Future Imperfect:
A Work of Fiction: Resulting From My Reading Too Much of the Internet
The New Dark Ages began somewhere in the early 2010's in America. By then, the Christian Dominionists held firmly the legislative branch of their government, beginning a reversal of 80 years of social Democratic reform. Over the next ten years, borders were closed, and faith-based organizations won support for the reworking of the education system, forcing many minorities off campus, nation-wide. Text books were rewritten, mosques and synagogues were closed, newspapers were censured and the entertainment industry was torn down. Millions of American lost their jobs as the nation refocused their economy back inside the nation’s boundaries. Hundreds of corporations went bankrupt as oil prices reached past $200 a barrel, crippling transportation and presaging the stock market crash of 2014. The Department of Homeland security took control of the pentagon bit by bit over these years, increasing government funding to military contractors, and forcing leveraged buy-outs of essential industries such as farming and transportation, turning the US government into the largest for-profit business in the world. During the Summer of 2018, the masses of unemployed American citizenry turned to violent protests in Washington, D.C., New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hundreds were killed by National Guard troops, and thousands were sprayed with Anthrax Mega and left to disperse risking infection for their families. For many, the only source of food clothing or medical care is through the state sponsored Christian Healthcare Consortium (CHC) and the Faith Based Unity fund (FBU).
With the 2021 pre-emptive nuclear strike by Iran upon the Iraqi puppet government, America declared war in support of “the democratic Islamic Republic of the future” and finished turning America into a Militaristic Theocracy. American foreign policy was reduced to the wholesale slaughter of Muslims. Europe, in the midst of economic crisis brought on by the failing Euro and the sudden disruption of petroleum production, disbanded the United Nations and formed the Earth First Alliance with Russia and various member states in eastern Europe and central Asia with the aim of hindering the American-led wars.
By 2025, China had no other options than to side with the Muslim states against the American-Dominionist Christian State, first by supplying money, then arms, then Chinese soldiers against the better equipped Americans. As the Oil Wars continued during the third decade of the millennium, engulfing the Middle East and part of southeast Asia, America’s relentless dominance of the Iraq and the former Saudi State, anchored as always by Israel, continued to hammer away at the Muslim World Union. To feed its relentless drive for world dominance, America re-instituted the draft for men and women under the age of thirty. Tens of thousands of jobless young Americans, devoid of other options for prosperity, signed on for the minimum seven-year enlistment, creating the largest military force in history.
As the American suburbs become a wasteland of scavengers, vigilantes and squatters, the inner cities turn into brown lands of decaying concrete and rusting steel. While underfed and impoverished American die by the hundreds of dysentery and malnutrition, or flounder in the re-education zones, the American Military-Industrial Theocracy began its move into space with its Nation-Buster Targeted Arrays (NBTA), the confiscation of communication satellites and the nationalization of Internet gateways.
By November, 2028 eighty percent of all space-based communication had been destroyed or confiscated. Not only did America have the upper hand in the Oil Wars, but it now owned most of the information flow worldwide. As a result, Earth First Alliance collapsed, completing the death of the European Union. The Chinese-Islamic Coalition slowed its advances and began to crumble into isolated resistance, due to their inability to respond quickly to American attacks.
On June 12, 2032, China suffered simultaneous nuclear attacks from space on the cities of Beijing, Nanjing and Guangzhou, forcing the Asian nation to surrender hostilities and forfeit its holdings in the Middle East. America quickly moved to button up the remaining oil fields and export the remaining crude to its refineries in North America.
Brownlands: the American southwest
Over the 11 years the Oil Wars raged, and after the “reconstruction years” that followed, world population fell by 53%, with Africa and the Middle East the hardest hit, losing over 70% of their people due to war and neglect. Worldwide, the population fell from around ten billion to just over four and a half billion people, the vast majority living in poverty, without clean water or adequate medical care. In America alone over six million soldiers died, and more than 1.3 million citizens during the New Dark Ages.
The American Dominionists won the third World War, yet their prize of global oil dominance will only last a few more Decades. By the end of the century, what is left of the modern, industrial world will finish collapsing unless the remaining oil production is used in the creation of a new infrastructure consisting of a renewable, diversified energy grid. Without a replacement plan for the fueling of the Christian world, all the suffering the human race has witnessed are in vain.
As the subtitle suggests, this work of fiction is a result of reading political discourse on the Internet late into the night and subsequent dreams. It was written in a fatigued state of flow in Friday the 13th, in May, 2005.
I wholeheartedly believe we are in for tough time ahead; that this burgeoning century may be civilization's last seems a real possibility. I fear for our children, who must life with the choices we and our forefathers have made.