I remember the war. The war that ended all others. The war was all started so easily yet,it was so hard to end. At times I question if my existence is worthwhile, then I remember all that happened and I know I must remind others of our folly.
I suppose it began after the Voyage 1 space probe was caught in the gravitational field of the planet now known as Juno. I don't know the specifics, but apparently the probe detected a strange magnetic field that resulted from massive amounts of valuable minerals. The government was interested of course and began the third space race. My country was sure that they would win as we had done in the last two, but the Russians beat us to the planet. We landed shortly after and began to mine immediately. The unfortunate crew of the Apollo 41 soon learned that even though the minerals appeared to have a minute amount of radiation the shear quantity on the planet made it deadly. The last signal that was received from the dying crew was a warning of how the planet wasn't worth the suffering it caused. We didn't listen.
Soon my countrymen were up in arms. Furious at the Russians who hadn't warned us of the danger, while ignoring the fact that they had won by such a short increment of time that if we had been warned it would be too late to save those aboard the Apollo 41, and just as the first great war had begun the third started with countries being drawn into the fray by either treaties or by lust for the spoils of war.
At first those of us who didn't believe in the conflicts righteousness thought that this would simply end as the cold war with a bunch of threats and a few acts of violence. We were wrong; a terrorist attack on Boston was blamed on the Russians and we fired the first shot at St. Petersburg. The Russians and their allies didn't like this. They retaliated by targeting Washington. Soon every country with registered nuclear capabilities, and a few who without it, began to fire their weapons at each other.
It was just our luck that most of the countries with missiles could defend from the opposing ICBM's to continue firing on each other. The war became a battle between the resources of two opposing forces that crushed all others in between. Within a week Polynesia and the Middle East, which were in between the two superpowers, were decimated by radiation from intercepted bombs. in the following months, countries that ran out of weapons were in turn destroyed.
After almost a year of war only the United States, Mexico, Greenland, Spain, France, Russia, and China were left as island floating in a sea of lifeless desolation. The western half of my country had been lost after three months and eastern Russia was now a giant crater. The remaining countries continued to fight, even if they didn't want to because to stand down was to open your defenses wide to the enemy. Moral in the two countries that started the war was still high. No one really thought that we could loose. I, admittedly blindly believed that we would win to become the greatest county in the world as many others did. This changed after the fall of New York. The loss the big apple, as it once was called wasn't the point that caused so much despair; the facility located the city. Unknown to the common citizen there was a lab located in an undefined area of the city. This lab contained experimental genetic mutations. One was a strain of small pox that was being tested as a weapon in chemical warfare. The radiation that resulted from the destruction of the surrounding area causes the disease to become a deadly plague that spread like wildfire. Somehow the plague spread to all remaining counties of the world infecting and killing the population.
Five years after the outbreak of the plague only the original fighters of the war were left to battle until the end. Moral was low for both countries and very few still supported the war. Those who continued fighting grew fewer in numbers and eventually they won.
A kind of peace was formed between our two powers, the eye of the storm. Both countries had been bluffing about having any more weapons for some time. Then my country launched a final and desperate surprise attack. Our leaders had decided that if this final strike didn't work then we would surrender to our enemy's forces. It never came to this though, the final nuclear strike was so sudden that it actually worked.
My country had won the Black war, as it was called then, but we had also lost. In the struggle we lost any chance of claiming our prize. In our prime we had a population of three-hundred fifty million; we were now down to only six-hundred and dropping. The plague was killing us faster than we could be born. The scientist who had survived the war happened to stumble across the remains of the lab from New York while looking for a way to cure the plague. They were able to recover some data from the genetic experiments done there. The discovered that they had enough data to create a new race of creatures that could aid us in our fight against our worlds destruction. The plan was foolish and I'm sure that nothing came of project Mannulus. I partook in the project know as Tempus Inalgesco.
The idea of the project was to place the select few into a state of deep sleep that would allow them to awake when either the pod was manually activated or a certain time limit passed.I was one of the first to test the chamber. A the time of my procedure the earths population had dropped into the early hundreds and the other project had created their first beast to assist in earths cleaning and repair.
I entered the pod and was strapped to the protective casing. Life support was tested and I was hooked up to the pods computer. The door closed and carbon dioxide was pumped into the pods main chamber.Then everything went black.