World History

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History as we know it went along until the year 2000.

Taken from the introduction to Horace J. Pinebridge Compendium of Recent History, a textbook for LATMA 6th graders (copyright 2019, WW Norton & Co., used with permission):

In April of 2000, shortly after Elian Gonzalez was reunited with his father, another story made the news. There was some kind of Thing living in the Los Angeles sewers and, as the days passed, the footage that came into nearly every living room in the world revealed that the Thing down in that darkness moved with absurd speed, struck with insane strength, and seemed to regard humanity as nothing more than an endless supply of victims. Although some in the scientific and religious communities had theories for what the Thing was, most of us realized, on a very deep, instinctual level, that neither science nor religion could adequately explain what was happening beneath Los Angeles.

A few days later, the Russian president was making an address on live television. Something terrifying happened: a creature both pale and horrible leapt onto the stage, knocking aside all bodyguards, and, well, he-- it-- ate Vladimir Putin.

Things happened quickly after that.

We all suddenly became aware of supernaturals living amongst us. We didn't know a lot, but we certainly recognized that there were different varieties: the ones that shape-changed we called werewolves. The ones that drank blood we called vampires. The ones that just made absurd things happen, well, we had a lot of different names for them. And then, when all the different varieties of Others seemed to realize all at once that we knew about them, they all went to war with one another. And humanity was caught in the middle.

If we had only stayed in the middle, we might have survived. But of course we involved ourselves. Many governments of the world felt that they could impose controls on the warring factions of Others. Many non-governmental organizations ("Hunters," we called them, or "Assassins") chose to hunt the Others down, killing them singly or in large groups. This combination of public and private action against them caused many of these supernatural creatures to turn against us. We became targets in our billions, sitting ducks, incapable of truly fighting an enemy that seemed to be able to go anywhere, do anything, and foil both our best security and our fiercest weapons.

Of course, all the nations of the earth were destabilized by a war that quickly became so multi-faceted that it was no longer clear who was attacking whom. Pakistan launched nuclear weapons at the start of 2002 and no one has ever been certain whether the launch was related to one of those inhuman groups taking it into their heads to try to end the world, or whether some warlord or other finally decided to take Kashmir away from India, once and for all.

In short, the timeline of the end of the world happened as follows:

By 2005, nuclear weapons, pulse energy weapons, and beam weapons had been used against thousands of cities, and more than two billion people had died in those attacks. Most of those who died were innocent human beings who were targeted for reasons they never knew.

In 2007, the President of the United States signed into law Emergency Presidential Order #47, which reads as follows: "Any individual that may be classified as being of non-standard or non-human DNA, regardless of citizenship status or possession of a United States Social Security number, is hereby stripped of all rights guaranteed to citizens in the Constitution of the United States of America. Henceforth, any non-human individual may be, and should be, killed on sight. No such non-human individual may travel across state lines, sell or buy any product, own any property whether commercial or private, nor enter into any communication with human beings of standard human DNA. It is so ordered by the President, the Supreme Court, and the Congress of the United States of America."

By the end of 2010, most nations that existed in 2000 were gone, reorganized into smaller, fragmented city-states or corporate protectorates.

Also by the end of 2010, severe nuclear disasters had occurred on every continent, with the exception of Antarctica. Large portions of our world remain uninhabitable, and cancer rates have skyrocketed everywhere.

We call 2011 the Year of the Fall, because that is the year that the United States, the last of the great nations, disassembled into constituent parts, and sold itself off in chunks to corporations. Huge tracts of it were afire and left as wastelands, with a few areas of the East Coast banding together to become the New States of America, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the last democracy left in the world.

The Los Angeles/Tijuana Metropolitan Area, also known as LATMA, was one of the first areas to be divested and sold to the Corporate Consortium, a group of companies which were given free reign over a tremendous portion of the West coast, from Mt. Shasta all the way to the Mexican border, with significant inland holdings as well. LATMA became an oligarchy, ruled over by a small group of wealthy corporations. Citizens of LATMA have no inherent rights with which they are born, except for the right to buy from, and sell to, the Consortium. We live here because we are corporate employees, we purchase products, and thus to be a citizen is to be a cog in the great machine that is the Corporate Consortium.

Communication with the rest of the world has deteriorated in the years since LATMA's founding. What we know for certain is that henceforward, the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries will stand out in human history as the Golden Age of civilization. As of the time that I send this book to print, huge portions of the earth's surface remain barren and irradiated. Most of humanity is enslaved to ruthless fiends and demons, or to corporations. Small pockets of luxury and peace exist in remote places, but year by year these remnants of happier times vanish bit by bit, captured, invaded, taken over, or simply destroyed by the forces of the great evil unleashed upon the world during the Fall.

-Horace J. Pinebridge, Professor of Pre-Fall Studies, LATMA Institute of Corporate Indoctrination and Education Services. January 13, 2019