City of Legions.1 [draft3]

Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To level a city was easy. The fusion driven Corsair, several blocks in length, had the unique ability to generate sound in the hundreds of decibels upon a target, seemingly without limit as to distance.

Who could have dreamed that millions would be killed by sound? The Corsair was not a horn, of course. It did not radiate sound outward. Rather, it generated sound at the target, as if quantum entanglement could be weaponised (which would be a state secret, of course).

“Captain, target co-ordinates reached. HQ order confirmed: obtain surrender or Q9 it.”

“Confirmed. Q9 or surrender.”

Captain Singh had only to follow orders. She had trained for this all her life. But to wipe out a city of civilians… That stain of doubt ruined her pristine sheen of confidence. She was well aware of how the bomber pilots could not get over their mission to bomb Hiroshima.

This was war to protect what was left, she told herself. You trained for this a hundred times she told herself. Or were brainwashed so you could kill millions she whispered to herself. She reasoned that she could restrain her actions until she had no choice: that crack in the fence allowed the elephant through. In the back of her mind she wondered whether history would judge her.

It was not hard at all. She sat in her comfortable chair, in a spacious command deck large enough to fit that WWII bomber.

“No response comms? Very well, hit Q1.”

“Q1.”

A low rumble could be felt on deck. In the streets below anyone foolish enough to be outside collapsed, their hearing gone. Birds fell out of the sky. Rats collapsed, quivering. Trees lost their leaves and branches. Cars exploded, their glass shards spraying the city sidewalks and road. In the central core, high-rise buildings buckled, denuded as their windows vanished to the streets below like accumulated snow off a roof.

By now thirty or forty pilots, the main reserve still left standing, had attacked the Corsair with nuclear armed missiles. But, like the earlier ground to surface missiles, drones, and other ordinance, the missiles vaporised well before reaching anywhere near the Corsair. Most were unable to fire, their planes and pilots incapacitated once identified. Like mosquitoes attempting to attack an elephant, the missiles had no effect. Indeed, Captain Singh did not even bother to issue a command as the automated systems hummed along, dispatching the attacks with the same care and efficiency as it did the sanitation and air filtration systems within the ship.

Along the way cities and bases had already fallen, stopovers to the target. Finally Captain Singh was above the command city, her job nearly complete.

“Can we hit the command centre with a Q3 please and see whether we can avoid taking out the entire city?”

“Q3. Narrow to command centre.”

Captain Singh’s order unleashed a flurry of activity as the destructive target narrowed but strengthened slightly. At Q3 buildings collapsed to sand, penetrating down 20 stories to make certain no basements survived.

The target area instantly vaporised, with dust blowing outward. Then, as the sound starting hitting below ground a geyser of dust blew up into the air as level after level was reduced and blown toward the edge of the hole and then upward to the sky.

“Comms, anything?” It did not matter that the enemy had millions of soldiers. One Corsair could fly to any part of the earth without let or hindrance, vaporise it and return to base without the Captain needing to do anything more strenuous than lift her coffee cup. Opposition was quite futile.

Just then, a blinding flash enveloped the city.

“What was that?” Before Captain Singh could respond, the Corsair started moving upward as fast as it could to avoid the blast radius: dozens of nuclear weapons buried underground in a ring around the command centre had detonated. The Corsair was in the centre of an expanding and rising ring, radiation and energy from gigatons of weapons enveloping the Corsair like a fountain spray. The G forces from the emergency lift knocked most of the 10,000 crew down to the floor.

The enemy had destroyed its own city when their leadership fell, the ultimate deadman’s switch, despite still being filled with millions of people–all in an attempt to take out one Corsair.

“Report!” The ring of expanding mushroom clouds hit despite the rapid manoeuvre. The Corsair tore apart along the port axis and started to bobble and shake, like a Frisbee without enough spin. As it fell to the ground it fell through the wall of nuclear fire. The impact when it hit the ground created a massive explosion that dwarfed the nuclear explosions and pushed the planet, throwing debris kilometres in the air.

The survivors say that the destruction of the Corsair, the breach of its fusion drive, caused the blink. Countries everywhere collapsed. Records were instantly lost. Climate altered the planet even more than before. Billions died.

Records of Captain Singh’s mission did not survive. She need not have worried about history after all. The nation state was replaced. The surviving corporations owned everything. Out of this, eventually, the City of Legions arose.

⥁

Many decades later, in the comfort of the residences of the employee district of the City of Legions, I filled my cast iron kettle embossed “LA THEIERE” and “STAUB” with fresh cold water, waiting for the temperature to drop until it felt cool as a river. Post blink many things had been lost or were so rare as to become luxuries accessible only by owners and their inner circle, tea being one of them. The cast iron kettle was pre-blink, a present from Sue, the matriarch leading the family which owned the City of Legions, as was the Cardamon tea. Even before the blink most tea growing regions had collapsed due to climate change so the notion of drinking tea had all but died out.

Steam soon escaped from the black cast iron spout, cleverly formed by indentations in the cast iron lid and base, at first in a whisper and then quickly thereafter with an urgent rush. Two steel handles swung up to embrace the lid when lifting the kettle. When the handles were swung down the lid was free to be lifted up, such as when filling the kettle with fresh water. So much was lost. It was a miracle to find anything pre-blink in working order.

A call came in. I touched the side of my glasses to answer as rain gently tapped the curved floor to ceiling corner window.