BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter XIV. A.D.

XIV. A.D.  

AND IT WAS A BRAVE NEW WORLD FOR IT HAD NOT STOOD STILL during his year in the clinic, nor indeed over the prior decade, now a distant blur in his mind, obscured by the mountain of pills that had kept him awake along the endless white-water ride of double-shifts, all fed by the lake of cachaça he had drunk to get him through the shadowy nights, all haunted by the victims of the bloody swathe he had cut through their ranks.

According to what the media had since turned into legend, his father's small startup, Nuronics, had gone on with his mother at its helm to eventually decode the extraterrestrial communiqué that had so enraptured the world when he was a child yet had so deranged his father for the last few years of his life, eventually sending him to an early grave at his own hand. 

Nowadays, as far as the media and the masses were concerned, his mother might as well have been the new Messiah. By cracking the communiqué at the beginning of the new century, she had prized open a bottomless treasure chest of ultra-advanced schematics for which she also had the foresight to negotiate the exclusive global licensing rights in the canniest business deal since William Gates III cut his operating system agreement with IBM in the late twentieth century.

Holding back the bulk of the decrypted file from the United League, his mother never divulged more than an 'executive' summary (itself running to over quarter of a million screens) but even with the technical specifics omitted, it was enough to send heads spinning at the Scientific Institute in Paris, bastion to the greatest academic minds on the planet. With the corporation's licensing deal paving its way, Nuronics then took just seven years to become the planet's largest and most powerful corporation, unseating Applebook from its number one spot in both sales and profitability along the way.

His mother had pretty much unlocked the secrets of the universe and, as such, she had been christened by the media as the savior of humanity. If their 21st century forefathers had thought technology was advancing at an exponential rate in their time then they couldn't possibly begin to fathom the quantum leaps made by Nuronics during the first decade of the 22nd century. She had barely begun to scratch the surface of the priceless jewels contained within her alien treasure chest and yet, over the course of those ten short years, she had used her initial findings to completely transform the earth's surface and skies.

Before her decryption, much of the world's population had needed to adopt to a nomadic existence, regularly re-migrating at the whim of the solar winds which dictated the shifts of the atmosphere's vagrant ozone holes, rendering vast swathes of land — including much of North America — barren and barely habitable. 

Those people who eventually grew tired of relocating across the planet's surface had chosen to settle in the windowless retirement conurbations springing up around the world, their subterranean roads and public areas covered to protect them from the sun's scorching radiation, creating an artificial cave-like existence, albeit with the luxury of scrubbed air and electrical light.

Curious anomalies had included Patagonia and regions covering a few of the planet's larger cities (most notably Paris and St. Petersburg), which had remained protected by an acceptably constant level of ozone, although a severe lack of local rainfall meant that these areas still depended on a desalinated water supply that was piped from ocean-side plants, making convenient targets for the rebels' repeated attacks. As much of Patagonia's ozone-covered landmass had long-since been requisitioned by the United States of Latin America to support the sprawl of its own defense camps, any claims to a privileged lifestyle were almost exclusively restricted to the military and their families.

But after his mother's discoveries, the world was provided with far greater stability thanks to the 'ZonePatches' constructed by Nuronics and now populating the heavens.