Nuclear Tomorrow

Work-work mode is fully on. You know, having part time job takes more of my time than the regular one I had before. It's crazy, but I get into doing all those "extra" things now, I had no time before, and it takes a looot of my time.

Anyway, today something that "touches" upon topic that fair number of games touched upon in the past. It is a touchy subject! Either from RTS perspective of World War 3, or the Post-Nuclear "rebuild of civilization" or RPG perspective of living after the war.."war that never changes"...

This is one of those classic for me "be there" moments.. so sit down, take your Rad-X and take a deep breaths.

It's early afternoon, maybe evening. It's still bright outside, little windy, but other than that the weather is fine. You're sitting in front of PC or with your tablet, iPhone, book - whatever you do to relax after long day.

Whatever you're doing, you're not looking at the window or even in direction of window. That's what saves your sight. There is a momentary flash outside. It bright up room you're in to uncomfortable levels. As if an eye-doctor just took his little flash-light and run it in front of your eyes. It's similar. But stronger and painful. You weren't looking outside, you didn't knew that the flash was, or what it meant.
You're barely done registering and classifying that event in your mind, as the noise, loud as all hell almost bursts your ears. It's a sound like you never heard before. Everything vibrates with the noise, your windows crack and burst. Something taken straight out of a horror movie, like a roar of a great dragon is coming. Anything relying on electricity shuts down, split of a second later.
You're not even in the state of shock yet. You just don't know what's going on. And then roaring wind, like an old, rusty train running on the rattle-railways.. too fast and too loud. By now you turn your eyes towards closest window and you see the hurricane-like wind rush though the street. Taking everything with it. Cars, trees, people. The vibration stars shacking everything. Walls crack and you expect any moment to be crushed by ceiling over you. Blast wave throw you to the ground and you feel great heat coming from outside, as if you sat in front of a giant camp fire. But it's not wood gathered earlier that burn outside, it's the world itself. And the flame steals all the oxygen. You take a breath, but all you feel is hot non-air getting inside. You're getting dizzy. It's funny. Why? You don't know, but it's funny.

The whole experience lasts few short seconds. Barely enough to realize that somewhere out there, a giant mushroom cloud grows in the distance, turning the life you had into a distant dream, never to be dreamed again.

You come back to your senses few moments later. You feel every fibre of your being hurting. Eyes, ears, fingers, mouth, tongue, lungs, stomach. Skin.
As you lie on the floor of your apartment, among furniture and broken glass you get the idea what just happened. But you don't want to believe that. It's almost beyond the realm of possibility. You sit up. You're more-less fine. Some cuts and bruises, but nothing that would inhibit your movement. your skin is slightly red-ish though. Something isn't right though. It's the silence. Complete silence. You don't hear anything. Not just outside. You don't hear your own breath or cough. There's just very distant high-pitched ringing. You feel dizzy and stumble as you stand up.

It's still bright outside. But there's something dark in that lightness. Something unnatural, an aura of menace that glows hungrily. Your first thought after the initial state of shock is for your close ones. Your family, friends, co-workers. You were alone in your house before.
You don't know what happened of them...
Hot air is filled with dust that slowly settles down on everything you see outside. Cars, flipped few times and mangled beyond recognition piled-up against large building that's still standing. Street lights were broken like matches. Bent and twisted they lie on the street too, among rubble of every possible origin.
You don't see anyone else. You don't hear anyone either.
Oh.. wait, you couldn't hear them, even if they were right behind you. People, finding other people. Your neighbours? You decide to leave the house you're in first. Cracked walls drip with dust and crumbs, suggesting that your house isn't really stable.
What do you take with you? Mobile? Coat? Keys? What else? Flash-light? Good enough for now. You leave, knowing that any moment the house may fall on your head.

You're outside, on the street you once knew, now transformed into a scene from worst nightmares. Now, up close, you see twisted bodies inside crashed cars. You see people thrown against walls, alongside debriefs carried by the blast. What do you do? Where do you go?

Closest police station, fire-station, hospital. You see other survivors in your area. Some of them wounded, with skin either red - like yours, or burned. All covered in dust that descends from the sky. Some call to each other, some call to you maybe? But you can't hear them. You just stumble down the street you use to knew. Idea of taking coat feels funny now. It's so warm outside, just like in the middle of the summer.
For the first time you look around at something further than ruins.
Even the sky is shattered. Clouds above you are shattered, broken and twisted. And there, over down-town a giant cloud majestically ascends into nothingness of the sky. You can see smoke rising from different parts of the city. Fires. Whole city is a burning wreak. Mangled buildings stand up among pillars of darkness rising even higher.

It's a guess, educated one thou, that the place you're looking at, is filled with dying people. Dying right now. Burned alive. Blinded and deaf. With street asphalt turn semi-liquid, nobody can run away. With air sucked out by the flame, there is suffocation and death waiting for those who somehow survived the explosion.
They will all die. Everyone. How many of the people you knew might be dying now? How many people you loved? Those who died instantly were the lucky ones. Those living long enough to realize they're dying however...

Our generation, spared the horrors of war, protected by political correctness and gentile minds - how can we comprehend and react to the death of so many, so fast, so pointlessly.
With our brutality meter set so low, how can we react?
What is the most horrifying, brutal and bloodiest memory you ever had? You might have seen someone who's dead, or dying. Someone who got shot, run over, hit by something. Someone that just lost a limb or head. Someone cut in half, someone burning alive. Imagine all of those things. At once, magnified by how far your eye can see.

It's cliche example, but in the "old times" public executions, even public tortures were something for common folk to watch. And they would! They would come with children to see flaying of another human being. In the old days people would themselves, stone their peers to death. They do that to this day in some parts of the world.
But we don't see that. We live in the world of gentle mindset born in the age of enlightenment, brought up in the age of steam and cultivated in the age of radio and TV. We're not use to seeing dead children lying in the dark alleys. And you know what? Dead children weren't so uncommon in the old days. Mortality rate was high; there were no contraceptions, no USG and no gynaecologists. Dead children. Infants. On the streets. Of Paris, London, Berlin.
We're living in the world so sterile and safe that we can't even understand mindsets of people living two centuries ago. And for them our world would feel strange too.

How far however we really are from our ancestors? With laptops and internet, with medicine for every illness and culture of plenty.. with all of that gone in a blink of an explosion. How would we reacted?
We would grew savage. We would kill for food.
Yes, you would be able to kill someone to take away the food he found. You would murder.
Kill.

You don't believe me? Then I dare to say you were never starving. And I don't mean those force-of-will attempts to get your weight down before summer. I mean starving - there is no food. Nothing. For days.
Forget about yourself, maybe you're so closed in modern mindset that you would starve to death before killing another.

But how about your children?
Your children starving to death. With their small bones easier to see though their skin with each passing day.
With life slowly bleeding out of them.
And you meet someone. Someone who you can kill. Someone who has food, but won't share it with you. Not a bit.
You have to kill him to get it.
Him or your child.
It's that simple.

Because world, despite our high-horse morality is that simple. We all compete for a limited amount of supplies. With hunger so strong you can't think of anything else, the primal instincts would take over. If not, you'd simply die. And those who shed the illusion of high morals would prevail.

We, as a race, moved very little in terms of our humanity from the earlier animals on the evolution tree.
Our civilization exists for what? 10.000 years? That'e extreme, but lets go with that. 10.000 years during which people chose to live in settled societies. Humans as a species is around for 200.000 years.
We abolished slavery between 250 and 150 years ago. We gave voting rights to woman depending on country between 120 or 40 years ago (France '44, Italy '45, Switzerland, '71)
War crime and laws of war were established first in Hague 115 years ago.

Are we that far from killing each other for food?
Would our modern mindset could carry such a burden?
Sure. There are people killing people today. In every city you have people that killed other people. Some (hopefully most) are in jail. But they murdered someone for something.
You could too if you were pushed far enough.

Remember, it's not the first death that weights on you the most - it's the one against most innocent of your victims.