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[first_of_steel]

That Mindy girl's alien burgers had turned out pretty good last night, and Roger will remember them in future, but right now his mind was on something else she told him about. She'd mentioned the Sensoriums could simulate just about any environment he could think of, and since he'd found a map to their location on his omnicomm this morning, he figured he'd put that to the test. He'd seen virtual reality training pods before, although as an MP he never really rated using one, so he wasn't sure what to expect.

... the desert north of the Lost Hills bunker where they'd been taking the younger Initiates for training, apparently. An absolutely perfect replica thereof, even down to the scorpions the size of Corvegas.

Huh.

Well, no sense wasting a perfectly good blighted hellscape. They'd pulled him here to fight a war, hadn't they? Might as well start practicing for it.

He pulls his helmet over his head, flips the neck latches shut, and reaches over his shoulder for the supersledge he carries. He'll break out the laserguns later. Right now, for all that he's taken his situation pretty well so far, he really, really wants to hit something.

Comments

[first_of_steel]

"This wasn't just shortage. This was complete and total ending of fossil fuel supplies," Roger says. "Everywhere. The last oil field in Texas ran completely dry in 2052. Half the wars in the Middle East died out by 2060 because there wasn't anything left to fight over except the holy sites. About all we had left to work with was nuclear power, and experimental solar energy generation out West in a couple of places."

"Between running out of energy, trying to keep everyone in the world fed, and diseases like the New Plague out there, I wish I could say I was surprised when those bastards finally let the A-bombs fly."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

"No one planned ahead for this?" Zouichi was a little surprised; humanity in general wasn't good at looking ahead to the far future, but when things started looking dire, they usually kicked it into high gear as far as research and development was concerned.

"...and what do you mean, the New Plague?"

[first_of_steel]

"The United States started doing everything in its power to convert to atomic energy pretty early on," Roger says. "The rest of the world... they weren't so good at it. Not to mention that even if they all had managed to move off coal and oil for energy, the sheer amount of plastics and advanced polymers in use was just draining the oil supply as fast as anything Chryslus Motors could've put on the road. We had our atomic cars, we had Hoover Dam, we moved our robots onto fission batteries and we invented the microfusion cell, but in the end it just wasn't enough."

He grimaces. "That was an epidemic that broke out in Colorado when I was eight," he says. "New Plague. Think influenza, the 1918 strain. Add in fevers, hemorrhaging, and swellings that make the worst case of the mumps you've ever seen look like a prickly heat rash. Spreads fast, spreads hard, tends to kill within a week or so of the onset of symptoms. It killed two hundred thousand people in Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs alone before the government brought down the boom and imposed a national quarantine."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi looked grim. He supposed some things didn't really change from one Earth to the next. "Naturally caused? Or engineered?" For some reason, this seemed to be an important detail for him.

"You survived... were you not in the area at the time? Or did you recover from the illness? What was its efficacy?"

That was right. Back then, the nation-states were still all strongly divided by physical borders. Eventually, time had eroded those somewhat, allowing rapid global deployment of personnel and equipment. But apparently, it had happened too late for Roger's world.

[first_of_steel]

"Chinese bioweapon," Roger said, equally grimly. "Rumor had it the zero point was a couple of Chinese agents captured in the act of seeding the virus in Denver. Engineered, to the best of my knowledge, not domesticated."

Most of what he knew about the New Plague's origins was what he had been fed by the scientists at West-Tek and Mariposa. Given what they'd been working on in supposed response to the disease, he didn't particularly trust them, but it was all the information he had. Probably all the information anyone had, now.

"I was still a kid then. I grew up in Wisconsin," he said. "Understand, the damn disease started turning up nationwide before they could really stop it. But I wasn't anywhere near the hot zone at its height."