we had spent an extra hundred and sixty of our years preparing accordingly when compared to the previous conquests. Of course, to us, the most difficult conquest was no more grave a matter than the most fearsome insect.

I remember spending hours upon hours poring over the few holographic images of your species, from what I now know to be a soldier of Ikh Mongol Uls during the invasion of Khwārazmshāhiyān aiming a bow at the probe, to a small village in the Yucatan Peninsula. I would corroborate with the other xenopsychologists once a day to discuss theories and analysis. That was all we had, you see. Theories, mountains of theories, but only theories. We had no new data to help us determine how you had developed so rapidly.

The best we could determine that the root of the cause lay either in a hitherto-unknown aspect of universal sociology, or your biology and the world that shaped it. Some suggested that perhaps the large oceans on your world provided unique challenges to trade, and it is known across all species -perhaps not the pre-war Fithp- that necessity is the nest that invention's egg hatches from. Another theory was that your large population but limited area meant that information dissemination and feedback loops occurred rather quickly. More people means a higher likelihood of brilliant inventors or more manpower available to important developments, and being so close together meant that great minds and great movements could better corroborate.

However, these theories were unpopular, as it implied that the sudden growth of your species was not an abnormality, but rather the norm for your kind. That implication produced ill odors, as far as we were concerned. A more popular theory was that of the technology explosion.

Q: Technology explosion?

A: I argue that it is not a very accurate term, but the venom behind the term when used by Straha made it popular in our circle. The basic tenets of the theory was that all species have a period in their development where they advance much more quickly than before and after. The theory would then mean that the Tosevites' rapid development was simply because they had had their technology explosion rather late in their development, which also had the calming implication that it had already passed. I still remember my excitement as I suggested that this revelation could help us unlock our own prehistory, that perhaps the Race had its technology explosion earliest in its development, hence its supremacy.

That had been the prevailing theory as I went into coldsleep along with the other scientists. The next cycle of scientists, who operated for half of our year, held onto it.

Then when I woke for the third cycle -as the chief expert I was expected to work for multiple cycles- we received a hammer to the tailstump.

Q: Was that when the first of the UN contact packages arrived?

A: About three weeks in, yes. I remember one of my junior assistants actually screaming when the Hetto's computer notified us of an unknown radio transmission. After all, it was proof that you definitively knew we were coming, and his panicked mind accidentally jumped to many correct conclusions. At the time we managed to brush it off, as it was only natural you would notice our photon rockets. The Rabotevs and Hallessi saw, and had put it in primitive records- they were just too primitive to know what the lights in the sky were.

For about a week we couldn't actually truly receive the message, as it was not meant for digital processing. I decided to wake the technician who had first detected the Tosevite radio signals, that poor Erewlo fellow, and asked him about it. He blurted something about cathodes and then rocked in his tube.

I didn't even know what a cathode was, but one of my junior assistants was a hobbyist who loved to dive into the lowest levels of archives back on Home and recreate primitive technologies. He had even made crude props as we discussed your medieval development, but I digress. He had an old cathode-ray machine he had built for fun, and we had Erelwo jury-rig something so that we could use it to interpret the signals.

On that small grainy screen, we were shown the contact package, and could finally begin to absorb how far you had come.

Q: What did you see?

A: Enough.

He scratches his chin.

The information within was very similar to your Voyager probes' Golden Records. Greetings in multiple languages, music, images. I was one of the first of the Race to hear "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by that particularly large Hawaiian, which was played so often by staff that I heard it in my nightmares, but that was honestly one of the least problematic things. The images showed many basic aspects of your life, such as you eating food, or rowing over a lake, but it also showed off much of your technology. From that first package we knew you had discovered the atom, computers, flight, and more.

Yet, it was still frustratingly sparse. You had been wise to withhold information on your military technology- we had no idea if you still used bows or had weapons greater than explosive metal bombs. We knew nothing of the exact nature of your population centers, your industries... we had to infer much. I managed to ascertain that your world was still not unified, much like the pre-conquest Rabotevs, as the greetings had such a broad range of phonology that I knew they had to be of different languages. The images of ovum and uteruses indicated live birth and that you raised your own young, which would make some aspects of assimilation difficult.

He trails off, glancing outside once again.

What frightened me the most was that image of a Tosevite standing on your massive moon. It wasn't just that you had spaceflight, you see, though that was indeed terrifying. Rather, it was the fact that the picture was clearly old, compared to the newer images of spaceflight. Your technology had developed visibly as you ventured out, yet the lack of signals elsewhere in the system indicated that you hadn't been in space for very long.

The next contact package was much simpler, on par with the Arecibo message, but it was meant to be interpreted by our computers. That had only solidified a revelation I had silently considered for several cycles.

If the technology explosion was a true phenomenon, then you were still in the middle of it. And we still had a long way to go.

-/-\-

Harpanet I

Though visibly exhausted by the effort, Harpanet insists we go on a walk around the White House grounds as we talk, citing a need for fresh air. Despite being middle-aged, his skin is wrinkled and loose about his large frame, a mark many former warrior fithp bear after returning to civilian life. A quartet of Secret Service agents, one of whom is also a fi', flank us as we walk.

Q: Thank you for your time, Advisor Harpanet. I know you have a busy schedule.

A: There is no need to give thanks, Loremaster. It is important that we better understand the past of our herds, lest we make the same mistakes.

Q: I agree. If you don't mind, I'd like to get into it.

A: Lead me.

Q: As an Octuplet-Leader of the Chtaptisk Fithp, how aware were you of the overall strategy being developed by your superiors?

A: More than one may think, though not because I was an Octuple-Leader. As a member of the Spaceborn herd, I was part of the group that occupied most of the command structure of Thuktun Flishithy. There was lingering friction between the Sleeper herd and the Spaceborn, largely showing itself through the dissident view that we should leave Winterhome alone and take the asteroids for ourselves. After all, we had been mated to a small moon of the ringed world you named Saturn, replenishing our depleted reserves of water and allowing our garden to blossom more beautifully than it had in years. Peaceful life with the belt seemed tempting to many.

As a member of the Spaceborn herd, one who occupied a high rank among the warriors as an Octuple-Leader, my mind was a battleground upon which the two factions would argue. You had the dissidents who would tell me things my current herd would describe as above my pay grade, in an attempt to sway me to their side and indicate to leadership that the warriors themselves were wary.

Q: What sorts of things would they tell you?

A: Many things. "Oh Harpanet, did you hear that the Winterhome fithp don't fight the way we do? " the occasional high-ranking dissident would tell me. "Perhaps they will not surrender, like an entire planet of rogues. You wouldn't wish to throw yourself against such madness, would you?"

"Oh Harpanet, another traveling herd is bearing to Winterhome. If we don't stay in the belt, they may conquer us as well."

And then I would be approached by fellow Spaceborn, who wanted the warriors to stay resolute. "Oh Harpanet, I know those cowardly dissidents wouldn't want me to tell you this, but the Herdmaster knows conquest will be easy. There's another herd traveling to Winterhome. We can let the two tear at each other until they are too weak to resist us."

"Oh Harpanet, rumor is that the planet is divided fiercely between rival herds. We can divide and conquer them. Oh Harpanet, the dissidents don't want you to know this, but this moon may be used as a weapon to cow the Winterhome fithp into line."

Between the two, I had an astonishingly clear picture of what the strategy we would employ.

Q: Which was?

A: That we would buy ourselves time by resupplying with our mated moon and pushing it, so that the other traveling herd would arrive at Winterhome before we did. We would not arrive too late, however, as we did not want the destructive war to render much of the planet unusable.

Then we would arrive and scour the orbitals, before choosing certain herds and landing in fertile regions after weakening their remaining military infrastructure. We would ensure they were herds with many enemies, so we could conquer them unmolested, and then we would do the same to other herds, gaining strength with the subsumed herds.

Q: Why fertile regions?

A: We felt that your herd would be far less willing to contaminate your breadbaskets with fallout than you would a desert or tundra. Successful nuclear strikes were undesirable, naturally. Even if losses were minimal, it would still make the planet less and less desirable. We were already appalled by your willingness to soil your own garden.

Q: And yet you were bringing the Foot along?

Harpanet falls silent for a few moments.

A: More than anything, the existence of the Foot was what made my desire to live on a world falter the most. As a Spaceborn, I had been raised to hate the metal halls and the nonexistent sky, even though I did not know what a sky was. When I was a calf, my parents would walk me along the garden in the heart of Thuktun Flishithy, telling me that there was a greater garden waiting for us. A garden filled with great ponds, ponds that could stretch so far you could not see the other side, so deep that you could sink for hours and not reach the bottom. A garden with things like sand, and fog, and great rocks taller than the world I lived in.

For a young spaceborn who could walk the width of his world in less than a day, a garden so great it would take years to walk around sounded like paradise. And yet, for four years in the orbit of Saturn, set black against those beautiful scintillating rings that I wish to see once more before I die, was a weapon meant to destroy gardens.

I still sided with conquest. The dream of the Spaceborn burned too strongly in me to quell, and the exhaustion of resupplying at the Foot had turned the prospect of peaceful life in the belt unappealing. I would tell myself that the Foot would not actually be used, once the Winterhome fithp saw sanity and surrendered, and that I would stand beneath that beautiful sky.

It seems that one of the universals of culture, no matter what world you hail from, is hypocrisy. It was a lesson we would soon learn in the war to come.

-/-\-

USA Today Article, November 19th, 2016

VERNE'S FICTION MADE REALITY
US Tests First Anti-Orbital Weapons Platform

TAMPA- With a resounding crack that silences the spectators gathered along the five-meter fence, a new world of warfare is opened less than an hour's drive from the location an inadvertent prophet wrote it would begin.

At first glance, the squat dome resting on a small hill outside of Tampa resembles a massive reflector telescope painted in camouflage, but the first emplacement of the USAAF's planned Anti-Orbital Defense Network is not meant to observe celestial objects. It is meant to shoot them.

"The idea of a gun meant to send objects into space is old, definitely older than most people know," says Jason Cho, head of the engineering project tasked with developing the network, called COLUMBIAD. "Jules Verne wrote about the idea a full hundred years before we landed on the Moon, back in a time when no one else was seriously thinking about sending objects into space."

Of course, many differences exist between the space gun of Verne's imagination and the weapon that had its first test-firing today. The technologies involved are simultaneously far more advanced, and with far smaller ambitions. Rather than filling a nine-hundred foot hole in the ground with a hundred and eighty tons of gun cotton in order to launch a twenty-ton shell to the Moon, Cho's gun uses magnetic rails, which had been previously tested by the Navy in 2008, to launch a five-thousand pound (2267 kg) projectile to low Earth orbit.

Perhaps the most crucial difference is that Verne's gun was a tool of sending a piece of the world into the heavens. Cho's gun, on the other hand, is meant to keep the heavens out of the world.

"If everything goes as planned, COLUMBIAD will become the forefront of the United States' defense against the extraterrestrial aggressors," says Cho. "Control of the orbitals will dictate control of the war, and this defense network will keep the aggressors from dominating our airspace."

Though today's test only reached an apogee of a hundred miles before plunging into the Gulf of Mexico about three hundred miles downrange, Cho is hopeful that later high-power tests will reach the proposed maximum range of four hundred miles within the month. Should that be the case, then construction of seventy more platforms across the country will begin January of next year. Each station will also have four COIL (chemical oxygen infrared laser) emitters, which had a successful test last year, with purposes ranging from blinding alien surveillance equipment to destroying landing craft.

Criticism of the project, however, has been abound.

"Sedentary defenses have always been vulnerable to air attack, and nowhere will that vulnerability be pronounced than when the attacker is in space," says Chinese Defense Minister Zhou Miao. "The United States risks spending billions of dollars making nothing but orbital target practice. I maintain that our ally must consider focusing funds on less risky projects, such as our own anti-satellite missile program. To do otherwise may weaken itself in the face of this invasion, and if a major ally falls we may all be doomed."

"Even if you can hit objects in low Earth orbit, they might react by putting themselves into a higher orbit and render the things useless," says Dr. Kanukuri Ramanaidu, head of India's own anti-orbital defense project, codenamed ARJUNA. "If they can cross the incomprehensible gap between stars, they can move out of such weapons' reach. The only saving grace would be if the enemy had to enter within range to effectively use their own weapons."

Despite criticism, Cho and his team remains optimistic.

"The defense network's use of railguns will make its detection far harder than with missiles and even laser emitters, and it is far harder to defend against a solid projectile than a missile or laser. And even if the fleet can stay out of range in orbit, they will still have to land if they wish to occupy the planet, and that'll make them sitting ducks."

Regardless of opinions at the governmental level, the public at large seems to be enamored with the concept, if the excited crowd at the test firing site holds any implication.

"Look at that beauty," says Raul Turner, a 43 year old Tampa resident as he watches the test firing. "That thing could knock down 'em ships from Independence Day."

"I remember watching a movie that shows how scary paint flecks are in orbit," exclaims Nancy Young, age 19. "Paint flecks. A bullet that big would punch through just about anything."

The realization of Verne's dream seems to have had a good impact on morale. Whether that will be the only impact it makes or not, only time will tell.

-/-\-

Ibe I

The residence in Yenagoa is surprisingly small, with only a single floor, and a small gate. I am given a brief pat down before I can enter, then I am ushered into the humble abode of one of the most famous, and controversial, figures in post-war history. A short, powerful-looking man, Nwashuku Ibe is sitting on the living room floor, drinking a glass of warm soy milk. He offers me a firm handshake, and requests that I sit on the floor as well as we talk.

Q: Good afternoon, President Ibe.

A: A good afternoon to you as well. There is no need to be so stiff; I am fond of your work. Please, ask ahead.

Q: Very well. As many are already aware, you were part of the Delta Freedom movement, before the war. How did you join that organization?

A: Because I am Ijaw. Laughs. No, no, there is more to that. I feel many still do not know of the conflict before the Lizards came. It was only a generation ago, and yet everything before the war seems shrouded in myth, like a long-forgotten time. I suppose it can be forgiven; what was lost during the war cannot be regained, and what we gained after cannot be taken away.

I was a young man during that time, baby-faced and knobby-knee'd when I the Delta Justice Mandate. It was a nonviolent protest group, doing marches and sit-ins. My job at the time was largely to hand out pamphlets alongside my brother, Mujahid.

Q: Against what, exactly?

A: Oil companies, both foreign and domestic. These capitalists had stayed after the end of British rule in old Nigeria, but under other skins. Through bribery and economic coercion, they were allowed by the government to continue sucking oil from our lands. They ravaged the environment here, here, in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. They cut down forests for facilities and excavations, they polluted our rivers with waste products as they took and refined the oil, and they caused us much grief as a result.

And despite the billions of dollars they got, we stayed undeveloped. Good hospitals and schools were scarce. We lived in squalor next to wealthy capitalists that took the resources from our land.

There had been movements agains the companies for decades. It was mainly nonviolent, until the government sent in troops to quell us, and killed Ogoni leaders. They declared our opposition to the exploitation treason. Then, it became militarized.

I was still part of a small, nonviolent group. We continued to march, and hold sit-ins, up until the announcement of the coming invasion. Things changed after that.

Q: Because of the initial panic, or something else?

A: The initial panic was like a gentle breeze before the storm that hammered us. Very swiftly, the grip on the region tightened. They stopped bothering with even a modicum of nonlethal combat, trading in rubber bullets for lead. Laws against protests were strengthened, punishments made harsher. Once again, protesting the oil companies in the region became known as treason.

Q: Why?

A: What else? The "developed world". Even in times of peace industrialized nations were like frenzied beasts, guzzling down billions of gallons of the stuff, only for their appetites to grow with each drop instead of ever being sated. They loved what it gave them, both the governments and the people. Oil was quite literally power. They didn't want to conserve it, they didn't want to consider what it did to the world. They just wanted to expand their interests, to drive bigger cars, to make the squiggly line of "the economy" go higher and higher, even if that didn't actually mean anything.

That desire for oil was like the furnaced jaws of Moloch, and the people of the Delta were the children being cast into that brazen stomach.

And that was before the discovery of the coming invasion.

After, the beast became something different. For once, the industrialized world halted its incessant waste and began to speak of preserving the earth, but these were cynical measures. It took the existential threat of an invasion from another world to make them admit that they needed to conserve their oil resources, and even in my youth I had no doubt that it would be back to business as usual if they survived relatively intact.

Yet, their demands for oil only grew stronger with the revelation of the invaders. After all, they were facing being cut off from their supplies of oil while also having to fuel the largest and mightiest armies ever seen on the face of this earth. And so at the same time as they made ration cards or license plate tickets, as renewable energy became increasingly in demand, they took even greater amounts of oil from places like the Delta, making strategic reserves.

As far as they were concerned, they needed to protect that lifeline, and with force. Oh, wars may have ceased in the face of the coming fleets, but I saw quite a few Americans and Chinese and British around in my neck of the woods. If they didn't wish to waste bodies, they were perfectly willing to lend the government money and guns as part of "defensive pacts", even if those bullets found Ijaw before they found Lizard.

Q: A common argument in favor of the peacekeeping efforts is that stable extraction was vital to global defense. What is your thought on the matter?

A: My thought is that maybe if they hadn't been greedy murderous bastards for decades on end, they wouldn't have "needed" to suck the Delta dry. Renewable energy technologies have been around for decades, and yet they never bothered to implement them until it was suddenly vital to defense.

My thought is that even if oil was needed, there were plenty of other places they could extract from. Old Russia was the largest producer on the planet, and OPEC was producing plenty. If they actually cared about the environment like they said they did, they wouldn't have despoiled the Delta for a little oil. If they were keen on preserving human life like they said they were, they would have paid generously and actually strived to help the Delta peoples instead of discarding them aside.

They never cared. As far as they were concerned, Africans died like flies all the time- what was a few more to preserve the actually important countries?

And as far as I was concerned, preparing to fight the aliens mattered little when we were already under occupation. I had that lesson painfully impressed upon me, when I saw Mujahid's brains spatter against the wall mere moments after he pushed me into an alleyway to flee "peacekeepers". It was that day I joined the Delta Freedom Movement and became a fighter.

Q: You committed acts of terrorism?

A: Call it what you like. Terrorism, guerrilla fighting, or a struggle for freedom. I applaud those who have fought for their freedom without raising a hand, but these capitalists did not care for peaceful protest. If they had to kill us all to keep the oil, then they were willing to do it.

It was not an easy fight. Turnover was high, due to the increasing intensity of the fight, as we became more steadfast and they less forgiving. And yet, the entire Delta had been engulfed by our uprisings at that point, as for every one they killed, three more rose up to avenge their friends and brothers. Some weapons found their way into our hands, courtesy of some sympathetic groups, and as much as they hated us, some countries found use in us. The conflict had hardened us, after all, providing lessons in how to wage guerilla warfare against a much larger foe. Many of our captured members were offered clemency if they helped teach other groups across the continent how to fight, but against invading aliens instead of Shell.

When the invasion finally began, the war had already been long-fought by us. I was second-in-command of the entire organization by the time of Landing Day, five years after I joined.

He frowns.

I was nineteen.

-/-\-

Yáng I

Despite her advanced age, Yáng Lán still works as a teacher in Mangya, a town in the old Haixi Mongol Autonomous County of Qinghai province. The town was small before the war, with only 33,000 people calling it home, and now the population is best measured in hundreds.

We meet in her school, a three-room building one story high, on the outskirts of the old town. Despite being 87 years old, she still insists on standing as she lectures her four students, and serves them their meals for their lunch break. I sit across from her as we talk, the students eating besides her.

Q: You've lived in Qinghai for most of your life, and have been a teacher for the past sixty three years. What kept you in Mangya?

A: If I left, there would be no one else for them.

She gestures to her students.

The generations who lived in the shadow of the war do not remember what our nation used to be like. Constantly changing. My home did not have electricity when I was young, or even when I was older for that matter. [Laughs]. My parents had never seen an automobile until they were middle-aged. In many ways, life seemed to have barely changed since the time of the Qing Dynasty.

Then, in less than a lifetime, we had railways stretching everywhere, including one that passed... still passes, near this town. People who went to the East to work would come back with stories of how the cities seemed to grow more and more with each passing week, skyscrapers rising in a matter of weeks. My goodness, we even had two spaceports within a few hundred miles of here.

I'm sorry for rambling. I feel like I'm giving a lesson.

She pauses to solve a dispute between two students over cabbage, then turns back to me.

What I mean, is that in this great change, many things stayed the same. For other rural communities, they grew richer and more sophisticated, but we stayed poor here. We, like many others, were left behind, running to catch up.

I was lucky to be carried along. I am Hui, and back then the policies gave me extra points on the gāokâo(1), so I managed to receive a good education in Xī'ān. That was truly a changing city. It used to have less than half a million people when I was young, and when I arrived to study it had more than doubled.

But those rising towers did not blind me to the plight of those left behind. When I spoke with my parents, they told me of how many others had to leave their children behind to work in the big cities. Tens of millions of children, left with ailing grandparents and teachers as caretakers.

So, I resolved to return home, and I have taught here ever since. For many of the children, I was the only solid figure in their lives as I taught them what I had learned in China's future. And all around me, over the decades, the country's industry continued to grow. Even if the fruits did not fall into our mouths, I could still see the trees being planted in the distance. Railways, wind farms, power plants.

Q: And then the fleets were discovered.

A: Yes. Everyone has their story of when the news was released, and I have mine. I was teaching, here, when one of the students' parents came barging in, screaming of how a fleet of a thousand ships was coming from another star to take this world from us. He had already known that it would be years before they arrived, but his panic made us thought it was happening right then and there.

She shakes her head.

My son is not a smart man.

I digress again. Even after the initial panic was resolved, and I gave my son a good whack over the head, a great unease had fallen here.

Q: Did the remoteness of this town have any impact on how people reacted to the news?

A: I suppose in a sense, yes. We knew of what was happening in other nations. The day of chaos America had, the suicides in Brazil, the quiet masses in Botswana. But we did not see these things, and we did not care much for these things. The world was always changing greatly around us without paying us thought, and we had learned to return the favor.

But we still worried here. A hush fell on the town, an unspoken fear. We knew nothing of the aliens yet. We had never even thought of such a thing, not when we had far more pressing matters. When you live in this cold place, surrounded by nothingness, in turn surrounded by mountains, it can be easy to forget the world outside.

They made it impossible to forget what was above us, however. Their mere existence had shaken us, for they had cracked our sky open and brought portents of doom. Doom!

One of the students jolts. She assuages him.

Q: Could you elaborate on your emphasis on "doom"? It adds an interesting connotation.

A: We lived in interesting times. No, that's not a good way of saying it. I suppose you're my fifth student for this day, no?

The end of the world is not so familiar to us as it is to Westerners. I blame their faith in the cross for that. In our stories, in our myths, there is always a beginning, but almost never an end. At least, the end isn't permanent. It's just same old, same old. Like the cycle of dynasties. The world's still there, isn't it? Most of us never really played with the idea of the whole thing ending.

The idea of the apocalypse, that fascination- no, obsession- with doomsday is strange. I remember an author my grandson adored, who spoke of how his writing of the apocalypse through a Chinese eye was part of why his stories were so successful.

If I recall, those books got very popular right before the war.

Q: So you would say that the discovery of the Conquest Fleet brought about apocalyptic sentiments?

A: Yes. Everyone had it. Oh, are you talking about my town or the country? It's obvious the outside world had it-

Q: Let's go with your community.

A: For here, everyone had their own "doomsday moment". A sudden realization, that instead of just a war or some unreal-feeling thing out of some silly book, we were finally looking at what may be the definitive end of the world. The end of everything.

For some, it was when people began to move. Not move away for work, but just leaving, abandoning villages they had lived in their entire lives and going to the cities. Those same mountains that isolated us, they made some of us feel vulnerable. After all, we are on the roof of the world, closer to the sky than any other peoples, and for some that made it feel like we were closer to the invaders as well.

The night sky became a terror for many. They couldn't bear to look at the sky and see the lights those ships made. I could bear it, but I would often get terrible dreams.

Q: When was your doomsday moment?

A: I remember my doomsday moment too clearly. It had come later than others. I was already an old, stubborn woman. I had lived through people rushing to the mountains during the Cultural Revolution, and all the trouble that had brought. I had gotten old in a nation that seemed to change every time I opened my eyes.

It came slowly. It started with the abandonment of the villages, but it was much worse when the construction equipment pulled away. For the first time in my long life, I had finally seen the endless growth of my country stop cold, then recede back to the coast like a great wave. The smaller wave of men constructing pillboxes and planting charges along the railways also weighed heavily on me as they came and went, especially as they rolled tanks to Xīnjiāng and Xīzàng.

But it was when I was one of only three teachers who had remained in this entire town, when in the third year those polite men in uniforms came to my school. When they sat me down, and had me relate to the children how to hold a gun and how to make improvised bombs...

She wipes at the corner of her eye.

That was when I finally admitted to myself that we were facing the end of the world.

(1) Chinese college entrance examination

-/-\-

New York Times Article, August 15th, 2018

THE YEAR WITHOUT CHILDREN
Birth rate reaches unprecedented low

CHEYENNE- Just five years ago, Rossman Elementary School had more than 350 students. Now, there are only twenty three. Each grade can fit comfortably in a single classroom, eerily empty without the desks and supplies of before. In some rooms, there can be as many as three teachers, engaging in focused instruction with a handful of children.

"Sometimes, I feel like I'm trespassing onto an abandoned school," says Ms. May, a twenty six year-old teacher, now in charge of the entire third grade. "It used to be lively, with buses coming in and parents dropping off their kids every morning. But now? I get an entire parking row to myself, and there's no hustle when I walk in. It's freaky."

Rossman is not an isolated example. Across the world, reported numbers of students have dropped significantly, to the point that some schools, and even entire districts, have closed doors. In the Alto Department of Paraguay, all schools have coalesced in two former high schools in the capital of Fuerte Olimpo.

"There just aren't enough students to justify having more schools," claims Guille Luis Velazquez, the superintendent in charge of Alto's education department. "Older students started dropping out to go work, or to hold down the house while their parents work. Many parents have started working much farther from home, joining the army or making defenses. And there's barely any children coming in. Less than a tenth of before, I'd say."

Velazquez would be quite accurate in his math. In 2014, the opening of the Invasion Crisis, there were an estimated 140 million births. In 2015, that number halved, then continued to plummet to its current rate of 15 million births a year. This marks the lowest the number of annual births has been since the First World War and Spanish Influenza a century ago, according to some estimates.

Reasons for this unprecedented drop in births are numerous, ranging from the increase in political instability in many nations around the world, the drain of non-war related industries and infrastructure to fuel global defense preparations, and workers spending far more time away from home. However, all of these issues lead back to a singular reason, one that is painfully obvious.

"No one wants to raise kids when the world might end soon," Zeynep Ozkok, a Turkish construction worker in Instanbul states. Ozkok, who has been married for the past two years as she helps make emergency shelters, speaks bluntly as to why she doesn't plan on having children. "Why bother? It's cruel to give them life just in time for the aliens to take it all away."

The sentiment has been echoed around the world, from internet posts to even politics, such as when President Sharif of Pakistan controversially advised his constituents to "build bombs and tanks, not families". In an extensive study conducted over the past year by Oxford University, over 90% of childless married couples cite the incoming invasion as their primary reason for not having children.

The impact of the decline in birthrate has gone beyond empty schools, however. The same study also indicates that the reduced amount of children has induced a "doomsday sense" in many, which is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and even suicides.

"It's like the Rapture, you know?" says Ms, May. "The children are disappearing, and the streets are getting emptier and emptier. I mean, knowing that the... uh... well, the maybe-apocalypse is coming via aliens is bad enough, but this is rubbing it into our face."

The streets are indeed getting emptier. While the birthrate has dropped, the deathrate has actually increased, due to the same factors. For the first time since the Black Death, the seemingly endless growth of the human population has been halted and reversed, something that even the Second World War failed to accomplish.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Zeynep laughs. "They haven't even arrived yet and they're already thinning our numbers. From the edge of the solar system, they're choking us in their grip."

Nevertheless, despite the negative impacts of the lowered birthrate, silver linings remain. With a smaller influx of students, schools worldwide have been able to focus more resources, while also allowing more funds to be diverted to the defense efforts without strain.

"I've been able to engage with my students in a way I could never have done before the discovery," Ms. May says, a faint smile appearing. "Their grades have been up, and they've been showing so much more interest in the subject matter."

The picture is clear. The threat of the alien invasion coming to our world has left a tremendous impact on our morale, an impact that shows itself in many ways, but hope continues to shine through. Perhaps it is these hopes that shall keep us all going through the dark times ahead.

-/-\-

Scrapbook I

"I remember when I was in freshman year, before the Discovery, the army recruiters were a lot like used cars salesmen. "Hey, wanna join up! Believe me when I say it will be the best decision of your life! What, PTSD and crippling injuries? Pffft, just sign up and you'll be the envy of the school." Only the really desperate kids or the meatheads went there.

Sophomore year, the recruiters were still kinda like that, but space flavored, you know? Hey, you like Halo, don't you? Wanna shoot aliens like Master Chief, but for real? I swear once a month they made us watch really crappy videos to get us psyched up about fighting the aliens, with crappy CGI of F-22s dogfighting 'alien' aircraft and stuff. Even then they were a bit more serious about how it was going to be dangerous work, but we should be proud to serve our country.

Junior year, an entire wall of the cafeteria had permanent booths where there'd be recruiters for all the branches, and instead of being really pushy they got pretty blunt, because they knew we were going to see them at some point. Had to take a bunch of tests to figure out where I'd probably end up. No one was really asking about college or cushy benefits.

Senior year? They were basically as grim as the goddamn grave. They didn't even act like recruiters anymore- none of the fake smiles, just weary nods and deep frowns as they explained what they needed. Every time they just said "I can't lie about the odds, but you're doing a service." After graduation, when me and everyone else went to finalize the papers still dressed in the robes, the recruiter looked like he was going to cry."

- Brynne Browning, from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"What was that you said, my guy?
All of us are gonna die?
They be more a lot more advanced
Hell we may just be a hill of ants
But we ain't gonna die my guy.

There might be one more comin'
And its lasers might be hummin'
But we ain't gonna die my guy.

We might be all divided
Which gets ET real excited,

They might win without a shot
Cuz they make our brains go rot,

They might just call it a day
And push a rock in our way,

But...

Damn.

Guess I can't tell a lie,
We probably gonna die,
But at least we gonna try?"

- An excerpt from "At Least We Gonna Try?", by rock band The Sufficient Velociteers. It is believed to be the most popular song of 2017.

"We Were Here"

- Graffiti message accompanied by an outline of a human hand that became prevalent pre-war in abandoned sites, with over eighteen thousand documented locations.

"Oh, back then the wait was bloody terrible, mate. I know it's nice to get a head start, but there's only so long a head start has before it feels a bit much, right? The important stuff felt like it got done early on, with opening up the drafts and churning out all those bombs and tanks, and then the rest was just hellish waiting. It was like, okay I can give up the movies, yeah I'll quit the cafe and start making grenades, but does it really have to be so early mate? They ain't even here yet and we're acting like bombs with "made in space" stenciled on the side are already falling.

The bloody aliens had so much time to rub it in our face, right? It was hard to enjoy anything when you knew that at a hard date it was probably going to end. Oh, you got it on with a fit bird? Aw sorry mate, if you have kids they'll probably die in three years, and you shouldn't be getting close either. You got a raise? Aw sorry mate, it's ain't like you got nothing nice to spend it on, and when the aliens take over that money will only be good for toilet paper. Found a nice tea shop? Aw sorry mate, the aliens decided they're going to make that their capital building once they settle in.

Honestly it made me want the UN or someone to radio the aliens and ask "Can you hurry up a smidge? The wait's fucking killing me."

- Geoffrey Copper, from London, England.

The distant lights in the sky
Cannot help but draw the eye.
Under their pinprick gaze
Has life turned to grey haze.
In fear of that pale light
Man has prepared its might.
We have traded days with our sons
So that we may toil and make guns.
No one dares to have a daughter
Before the coming worldwide slaughter.
We have banished all our mirth
For the survival of our blue Earth.
The day will come where they arrive,
And we will fight like rats to survive.

But that day is not yet here.

They have stretched our twilight to a day
And in its wretchedness we shall stay.
Oh, God, do I truly hate.
This unbearably Long Wait.

- The Long Wait, by Arthur Chu. Published June 16th, 2019.

-/-\-

Kovár I

Otesanek's Nursery is a small toy-store in Prague of local acclaim- the owner and sole worker of the store, Dobromira Kovár, hand-makes all the toys herself. She agrees to meet me after closing down for the night, and we hold our interview in the store, no bigger than a bedroom.

Kovár, a retired corporal in the Czech Army, is quite similar to the dolls she sells- round-cheeked, wide-smiled, and composed of wood. She takes off a colorfully painted peg-leg and lays it on the table as she sits down, patting it absent-mindedly.

Q: Thank you for your time, Ms. Kovár. If I may begin, I would like to start with what your life was like before the war.

A: It was very much like it was after the war, give or take a few parts.

She holds up the leg and laughs.

Quite literally!

Ah, where was I? Oh, before the war. Yes, before the war I was part of my father's business. He was a puppeteer, you know. Puppetry is highly regarded here, not as a triviality but as art that can be called beautiful, and my father's work was beautiful indeed. He made puppets of kings and queens, fairies and goblins, and even living people like the American president. He'd do shows in the park during festivals, and sometimes he'd even go to schools and do historical reenactments for the little children. He had passion for the craft, and that passion was passed down to me.

By the time of the discovery, I was, oh, twenty-seven. My father was on the older side, and his hands were getting too arthritic to carve, but he still did the puppet shows all by himself. I took over making the puppets, though my father felt he had a lot to teach me yet and so would sit by my side, pointing at mistakes with a finger that looked like three walnuts glued together.

On the day the Fleet was discovered, my father decided to host a puppet show, even though the world outside was losing his mind. I remember asking him how he could be so calm, why he would be hosting a show now. He told me that his grandfather did the same when the fascists came to our country, and his father followed in those footsteps during the terror of the missile crisis in Cuba.

"Dobra," he told me while setting up puppet of the dragon St. George killed, "sometimes it's the littlest things that give us hope everything will be alright."

A few people actually did go to see his show that morning.

She absentmindedly rubs her wooden nose.

Hard to believe him at the time. Back then, it felt like there was no hope.

Q: Many who lived during the pre-war period described the years between the discovery and the war as "the long wait". Would you describe it as such?

A: Like a long wait to dive into the pool, yeah. Have you ever been to those public pools with that really tall diving board? The one all the kids wait in line just to jump like four meters into the water. We were like a kid waiting to go in, who at first didn't want to go. Then you had all your friends encouraging you, and you're like "you can do this!" and you do a little silly fist pump as you climb the ladder.

But then you see kid after kid take the plunge, some screaming, some flailing, some hitting the water with a slap that sounds as painful as it is. You can't jump in yet, and there's only so much stretching you can do, and so you start thinking. I'm not that good a swimmer, am I? I've never dived this high before. What if I land wrong and break something? I can't see the deep end's bottom; what if I sink all the way down and can't get back up? Soon, that's all you can think about.

That was what the wait for the war was like. Oh sure, after the first panic we had things to boost the morale. World peace was a thing we talked about a lot back then, and it helped create that sense of togetherness, that it was everyone against this. You saw news videos of all the massive armies being built up, all the new weapons the world was preparing, all the propaganda, and you thought "we can do this!".

But that was like a weak fire on a cold winter night, giving us only a little warmth for a little while. And now we lost all the other things to give us comfort.

Q: You're talking about the gutting of the entertainment sector and other "non-vital" industries for the war effort.

A: I am intimately familiar with that. You had the bigger, obvious things. All those millions of people working in tv or film, all those app programmers and game developers, they were scattered to the armies and the factories. I saw theaters close left and right across the city, since even the theater workers were getting drafted or assigned new jobs. New cars weren't getting made either, because of the gas rationing and the need for war factories. One by one, all of the "frivolous" things disappeared. No new movies, no new shows, no new games or cute costumes for your dog...

...no more toys.

My father was heartbroken when I received a letter in the mail telling me that I was to work in a munitions factory an hour away from home, because it meant I could no longer help him with the puppet shows. He wept in front of me when I left for my first day of work, because it meant his last. I wept too. I don't know if you can understand how much I hated making bombs, making killing things instead of things meant to bring joy.

That time was almost caustic, like acid. People were miserable, and it made them want to throw their misery at things that weren't. I remember in the news when politicians and talking heads would point at something like an arcade that was still open because the owner was too old to fight or go the factories, and they'd scream "Why is this still here?! Why aren't they contributing to the war effort?! Don't they know the survival of the human race is at stake?!" And so the owner would close the shop and wallow in sad retirement like my father and countless others.

It felt like a grey time, even though the weather was actually getting more beautiful than it had been in far too long. That's why all the photos and paintings and movies of life in the time are in black and white, because it's hard to hammer the message in when you have the most gorgeous fall weather going on.

The weather might not have been grey, but the people were, dressed in shabby hand-me-downs with bad haircuts and no make-up. The long wait was like being constricted, held in place and choking. The anxiety was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife, and it was killing us. Suicides were high, preventable workplace accidents were abound, and peoples' health was suffering. Total war isn't possible- we just can't dedicate our minds like that, not without breaking somewhere. We were struggling against that constriction- I remember the violence of a protest against ration cards here in this city.

Q: I imagine such outbursts were condemned by many as treasonous to the human race.

A: Oh, they were, but after a while the constant remarks lose their sting. Hard to care about that sort of thing when you feel like you're already dying. I think a writer of fantasy stories once said that while things like art aren't necessary to life, they make life worth living.

People needed the slightest relief, and so it was only natural that it happened.

Q: What happened?

A: One day, maybe three years after the Discovery, I was walking back from the bus stop when I saw a crowd milling in the park. Big crowds weren't a thing you saw that much anymore, not with so many people away at boot camp or working 12-hour shifts, so I was curious. I pressed in through the crowd, trying to see what they were looking at, and when I saw what it was, I gasped.

My father was in the middle of the park, doing a puppet show of Otesanek. There were three young boys with him, who'd watched his shows when he hosted them at school, helping him hold up some of the puppets, and one was even providing some of the voices. My father had the biggest smile on his face as he worked, and it only got bigger when he saw me. Even before the war he'd never had a crowd that big, nowhere near.

After that day... I don't know if I only noticed it after that, or if it really started after that day, but it felt like a dam breaking. Every day, it seemed, there was someone doing a reenactment of a play in the park, or a few musicians would set up to play classic songs, or someone would bring a projector and play an old movie. And the crowds would always be massive. I don't know if they ever got permits for it, or if either they or the government actually cared.

It wasn't just the park. I saw more and more street art each day, the radio got livelier, and the internet seemed to explode with home movies and entertainment.

It was as my father said. Sometimes, we just need the littlest things will give us hope that everything will be alright.

-/-\-

You have been reading:

Worldfall, Chapter Two: The Long Wait