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hmpfThe bomb on Manchester never falls.
New York, Moscow, London, Leningrad - 15 million dead shock the world into unprecedented, unlikely sanity. Leaders meet, treaties are signed in a place picturesque and idyllic, far from the fallout. Pictures of men shaking hands in the newspaper, straining to smile.
It takes weeks after the official end of the hostilities for the people to start trickling back into the city. Sam and Gene and the others are among the first, along with other, dedicated members of the police. Somebody has to uphold the order, make the place safe.
They aren't needed. In the weeks of the return, as the city fills up slowly, people walk the streets as if in a dream, talk to each other in hushed voices, touch each other gently, disbelievingly. Many, trying on their lives like old shoes found in the attic, find they no longer fit.
***
Writing this took me one hour. It's from "Back to the Future (the Long Way 'Round)"
New York, Moscow, London, Leningrad - 15 million dead shock the world into unprecedented, unlikely sanity. Leaders meet, treaties are signed in a place picturesque and idyllic, far from the fallout. Pictures of men shaking hands in the newspaper, straining to smile.
It takes weeks after the official end of the hostilities for the people to start trickling back into the city. Sam and Gene and the others are among the first, along with other, dedicated members of the police. Somebody has to uphold the order, make the place safe.
They aren't needed. In the weeks of the return, as the city fills up slowly, people walk the streets as if in a dream, talk to each other in hushed voices, touch each other gently, disbelievingly. Many, trying on their lives like old shoes found in the attic, find they no longer fit.
***
Writing this took me one hour. It's from "Back to the Future (the Long Way 'Round)"
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Heeeh. That's actually the one sentence I've already changed...
Date: 2007-11-27 10:45 pm (UTC)>I hate you for making me feel so vulnerable,
Would it help if I told you that things are going to get positively utopian after the war, for the most part? Complete with Hippie!Ray? *g*
More spoilers follow. Read at your own risk.
Sam's going to stay a bit angsty, of course - poor guy's kind of blaming himself for the war in his worse moments, and managed to catch a fairly large dose of radiation as well, so he'll get ironic!cancer later - though what's going to drive him truly insane, for a while, are minor differences - things like Michael Jackson becoming famous, but as a reggae singer etc. But he'll live to see and enjoy flying cars and stuff.
>P.S. - Are you sure you and I were not twins separated at birth? Post-war, decadent scenarios are another of my secret kinks,
Kink twins. Definitely. (Maybe our kinks generally tend to occur in combination? Maybe they're all closely related, psychologically?)
>besides being a recurrent dream/nightmare I've been having since childhood.
Dude!!! Me too! Usually nuclear - either war, or Tchernobyl mark II (what's called, in German, a GAU - "größter anzunehmender Unfall"). I think I'm writing this story mainly because of my deep fear of nuclear war and disaster. I happen to live near one of the most dangerous nuclear power plants in Germany, and I was old enough to be thoroughly scared by Tchernobyl when it happened, and not old enough yet to really understand. For a while I was afraid of breathing, of rain, of eating...
Though, with all the utopian elements of the story, it's really about *all* the ideas I had about the future when I was a kid. (I kind of assume that, being born in 1976, my ideas of the future were still fairly similar to those that people in the 70s would have held. The central idea of this story is, "what if science fiction had got it right?")
Anyway... thanks for the high praise. It's appreciated, and it's very motivating. :-)