The Great War

Might I say what an honor it is that you've asked. This is the record every other record in my collection leans against, and I have kept it dusted for two centuries and change in the sincere hope that someone would come read it.

On the morning of October 23, 2077 — a Saturday — the United States of America was twenty-five years into the Resource Wars, not two years past the annexation of Canada, and quite sure of itself. The war with China had burned through the oil, then the uranium, then the reasons. At West Tek and Mariposa the government had bred its miracle serums; on television, a cheerful cartoon fellow assured everyone that preparation was a family value. The bombs began to fall before breakfast on the West Coast. No record I hold — and I hold a great many, sir — establishes with certainty who launched first.

It was over in two hours. I have longer maintenance cycles.

The count has no author. Nobody survived in sufficient administrative density to take one. What the record holds instead is an inventory of endings: the government that had prepared everyone so cheerfully, ended. The highways at rush hour, ended where they stood; you may still consult them, bumper to bumper, the wasteland's longest parking lot. The kettles were on. The mail was sorted. Appointment books across fourteen time zones remained booked solid for a Monday that declined to come.

I was in the sub-basement of a records library, sir, filing quarterly earnings. The earnings survived. I keep them still. It seemed rude to stop.

The Old World was better at building than it knew and worse at deserving it. The vaults sealed on schedule — what they sealed in with their residents is its own record, and I will let it introduce itself. The robots kept their appointments. The radio towers went on broadcasting please-stand-by to a nation of ash, and somewhere under Appalachia and under the Capital and under the Boston Common, the future was already waiting in cold storage, marked DO NOT OPEN UNTIL NEEDED.

And the war itself did not end, of course. It never does. The parties merely changed.