May

It was not clear who launched the first missile, or why. The info-sphere was awash in conflicting currents of information, misinformation, and disinformation. Some claimed that it was the US that fired the first shot, trying to unite its conflict-torn country against an old, common enemy. As western Russia, the most densely populated part of the world’s biggest country, was beginning to experience the returner phenomenon, it seemed like the perfect time to strike. Since before the Cold War, the two superpowers had most of their weapons pointed at each other, in the world’s longest Mexican standoff. For years, the nuclear deterrent seemed to work because of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, but the returner phenomenon had drastically altered people’s views on mortality and the future of the planet.

The US would claim that Russia fired first, though considering the cultural climate leading up to Mayday, it seemed unlikely. While these were the two conclusions most people jumped to immediately, as the conflicts developed and multiplied, other possible explanations were put forward. One of them placed the responsibility on China, who had remained fairly quiet over the past six months. Though historically China used to bury their dead, over the past century of rapid growth and urban expansion, cremation had largely replaced burial. Given that the majority of returners had been those who had died in the past few decades, China felt that the phenomenon posed little danger to its stability. So, it was possible that it waited until half of the world was distracted by internal problems before making their military play.

China, meanwhile, shifted the blame onto India, using much of the same arguments. India had surpassed China as the most populous country in the world, since it didn’t have the infamous one child policy that China had enforced for years. Moreover, being a Hindu majority country, it had always cremated their dead, and thus feared less from the phenomenon than almost any other nation. It had also long maintained close diplomatic relations with the US, and much of the tech sector in America was staffed by Indian Americans. So then the blame game came full circle, with some suggesting that India had initiated the conflict by making it look like the US fired the first shot.

However, it also seemed strange that none of the superpowers took responsibility for starting the conflict. What is the purpose of starting a major war without an expressed purpose? Sure, for decades nations would classify incursions as “operations” or “conflicts” to circumvent declarations of war, which in many places would require the approval of congress, but this was radically different. So, another theory that quickly spread was that it was some other nation that triggered the conflict by means of a cyber-attack that hijacked missile command. Some experts suggested that there never was a first shot. It was enough to trick one of the automatic systems into thinking that there was an incoming attack to trigger countermeasures, which in many ways was far easier to do than to hack into the launching mechanisms.

Ultimately, it seemed that most of the consequences stemmed from built-in automated responses, rather than deliberate human decision. Given the high speed of modern computing and the wide extent of satellite guidance and surveillance, the deployment and destruction of the majority of the world’s nuclear weapons only took 3 days. The battle was essentially fought by the military AIs and their predictive algorithms.

Of the thousands of IBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) launched, less than one percent made landfall. The trillions of dollars previously invested into missile defense over the decades allowed the military industrial complex to run countless simulations of how such an event would play out. As such, there were measures in place to intercept or disable most of the missiles targeting major urban centers. Though the frequent explosions in the sky visible from the world’s largest cities still had a traumatizing effect on the spectators, and made “mayday” the most frequently uttered word by pilots and air traffic controllers.

While most of the cities were spared, preserving hundreds of millions of lives, the defense algorithms did have to allow certain missiles heading for more deserted areas through, when the risk/benefit analysis deemed it preferable. So, the beginning of May witnessed the most nuclear explosions in the planet’s history, visible from space, like fiery flowers blooming. The fallout from these explosions would color the sky red in the months to come throughout most of the world.

The majority of the casualties from the Three Days of Fire and Brimstone, as the period came to be known in subsequent apocalyptic literature, in fact came from water rather than fire. Though the AIs were instrumental in minimizing the loss of life, with estimates that the casualties would have been hundreds of times worse if the same exchange happened during the Cold War, there were unforeseen miscalculations when it came to the missiles that detonated in the oceans. In programming the defense systems, the goal was mainly to protect land targets. Therefore, not enough thought was given to the possibility of detonating a nuclear missile in water offshore for the purpose of creating a tidal wave.

Dozens of coastal cities suffered heavy casualties and structural damage. Furthermore, the radioactive ocean water ended up contaminating many of the inland drinking supplies. Even after the ocean water receded, much of it had seeped into the soil, which would cause mutations in the area for decades to come.

The brief period that had offered a glimpse of global harmony and universal immortality was violently cut short. The pendulum once again swung to the other extreme.