Prelude Chapter 5: Fleeing the Night
Despite the World Council's more visible efforts, the chaos in the world continued unabated. Everything they had tried seemed to make things worse. However, the seeds of the future were being sown – behind closed doors, in encrypted communications, and even underneath the feet of the very people they were supposed to be serving.
In secret convoys, unmarked aircraft, twilight departures, and other mysterious disappearances, the cream of the human race withdrew from the Earth. To be more accurate, they withdrew into the Earth. For nearly a decade the unified world government, also known as the World Council, had been constructing the Arks under the auspices of the Hestia Corporation. The Arks were a series of underground impenetrable facilities intended to sustain tens of thousands of lives for an indefinite amount of time. From these Arks, humankind would begin anew.
Quietly and efficiently, the World Council chose relocation for world leaders, executive heads of the remaining powerful corporations, leading scientists, researchers, economists, and selected military commanders (and their families). They now had the best and brightest in the world to repopulate the human race.
Meanwhile, the World Council embarked on an ambitious plan to sanitize the Earth using a lethal mixture of weapons of mass destruction. Anything and everything was under consideration: low-yield tactical nuclear devices to destroy armies, massive fusion warheads for population centers, biological diseases, nerve agents like Soman and VX, or genetically tailored Contamination plagues for widespread use, and even kinetic energy weapons dropped from low orbit. Planners established various forms of delivery, utilizing “black” military units, robotic transportation systems, natural aquifers, and other supply systems.
Simply put, the World Council had given up. They had determined that the Contamination was of extraterrestrial origin, a form of widespread ecological transformation that had proven impossible to prevent. The Contamination had radically altered not only people but also the many sources of food that the world's population had depended on. Genetic crops couldn't be tailored fast enough to battle the effects of the Contamination, and those that seemed to work were shunned because the crops were genetically altered in the first place.
As a result, millions died from starvation and unrest in the Contaminated areas; those that remained frequently became Mutants or bore Mutant children. With the rapid decline in population and the reduction of the worldwide workforce, the global economy collapsed. The World Council stood on the precipice and saw an epic disaster unfold before them.
The Mutants themselves were the other major problem. Many had formed a united front against the oppressive policies of the World Council; their strange, inhuman capabilities and the idea of an independent, uncontrollable Mutant nation-state greatly frightened the Council. An attempt to decimate the Mutants with the military had resulted in a long, protracted campaign of attrition that sapped military strength at an appalling rate. The introduction of the 1st Biomechanical Raider Project had helped matters tremendously, was not fast enough to completely stop the uprising. The World Council also knew it could no longer fully trust the military.
The world had spiraled vastly out of the World Council's control. They had decided it was high time to end the vicious circle finally and start anew. One weekend in 2075, thousands of families received the code phrase, GENESIS SOLUTION. It was not entirely unexpected. All of a sudden, those that had been the important people in the world had vanished. Righteous Fire had begun.
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