The Fires of Orc

Would you dare to walk with the beast

on the dark side of the moon?

Demetri Daskova

July 4, 2032, the United States of America celebrated two hundred fifty-six years of independence in its traditional fashion. Tens of millions of people drank themselves into oblivion. Several million of them sang along to patriotic country and western ballads. A few million attended civic parades. A few hundred million watched fireworks. There were barbecues and monster trucks and bonfires and homemade ice cream. There was much revelry and little reflection. More than two-and-a-half centuries of Americanism had made my countrymen soft, gluttonous and indifferent to higher purposes.

Monday, July 5, was a federal holiday. Americans shopped and the world anticipated the upcoming Games of the XXXV Olympiad in Singapore. There were wars in Africa and the Middle East. There was poverty enough to go around. But for the most part the advanced world was at peace and its capital class enjoyed the prosperity of a half-century of post-industrial globalization. It was neither the best nor the worst of times, but it was the end of time.

The thing about people is that they can’t always tell when something’s wrong. As long as they’re comfortable they feel like everything is as it should be. In 2032 Americans were comfortable. The class wars were a decade in the past. An entire generation of young adults knew almost nothing of what had once been middle-class life. They had quality healthcare. They had access to affordable education. They had a wide-open employment market that demanded the skills and intuition of the quantum age and in that arena their youth placed a premium on their job prospects. No one older than me could relate to the quantum youth. The white-haired oligarchs still running the world were already obsolete.

Thus the young, the only rightful possessors of social energy, had really nothing to be energetic about. Sure they were exploited, as exploited as every young generation before them, maybe even moreso. But that didn’t matter. There was very little chance of mobilizing a mass of young people to change a status quo in which they could earn enough money in a four-day work week to live comfortably in a large city, walk to a bistro for dinner every night, party with friends at Club Nouveau on weekends and travel to a yoga retreat twice a year. They were placated and that, for all of us really, is enough.

The old, on the other hand, had long since resigned themselves to insignificance. They no longer understood either the world or their place in it. They might have demanded change if only they weren’t bought off with public entitlements and beaten down by a sense of their own uselessness. They were as useless as they thought they were. For young and old alike, there were the very, very rich and then there was everyone else and almost everyone was as well off as almost everyone else – no worse, no better – and that’s good enough when you think about it.

Seemingly everyone thought as I did, that the future held nothing at all except more of the same. And then on the afternoon of that long ago holiday it happened. The fires came and with them the end of everything wrought by human hands and minds over the centuries.

First the lights went out, a total shutdown that cascaded from central control systems the world over taking all electrical grids offline. For twenty-four hours there was unchecked panic. There was looting, rape and murder in the worst cases; drunken public orgies in the best. Global communication networks went dark for consumers. Major news media broadcasted from battery power. Smart buildings in the world’s most advanced cities continued to power themselves and defense systems ran off back-up generators. Rail and air travel ceased. It was not yet the end, just the very brief calm before the final storm.

Then came the fires and with them the rage of ages. A hate as wide as the oceans flowed down from the skies, blasting whole cities from the earth. The first to go were the great world centers – New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing – followed by the second cities of the old order – Los Angeles, that great warren of extravagance, Birmingham, England’s factory for all time, New Delhi, Shanghai, Nagoya and so many more. In less than an hour, eighty of the world’s major cities were consumed in nuclear fireballs let loose from the arsenals of two countries.

Though it made no sense to anyone, Russia and the United States maintained almost two thousand nuclear weapons with inter-continental delivery systems more than four decades after the end of the Cold War. A total of six European nations hosted American nuclear weapons on their soil. Both Belarus and Iran had Russian nuclear bases within their borders. There were at least eight other nuclear nations whose combined arsenals totaled perhaps a thousand weapons, most of them with short-range capabilities. Those smaller caches had a role in the end, but it was the standing, hair-trigger stores of Russian and American ICBMs that threatened the world and on July 5, 2032, the threat played out.

Neither government knew what was happening at first. The missiles woke of their own accord and began counting down to launch before human agents could trip the wires necessary to stop them. Within a span of only a few minutes, there were eighty missiles aloft heading for the major urban centers of the world and although alerts went out, evacuating even a fraction of those cities’ populations was impossible. More than two hundred million people died in the first round of explosions.

After those initial launches both countries managed to wrest control of their remaining weapons and take them off-line, assuring the remaining warheads would stay put. But no sooner were the Russian and American arsenals secured than the Indian and Pakistani missiles took flight, spanning all of Southern Asia, taking out Islamabad and Delhi as well as Hanoi, Bangkok, Manila, Daka, Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur and many more.

Almost simultaneously the Chinese arsenal was aloft, taking out twenty cities in their own country and another two-dozen in Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. It seemed briefly that Australia and South America might be spared. But Russian missiles already aloft eventually reached Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane while late-arriving American nukes obliterated Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lima, Bogota, Santiago and many more. In Tequis we felt and heard the destruction of Mexico City, a hundred and twenty-five miles away. Mexico also lost Guadalajara, Monterey and Juarez. Tijuana was consumed in the same blast that ended San Diego.

The San Diego/Tijuana region was one of the few major metropolitan areas that did effectively evacuate a large share of its population. An hour passed from the first blasts before San Diego was hit. In that time the exit options to the north, east and south allowed millions of people to escape death’s shadow. Aside from a few other similar cases, the only large areas of the world not immediately consumed in nuclear destruction were a chunk of Eastern Europe and most of sub-Saharan Africa. The largest city left unaffected in the former was Almaty, Kazakhstan. In the latter, Accra, Ghana, was spared.

By the first evening, almost five hundred million people were dead.

News ceased. Communication, the foundation of the post-modern world, went dark. Human beings were relegated to exchanging information from one to another, as in the mists of time. Radio, the forgotten medium, became the only connection to anything outside one’s own vicinity. A few dauntless end-time reporters, reporting from the edge of catastrophe, passed from one small outlet to another the general picture around the world. Anything we learned in the week after the fires was hours or days old before it reached us. None of it mattered to anyone’s immediate circumstance. The news of the day was once again only that which was relevant to one’s direct here and now. We were pre-industrial practically overnight.

Still, the news did continue to trickle in for a few weeks with sufficient regularity to piece together what happened.

In practical terms, Western Europe ceased to be. The dozens of explosions in that patch of earth came together to scorch whole nations, tearing asunder the land of Caesars, Kaisers and Kings. Everything from the Mediterranean to the Baltic was ash and cinders. The main expanse of Greater Russia and the Steppes, by contrast, was largely undamaged for the time being, although Russia’s major cities were all gone. The American coastal cities were also gone, as were the major cities throughout the South and the Midwest. But stretches of the prairie remained inhabitable, as did most of Canada, excluding all of Quebec and Ontario, plus the entire vicinities of Vancouver and Calgary. Central and South America were a hodgepodge of destruction and virtually pristine country. Most of Brazil was untouched, as was everything from Honduras to Panama.

That’s how things stood as of the first reliable reports arriving to us in Tequis. But the news got considerably worse. The half-billion people who died on the day of the fires were only the beginning of a reaping that would leave the world a ruined, sparse place. Within days of the blasts refugees began arriving in some cases in the millions at the outskirts of what cities remained standing. Half of them were walking dead when they arrived, victims of radiation poisoning who would have been more fortunate had they died in the fires. Tens of millions of other survivors brought with them the acquired disease and pestilence of human crowding. It was a radioactive bacterial holocaust.

As plagues undreamt began to claim first the very old then the very young then all ages indiscriminately, the vestiges of law and order collapsed utterly. Vigilante armies sprang up and took it upon themselves to exterminate those thought to be the source of the countless maladies that decimated humanity’s remaining outposts. Violence, disease and starvation prevailed and the polluted skies, earth and water churned with bloody fury. In time every place once marked by civilization was returned to our species’ most basic state. Life in the primitive pockets of habitable earth that remained was nasty, brutish and short.

There were an extremely few oases. Tequis was one of them. Our corner of Mexico was spared the worst of the devastation for several reasons. First, there was the weather. Beginning the day after the missiles struck, it rained in Tequis twenty-seven out of the next thirty days. It never rained hard, but we had six inches of rainfall spread out over a month which kept the air clean enough to breathe safely with nothing more than a bandana over one’s mouth. Moreover, Tequis sits at the edge of the Sierra Gorda where the soil is permeated by porous volcanic rock. The land filtered the falling radiation and kept it out of the aquifers, leaving safe, potable water available from underground wells. Livestock and crops survived, aided in part by the protective winds and temperate microclimate formed by the mountains.

Then too we were protected by our distance from major centers of destruction. Almost no one escaped from Mexico City. Nearly all who did fled either south to the jungles of the Yucatan or east to the Gulf of Mexico. Refugees from Guadalajara and Monterrey headed north to America, as had tens of millions of Mexicans for a century before them, out of habit, I suppose.

Also important to our survival was our quickness to shore up the institutions of local government and public protection. The Municipal President was a respected man with deep roots in the region who opened all civic buildings to the public and instituted a plan for the common storage and distribution of primary goods including food and water, building supplies, fuel and medicines. We quickly ran out of everything we could not salvage, grow or gather, but for the months following the fires we had enough to get us over our dependence on manufactured goods.

We powered three buildings in town by commandeering all solar panels in the area and by harnessing the power of the San Juan River with a wooden paddle wheel. This allowed us to receive news from the outside and also to light the night in the town square. A few thousand residents began sleeping in the lighted square and an enormous sheltering semi-structure was erected to accommodate them. All in all we managed to preserve civility admirably.

We traded with the community in San Juan del Rio just ten miles away. Both towns erected walls around a defensible area roughly a quarter-mile on each side. We stayed in contact with one another via ham radios. As it turned out, no hordes ever appeared at our gates but the fact that we were prepared for them kept us calm and, being calm, we worked for the future, in time ceasing to despair of the past.

“How did you survive, Old Timer?”

Again the Landlord. Outside an owl hoots barely audible above the distant laughs of decadent men and fallen women in some nocturnal game. Does the Landlord not sleep? Here sit I, a day of days nearly past, the moon white overhead, the familiar forms of the Friendship Inn twisted in night’s grey distorting, my eyes weary, Ulysses unread on my lap, a story nearly told and still he talks.

“How did I survive what?”

“The fires of course.”

“I was nowhere near the fires,” I tell him.

“Yeah, but after the fires everything was madness I thought. They say anyone who made it through had to do some pretty nasty stuff. Is that true?”

“Surviving wasn’t the hard part,” I lecture. “The hard part was wanting to survive. The world got ugly but I was spared the ugliest of it. I got through it the way people have gotten through hard times forever.”

“How’s that?” he asks.

“In the company of good people.”

That really is the truth of it. We got by in Tequis, as did our neighbors in San Juan del Rio, through the company of one another. We pulled together and had no reason to grow apart. There was nothing to divide us, only common cause to bring us together. All societies everywhere, at all times, big and small, primitive and advanced, have been rooted in a social contract. The individual concedes certain unfettered liberties to the group and in turn the group agrees to protect the individual and refrain from abusing its power of numbers. The balance between individual and group is one that strengthens all parties. That fact was explicit for surviving communities after the fires. Not all groups built upon it as well as we did in Tequis, but any community that survived did so by reviving the social contract that had always held civilization together.

In Tequis, children were born and grew up in peace. They learned from those of us who lived before the fires but eventually most adults stopped teaching them about things that had no real application to the new world. Some of us held out for education for its own sake but we smug few ultimately lost. The children of those children learned everything about how to farm and build and live well off the land. They learned nothing of the world before the fires and they seemed none the poorer. The young had no sense of loss. For years, however, grown people spewed and fumed and guessed and accused about how and why the nuclear arsenals were unleashed in all their fury. Some of the oldest of us haven’t stopped surmising yet.

Theories abounded. It was widely believed that a pair of rogue operatives, one in Russia the other in America, entered a suicide pact and turned their countries’ weaponry loose on the world to hasten Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. That account was credible for those who believed religion to be at the root of history’s worst inhumanity. But it lacked credibility for anyone at all familiar with the intelligence community of either country. There was simply no way a single inside player could have bypassed or worked around the multiply-redundant fail-safes designed to prevent unauthorized launches.

Another common myth centered on the dispersed surviving members of the terror groups spawned by the Second Gulf War. They numbered in the thousands and had drifted back into their respective societies undetected, so the story went, but continued to operate covertly. They had, depending on one’s preference, either slipped enough of their own rank into the security apparatus of the major powers to take action at a prescribed date and time or had gained access to the security codes by purchasing them for a king’s ransom from unscrupulous officials at the highest level of government. Neither of those guesses held up under scrutiny.

What happened, and take my word on this, was the work of the Julianistas.

From the moment quantum computing was unleashed on the world, our intelligence, our security, our basic resources, our transportation and distribution systems, essentially all the fundamental functions of the developed world were transferred to the oversight of infallible artificial minds. The quantum management of our infrastructure moved humanity to a position of dependence on its creation. We did not build a master and we did not become slaves. Instead we built an indulgent, tireless, omniscient parent and we became spoiled, guileless children.

We were utterly defenseless against any force that could corrupt our quantum providers.

The Julianista manifesto was terrifying in its generality. The mission of the dedicated zealot hackers living and working each day in cells hidden in remote countries in the Asian Steppes was to unravel the fabric of modernity, to take apart the structure of society and leave no two pieces connected. The Julianistas were not committed to bringing down a country or rocking an industry. They did not take sides in internecine squabbles that pitted corporations against one another. Instead, they intended to eliminate the corporations in their entirety, to crush their capacity to continue ruling the world of nations. To bring all their lofty goals to pass, the Julianistas were committed to destroying whatever needed to be destroyed, to end the course of history and allow people to begin again.

I remembered what Theowulf texted me shortly before the election:

Where we’re all going – you, me, Markus, all of us… Let’s just say we won’t care much longer about elections, or abortions, or affairs, or dead staffers. It’s not going to matter anymore.

He was correct. It took three-and-a-half years for his prophecy to come true, but from the moment the missiles came to life, almost nothing mattered anymore. Where people survived they came together, they started at the beginning, securing for themselves and their progeny the bare necessities of life and creating a common system and structure in which each individual mattered no more or less than every other. While we scrambled to secure our very existence, we found a better side of ourselves, and as humanity began to claw its way back from near extinction, we could all sense that we were, in some tragic way, actually better than we had ever been before the fires. There is no way to justify six billion dead but for the two billion of us left, the world was open to the possible, not stuck in the actual.

I am convinced to this day that the fires came courtesy of Theowulf and his ilk. We could have foreseen it, I guess. Anyone who ever saw a movie should have known that the instrument of our undoing would be the genius of our own creation. It wasn’t Skynet; it didn’t need to be. We weren’t the victims of artificial intelligence run amok. We were the victims of real human intelligence that could turn our systems against us. For more than three decades we trained our sights on fierce, brash enemies who spoke the tongue of evil, but we were beaten by meek, sallow young men who whispered to angels.

Even a quantum reasoning machine is just a machine and a network of thousands of such machines is, in the end, still subject to human instruction. If one could learn how to talk to the network one could do anything. Placed in service to a malevolent human mind, the quantum network was the greatest instrument of destruction ever built. Through it the Julianistas told the missiles to launch themselves and told them where to land. They had become Death.

For thirty years I stayed in Tequis. It became the only home I knew. In Mexico one learns that there is more time than life. I grew old while the world got less familiar, each day shorter than the one before. I was, in time, not who I had been but rather who I had become. I was an old man with a strange accent, no family and no known history. I taught English and history at the town school. The children learned the language masterfully and easily. They had much less interest in history. To them the past was myth, just a quaint old story told by meaningless grizzled figures like me. My life was running out and time would not wait for me to catch up.

The Municipal President in 2061 was Nestor Miranda, a man in his late thirties who had been one of my very first students following the fires. As I had no real skills, none that mattered in the new world, the town installed me as a teacher with the task of keeping alive the important knowledge of the past. I failed utterly at that task but Nestor and many other youth enjoyed learning my native language and listening to old stories. As he grew into manhood he and I remained close. I saw greatness in him. He saw it too but he never let his confidence slip over into arrogance. He was the best of Tequis.

One Saturday afternoon in June found Nestor and me sitting under a ficus tree discussing abstractions. He loved to pry open the philosophy of the old world just to point out its foolishness. Nestor kept me connected to my past, even though he rejected the old world and its presumptions. He was a good friend and well worth listening to. He governed as he lived, patiently and graciously.

I told Nestor that afternoon that I had begun to question my real purpose. “I no longer think I’m making a difference,” I said.

He invited more discussion of the subject, asking, “Why do you think you’re here?”

I thought he might mean existentially. “Do you mean why am I alive?”

“Not really,” he said, “but I guess that matters too. I mean why do you think you’re here, in Tequis, right now?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” I told him. “This is just where I live.”

“Yes,” he said, “but why? You weren’t born here. Your parents have never been here. Before the fires you never had a job here. You have no wife, no children. No one here knows anything about your life before you were already a grown man living in a grand home with two servants. So why here?”

It wasn’t the sort of thing Nestor typically asked about. It was uncomfortably personal.

“Because I like it. How’s that?” I replied, adding, “And besides, anywhere you live is home.”

“No” he rejoined. “Wherever you belong, that is home.”

“Are you suggesting I don’t belong here because I didn’t grow up here?”

“No, Viejo,” he replied. “I’m not saying you don’t belong here. I’m just asking you why you think you are here when you could be anywhere.”

“Choice,” I said. “It was just a choice, a choice I made a long time ago. There’s no significance to it. I was tired of moving around and I chose this place to stop moving.”

“I see,” said Nestor.

We were silent for some time. A child played across a cobblestone square, wielding a sword fashioned from an old street sign, charging his invisible foe with genuine ferocity. The sun cast long shadows across town. Birds sang languidly in the trees.

“You know what?” asked Nestor.

“No,” I said. “Tell me what.”

He thought for a moment then began, “I don’t have many close friends. I know everyone, as you are aware. I know that I’m popular and well respected. But aside from my wife and a few other family members, I’m not really very close to anyone – anyone except you.”

“I’m flattered,” I said. “And I hope you know I consider you a true friend, my best friend.”

“I do know that,” he said, “and that makes it hard for me to tell you something I’ve been thinking for a long time.”

“Well just tell me,” I urged.

“It’s not a big thing,” he said, “but here’s what I think. I think the old world was something I can never really understand and because you’re from the old world there will always be something about you I don’t completely understand. However, from everything I do know, when I see an old gringo who has been in Tequisquiapan for thirty years, I don’t wonder what he came here to do; I wonder what he came here to get away from. Maybe that’s not an important difference, but it’s what I think.”

We sat in silence, as friends may do. In time he rose.

“Goodbye my friend,” he said, offering his young hand.

I stood and took his hand firmly in mind.

“Goodbye,” I said.

I watched him walk across the cobblestone square, waving an imaginary sword at the child some yards away. The child laughed and swung his makeshift weapon wildly.

I called after him, “Nestor…”

He turned and paused, looking intently at me.

“It’s okay, Gringo,” he called back. “I know.”