Another piece that I'll finish off some other time:

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If Armageddon was supposed to be the end of days for mankind, it arrived a good two hundred years and fifty too late. On the day the Earth died, humans had already spread across the remainder of the solar system, terraforming and colonising Mars, maintaining a dozen space based stations each capable of housing a half million permanent residents, and building a sizable mining empire amid the vast asteroid resources in both the main Belt and the Kuyper.

But for all the event, which came to be known as the Revelation, failed to kill us off, it certainly made a good effort. 99 out of every hundred humans alive at the time was snuffed out in a matter of seconds as the planet which gave birth to us was destroyed in a violent fit of fire, exotic matter and hard radiation. Even most of those not on the ground at the time were hit pretty bad. The Moon and it's five and a half million inhabitants probably didn't get the chance to see the blast coming before it burned them into something considerably less substantial than ash.

Mars was rocked by meteor showers and lethal radiation wash until they managed to figure out how to configure a force field that would at least keep them alive. Spaceships simply disappeared, consumed by the wrathful conflagration, or were smashed like insects by meteors larger than Pluto.

There had been no warning. Everyone was going about their daily lives, and then 'poof'. But humanity endured, albeit changed forever. Of course, when every figure of authority is summarily extinguished leaving you hundreds of thousands of miles from anyone with a right to tell you what to do, what happened next was so predictable, even I'd have put money on it. The chaos threatened to kill off most of what remained. The survivors contrived means to blame each other for the atrocity, and the division which resulted ultimately led to war. It was comical. Giant spheres of metal and plastics good for little more than human habitation and commanded by egomaniacal executives not about to miss the chance to be crowned king laid claim to the vast expanses of empty space around them, and quickly turned their resources towards defending it.

There was no government, no law, and under these conditions, that the human Remnant consolidated into a mere handful of factions holding an uneasy peace within thirty years of the Revelation was a miracle in itself. Government was re-established, albeit under principles which were deemed more relevant for the time. Dog eat dog. First come, first served. Snooze you lose. Finders, Keepers.

It was only then that the slow realisation dawned that even at the peak of humanity's magnificence, we lacked the resources by an order of magnitude to so dramatically destroy our homeworld. Any natural event of such incredible force would have been seen coming centuries ago by geologists across the globe. That left only one option, and it was not especially palatable. The possibility that an outside intelligence had deemed Earth a worthy target for an attack of this manner ushered in a new age of human paranoia. After all, if you can do that once, and wipe out almost every human being in existence, you could easilly do it again, and finish the job.

It also brought about the unification of human purpose, a glorious and magnificent event that saw the consolidation of all factional governments into a new central council on Mars, and the setting of an agenda that would drive humanity forever more. Paraphrasing, the agenda boiled down to two points, both of which essentially took one of the core drivers of humanity since the time we first climbed down from trees, and evolved it to another level. To the citizens of the Remnant, it is a mantra.

Make ultimate our defences against any external threat or entity. Make ready our vengeance against those who took from us our Home. We will endure. We will have our revenge.

Me? I look forward to the day of Reckoning as much as any other, although probably more than most. Because I was there. And when you stood helpless and watched your world turn into so much intra-solar debris, there is only room in your consciousness for one thing.

0 message(s) of denial

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