Chapter Text
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It is the year 2042. Nearly sixty years ago, in October of 1989, military hardliners in the Soviet Union staged a political and military coup and deposed newly-elected Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Once installed as the new leadership of the Soviet Union they fiercely resisted the new policies of glasnost and perestroika, ordering harsh military crackdowns on both civilian protester and more moderate communist leaders. By early-November, East German troops opened fire on civilians attempting to scale the Berlin Wall, an act which drew international condemnation.
By mid-December, driven by a fear of losing their stranglehold on Eastern Europe, these same hardliners staged a Soviet-led invasion of West Berlin, driving fully-armed tanks and other mechanized armor divisions directly through the Berlin Wall.
World War Three had begun.
Mammals everywhere watched in horror as NATO and Warsaw Pact forces clashed, the war rapidly spilling out from Germany to the surrounding nations of France, the United Kingdom, and even the United States and Canada. Although initially unprepared and caught off guard, NATO rapidly regrouped and went on the offensive, pushing the Soviets back and, despite heavy causalities, push into East Germany and attempt to negotiate a ceasefire.
The new Soviet leadership, rapidly descending into paranoia and political infighting, believe that the offer of peace and an assurance that NATO forces will not press their advantage further than East Germany is a lie and order a symbolical nuclear strike over the North Sea. NATO’s own nuclear forces prepped for thermonuclear war as Soviet forces began a fierce counterattack in a vain attempt to push NATO out of East Germany.
On January 22nd, 1991, a Soviet radar station suffered a critical and tragic malfunction and falsely reported that a U.S. nuclear strike had been launched directly at the USSR. Responding in kind, the Soviets launched a nuclear strike against the U.S, with some NATO forces launching their own nuclear strikes, while others deliberately disabled their own launch capabilities.
The entire exchange only lasted less than an hour and became known to the survivors simply as ‘The Burn’.
In the aftermath, approximately one billion were killed instantly, with another billion fated to die later from the subsequent environmental, societal, and political collapse that followed. With both the Northern and Southern hemispheres devastated, the estimated 800 hundred million survivors were left to pick up the pieces as a nuclear winter began to set in.
However this is not the end, far from it. The resulting nuclear winter, while severe in certain parts of the world, was not as deadly as once predicted, and some smaller nations, such as England and Japan manage to hold onto stable governments. Indeed, a handful of regions, territories, and countries not only held out in the face of what came to be known as the ‘post-atomic horror’, but also stabilized and mastered the basic problems such as food and medical supplies. As time passed and the recovery continued, what were once small, individual cities and communities grow into small but powerful and independent city-states, while other smaller unions of former territories emerged.
Initial hopes of some survivors for a united world (or at least warfare and destruction being ended forever) quickly proved false however. Indeed, this new world is still light-years away from any utopian imaginings. Famine, disease, and a general lack of resources provoked conflicts and wars in large parts of the world, thus devastating all the carefully achieved recovery, as new blocs and unions were formed to all fiercely guard what few resources these new nations had and, if possible, take what they didn’t from their neighbors. These on and off conflicts soon came to be known as the ‘Ash Wars’.
Despite this, a few bright spots emerged from the darkness. In North America, the New England Maritime Union is formed and rapidly grows to become a vital trading link across the Atlantic, while on the West Coast; the New California Republic, encompassing the former U.S. states of California, Oregon, Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia, does the same for the Pacific, reopening vital trade routes with Asia. However, hopes of eventually reestablishing the fallen United States soon die as the various successor states, though largely holding to the same values and principles as the former Union, are too different in terms of culture and society.
In the former Soviet Union, power shifted from the irradiated ruins of Moscow to the more sparsely-populated and isolated Siberia and northeast Kazakhstan, and a little over a year after the Burn, the ‘Union of Socialist Siberia’ was founded, providing a much-needed law and order to region. Eager to atone for the mistakes of the past, this new union opened full relations with the West, but old wounds take time to heal..
Finally, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the fragmented and failing United Nations was reorganized into the ‘Unified Interspecies Command’. Unlike the United Nations that preceded it, the UISC included a paramilitary arm known as the ‘Multinational Unified Taskforce’. Organized from the remnants of both NATO and Warsaw Pact forces and comprised of the best of the best that the world’s new militaries have to offer, ‘mutt’, as it is commonly known, operates under the direct auspicious of the UISC and is tasked with maintaining the often fragile and tenuous new world order that has risen from the ashes of the Burn.
Through MUT's efforts as well more traditional diplomatic means and a general reluctance to commit to a full-scale war by an already-traumatized global populace, the UISC seems well on its way to achieving a long-held and long-denned dream: unification of all the species of the Earth. But war is a harsh mistress and fear a powerful tool for those who know how to use it...