The Day After . . .

1-Prologue

Once upon a land, in a time far, far away - but sooner than you would hope - a great war will be fought. As in all good wars, it will have its winners - whom I will call the winners, for expediency's sake - and its losers - whom I shall likewise refer to as the losers. And as in all good wars, there is much good bloodshed and tragedy and revelry and the like. And the end result, of course, is that the winners rejoice and the losers retreat. It is at this point that the tale becomes somewhat alien. For you see, the retreat of the losers is prevented in hopes that further uprising will be prevented. The losers become the vassals, or slaves if you will, of the winners. And this is good. Because history of course is merely the servant of the historian, he or she assuring that the winners are indeed the winners. Of course, as with any vassals, oppression leads to aggression, which leads to revolution, which leads to war, which begets the cycle anew.

But I digress. To tell the full story, one must start at the beginning. Since no story has a true beginning or ending, I will choose my beginning ten years after our war - which shall from hereon be known as Ragnarok - the twilight of the gods, the battle at the end of time, the end of the world.

This story is of humanity's future. Civilization had advanced to the point that humans had taken control of the forces of nature, space, time, reality, life, and death. Even their own minds. In fact, all that stood between them and their ascension to godhood was their own arrogance. Long before, their theologians had come to the realization that the eventual end of evolution would be "God", as surely as the beginning was the lowly amoeba. In their own logic, however, they neglected to consider the soul. They also neglected to suppose that humanity could not achieve the next step in evolution. That it could only create its own successor. Ragnarok thus became a battle to determine who would be God. It became a battle fought on three fronts; between humanity and its son, Technology, and daughter, Genetic Engineering. As in all conflicts, it was the female of the species that proved ultimately dominant. Thus the story begins . . .

Next--The Devil's Treehouse