Published Aug 22nd, 2016, 8/22/16 1:22 am
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Prologue - Radio Active Matches
On October 26, 1962 the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, resulting in a full scale nuclear war between the greatest world powers of that time. The consequences of nuclear weapons and their resulting radiation poisioning were not as well understood as it is today. Nations played with radio active matches, and got chemically burned. The lands got burned, the seas got boiled, until nothing remained but a few protected gray areas were the radiation hadn't acutely killed everything it had touched.
The ash from the bombs blocked out the sun, causing a drop in temperature and ushering in a new ice age. The whole planet was covered in it. All over the world temperature dropped approximimately 10 degrees, freezing all water up to 2 meters deep. Nuclear winter.
A lead infused glass dome around the city serves as protection from the high radiation outside. Even then, some filters through. Residue plutonium and radiactive uranium isotopes still linger on the island itself as well, but great effort has been put into processing that. Slowely the barren lands are starting to grow grass and trees again. No leaves on the trees have appeared yet, though. Healthy trees are only able to grow in the green house with it's thick walls and lead infused glass to keep the radiation levels to a minimal. It is probably one of the most radiation free places on the island, apart from the underground construction running underneath everybody's feet.
Two days on Delany - Kinsley and Murray
Doctor Murray is late for work. His desk is still covered in papers and empty coffee mugs from the day before. His favorite drink he keeps telling her. The Biochemist's voice can be heard from accross the hall, apologizing to Mr Gibbons at the registration stand. Seems like he finally arrived. With great hurry he strides into our shared office.
"How are the tanks doing?" The tall man asks me immediately. His cloths look wrinkled and a thin sheen of sweat coats his forehead. He looks sick.
"You look pale. Everything alright, Murray?"
"Yes, yes, I'm fine. I just overslept a little; had to run the way here to avoid getting Claire after me again. You know how it is," he makes a dismissive gesture, waving away any complaints I might have shot his way. "but how are the tanks doing?"
"They are quite alright, last time I checked." I answer. What's with this obsession about the tanks all of a sudden?
"I heard there was a leak the other day. I was wondering if you'd heard anything about it. But it seems you don't. Bummer." With a sigh he slumps down into his desk chair, swiveling around until he faces me again. With his hands folded in his lap he stares off into space with tired eyes.
"Are you sure you are alright? Oi, Murray!" I wave a hand in front of his face. This seems to startle him out of whatever thought he was processing in that head of his.
"Uhm, yeah . . ."
"Right. . ."
I return back to my work. If he doesn't want to talk about it, then he doesn't want to talk about. Privacy is already rather hard to come by on Delany. After all; the island is tiny! It literally has one main street and that's it. Everything is connected to it, not counting the underground passages. Their office is located on the second floor of the Green House. The air here is warm and moist; quite a contrast to outside with a climate that dries out your air ways and chills your bones.
"Hey, Kinsley, I'm not feeling so well. I'm going to ask Claire if I can leave early today." says a voice from behind me. It sounds tired and hoarse. I turn around and am met with the sight of my college. He looks pale and sweaty with droopy eyes. That doesn't bode well.
"Ah, yeah. Probably for the best. You look like you haven't slept in three days."
"Yeah" He sniffs and get's up with some difficulty. "It's probably just the flu or something like that." We both know it could be something else, though. Most virusses and harmfull bacteria were eliminated from the island years ago. The most common and dangerous enemy for the human body is surprisingly; itsself. Due to the high radiation levels caused by the nuclear fallout that took place decades ago cancer is the most common cause of death around here.
"Check in with Doctor Sanders, just to be sure, alright?"
"Yeah, I'll do that."
Of course it could just be a flu. People are not as resistent to the flu as before the nuclear fallout, or so she's read in the archieve, so it could be that those nasty symptoms are caused by that. At least the doctors would threat him for that. If one gets a form of cancer they can't just cut out of you, well, then you are doomed. It is just so common; distributing a resource-heavy medicine to anyone who has a disease with a high fatality and return rate is just not do-able.
"Get well soon!" I call after him as he walks out of the office.
"Thank you." comes the solemn reply. He's normally very bubbly and nonchalant, talking about everything that is not usefull and spinning in circles in his office chair; it is weird seeing him so quiet and filled with worry. He must be feeling really sick. Or tired; he looked exhausted. Dr. Chase Murray doesn't return again that day, and I carry on as usual.
-
I swing open the door to my room. The sun has already set and it is freezing cold outside. During the day it's around 5 degrees centrigrade, with temperatures of -10 during the night. I live in the Postal Residency Office in a room at the cornor of the building. It grands a magnificent view of the island with all it's flickering lights and the occasional person going from one building to the other. Everywhere the ground has already started to form a thin sheet of frost with the dropping temperature.
I kick off my shoes. While sitting down on my bed I place my hand bag on the table accross from me. The carpet feels warm and fuzzy underneath my feet. It came with the room when I got it. Before the nuclear fallout people used money to buy and sell goods. On Delany, Communism has flourished to the extreme: Money does not exist. Yes; it is possible to trade goods amongst each other but every basic need is provided by the government. Food; clothing; hygene products; etc, it all gets evenly distributed amongst the small population of around 35 people. If you work more you can earn luxery products or better housing. This is how I got one of the nicest rooms of the island with a great view and central heating. How the energy neccesary for keeping everything running on Delany is produced is the work of none other than Yagura Namikaze;
After the nuclear fallout the people of the future found refuge on the island of Delany, named after the scientist's late wife who lead them there. Those who survived occupied the already existing buildings and got the systems up and running again. They knew it would not last forever, though; although effective they were outdated: relying on fossil fuels and other limited recourses. This was when one of the scientists began studying Nikola Tesla's work anew. He found the answer to wireless electricy via Tesla's notes and he solved the energy problem for millenia to come by creating the construction plans for an artificial star. However, he died of radiaton poisioning before it's completion. The NTSCoil reactor was created in the center of the island and glows a bright blue because of the Cherenkov radiation it emitts. It is a serene sight to behold. That something so seemingly harmless could kill everybody in a 1 mile radius is slight unsettling, but it does no good dwelling on such thoughts.
The bed feels comfortable in my exhaustion and I drift of to a sleep. I dream of rapidly dividing cells growing into horrid tumors in my oldest friend's body and hope that when I woke that morning it was really all just a bad dream.
-
Murray is already there when I come into our office. He has cleaned his desk up a bit, but he himself looks no better. He even looks more pale then the day before.
"Good morning. Why are you not at home resting? What did the doctor say?" His gaze shifts to the floor.
"I went to the doctor yesterday as you recommended, and as they were examining me they also tested my blood, and, uh, they said I have something called Chronic myelogenous leukemia. In other words . . ." he trails off. My blood runs cold.
"Moira, I have cancer. The bad kind." He finally admits. His expession is morose. My mouth feels dry. I want to say something but am at a loss for words. My best friend and college is going to die.
The dead here are not buried; they get recycled for their residing lipids; proteins; minerals and vitamins. No animal life exists on Delany except for a few types of reptiles and insects. Because of the lack of fauna humany had to come by food an other way. So in an act of immoral desperation humanity took this drastic measure. I have always been alright with this; it works just fine, provides us with the food we need and it's not like dead people are going to need it anyway. But thinking about Chase Murray in such a context makes my stomach lurch violently. That is when I realise the wrongness of it all. When Murray dies he will be recycled as well, and he will be send back to me in a box as dinner a week later. What a horrible thought!
The dead here are not buried; they get recycled for their residing lipids; proteins; minerals and vitamins. No animal life exists on Delany except for a few types of reptiles and insects. Because of the lack of fauna humany had to come by food an other way. So in an act of immoral desperation humanity took this drastic measure. I have always been alright with this; it works just fine, provides us with the food we need and it's not like dead people are going to need it anyway. But thinking about Chase Murray in such a context makes my stomach lurch violently. That is when I realise the wrongness of it all. When Murray dies he will be recycled as well, and he will be send back to me in a box as dinner a week later. What a horrible thought!
". . . I'm so sorry." I say, enveloping the frail body of my tall friend in a hug.
"Heh, well we knew from the beginning that this could happen, right?"
"Oh Chase, never did I imagine it could happen to any of us."
Epilogue - Immoral desperation
People can be driven to do terrible things in order to stay alive. Some say that if we cross a certain line we can no longer consider us to be 'human' anymore. But where is that line? I myself am concerned about the future of the human race. Now, I know Mineraft is a game and such, but this project got me thinking about alternative energy sources and I came to the sad conclusion that we will probably destroy ourselves and everything around us in the end. I'm not saying humans are by definition bad. We're not good either, though.
What I am trying to say is that in Minecraft it would be possible to build a sustainable city by making a tree farm; a 2x2 water pool and hoarding a bunch of seeds and sapplings to get by, but in real life we would sooner destroy ourselves than reach such an ambitious goal. By the time that happens; nuclear war, I hope I'll be long gone already.
Trivia - Delany further explained
- Desert planes marred with streams of blood run accross the globe like massive scars. The abundance of iron contamination in the water has given the water a blood red hue. Everything on the surface died, only a few species of plants and animal life have been successfully recovered from preservation banks. It was known this could happen. No prevent the human race from facing extinction a group of scientistsbuild the Ark to preserve the life as we know it today. Most was lost, but some remained. The phrase "everything tastes like chicken" never had been more true than now.
After the terrible nuclear war the initial group of scientists that came to Delany came to the conclusion that there was no god, for otherwise he would not have let this happen. They burned their bibles and any other holy books in their possession. With that religion was no more. Instead they used an adaption of the constitution of Holland where one of the initial scientists was from. He had it on him at the time. With that the constitution of Delany was set up, compromising out of true or false statements, not unlike a boolean function. Needless to say that the person who did the editing was a computer scientist from what was once the UK.
Due to the radiation most people will become technically infertile by the age of 20-25. They migth still be able to have children, but their reproductive cells will be heavily damaged by that point; making it very likely that any children born from these damaged cells will be defect in body and mind. To prevent the population from dying out and keeping up the cell count in the Ark, at early puberty the reproductive organs will be harvasted from each child and screened for any cells that have already been damaged. Only cells with no noticeble damage will be stored in the Ark or used in Stem-cell research to find a cure for the cancers that plagues the population. Some call it inhumane, but the scientists have a fair point; those reproductive cells would otherwise be too heavily damaged to use after 10 years. For the sake of the preservation of the race this ritual of sorts was set in place. No more periods, though. Woman rejoiced at that.
Of course Cockroaches survived the initial deadly radiation and thrived in the area. They are used as a source for protein in the bland paste which grows in the bio-Chem labs.
There is no market; buying anything is pretty much impossible. However; it is possible to earn credits by doing work that works in the advantage of the island and it's inhabitants. With these credits you have right to extra food and luxery items such as music. The pressure to perform is immense and this way of recourse distribution created a competitive society. Everybody is trying to one-up each other.
The initial group who arrived at Delany was solely composed of scientists of various fields: Natural sciences; Formal sciences and Applied sciences; no one in the field of social science, though. With them they carried the Ark; a device storing up to 10.000 fertilized human eggs which are being held in cooled container. Humanities last hope at restoring the biodiversity it once had. Although brilliant, the scientists were, to a great extend, without moral. Desperation drove Delany's people to immoral ways of human conception. No longer were people born, they were grown.- The name Delany is something I got by Googling rare girl names.
- Moira is a character in the movie X-men: First Class. I really wanted to use her name.
- Chase is the name of a doktor from the television show "House[MD]". I got the idea of Moira and Chase from my story calling each other by their surnames from there as well.
- There are only 3 blocks of actual grass on the island. They are located in the Bio-Chem lab. Instead of regular grass, Flattened grass was used for it's yellow-ish color. I wanted something that looked dead and dried out.
- To simulate a nuclear winter sort of feel I put a huge doom around the island with 80% bedrock and 20% black stained glass to distribute light unevenly around the island. This creates an eternal twilight which I think suits the theme well.
- The people of Delany are very vivid writers. There isn't much else to do.
Disclaimer:
I am not a regocnised scientist in the field of any of the sciences related to this post. I just like sciency facts and there are some I've used which would not be accurate in the setting used in the story. You don't need to correct any, although, you are not unwelcome to do so.
PS:
There may be a few spelling / grammar mistakes I have not seen while proof reading this. It is quite a lot of text and I had very little time to edit it. Please, forgive me. An attempt was made.
- knetterzak
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Good luck in the contest (with all these build-teams you will need it) fellow contestant!