United Nations Global Invasion Special Commission
Preliminary Report on the Total Casualties of World War Three (Invasion of Earth)
During the seventy eight days of World War Three, from the start of combat on November 23rd, 2020 to February 9th, 2021, total casualties, both civilian and military, as well as human and alien, reached a scale that can only be deemed 'catastrophic'. Despite the rough estimates of this report, it is clear that this war has proven the deadliest war in human history, and possibly in the history of both the Fithp and the Empire of the Race.
It must be reiterated that the current casualty report is a rough estimate. A high percentage of combat took place in regions with incomplete record-keeping, such as Tanzania, or many records were lost in fighting, as with India. Likewise, the presence of homeless, illegal immigrants, and other unregistered residents in cities that were outright destroyed means that an accurate casualty count cannot be attained. In such cases, census data and estimates made by the UN in summer of 2020 are used in their place, correlated with 79,452 documents across the globe.
Race documents on casualty rates for their own personnel are by far the most accurate. Of the exactly 60 million Race personnel, including their soldiers (called troopmales), officers, technicians, doctors, and other specialists, total deaths come to 41,392,792. Of these casualties, the vast majority were of troopmales, with 37,332,887 deaths and 2,993,187 wounded. Officer casualties came to 2,310,345 dead and 2,187 wounded, while specialists came to 993,213 dead and 345 wounded. Medical personnel and researchers suffered the lowest casualties, with 756,347 deaths and 399 wounded.
Of these casualties, an overwhelming number were combat-related. It is estimated that 34 million of these casualties were inflicted by humans, with the remaining 4 million inflicted by the Fithp, as well as 1 million deaths from the so-called Schism. The remaining three million deaths or so are a point of contention, due to confounding factor of ginger withdrawal. The official Race claim is approximately half a million, but many experts believe this is merely an attempt to ward off future ginger tasters by creating an alarmist figure. UN estimates range to a mere 2,000 deaths from ginger withdrawal, with the vast majority only exacerbating pre-existing conditions or injuries. The largest killer in terms of non-combat deaths was hypothermia, due to the Race adapting poorly to Earth's winters. Estimates range from 400,000 to 1,200,000. Other causes include accidental consumption of toxic foods, radiation poisoning, and, strangely enough, hostile wildlife. One report even states that twenty-two troopmales in Burundi were eaten by crocodiles, though Intelligence Officer Drefsab's insistence that it was almost entirely the work of the notable specimen named 'Gustave' is held in doubt.
Fithp casualties are harder to ascertain, as many believed killed in action have turned up in remote locations across the planet, serving as slaves. Likewise, the Chpatisk Fithp's tribalist nature meant that ground deployment were difficult to confirm. Estimates for military casualties range from 233,389 to 243,420, with deaths ranging from 219,883 to 224,154. Civilian deaths only come to 34, half of which came from the final attack on the Thuktun Flishithy during Operation Earth. Nevertheless, in terms of percentage, the fithp suffered the highest casualties of the war, with an estimated 23% of their population lost.
Of most interest to the UNGISC, however, are human casualties. The sheer scale of human loss during the war, especially due to the disproportionate amount of casualties from wide-area attacks such as nuclear weaponry, deliberate destruction of dams, orbital impactors, and even an asteroid impact.
Of these casualties, military losses are the easiest to determine. In a twist of fate, it appears that total military casualties in the Third World War are fewer than those of the Second, with an estimated 18 million dead and 3 million wounded. Of the various pre-war nations, the highest number of casualties were in the People's Republic of China, with 4,219,332 to 4,302,299 deaths recorded. The United States of America follows closely behind, with an estimated figure of 3,122,980 deaths, while the Republic of India suffered between 3,029,345 and 3,592,341 deaths.
The remaining casualties are highly contested, due to loss of records. The former Democratic People's Republic of Korea, for example, is estimated to have lost anywhere between 500,000 to 1,500,000 soldiers during the invasion, but the destruction of Pyongyang makes such numbers almost impossible to pin down. Likewise, the lack of official records makes an accurate estimate of casualties for partisan fighters in nations such as Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo difficult. Nevertheless, rough estimates give total military casualties in Sub-Saharan Africa at approximately 1 million, with 2-3 million estimated deaths in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Civilian casualties, however, are far greater. While the Race avoided inflicting damage on civilian structures before Straha's mutiny, the sheer scale of their conquests in Africa and the Middle East during the first stage in the war still resulted in approximately 300,000 to 340,000 deaths and over 2 million injured. This number only grew during the brief nuclear escalation before the December Ceasefire. The exact number of deaths will never be known, due to the presence of unregistered residents such as homeless, illegal immigrants, political prisoners, or workers who entered the city, but the destruction of Pyongyang and the partial destruction of Multan is believed to have incurred anywhere between 1,500,000 to 2,100,000 deaths, with half as many wounded.
The rate of civilian casualties skyrocketed during the initial Fithp assault on the planet. While many orbital impactors merely hit power stations and railways, with casualties between 0 and 100 per target, the deliberate destruction of multiple damns proved lethal. The fall of the Three Gorges Dam alone is believed to have resulted in anywhere between 4 and 10 million deaths, with an additional 21 million displaced. Overall global deaths from the first Fithp strikes are estimated to be between 7 and 15 million, with an overall 30 million displaced.
Greater still, however, are the deaths from the human retaliatory strikes against Fithp-occupied regions in China and India. Like with Pyongyang and Multan, exact casualties cannot be determined. However, the deaths caused by Operation Yi are believed to range anywhere between 17 to 26 million, with an additional 4 million wounded and 11 million displaced. Roughly 13-20 million of these deaths are from the destruction of Mumbai'i and the nearby city of Pune, while the destruction of Chongqing is believed to have claimed between 4 to 6 million. Radiation sickness and various forms of cancer are expected to claim even more lives in the coming years.
Most devastating of all, however, are the civilian deaths from Footfall. Despite evacuation efforts by the United States and other affected nations that surpassed expectations, the sheer size of the impacted regions ensured that casualties would remain high. Of these nations, the United States was impacted the greatest, with an estimated 16-17 million deaths and an astonishing 72 million displaced. Likewise, Mexico suffered approximately 500,000 deaths, but with an additional 30 million displaced. Of the island nations impacted, Cuba was hit hardest, having lost 2-3 million, many of which died with the loss of Havana. In the Mediterranean, overall deaths came to 6-7 million, 5 million of which were in France. With a global death count of 31-32 million, it is for this reason that Footfall has been named the greatest single disaster to befall the human race, with January 26th as the bloodiest day in human history.
Overall, total human deaths during the war amount to between 77 million to 100 million, with an additional 17 million wounded and up to 300 million displaced. Combined with alien casualties, the war has claimed a sum total of anywhere between 117 to 140 million lives, making it the single deadliest conflict in history.
However, as more data comes in, and the lingering aftermath of the war continues in the form of ecological devastation and lack of access to food or medical aid, it is likely that this number will increase by next year's more refined report, and possibly even by a drastic margin.
-/-\-
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, Ms. 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.
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. I was primarily tagging caimans and collecting data on ratios of male to female hatchings for green anacondas, and then suddenly... I and thousands of others were thrust into a race against time.
Q: Would you care to elaborate?
A: Here's a way to put it. 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. The coming invasion changed that. We weren't looking at vague ramifications twenty, forty years from now, but immediate devastation. For all we knew, the Serengeti could have been blasted to glass, or this very rainforest could have been burnt to ash. Crucial parts of the global ecosystem, the ecosystem we need to survive as a species, could have been destroyed, whether by deliberate alien attack or just as a side-result of the fighting.
So, we needed to be as prepared as possible. 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.
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. 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.
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.
-/-\-
Nguyen I
It is a sunny day in Abuja as I arrive at the University of the United West African Republics, regarded as one of the greatest institutions of learning on the entire continent. The crowd milling between classes is far more eclectic- local students; fithp, both naturalized citizens and from the nearby Nation; and even the occasional Race male.
Carlos Nguyen greets me in his classroom, where he gives lectures on meteorology. He offers some tea from his thermos as he sits down to a hasty lunch, which I politely decline.
Q: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Professor Nguyen. I understand you're a busy man.
A: Not as busy as some of the other people you've spoken to, I imagine. Let's get to it.
Q: Now then. How well did the scientific community understand the potential ramifications of the planetary invasion?
A: I would argue that we had a fair understanding, even if we were ignored quite a bit. Weather is an inherently chaotic system, one that we can never fully predict, but that doesn't mean we can't have a good grasp of the greater picture. There were papers on global warming and nuclear winter as far back as a half century before even the war began. There were inaccuracies in regard to the finer details, but not the overall concepts.
Q: How did that knowledge influence the pre-war preparations?
A: Well, I'd argue it had a large impact on food production. Before the war, there was only about enough grain stored to feed the population for two months, and that was not distributed evenly. We were facing destruction of crops and other food sources, whether accidental or deliberate, on a scale unseen. I don't even work with agriculture and I still knew that.
So, that was why the rationing happened, and why many countries started focusing on more... efficient food production. I still remember my uncle's furor at having half of his ranch seized by the Mexican government and converted to bean production. I could have sworn reading somewhere that two thirds of all cattle were slaughtered during the lead up to the war.
But, I'm digressing. Yes, our findings had an impact on how we prepared for the war. We also had an impact on responses to the various disasters that befell us during those maddening months. Operation Yi, especially, was concerning.
Q: How so?
A: Nuclear winter. Take all of those burning buildings, forests, people. Take all that ash and dust they create, and fling them high into the sky, carried aloft by the heat of the bombs and sunlight. At the altitudes they reached, it would take a very long time for the dust to come back down. During that time, you're looking at vastly reduced sunlight, low precipitation, a weakened ozone layer... we'd developed an idea of it, via study of Mt. Tambora's eruption and the impact it had on the globe, as well as Martian dust storms.
A report in 2009 indicated that a regional conflict in the subtropics between two minor nuclear powers, which totally weren't India and Pakistan by the way, could have drastic impacts on our climate with merely a hundred bombs equivalent to the one that destroyed Hiroshima. By drastic impacts, I mean an ozone layer so thin that you'd be burned in the time it takes to go from your car to the store, widespread crop failure, and possibly a billion dead over ten years from famine.
He pours some tea and sips it, slowly.
Mumbai'i and Chongqing were hit with at least ten times that tonnage. Eight teragrams of dust was kicked up into the troposphere, which would have hit the stratosphere in a month.
Ironically enough, Footfall actually saved us from the worst effects.
Q: How did an asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico mitigate a disaster half a world away?
A: Footfall may have happened in the Gulf, but its impact was felt everywhere. Thank the Lord the rock hit the deepest part of the Gulf; the waves were worse, but if that impact had been in more shallow waters, or even on land... we would be going the way of the dinosaurs. Teragrams? Try exagrams of dust and noxious gases if it hadn't hit the water. We were lucky it was mainly just water vapor that was released into the atmosphere. That unnatural precipitation helped pull down the dust from Operation Yi, which saved the ozone layer.
Still, that replaced one issue with a thousand more. Now, we had violent rainstorms in ecosystems that were not used to that kind of rain, heat blooms in normally frigid places, and the nightmare of what happened to the Gulf's currents. It was a meteorologist's nightmare. I mean, it was also a nightmare for everyone else, but we knew the specifics of what was fucking us, and how it was going to fuck us.
I knew that some people talked about how Earth was white from the clouds, but that's a bit misleading. The clouds from Footfall covered 99% of inhabited areas for a good eleven days, but the polar regions avoided the rain almost completely. Which was a godsend. If that hot, hot rain fell on the ice caps, it wouldn't have been just Texas and Florida that went underwater. As it was, we still had to deal with considerable permafrost loss in places like Siberia, which was the cause of that major anthrax epidemic in 2026.
Q: You said that Footfall prevented a nuclear winter. Wasn't winter still harsh for years after?
A: Oh, yes. I can picture the July frost in 2021 like it was yesterday. We may have avoided the long-term deep freeze, but the chaos of Footfall resulted in weather extremes of all sorts. Normal currents were disturbed, both oceanic and atmospheric, and the ecosystems that helped maintain a normal climate were also shaken up. We had harsher winters, drier summers, hurricane seasons on steroids, all things out of the Book of Revelations.
But. The ocean acidity had not been too drastically affected. The current disruption was temporary, and we still had an ozone layer to protect our plant life. Compared to even the Triassic extinction, we had gotten off lightly. What was more, but many industries that were harming the environment had been pushed back by the prewar preparations, or rendered obsolete in the aftermath.
That isn't to say it wasn't terrible. Lots of people who survived the war didn't make it to the end of 2021. But, it was, dare I say, a good climate for rebuilding.
-/-\-
Muktitul-thith I
A powerfully-built fi' despite her age, the mayor (more literally, citymistress) of Yimptunf greets me with curled trunks as I step into her office. Outside, the capital of the Fithp Nation in Brasil bristles with activity, hovercraft practically clogging the roads. As I sit down, I can even see an orbital airliner taking off in the distance.
Muktithul-thith is a reflection of the drastic changes in fithp culture. Garbed in a fithp-designed robe inspired by Yoruba iro, she nevertheless wears mascara around her eyes, as well as Indonesian jewelry about her trunks. Even her name is evocative of the changes- much as her husband took on her last syllable, she herself took on the last syllable of his name, regarded as a major win for xenogender activists.
Q: Good afternoon, Mrs. Mayor.
A: Such a polite darling! I like you already. Now, what stories do you desire to hear? Everyone loves to talk about the war, it seems, but I just spent that cramped up in that metal can. Dreary stuff. Nothing to do but eat, talk, play in mud, and panic.
Q: I was actually hoping to ask you about the Reconstruction period.
A: Now that is some lovely discussion matter. Ask away, ask away.
Q: Now, you were part of the first wave of colonists, that is correct?
A: Yes I was! I came down here back when this was just a patch of grassland, with nary a brick erected. Oh, how I remember that day... I was part of the fourth generation, you know. That day was the first time I had ever seen a sky, and what a sky it was! Some of the others were terrified, absolutely terrified, sucking their trunks like infants as they saw that big blue expanse, but I was in love.
I didn't even mind those first few weeks, back when our new nation was just a bunch of prefabricated buildings. All we had to eat was rations, and it became crowded all to quickly as a quarter million of us became packed in, but as long as I could see that sky, I was happy.
Q: A quarter million of you were in how large an area?
A: Oh, about the size of this city, but we didn't have anything taller than one story, so it was quite packed. Thankfully, I suppose years of being cramped up in Message Bearer gave us quite a manic fervor. I suppose being huge and freakishly strong compared to the other four species on the planet helped in that regard. Laughs. We were like workhorses and carpenters rolled into one. I remember how my father looked, wearing hastily made coveralls and a hardhat far too small for his head, plowing fields by day and hammering together our house by night. It is still a hilarious sight to me.
By the end of the first month, the first permanent buildings had already been built. Many of us were still living in prefabs, but those prefabs now had a small hospital, mainly just to treat work-related injuries, and a school as well. Herdmistress Joshi hand-picked the teachers. I suppose she was afraid of someone slipping in biased material to indoctrinate us or whatever.
Q: What sort of materials did you study?
A: At first, the basics, for us children and the adults. We were in a new world, and we needed to catch up. We were all taught our writing system, instead of just loremasters and the crew, and we learned how to operate the human and Race built equipment we were using to build our new homes. There were many hasty modifications made to let us use them. I doubt Caterpillar had 800 pound quadrupeds in mind when they designed bulldozers.
The digit ships were still coming down, but no longer were they carrying more fithp. Instead, UN aid workers and the occasional Race males were pouring out, armed with shovels and wrenches and medical kits. They set up a lab to help develop any vaccines or other medications we'd need, since our own medical knowledge was laughable at best, and they helped us with more niche-y fields.
Q: Niche-y fields?
A: Well, all native life from Hearth was kept in Message Bearer, for one, so we had to figure out what Earth-based crops were safe to eat. Much of that was figured out from seeing what sort of crap Harpanet vacuumed up while in American custody. I still blame him for the amount of watermelon we ate during that first year. We had to figure out our place in the local ecology, before we could set about to settling into it.
Still, I think we learned quick. We had come to a lush world, a paradise to what we left behind. We had been given a Garden, and it was our duty to maintain it, make it grow lively. Us children poured over the textbooks we had been given, about agriculture and ecology and green living, while our parents worked to make it happen. It wasn't a casual interest like in other nations; it was a foundation of our new identity.
Another foundation, I might say, was filling that garden.
Q: With?
She waggles her trunks. A suggestive gesture.
A: Babies.
There were a little less than a million of us on Earth, and though we only had suspicions at the time, less than a million of us period. There were more followers of Jediism than there were fithp. We were in a world we had hurt, and so was hostile to us. I can recall the terror of that time, of realizing our vulnerability. If that sicko Lizbeth and her friends had gotten her way, a full third of our species could've been snuffed out with just a handful of trucks.
And so, we needed to breed, and swell our numbers. I was an only child when I came to Earth, and then I got a baby sister, then a baby brother, then another baby sister... I certainly, uh, did my part as well, when I entered musth. I believe some political cartoonist in that time joked that we should have been space rabbits, not elephants.
I don't suppose rabbits are all too fitting. Rabbits die easily. I should know; I accidentally stepped on one, once. Fingthtup still rubs that into my face. But us? With the advanced medical care coming our way, we essentially had the infant mortality rate of a first world nation, and the birth rate of a third. By the time of our 2025 census, there were two million of us on Earth. And that number was only going to get bigger.
She glances out the window.
How does that old saying go? Be fruitful and multiply. Well, we had a garden, and we were indeed fruitful. But we weren't governing the earth anytime soon, and we were constantly reminded of that.
-/-\-
Dkolo II, Gorrpet II
The parlor begins to become livelier as more troopmales come in for ginger and relaxation after a long work shift. Many are technicians and factory workers, likely from Cairo Spaceport or local power plants. Dkolo briefly leaves the interview to take in some orders, then returns as his kitchen staff starts preparing a menagerie of ginger-laden meals, from pumpkin pie to spice cake, all served with Tau Ceti Slammers or ginger ale. Gorrpet stays at the table, keen on having his own story told.
Q: You have quite a successful venture here, Dkolo. When did you enter the ginger trade?
A (Dkolo): During the month or so that the Manhattan Conferences were going on. After the Americans kicked us out of their territory, I was sent to do reconstruction work here in Darfur as part of the Fleetlord's plan to win brownie points among the new world powers. This place was rife with the spice, and it was easy to get into the trade. Funny enough, you'd think that the Rabotevs and Hallessi would be all over that business, since they couldn't get high on their own supply, but the intelligence officers and guards had both turrets on those guys because of how easy it would be for them to deal ginger.
A (Gorrpet): Oh, definitely. I went through three dealers because of that.
Q: Wouldn't human dealers be more commonplace at the very least?
A: At first, it was. Had a lot of stiff competition. But then, I started getting... unofficial support.
Q: Unofficial support?
A (Dkolo): You see, I suppose the higher ups, or at least the Fleetlord, realized that the ginger trade was never going to stop. Too many of us needed the spice to keep on going, after everything we'd seen, everyone we'd lost. And compared to some of the drugs Tosevites use, it's mild, even if the withdrawal is horrific.
Gestures to some of the humans in the bar, smoking marijuana or eating edibles.
It's a way to unwind. And biting raw root, some scientists claim, can help with PTSD thanks to its mild hallucinogenic properties. Don't know if that's true, but I do know it's profitable.
A (Gorrpet): I, for one, can confirm.
A (Dkolo): So, what are you going to do? Can't stop the river, but you can change the course. If there were going to be ginger dealers, they were going to be Race dealers.
Q: Why was that?
A (Dkolo): Power, of the kind your France of the Bacon discusses. Lips aching for the taste of ginger, I find, are loose lips. Take a male going through bad withdrawal, and give him a human dealer, and you'd be surprised at the secrets he'd be willing to spill just for a taste. If you want to control the flow of information, you gotta control the flow of spice.
And so, a vast number of ginger dealers apprehended by our security were, suspiciously enough, not Race. We help them apprehend the human dealers, and in turn they leave us alone, and so the leaks stop.
By the end of the first two years after the war, me and three other males were controlling virtually all of the spice in this region.
Q: Is that why you stayed in Darfur?
A (Gorrpet): Eh. He probably could've moved shop easy.
A (Dkolo): It's not the only reason. I actually like it here. Darfur is the only place outside of a Free Zone, in my opinion, where we can walk around and feel comfortable. Truly safe. Where we can mingle with people without problem.
A (Gorrpet): Some places come close, I think. But I still get dirty looks sometimes, a few slurs, when I'm in Melbourne or Riyadh.
A (Dkolo): Did you know that Darfur is the only not-empire that is willing to offer citizenship to Race males, instead of green cards or work visas?
Q: Perhaps I was aware.
A (Dkolo): Like I said, brownie points. I must've helped build a hundred bridges and half as many other structures over these past two decades, but it's hardly recompense for what we did. Helping bury the dead doesn't make up for the fact that they're dead because of you. It just keeps us from joining them in the grave.
But here? We stopped a genocide, we pulled them up, and now they're their own prospering nation. None of those things would've happened if it weren't for us. That brownie points program was basically shit polishing in places like America. That whole schtick about saving you from yourselves was shit.
But in this place? Here? Well... I think we actually accomplished something, here. And they recognize that. It's places like these that show there's a chance for peace, if you ask me. Not Manhattan. Not the rebuilding. But here.
A (Gorrpet): Laps ginger. Woah.
-/-\-
Perkins III
Perkins pauses briefly to pull up some images on his holophone. They are clearly from his youth; aside from being two-dimensional images, I can see a familiar pair of eyes looking back at me, from a youthful face.
Q: These were taken in Kentucky, I presume?
A: Nah, my mother and I were pulled out of Kentucky when the Race started moving up along the Mississippi. I spent about a month in Cincinnati. Well, the camps they set up around Cincinnati, anyway. Some folk were lucky enough to have family in the city who had spare rooms, and some got to live in the empty houses, but most of us had to make do with tents and prefabs.
Q: I presume you lived in a tent?
A: Yep. I had to share a tent about, I dunno, maybe twenty five square meters, with two other families. Goldfarbs and Estevez. Mrs. Goldfarb didn't like me much, but her two boys and I used to play Smash Bros when we had electricity. There weren't that many friendly faces back then- the soldiers who made sure we got our rations and were in charge of security were polite enough, but they scared me shitless for some reason, and quite a few trashy folk were nothappy to share a refugee camp with us darkies.
But yeah, it was good to have friends in that place. It sucked when they were moved out.
Q: Moved out?
A: Yeah, during Reconstruction. That was all the talk back then, about how were were gonna rebuild the country, make it better. Of course, to a kid like me, it just sounded like talk. My hometown didn't exist anymore. Mississippi didn't exist any more- all of us were scattered to the wind like fucking leaves, to Seattle and St. Louis and New York and every small town in between.
There were a good seventy million people like me and my mom. America had more refugees than Germany had, well, Germans. Yeah, we were making rations and shelters for six years like the American industry was on crack, which it probably was in places, but seventy million people. Fuck. We had the harshest winter on record coming in, it was still raining buckets half the week, and you had all of these people crowded up in small tents or bomb shelters. We couldn't just stay in those camps, eating MREs and shitting in trenches, less we wanted to lose another few million in the frost.
It was why the government was making such a huge deal about rebuilding the country, acting like it was the only thing that mattered, which it kinda was. Every radio, every TV, everything was blaring that shit. Lots of dreams were ruined that way. Oh, you wanted to be a software designer? Fuck you, build houses. You were majoring in English before the war? Fuck you, build houses.
He snorts, then shakes his head.
I don't wanna even imagine how expensive it was to start Reconstruction, even if Canada and Brazil were sending us workers and food.. Every day it seemed, people were getting moved in and out. You got people being sent to any city, any town, with extra room. Some of us were sent to Canada, even, or Alaska.
Then you got the people that were being 'recruited' to rebuild the states that got flattened by Footfall.
Q: You mean impressed under martial law.
A: No one wanted to think of it like that. They just called it doing their part, or whatever. I mean, we needed someone to clear the rubble, plant new forests, build new houses, all that shit, and it beat just sitting with your thumb in your butt. That's how my mom and I ended up in St. Louis; she got a job as a truck driver, delivering supplies to the soldiers and construction workers in my old state. I missed her a lot during those long hours, but at least I had a hot shower and something that wasn't jerky to eat.
And it was definitely better than staying in the camp with those hateful folk.
Q: You mentioned racial tensions before. Was it really that bad?
Perkins looks at me, then just shakes his head, snickering.
A: Oh, yeaaaah. I remember how everyone was talking about it in the news, when they weren't talking about aliens or Reconstruction. Lots of people from nicer places, or just under rocks, were acting all shocked at the shit they were seeing. Acting like the hate crimes and rapes were just some regression, some new wave of problems.
Truth is, they were just used to having all that crap at the bottom of the pot, and now the Foot stirred it all up. All those glares, all those slurs, all that nasty business that used to go below the radar, was now suddenly being flung into the light. Instead of being limited to just Alabama, you now had sundown counties threatening to crop up in Hipsterville, Oregon; or right outside San Francisco.
People weren't getting more racist. If anything, all that mixing was why it died down. People were just realizing that they were racist. Hard to ignore the shit when its on your doorstep and not in another state. So, they either had to ignore it, or you had to clean it up.
And well, now this hate was out of its den, and in enemy territory. When you had aliens to hate and fear, people are less willing to put up with Uncle Jim's shit.
Q: Would you say that the racism merely shifted to aliens, then?
A: Not exactly. It did for a lot of older folk. And there's definitely a bunch of obnoxious fuckboys on the internet talking about burning Home to glass, when they can't even get prom dates. But for me, and others like me? No. No Race male has ever called me nigger. No fi' has ever clutched her purse when I walk by her. They killed a lot of us, yeah, but it felt so dispassionate. It almost felt like losing a loved one to a disaster, instead of some murderer.
We cheered when Straha dangled, true, but then we just wanted to get on with our lives. It's hard to think about killing aliens when you got so many problems to worry about. I heard it was the same for Poles in WWII. I dunno if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised. After experiencing so much hate and pain, a lot of us just wanted to be rid of it all. Break the wheel, not spin it, like that dragon princess my mom loved to watch on TV said.
He leans back, looking skyward.
I don't think the hate transferred. I think, after all the pain, it just... dissipated, like it was too tired to continue.
-/-\-
Jeong III
Putting aside the old schoolbooks for the time being, Jeong pulls out more photographs, this time of both human and Race design. I see more images of Jeong and his parents, this time with slightly fatter faces and different clothing. The cityscape of Wuhan has changed considerably from before, with many of the older buildings in the process of being demolished or renovated.
Q: It must have been strange during the early days of Korean Reunification.
A: Oh, there are many words for it. Strange, elating, terrifying... perhaps electrifying is the best. Regardless of whether it brings you pain, or pleasure, or an odd mixture of both, it is certainly something, and it is omnipresent. We had already felt it in the Race occupation, and now it came in full force with reunification.
Q: After the surrender, what immediate changes came?
A: Well, for one thing, there were now Southern soldiers at every street corner, instead of Race troopmales. As per the Manhattan Conferences, the Chinese had pulled out on the condition that reunification be entirely a Korean matter. No Americans, no Chinese, and none of their respective corporations.
Actually, let me go back to that. The fact that we were allowed to listen in and watch the news about the Manhattan Conferences was astonishing enough. No censorship, no filtering, no lies. The invasion had shattered the regime's grasp on us, but now the Conferences allowed us our first real look at the outside world. Not imperialist invaders and capitalist demons, but as people. Even those who didn't believe the old propaganda were still uninformed about the outside world, and now we all knew.
Q: I imagine it must have been quite the culture shock.
A: You imagine, but you don't know. People were already reeling from the deaths of the Kims and our occupation. Whether it be joy, anger, fear, of just a sense of suddenly having your world turned upside down. Even if it didn't like it, it had been our world. Then now, we are finally reunited with our brothers across the 38th, our brothers that are simultaneously dreaded enemies and hopeful future companions.
Family, in fact, was important to ensuring we survived the coming changes. That was one of the first changes. Not a flood of movies and manhwa and music, but of grandparents and cousins and siblings, no longer separated by controlling madmen. Some Southerners went North to reunite, and some Northerners went South, though they were far fewer.
He produces one photo, of himself and his parents with another Korean family.
See them? That older man is my father's older brother, who had gone South with my grandfather, while my grandmother was trapped in the North. Those teens are my cousins. I didn't even know I had cousins in the South. They left behind what they had in Seoul to come up here and live with us, even though this place was far worse in comparison to their nice little home.
That, in retrospect, helped dampen so many of the changes that came after. I wasn't thrust into the glossy world of smartphones and global pop culture, but slowly shown it through my extended family. My cousins showed me some of their favorite movies and soap operas. I would sit on the couch between them, munching on whatever snacks they had brought from the outside world, and be introduced to Southern entertainment. When I asked questions, they were kind enough to answer.
Of course, they weren't just up North for reunions. Many of them had come to help us rebuild, or just to adjust in time for the influx of workers who didn't have close ties. My parents got jobs in that department, helping install cell phone towers. Even a few of our former Race occupiers were there to help remake the North into a proper reflection of her Southern sibling.
Q: When was your first visit to the South?
A: It was after that first harsh winter of the war. The world was finally breathing again, and I supposed that meant a return of festivities and the like. No more blackouts, no more bans on producing 'non-vital products'. My family did a big trip to Seoul for Chuseok.
I'll never forget that first trip. The sight of the towering glass buildings, glittering in the light. Of the shops stuffed with more types of food than I knew existed. Of the beautiful decorations and colorful people. I couldn't take my eyes off of it all.
Certainly, there were still hiccups. I remember a night when I was about eleven, and saw a man wandering the streets of Wuhan, muttering to himself before the police gently took him away. He was a Northerner, you see, but he didn't take to the changes. Even with the gradual changes the South was trying to bring, it was all too much for him, drowning him in an overwhelming tide of credit cards and K-Pop and blockbuster films, and he'd had a nervous breakdown. Many of us had that. My mother nearly broke down herself, after our Chuseok trip.
Q: Would you still say that the overall changes were positive?
A: Oh, yes. Breakdowns were plentiful, but many people recovered, and most did not break down at all. By the time I was in high school, I saw many Northerners chatting on smartphones, driving minis, and wearing Southern clothing. You should see my mother now. The only way to tell her and her friends apart from the gaggle of old ladies in the South is the accent, and the fact they're a good three inches shorter than average.
Was it perfect? No, nothing can be perfect. We were a popular source of frustration with the South's economic woes, considering just how much poorer we were in comparison. And I was just old enough to understand when the gravity of sexual misconduct in the North was fully uncovered.
But in the end, we were happier. We Koreans may not have a perfect society, but it is ours. Not North. Not South. Just Korea.
After so many years of division, there is unity. And that... that is the greatest thing in the world to have.
-/-\-
Wang V
Wáng's face becomes more weary, expectant, as the interview continues.
A: I expect you will be asking me of my legacy soon enough. I do not blame you for that burning curiosity, but the magnifying glass becomes wearisome after a while. I must admit, it has been... good, to talk about the times before. Of my youth and life.
Q: You were involved in rebuilding in your home province of Chongqing, were you not?
A look of surprise crosses his face, then a small smile pulls at his lips.
A: Indeed, I was. There were millions of sick and wounded in my country after the war. Soldiers. Civilians. Those who'd been injured during the orbital strikes from debris, or burned by Operation Yi, just as I was. The displaced needed treatment as well, you see, for radiation poisoning or the various outbreaks of influenza and other illnesses.
This was the jurisdiction of the Disaster Response Corps, but I was Army. And what was the Army keen on doing? Holding on to the territory we'd liberated from the Race, until the Conference was over and the new governments were established. What was it, I believe? Half of Kazakhstan, and a few other of those old Central Asian nations. The Russians had been keen on claiming they had liberated those places as well, but it was... fuzzy.
And so, I managed to get a transfer to the Corps, and spent my time bandaging burns on children and handing out flu vaccines, while my fellow soldiers were patrolling frigid mountain villages just so the Russians wouldn't be doing the same. Silly thing. We had fought side by side against the true enemy, from Chéngdū to Kabul, and now we were acting like poor neighbors. It is a good thing it was resolved quickly enough.
He pauses briefly, lip twisted as he considers it.
Then again, I suppose it is also good they did not come back immediately.
Q: How so?
A: Despite the Politburo claiming they had already restored internet in half the country by the time of Footfall... well, they did not. I do not know why. Perhaps they were preoccupied with vital structures, or perhaps they had been hoping to replace the internet with their own version, as some had speculated.
Either way, I noticed as I traveled from town to town, then eventually province to province, that many of the new servers were not being put in by the Politburo, but independently. There was too much red tape, too many other issues to tackle, that dissenting voices were finally being heard. When I went on the internet, there was no need for a VPN; the Politburo had lost its chokehold on the web in these places.
The war did not just break the Three Gorges Dam. It broke the Great Firewall as well, and now there was a flood.
-/-\-
Hu II
Hù pulls down her shirt slightly, allowing me to see a faded scar on her shoulder.
A: I didn't get this in clean-up work, I'll tell you that.
Q: Was that from a protester or a soldier?
A: Neither. Paid thugs, meant to disperse crowds when the army and police couldn't, or wouldn't. Nánjīng was one of those places. A few of them tried to have, well, fun with me, and I shot one as soon as he tried to grab me. They ran, but not before one shot at me as he was fleeing. That's the thing about shitbags in Zhōngguó, whether they're thugs or bullies- they always gang up on one person. They're terrified of the victim fighting back, and that's what I did.
Q: You were in Nánjīng, after recuperating in Xiânggâng?
A: Rest is for the dead. As soon as I was cleared, I was sent back to helping with rebuilding in Jiangsu. Even by the end of the war, there were still a good few hundred bridges that hadn't been rebuilt yet, and that isn't even getting into the highways and everything else. Just about all rebuilding after Yi was focused around military logistics, with only the immediate refugee issues being handled by people like yours truly. Helped with Operation Earth, but it meant that the civilian populace had been basically split into a thousand and one smaller nations.
Pre-war, it took, like, seven hours to get from Bêijīng to Jînán. After the fithp bombardment, you'd be lucky to make it in three days. Civilian flights across the country? Grounded, so the Corps and the Army could clog the airways with supply choppers and transports. People were bottled up with hardly a way to call their family or friends, they were cold, they were on rations, and there was no Happy Camp on TV. And what was more, the Army was all holed up along the Korean border and Central Asia, processing Race prisoners and making sure nothing happened at the northern border while Russia was having its own problems.
She claps her hands once, admittedly startling me.
Perfect pressure cooker. You had protests in Nánjīng, protests in Beijing, protests in fucking Ürümqi for all I know.
Q: What were the goals of the protests?
A: At first? A million things, because these people hardly knew there were other protests going on. I saw people just demanding that their roads get fixed, people calling for a purge of our Race prisoners, people calling for the end of the Party... a thousand and one little nations made a thousand and one little points. It was only when people started putting up uncensored internet that they really started coordinating.
A thousand and one fires, and the Politburo couldn't put all of them out.
Q: The Army was still numbering at a good eighteen million, was it not? I am surprised they weren't used to quell the riots.
Hù snorts.
A: A lot of servicemen started getting in on the protesting, too. Millions of conscripts meant millions of sons worried about accidentally killing their mothers, millions of fathers worried about killing their sons or daughters. There were officer revolts, people refusing to move from their stations... that's how I got involved in the protests. We were operating at a dismal rate, because we just didn't have enough equipment, equipment the Army could have given us if the Politburo wasn't worried about the border.
Before I knew it, my commanding officer had us make signs about it and stand in front of the protesters, staring at the police or guards. Even if we weren't Army, the sight of our uniforms had an effect on them. Hesitation. One thing to shoot some random civilian. Another to shoot the people who were rebuilding our nation.
This wasn't Tiān'ānmén. This was the February Revolution. The leash was cut, the muzzle had been ripped off, and we were pissed. Decades of shit was freely pouring all over the Party, unafraid of being taken away in the night by the police or getting shot by the Army. I have to say, it was an odd feeling, suddenly having that fear ripped away. Old farts loved to talk about héxié, harmony and peace and all that pacifying garbage. But in that moment, we were all just thinking:
"Chóngqìng's radioactive, Shànghâi's a wreck, and there's still corpses in the Yángzî. Fuck héxié."
Wasn't easy, of course. They were trying hard to ensure we stayed quiet. Assassination attempts, thugs... there was that poor girl, Luàn Doū, and the shit they broadcast being done to her... but it was just galvanizing us. It reminded us that the Party never really fucking cared about us, and now they couldn't fool the people.
And at the same time, Xīzàng and Xīnjiāng were trying to pull free again, which meant that the Army would have to split up if they wanted to pacify the nation. The rest of the world was watching, judging, maybe even helping us a little.
Q: Do you believe that they really pushed the protests?
A: In truth? No. I entertain the possibility, but I don't believe it. This was our fucking fight, not theirs.
That sense of it being our fight, that unity, it was what lead to that big realization. That while the Party needed the people to rebuild, the people didn't need the Party. And they realized that truth, too.
Q: Is that why the CCP enabled all of those reforms?
A: They knew at that point that they'd never win, and if they lost hard, they were screwed. At the very least, by capitulating like that, a few of them could still influence policy. A defanged and emasculated Party was still better than no Party.
Q: I imagine it was quite an elating time for the nation.
A: For others, maybe. But for me, it just meant that I could get back to work... that we could all get back to work... and have a home worth rebuilding.
-/-\-
Rasmussen I
Despite pushing ninety years old, Niels Rasmussen still teaches classes at the University of Copenhagen, where he discusses European economics and history. My first impression of him is of a portly, hunched-over man sitting on a bench facing the beach, wearing heavy winter clothes in autumn weather. He smiles as I approach, stretching the deep wrinkles of his face.
Q: Good afternoon, Dr. Rasmussen.
A: And a good afternoon to you as well. Now let's get started; I have a class in three hours, and it's pudding night at the dining hall.
Q: Very well. Now, Dr. Rasmussen, you were already a well-respected economist before the war, were you not?
A: Yes indeed. I was already past retirement age when I was recruited as part of an EU-commissioned think tank, but they still let me on. They didn't quite want me for the pre-war economic planning of the time, mind you. Deciding what industries would die first to fuel our global war machine, and how they would die, and how to maintain or even strengthen the world's economy during that time... that was a different think tank entirely.
No, mine was doing the opposite. How to bring these nations, militarized to an extent never before seen, back into a civilian economy, while also rebuilding from a war that, for all we knew, could have killed billions or forever made certain regions unviable for trade. I had quite a bit of expertise in that regard, considering that my main area of study was the rebuilding and economic shifts of the previous world war.
Q: But the War for Earth was decidedly different from World War II. There must have been unique challenges.
Rasmussen lets out wheezing laugh.
A: You don't need to tell me that. It was my job to figure all of those out. World War II didn't have aliens or asteroid impacts. But, in a more serious note, one major obstacle was the loss of American industry. Oh, they still had plenty of factories, and were actually still above pre-war levels, but...
He shakes his head.
All of that would be dedicated to rebuilding their own country. In the last war, rebuilding Europe had been an essentially American endeavor, and now we could not rely on them for a penny. And we could not rely that well on other major economies. China's biggest trading city had been given quite a chewing, and India's was simply gone, may Mumbai be remembered. And Russia... I don't want to even get into the mess that was immediate post-war Russia.
That wasn't even getting into the actual damages. It is quite an interesting case, I must admit. The Second World War had led to almost every major city in Europe becoming a bombed out wreck, but that didn't happen here. The Race did not carry out long distance bomber raids, not even hitting Paris if I recall correctly. I don't know why, but I'm sure you could ask a military man that.
On the other hand, the places that were hit did not simply become damaged- they were obliterated. Barcelona, Marseilles, Algiers... scarcely a brick left of them. Some important things were recovered in those massive salvage runs, as though we were desperately reaching for any lingering scraps of memory. But we didn't get everything.
A single sigh.
And unlike the other war, we had climate issues. The Nazis killed a lot of people, but they didn't plunge us into ecological catastrophe. We had to contend with widespread crop failures, flooding, heat waves, and many other issues. It was enough to make anyone smart enough to understand the impact go cucumber.
Q: With those issues in mind, what plans were decided for rebuilding?
A: The Mutual Reconstruction Aid Resolution. If Europe could not rely on China, or America, or even Russia, then Europe must rely on Europe. We essentially suggested laws that streamlined working abroad and encouraged mutual aid between our nations while we rebuilt. Less rigid taxing if the remaining European companies did business with other European companies, offers of land at vastly cheaper rates in the rebuilt territory to migrant workers, and education benefits for all.
At the same time, a lot of propaganda was made in that vein, an idea taken from the Americans. Rebuilding wasn't just work; it was patriotism, it was an honor for the human race. We also tried to ensure that we wouldn't be stuck in an economic rut in the future, by encouraging them to 'Rebuild so your children don't have to'. That was the quote of the day back then. Build houses and new roads now, so your children could become artists and scientists and all those other non-survival jobs. You wouldn't believe how much easier it is to galvanize the public when you have an actual nonhuman enemy to serve as a scapegoat for everything.
Though it was especially awkward, considering that we were also enlisting the Race's help.
Q: How involved were the Race and Fithp?
A: The Race provided material and transportation, but not manpower. People didn't want to see their faces after what they did in France, but those starships were astonishingly helpful when it came to bypassing dozens of kilometers of broken roads or muddy fields. We could drop off literally tens of thousands of workers just about anywhere, with all the material, prefabs, and machines needed to rebuild, in an hour. And there was also the advantage of their hydrogen fuel cells... the economic impacts of being able to use the most common element in the universe to fuel our cars gave me the biggest of headaches.
Fithp contributions were more subtle. We were rebuilding our nations, but they had to make their own, and they were involved in a multitude of projects in the Southern Hemisphere. What they did came a bit later, in less upfront ways. Hovercraft to deal with the less car-friendly places. A higher degree of automation with large-scale moving equipment. So on, so on.
They were immensely helpful. They made the mess in the first place, but we wouldn't have been able to fix it so quickly without them. They allowed us to end our initial rebuilding plans a full two years ahead of schedule, in 2024. By then, we had major nascent economies in Africa and Southeast Asia to trade with, the worst of the climate issues were over, and America was also beginning to emerge from its slump.
Still, there was no going back. We may have shaved the goat, but now it was on the ice.
Q: Er... are you talking about the migrant issues?
A: No need to walk the cat around the porridge. Think about how many people lived in the war-affected areas, how many had been evacuated in a frenzy in those mad days before the waves came. By the time the war ended, there were two million French living in Britain and three million in Germany, and there were a million Spaniards living in France. Many of them didn't have homes to go back too, and by the time their home regions had been rebuilt, they had found new lives.
And that isn't getting into workers from other less damaged nations, coming in droves. Italians in Spain, Poles in France, even Ukrainians in Germany. There had to be millions, all around, and in addition to refugees from Race conquests in Africa and the Middle East... one big mix, and not everyone was happy. But, in the face of that open sky, they had to bite the sour apple, and help us rebuild.
Personally, I think those half-dozen mini diasporas were a good thing. After seeing what a truly homogenous culture looks like, I think it just lends credence to the belief that diversity is our strength.
He smiles, and waggles his eyebrows.
And the fact that my house is now sandwiched between a French bakery and a Spanish restaurant has nothing to do with that.
-/-\-
Fistarteh-thuktun II
Despite the Race male's insistence that he leave, Fistarteh-thuktun makes himself at home in Ttomalss's office, sipping from his coffee pot.
Q: Loremaster, you describe the Race's efforts as neocolonialism? Would you describe fithp reconstruction efforts in a different light?
A: Yes, I would. It was not us who had conquered much of Africa and the Middle East. We were scarcely an occupying force, and when the time for rebuilding came, we did not try to prop up governments that would benefit us in those regions. Instead, we moved to the regions we had not conquered and helped rebuild there. Brazil. Vietnam. Honduras. Our digit ships must have moved millions of workers during those first five years of rebuilding.
During that time, I was enlisted to lead the team of scientists that would begin to decode the thuktun in its entirety. Instead of a handful of assistants, I was working with hundreds of linguists, biologists, and engineers. The greatest minds in humanity, eager to learn all we had known, and more.
Q: I imagine the thuktunthp must have still been difficult to decode.
A: Indeed. Even considering its astonishing size and the small scale of the etchings and diagrams, there should have not been enough information available for what we built. There were markings that indicated concepts from pre-existing thuktunthp, of which there were hundreds. To understand the thuktun, you needed to understand all of its predecessors as well. We had barely scratched the surface of the thuktun we brought with us when the war began, and yet it had given us a key to the stars.
A (Ttomalss): A very ineffective one when compared to Race engines, I might add.
A (Fistarteh): Pray tell, how many of those engines were cracked apart by Message Bearer?
A (Ttomalss): Oh, a joke about your initial attack, one of the bloodiest days in history. How original.
Q: Er, I believe I was going to ask about the thuktun?
Ttomalss glares at Fistarteh-thuktun, then resumes reading emails. The old fi' turns back to me.
A: Apologies, fellow loremaster. Yes, there were many scientists and the like attached to the project. It was agreed to be an international commission, between the signatory states of the World Armistice and related treaties. We would all study it, and in turn we would all benefit from its secrets. In addition, our pre-existing technology, from hovercraft to fusion reactors, were being studied in laboratories all around the world.
A (Ttomalss): It was hardly equal opportunity. We of the Race were explicitly forbidden from accessing research or technology that they deemed 'problematic', even if it had more uses than military. They were blatantly biting their non-existent tails at us by withholding ftaskelkwank, for just one example of many.
A (Fistarteh-thuktun): The last time one of your species studied the stone, tens of millions perished.
A (Ttomalss): And just who let him study it?
The old fi' suddenly falls silent, trunks curled in consternation. Ttomalss clicks his fingerclaws together, looking suddenly uncomfortable.
A (Fistarteh-thuktun): The past cannot be changed. The dead cannot rise. Too many of us, from all sides, perished at each others' hands. Wallowing in remorse changes nothing, but atonement can. And the way to atone is to repair the world we have broken, and ensure a better future.
He sips his coffee, eyes looking elsewhere.
That is what I have been doing for twenty years.
-/-\-
Joshi IX
Folding back up her copy of the World Armistice, Joshi turns back to me.
A: It was unbelievably hard, you know.
Q: Being a leader of the Earth Fithp?
A: No, meeting Chris's parents. Of course I'm talking about the Fithp Nation. I never even led group projects in school, and now I was leading a nation one million strong, hated by much of the world, and distinctly nonhuman. Their very biology and psychology confounded things. Can't just ban drugs like LSD when the stuff doesn't affect them, while even a day or two of putting a fi' in a single-person cell is banned by the Geneva Conventions.
Writing a proper constitution was a nightmare. I had to figure out a stable system of governance for a people that were socially still very much in the Neolithic era, while catering to their psychological needs. It was not something I could have done on my own.
Q: Who helped the most considerably?
A: Chris knew quite a bit about the US Constitution, considering that he had the preamble tattooed on his back. A two hundred and fifty year old document with only a few amendments is quite resilient, and it had been an inspiration for nations across the world; why not one more? Freedom of press, speech, religion, and assembly were all at the forefront. Total egalitarianism as well; as long as they were of age, which we made 16 due to their quicker maturation, they could vote.
Now, getting them to vote was another thing. The fithp never voted before they came here. It was an... well, it was alien to them. It didn't help that I wasn't an elected official; quite a few thought voting was just a way to show how content they were with events.
Fistarteh-thuktun turned out to be very helpful, actually. He was much quicker to grasp political concepts; I suppose his job favored that kind of thinking. We combed the Herd for young fithp with a knack for art, and had them set to making... well, I'm not sure if propaganda is the right term. Informative artwork is better, perhaps. Posters written in thuktush, drawn in nascent fithp style, meant to inform the Herd of just what voting is, what rights they had, and so on. I even starred in a cringy video meant to demonstrate the voting process. Fistarteh-thuktun helped relate human concepts of government to their concepts all the way through. Without him, I'm sure it would have been much more difficult.
Q: How long did the constitution take to write?
A: Four months. Countless contributions, from old constitutions and new thinkers. Human rights, with a pinch of Race egalitarianism, fithp ideals of social structures, and so on. It was essentially a Frankenstein's Monster.
Still, it was good enough. My people now had a foundation for their laws, a foundation for the nation. By the time I wrote it, they had already made their first three cities. Simple things at the time, but better than quite a few human cities. That was an advantage of building a nation from scratch; no problems with historic infrastructure, both physical and legal, clogging things up.
Of course, that's just building a nation. Growing it, and running it? That's something else entirely.
-/-\-
Vesstil I
My next interviewee is quite difficult to plan an appointment with, due to his incredibly busy schedule. Eventually, we agree to have me sit in a seat normally reserved for observers as he flies from Buenos Aires to Amadioha-1, the main orbital station of the United West African Republics. Even as someone who has flown in space before, it is an uncomfortable experience, sitting in the undersized cockpit of a Race shuttle.
Vesstil is, for lack of a better word, quite chatty for a Race male. Between constant updates and replies with ground control and Amadioha-1, he speaks in a rapid-fire manner that seems to go all over the place.
Q: Now then, as a shuttle pilot, you were involved in the Joint Spaceflight Initiative, is that correct?
A: Yep, yep. Back then, humans had us beat in lots of places, even in space combat, but they were rookies when it came to the void. Rookies. They were acting all proud of landing two dudes on that oversized Moon-
For effect, he points at Luna, barely visible as a thin crescent in the right corner of the cockpit window.
-while we were crossing light-years regularly for longer than their civilization has existed. Some of you guys still remember a time where all you had were planes, and isn't that some addled tsiongi pellets? From there to, well, here? Crazy fast. Scary fast. But, still, if they wanted to get past cislunar space anytime soon, they had to ask us and the fithp how to rocket.
Of course, wasn't like we could say no, you know? They were already picking apart captured starships and shuttles, sucking up our knowledge in that freaky way they do. We couldn't stop it, but we could work with it, maybe win more brownie points by speeding it up in places. I didn't complain. I got to do what I was trained to do, what I loved to do, without having to do all that nasty bricklaying. Not that it's a bad thing to help rebuild, I mean, but personally I hate how scratchy my scales get after working outside, and...
Q: So what did the Initiative entail for you, specifically?
A: Well, I had humans sitting where you are right now. Scientists, astronauts, engineers, all that stuff. I'd just do what I normally did when going from surface to orbit, or vice versa, and they'd be watching me, looking at me with those creepy big eyes that can only look one way. Have I mentioned how weird human eyes are? Sssss.
Anyway, yeah, they'd look at me with their weird eyes, taking notes about everything, taking pictures, taking videos. They'd ask me questions all the while, too. "What's this? How does this work? How are your heatshields able to withstand multiple reentries without renewal?" Chatterboxes, all of them. I didn't build the rockets; I just fly 'em. Who did they think I was, that rocket scientist of theirs? Jimmy Neutron?
Q: Robert Goddard.
A: Knew I got it mixed up. Love that show.
Anyway. Space stuff. Yeah, once they squeezed me dry, they had me working as a cargo guy, basically. Lifting parts and tech into orbit, so they could build their orbital toys for cheaper while they were still working on their own ships. Risky flying, back then. Tstilov's Warning was still in effect.
Q: Tstilov's Warning?
A: Basically, if you break something in space, it could result in little bits of hypersonic shrapnel that breaks more stuff and makes more shrapnel. And boy was there a lot of stuff broken in orbit back then. Human satellites, our starships, fithp digit ships... Your big-ass warships were safe in those conditions, as was the fithp worldship, but you gotta remember that they were basically bricks. Delicate ships and equipment would've gotten shredded.
Yeah, they had to clear that out. Digit ships carried salvage crews for the big things. Detached engines. The occasional reactor. Even bodies, frozen ones that got spilled out into the void when their ship got split by a gamma laser or fithp missile. Think someone made some creepy photo artwork about that; it was in big museums for a while. As for the small things, they used fithp lasers with modified specs and called it a laser broom or something. Make the shit ablate so its orbit gets all eccentric, and then it burns up in the atmosphere. Earth was getting little meteor showers everywhere for a good six months because of that.
Q: Afterwards, did your role change?
A: Yeah. By like... 2024, 2025? By then the human spaceflight industry was exploding, thanks to all the little and big things they learned from us. Anything they weren't investing in rebuilding or other vital stuff was going into space. Coulda sworn a human astronaut told me that they used to only put half a percent of their economy into space travel in his not-empire, and then it skyrocketed to eight percent.
Now, we didn't just have digit ships and our ships up there, but human ships. Shuttles like ours, but on raw ginger root, and their own specified vehicles. Tugs, repair craft, research vessels, asteroid miners... oh, and the warships. But that shit was opaque to me. They let us in on development for civilian spaceships, but their military stuff were on black sites. We aren't even allowed to try and find out about those sites, under penalty of death.
By that point, we were kinda becoming unimportant. They didn't need us to carry their stuff into orbit when they had their own ships to do the job, now, and no Race ships are allowed past an orbit of five thousand kilometers from Earth, which means we couldn't really help with their bigger cislunar projects.
Q: You aren't allowed past five thousand kilometers?
A: And even then you're pressing things. One time the Hetto got tailed by an Archangel for hitting an apogee of one thousand while making a suborbital flight to the Free Zone in Australia, back when all those males got sick from bad water. Basic thinking is that you can't get far enough to turn around suddenly hit the planet as a relativistic impactor. Since, well, you know.
They mean it, like, they hecking mean it. The Fleetlord signed the agreement as part of the World Armistice. Doesn't matter who you are, what you're flying, why you're heading out. You put a toeclaw over that line, you're gonna get turned to radioactive vapor.
So, if we can't really develop the space industry, and we can't head out into the planets, what can we do? What I'm doing now. Become part of the orbital traffic. Instead of helping humanity take baby steps into the void, we now do commercial flights and cargo runs.
He turns an eye turret to me.
Know what, though? I like it. It's good work, and it's safe work. We may be lagging now, but we're reliable compared to the others, so we have no shortage of passengers. People want quick, they go Chinese or American. They want comfortable, they go Fithp or Indian. But if they want safe, they come to us.
Like I said. I get to do what I love to do, and do it safely.
For a moment, there is a rare look of introspection on his face.
I'm really lucky in that way, you know?
-/-\-
Timpinlithchup I
My next interview finds me in Patagonia, where the second installment of Lingfutunpth is being filmed. Much of what I see cannot be described, as I have signed a non-disclosure agreement in order to prevent spoilers.
The worlds-famous director invites me into her trailer, where she is currently working on the script of yet another film. A young, smooth-skinned fi', Timpinlithchup waves me over and invites me to sit across the table. Closing her computer, she looks at me with keen eyes.
Q: Good afternoon, Filmmistress Chup. I know you're due on set in a short while, so I'll try to be brief.
A: Oh, it's no trouble. I've been harangued by reporters and paparazzi prying for any rinds of information about this shoot, but you're the first to ask about something else.
Q: Allow me to get into it, then. Now, you spent your childhood in the Fithp Nation in Borneo, did you not?
A: Yes, I did indeed. I was only two when the war ended; I was actually born as the Thuktun Flishithy marched here for battle. I was part of the third wave of settling, so much of the city of Natnayf had been built when my family arrived. I don't remember my time aboard Message Bearer. No real thoughts; just feelings.
The city had gotten bigger by the time I can remember earliest. Our numbers were already swelling, and what had been but a small collection of prefabs and ramshackle houses was becoming a proper town. We had internet, we had cell phone towers, a marketplace...
Her ears flap, a happy gesture.
And a movie theater.
Q: A movie theater? But I thought the fithp had not made film entertainment before the war.
A: And we didn't. The movies available in the theater were all human made, with the occasional Race film that some male had brought with him on laser disc or holoprojector. Herdmistress Joshi had decided it would be good to allow mutual cultural understanding, and so we were being granted or sold all sorts of media, though there was still screening to avoid propaganda, and they had to make translations for everything.
I remember watching movies nearly-constantly as a youth. The theater was state-funded, you see, so tickets were free. If we fithp were looking to relax after work on building our new nation, or just wanted to keep the children occupied, then the theater was the place to be. My family and my friends would go after school ended, since the work-shift and school schedule were made to be aligned, and we'd watch all sorts of movies.
Q: What films did you watch as a youth?
A: What didn't I see? I saw comedies from America, horror from Germany, romance from Mexico... I saw film greats, like Kubrick and Bergman and Kurosawa, and I also saw Judd Apatow flicks and B-movies. Anime, musicals, silent movies... if there was a style or genre, I saw it.
There were also a thuktun's worth of Bollywood films. I'm sure there was no bias or subtle anger in that one.
She winks.
Moving on, however... as much as I enjoyed many of the films I saw, there was an... empty spot. A longing.
Q: Care to explain?
A: I have always loved stories. My parents used to regale me with the oral stories they heard from their ancestors. Lingfuntunthp, the legendary Herdmaster of the old Herd of Chpuk, who stole the thuktunthp from the gods and gave it to all fithpkind. Glingfkip, the war between our two suns that birthed the world.
But the thing is, our stories were... few. Our people were... are young. More time passed between the rise and fall of old Rome than did the discovery of the first thuktun and our arrival here. We had few stories compared to even Bronze Age men, for our cultures were barely changed by the wonders we found in the stones.
And besides, no matter how engaging an oral story is, it's still just one type of fiction. So when we suddenly had books and movies and manga to consume, we were quite happy to. But even then, that empty feeling, that yearning, continued to linger.
Because ultimately, we were holding them at trunk's-length. I loved the movies I watched growing up, and I still do. But I cannot connect with them on the same level that humans can, because humans are, in a term I'm sure some will find ironically amusing, alien. A calf and a child are going to look at a Superman comic in inherently different ways, because Superman is a man, not a fi'. Everyone instinctively creates stories about their own species, because stories are a way of reflecting upon ourselves. But during that time, when we looked in that mirror, we didn't see ourselves. We saw an alien.
Q: Is that what pushed you to start making films?
A: Yes. And it's what pushed Mingtupnang-thul to start writing poetry, and what drove Pfanglikaynf to become a novelist. It's almost like the paradox of light. These things happened because we decided to do them, and yet at the same time it was an inevitability, like gravity, that fithp started making art, just as how light is both wave and particle.
Inevitable, because we had undergone the largest cultural shifts in our short history, so vast as to strain belief. We had neither absorbed, nor been absorbed by, humanity, instead living aside them as neighbors. We had been given a sky once again, even if there was only one sun in it, and we had been exposed to all of these new ideas and forms of art.
But also a decision, because I had no idea about any of that when I started out. I just wanted to make movies.
Q: Your first film was an adaptation of Lingfutunpth, was it not?
A: Oh, that.
She lets out an amused moo.
That's still more than a little embarrassing. There was no production value to speak of. My friends and I just went off after school every day and we'd film in the forest nearby, covered in sloppy 'warpaint' and waving clubs around. My, my. I was always entranced by the forest, just creeping at the edges of our home, and so I incorporated it into my film as much as possible. It was near orangutan territory, actually; and sometimes they'd watch us film.
If you ask me, after years of film school and literary training, it is only natural I was drawn to the forest. After being born in metal halls, we had a sky to live under, and proper soil to roll in. Alien, but ours. Playground equipment for the imagination.
Anyway, we used an old computer for special effects, and then we uploaded the film to the internet. And then it exploded. It was the novelty, and definitely an ironic pleasure in the horrible quality, that made it so popular. People were touting it as the first fithp movie, the first alien film made on Earth, a landmark in cinematic history, while laughing at the horrible effects and acting all the while.
But in the end, it was still good.
Q: Because CalArts offered to accept you into their film classes?
A: That too, but mainly because it brought attention to us in a way that wasn't just politics, wasn't just the war. It allowed the world to realize that we were a people, that we had a culture, however nascent... and that we also made horrible home movies as youths. A cultural renaissance for an entire species was happening, and now they could witness it in action, maybe even help it grow with patronage and good box-office returns. A seed of change and beauty was planted that day.
And so, I have been watering it ever since.
-/-\-
Sudarto I
Unlike previous interviews, the very nature of my next subject's situation demands a video call, as the next flight inbound to Meridiani Planum would take forty days at the current moment, with a price tag in the millions. Even the call itself is difficult- due to light-speed lag, a minimum of sixteen minutes can pass between my question and his answer.
A young Javanese man of thirty-four, Sudarto greets me on the video screen with a smile, though he is clearly tired from his week-long geological survey in Da Vinci Crater. Nevertheless, he manages to be quite lively as we speak, even across the light-speed lag.
Q: Good morning, Dr. Sudarto. To minimize your time, I will ask my questions in clumps. Firstly, what were some of the difficulties your crew has faced in establishing a permanent presence on Mars? Secondly, what impact, if any, would you say the fithp and Race have had on that?
A: It's mid-afternoon here, actually. Nice high of ten degrees Celsius, though it's going to drop into about eighty below when the sun sets. Anyway, to answer your questions.
Yes, we have faced some considerable challenges. Not necessarily the challenges that people might imagine. Despite what some old movies have implied, dust storms are more of a nuisance than anything else; the atmosphere is so thin that you'd experience worse on a normal day at the beach. And we are able to synthesize oxygen from the water ice we have found, though we were operating on our own rations for a good two months as we made sure there were no organisms or harmful chemical compounds within. It's a miracle that we haven't suffered any real contamination issues with the alien life that has come to Earth, and we don't want to press our luck.
What is more challenging is radiation. There's no magnetic field to speak of, here, which means we get the full blast of the sun's radiation. It's why we cake the habitats in a sort of concrete made from the regolith here; the thickness and metal-rich nature helps to protect us, but we still need to take cover during solar storms.
Even more challenging altogether, however, is sustainability. It's easy to maintain a presence if you only have a handful of astronauts that can be resupplied by our torchships. But to prove that we can live here, with room for population growth? When making Martian soil usable for our greenhouses is an immense problem, and everything must be carefully managed to ensure our little ecosystem functions? That is something else entirely.
Now, allow me to answer your question about the fithp and Race. Yes, they helped considerably. Our engines derived from Race designs have allowed absurd amounts of supplies and equipment to be delivered here, and much shorter than what we had dreamed of before the war happened. We used to speak of Hohmann transfers to bring a handful of people here in eighteen months, with everything stripped of weight in ways that sometimes veered towards the dangerous. Did you know that you could punch a pencil through the first generation of lunar landers' hull? Terrifying.
Now, we can get a hundred people and practically entire disassembled bases brought here in less than a tenth of that time. When I came here eight years ago, we started with twenty crew, one inflatable base with a floor area of three hundred meters, two rovers, and only basic scientific instruments. That was Opportunity Base. And now, we're essentially a town. Five thousand colonists and scientists, working together to make a new life here on another world.
That's where the fithp have aided us. They had to live in a lone ship for more than sixty years, and the knowledge they gained from that stone is a treasure here. Methods of handling the radiation, technology for deriving air and fuel from the soil beneath us that outstripped our wildest dreams... so many things, so many things I could list.
Q: You mention fithp assistance in that regard. What is your opinion on their claims that Mars is, in essence, a dead end when compared to the Belt and Oort Cloud? What are your opinions on the debate regarding the political impact of Mars's growing population in the future?
Millions of kilometers away, he snorts.
A: Some of the fithp place too much emphasis on the mineral wealth of the asteroid belt. There's still a gap in opinion between the sleepers and the lifers, I hear, but that's a bit beside the point. Yes, the belt contains many, many materials that are useful... no, vital, to the future. Iron, nickel, carbon, the like. That's why ships are heading out here, though I still feel Luna is more important in that regard. Yes, the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt possess far more water than even Earth. And yes, the gravity well poses issues.
But the fithp forget that many of the asteroids in the belt are essentially mounds of gravel held together by their own weak gravity. Only a few asteroids are safe for colonization, such as Ceres and Vesta. The rest are too small or too unstable, best meant as mines or even tools in the colonization of other worlds. I know the community Earthside is debating the use of comets to terraform this world, but if you ask me...
He grimaces.
Too many problems on too many levels, at least for now. Despite the gravity well issue, Mars is still ideal. We may be metal-poor when compared to Earth or the Belt, but all the necessary materials of survival are here, in the air and soil. We can expand without worrying of cracking the entire thing apart. And let's not forget the psychological impact. It may not be Earth, but at least here there is still a sky above us, and ground beneath our feet. We even get the occasional clouds. We have only sent thirty people home over the years because of the stress, while the asteroid crews have double that number and a tiny fraction the populace.
A waste? No. I think this is an experiment. If Man can live here, He can live anywhere. If we can make a living, thriving populace here, then we can make one amongst the stars, without having to fight for habitable worlds.
And as for the social impact...
He falls silent, thinking for a few moments.
Excuse me.
Carefully, he picks up the computer, and brings it to one of the nearby windows. Through it, I can see the 'town square' of Opportunity Base- neatly paved roads of compacted regolith connecting a multitude of domes, power stations, and greenhouses.
In the center of this tamed land, however, a patch of wilderness remains, ringed by a fence. A lone machine sits in the regolith, clearly worn with age, but still easily recognizable.
Our namesake. She was a silent casualty of the war; we couldn't bother to send her wake-up signals while we fought for our survival. We decided to build the base around her when we arrived, taking care not to disturb anything. Some of us wanted to take her home, put her in a museum. 'Bring Her Back' was a political slogan here for a while.
But Earth isn't her home anymore. She was there for a short time, best measured in months. She lived here fifteen years, and she died here, in that very spot. She belongs to Mars, now. Just as we belong to Mars. Many of us can't go back due to the gravity wreaking havoc on our bones and hearts.
His tone softens.
My uncle was a salvage man, you know. He spent five years in the Mediterranean, pulling as much as he could from the bottom, rescuing priceless things the waves had pulled out. Worn statues of heroes, broken arches from historic buildings, even jewelry and priceless artifacts from museums and historic ruins. I used to ask him why people cared so much about these things. He told me, "Sometimes, looking back is what gives us strength to move forward."
Many of those pieces he rescued were put back where they were, but they put them in with the new instead of just restoring it to the way it was before. Using an arch stone from the old capitol building for the new one. Incorporating the broken bits of stained glass into new artwork for the churches. Even our namesake had a piece of the old WTC as a shield for cables from the drill.
It's what we're doing here, too. We aren't going to repair her, or send her back home. She's staying here, as a testament. A testament to the old days of exploration, and of human endurance, when some flimsy rover managed to last 15 years instead of the planned three months. In the center of the future, we're keeping a bit of our past, to remind ourselves of what it took to get here.
Some people have said we're going to make divisions as we spread, but I think it's the opposite. I think the effort to get here is just going to bring us closer and closer together, as we go from here to Jupiter and to the stars.
After all, sometimes looking back is what gives us strength to move forward.
-/-\-
You have been reading:
Worldfall, Chapter Eighteen: Rebuilding