New Game Plus, Part 2

The proceeding breakdown of communication was not recorded nor ever reached the public in any complete way.

While conspiracy theorists would speculate on the gaps in history, they would always over-complicate the bloodbath that the BNG’s last political meeting descended into.

With every rejection of Kidney’s ideas, someone died. Sometimes a lot of people. Even the oldest ones at the table had grown up with this man, and now he was ordering more and more of them to their graves by the minute.

Any attempt at diplomacy broke down.

The globe was essentially robbed from its holders, placed entirely in the hands of one Walter Roscoe Kidney.

The few who survived that day were sworn to secrecy. The coming times of mass protest, destruction, and reconstruction were largely framed as an old world of absolute apocalyptic decay. With Kidney slowly painted as a savior to dissuade the image of a man who tore down everything for the sake of his own dream, he found his only way to escape the past.

Slowly, history was replaced, though never perfectly. Most could accept the alterations, or never thought so hard about it. Alongside the past, Kidney replaced “lost” officials with those inside his own cabinet- or in the case of his home country, himself.

As the first Official President of the United States, Kidney, alongside his friends around the world, could start construction on his dream. The economy would be made to stay still. A single, untoppable market was artificially made for theme parks and theme parks only. Renaming the year to the one in which his dream started, when his dark Foundation was first created, Kidney stood at the top of this intense upheaval, less like a political revolution and more like a geographical phenomenon. Once, there was an ice age. Today, he thought- would begin an amusement age.

Many machines were destroyed, and important innovations discarded. Technology was turned back so drastically, it was as if the world had gone back in time. Reproduction was encouraged, often financially, just to provide more unknowing masses to the world. In schools, they were only ever taught the new history- never the old one, like their parents may have provided.

In time, this added up to a success. The reboot of humanity was carried out not flawlessly, or without bloodshed… but… at least to a man like Kidney, it came across as rather simple.

Someone spoke to him, just a few days into this “NGP” era.

“Why… do all this…? The world would have changed on its own eventually…”

“I just felt I’d… messed up before. Wanted another go at it.”

“This is a lot to do… for a few mistakes.”

“I don’t settle for anything less than what I see in my dreams.”

“I’m so tired, Walt.”

Kidney finally faced the pickled brain. In his prison, what remained of Ib Waschbär was now regretting ever crawling back to the man who made him.

“You really don’t want to see the fruits of my… our labor?”

“I don’t care anymore, Walter. You can have Ron, tell everyone you made him, I don’t care. Please, please kill me.”

A flash of a bright-haired young woman blared in Kidney’s head like a painful solar ray.

“You want to die. After all this- with so much still to come- you want to die.”

“Yes.”

“…” Kidney’s neck tilted downward, furrowing his brow as he stared at his leather shoes.

“Please kill m-“

Kidney whipped around and threw the pitiful thing right out his window, before promptly straightening his bowtie.

“We don’t have time for that in my world.”