Pillars of Salt
In the 21st century, the collapse of the Russian Federation leads to the widespread dispersal of nuclear weapons across the world, as they are sold off or stolen from the rotting and corrupt military. The weapons find themselves in the hands of minor nations, petty dictators, and even criminal movements. A number of rebel groups kickstart enormous wars across multiple continents by simply nuking their governments.
The political instability of the other global powers allows the weapons to be moved freely and easily, for the most part. Many, including the U.S. and China, are hit by surprise nuclear detonations due to their failure to properly screen for their smuggling into the country.
Soon, the world is embroiled in a cascading series of conflicts, with the rate of detonations increasing each month. The chaos proves too much for the United States, China, the U.K., and most other major global powers. They collapse.
The European Union manages to stay somewhat stable and mostly free of unwanted nuclear bombs. Solidified into a more solid core after Russia’s death throes, the E.U. picks up after the others and begins creating teams to recover unsanctioned nuclear weapons when found.
Aftermath
By the 2060s the political situation has stabilized considerably. The E.U. has built itself into the new superpower, unchallenged, after its decades-long campaigns of nuclear recovery and reconstruction of the rest of the world. The environmental damage from the prior years was bad, and many people lived within areas of hazardous radioactive material; the result of shoddy Russian nukes blowing up “dirty” rather than cleanly converting their radioactive mass into energy.
People were forced to live with famines, contaminated food and water, and the realities of life as a refugee. The new range of mutated crop diseases left little arable farmland, leading to the largest refugee crisis in human history.
Before the Collapse, humanity numbered just about 8.1 billion individuals. The Hot Years (2025-2040) claimed 2 billion of these, primarily in wars and megaton-scale detonations in urban centers.
In the years after, nearly 4 billion people would meet the definition of a refugee. A stateless person, lost in the churn. Most would also die as one.
This put humanity into a kind of survivor mentality, allowing much more effective group action. Significant changes were made to the nature of life, and what was expected of a person.
The Earth was not unified at this point, nor peaceful. But, the chaos of the prior decades was gone, and something seemed different about humanity now.
Bound to This Earth No Longer
Under E.U. guidance, Mexico-newly transitioned to a eusocialist government-was granted permission to take over administrative control of much of the former American south and southwest. The old remnants of NASA and the United State’s enormous launch capability were salvaged, rebuilt, and put back to use again.
A new thought had sprung forth out of nuclear fire; a new way of thinking. Humanity was a bumbling idiot in the cosmos, so addicted to the vices of personal pride and greed and blind to any consequences its actions may have. The lives of most people on Earth had become miserable. Suicide rates, especially among children, left an atmosphere of crushing despair and no room for hope.
Eusociality, born not from an individual philosopher but the collective anguish of many, required enormous sacrifice from the individual but would grant wonders for many. If anything had thrived on the new hellish earth, it was the meager insect. The cooperation of tiny, weak things. The grandness of all moving to support all’s collective dream of a good life.
The alternative was death. Most were already now accustomed to living in a world where money had no meaning and, if anyone held a position of power, they usually used it towards evil ends anyway. Most were children, born into a nightmare.
They put themselves to work, and built things again. Worked to clean the irradiated wasteland, where many would die. Then to build infrastructure again, roads for others to use to better them all, and some died too during this effort. When the remnants of the old world came to take what they’d built, some too died in defense of their kin.
It made them into a kind of humanity that hadn’t existed before, but it worked. Mexico, later simply “The People’s Union” turned the Americas into somewhere livable again.
Like insects, a major goal of the new eusocialist governments was redundancy and expansion. Humanity would need to find some new homes too, or a worse catastrophe than this could end it all. And new homes meant more room for freedom anyway, for those who wanted to try even less traditional ways of living than what eusocialism required.
In 2071, the Mexican ship Vela departed for Mars, carrying the first people who would found the Martian People’s Union.
The Box is Open
Centuries have come and gone. The deep wounds of humanity’s visit with Death linger still, but the pain has lessened. Everyone can still trace the gaps in their family trees like scar tissue, with only a dull ache left now. Most children have their favorite extinct animal from Old Earth (Old, as in the Old Way of Living). The elephant, for most Martians.
2563 - The anniversary of the end of the Venusian/Alliance war. One year prior, on October 4th, the joint alliance of the Earth People’s Union and Martian People’s Union defeated the Venusian Pryme over the skies of Earth.
If the Solar System was a peaceful house of very unique but otherwise pleasant people, Venus and its Mercurian vassal state were the narcissistic psychopath everyone avoided. All the worst excesses and habits of the Old Ways refined into faux cultural charm and glamor.
The Venusian Pryme, their supreme leader, was never directly identified but believed to have been a wealthy individual from the 2100s who ingrained himself in the Venusian settlement project. Sustained by artificial organs and progressively more insane over time, he sought to expand across the system numerous times and engaged in frequent internal conflicts at home amongst his various lords. Almost all of whom were his offspring.
The Alliance powers were happy he was dead, to say the least. With Venus defanged and collapsing into civil wars, they allowed their citizens time to focus away from war and return to normal operations. Most military personnel were decorated and sent home on new assignments, their military-service obligations considered satisfied for life. They would never be called on for service again if they didn’t wish; recognition for the brutal war.
By coincidence, it was the date of the anniversary when the Bah-Jurang Listening Post went silent, out on the edge of the system. 6 weeks later; the travel time of an E.P.U. fast scout from Bah-Jurang to Earth, the Defilement began. Humanity’s brief reprieve from the nightmare was over.
Wake into Nightmare
Martian People’s Union intelligence officers were the first to pick up on anomalies in behavior from Earth. Most of what would be learned came from the hushed, frantic conversations of Central Intelligence personnel in their compound under Olympus Mons as they listened to the solar system.
Reports of mass crowd hysteria in the spaceport around the New York space elevator spread to local news networks first. People were seen seizing, or foaming at the mouth, collapsing to the floor and spasming in apparent agony. A smaller subset engaged in aggressive, terrifying behavior that intelligence agents would later recognize as provocatory behavior meant to cause a mass panic. No airborne-dispersed drug or chemical was identified.
Station authorities instituted a lockdown and shut down the elevator. For three hours this continued, with little communication from the station staff, until station administrator Corril lifted the lockdown and personally traveled down the elevator cable to New York. He was met with armed bioterrorism response agents, as administrator Corrill had not explained why he’d illegally lifted the lockdown without proper clearance.
Corril was heard to say, through a pained gurgle “help me” before vomiting blood across the terminal floor and collapsing. Enough officers were too distracted to realize several of Corril’s “staff” had just come out with military-grade firearms, which they used to great effectiveness.
The narrative grows harder to follow at this point. It is believed the infection spread once on the surface, with great speed. Due to extreme changes in behavior post-infection; authorities were quickly compromised as people at every level of command were infected. Within a week, humans on Earth, Luna, and the orbital colonies devolved into grotesque rage-filled violence. Aerial drones captured scenes of bizarre mass ritual suicide, with millions of people moving into predetermined geometric shapes to lay down and die, others on endless marches where they would simply die of exhaustion after days of walking.
The worst footage, now banned and restricted to MPU Central Intelligence only, was a two minute long video of 3-4000 children in Tokyo marching down the corpse-laden street, singing in perfect unison a hauntingly beautiful song. The song does not exist in any record. The children also came from all over Japan, each independently arriving in Tokyo to join the strange musical death march. The music causes nostalgia in listeners, then extreme depression and the loss of the will to live.
The MPU instituted total quarantine on Earth, as per the two powers’ mutual aid treaties. The Martian navy ensured a system-wide stoppage of travel until the situation was better known.
Unfortunately no immediate solution would present itself. Earth was simply gone, and nothing could be done even within a few years to address the disease. Worse, it proved difficult for the MPU to maintain its quarantine as, periodically, the remnants of humanity down below would somehow figure out how to turn on the planetary defense grid. Scavengers also became a constant problem.
The mystery of what the disease even was, or where it came from, spurred great concern. The insane pace from initial infections to total civilizational collapse implied some kind of super-pathogen never before seen. Or a bioweapon. Either way, existence around Sol now felt very uncertain.
Flee into the Night
Like the insects, one must scurry away under the floorboards before the exterminator comes. The M.P.U., believing that humanity is once again facing an existential threat, commissions three Seedships to establish three new homes somewhere in the stars. It takes ten years to get them built and ready, with trained crews. During that time Mars looks to the stars and tries to collect from them three good worlds to send their children off to.
The three ships are Sparrow, Dvinalya, and Petierre. They are not the first Seedships ever constructed, but certainly the most advanced and most likely to succeed. Past efforts by smaller states, corporations, or private individuals were invariably limited by their lack of access to the tech and gear of something like Mars.
Martian naval vessels like their battlecruisers or corvettes were already capable of travel out to the Kuiper Belt and back without needing to refuel. So they formed the foundation of the design.
Long, but visibly bulky with armor belts and plates over vital sections. An enormous iceshield eclipses most of the ship behind it, and the drivecone at the end. Even when the fusion torch is off the ship can be seen in orbit from a viewer on the surface. When lit, it is like a small star racing across the sky.
There is no doubt the Seedships can survive hard travel, stressful maneuvers, and even combat. The crushing weight of time cannot be accounted for perfectly; however. There you can only trust that the engineers did their best.