The Nationalist, Prologue

The war had always been.

Even before Helen, New Arabia, Christopher, and Nate; before the Earth’s air had become too dank and rotten to breathe without a Saf-T-Filt; before space, before colonies, before the Coalition: the war had been raging. Jennet I had not started it, nor his great-grandfather, but it continued to exist under Jennet IV and could possibly exist forever.

No one could even remember what had started it. Was it a bomb, one of those old school “nukes” kids read about in flip-screen techmonitors? Was it a man, or a woman that had thrown the first punch, a child, or maybe a combination of the three? Who had cared, and who kept caring?

The truth was that everyone cared. The war gave everyone a purpose: doctors, soldiers, sinners and saints alike. It gave people something to talk about and do. Inevitably, the day it ended, the whole universe sat in stunned silence, not even knowing what to do with itself. After all, the war had always been, and all signs had pointed for it to continue forever. Wasn’t everything like that, good or bad?

PROLOGUE

In the year 2035, a war began on Earth that would eventually span the better part of six centuries. By 2037, the first nuclear weapon had been detonated by the People’s Capitalist Federation on the burgeoning city-state of the Coalition of Peace and Truth—and by 2137 humanity was looking to the stars as a way out of its misery, because the planet was quickly becoming inhospitable. The ozone layer had been destroyed and all natural water within reach (what was frozen was eventually melted and contaminated as well) was poisoned beyond repair. Homo sapiens survived like rats in their guerilla war, fighting invisible enemies and continuing to wreak havoc on their homeland, their health, and their safety. In 2138, when the first outer space colony launch was announced, both sides engaged in the longest cease-fire that would ever be realized between them. After all, the colonies were necessary in order to continue the prosperity of the species…and the duration of the conflict. After about ten years, country-sized colonies in the solar system numbered around twelve, and still more were being built. They were a marvel in themselves, a real testament to the power of human intelligence: climate-controlled environments, synthetic atmospheres held in place by fabricated gravity fields, and each had its own fleet of the corresponding army’s aerospace jets. The most expensive colonies were each the size of two Asias, and belonged to the headquarters of the opposing sides. It was relatively safe to live in space, but only the wealthiest could afford the shuttle passage off of Earth in the first exodus, and as a result, most poverty-stricken and indigenous peoples perished from the treacherous living conditions before they could be saved. Shuttle launches were frequent the first years. There were no rules—no women and children first, no classification—just a mad, panicked rush to find the next safe hideout before the enemy decided to begin shooting. Not that space was a grey zone—every so often, a particularly volatile group of pilots might be ordered to surround a colony and self detonate, which would make the colony and anything within twenty thousand miles into a roaring inferno that wouldn’t subside for months. These attacks were few and far between, and by the rule of Jennet III did not happen by executive order, but by terrorist Federation organizations.

The two sides to the war had not formed definitively until late in the 21^st century, when the Eastern hemisphere had declared itself part of a massive partnership that overthrew at least a dozen non-coalition forming treaties. The countries called themselves the Coalition of Peace and Truth. Mostly peoples following pacifist religions initially populated the city-state. (Eventually, this description would narrow itself to simply including extreme political leftists and secret neo-pacifists.) As a response, the ever-hostile Western Hemisphere countries set their differences aside and bonded into the People’s Capitalist Federation, bristling with unnecessary weaponry and already preparing itself for a conflict that the Coalition insisted was never going to come. In truth, the East had banded together to better be able to withstand the powerhouse that was becoming the West, and never had any intention of remaining peaceful if there was any indication of hostility. By shrugging off individual culture and identity with such ease, and peacefully appointing a five-man oligarchy to set standards for millions, the Coalition countries had crossed a line into what the ever-vigilant Federation considered a challenge. It responded accordingly (though there was much more civil war involved) and appointed a singular leader, then blazed forward into the silence of tenuous friendship by detonating a nuclear weapon on New Beijing, where the benefactors of the Coalition were rumored to be hiding.

At that particular time in history, a new world order was also established among social classes. Wealthy people began to secede violently from their lower class fellows, resulting in two groups: the Lowers and the Uppers. There had been a Great Renaming early on in the war—advocated by the Uppers of course—that had taken everyone reachable by any kind of communication and labeled them according to one of the two classes. Once labeled a Lower, you and your family never lost the hungry look of wanting more, so it became easy to tell everyone apart. Lowers’ lives did not change from previous years, except that they were now confined to cities and certain professions. There were different levels of Lower, of course, and not all equal. However, a Lower could never be an executive or a politician, and a Lower that made as much as or more than an Upper never became an Upper, was never allowed to really attain the recognition so many of them craved.

Uppers, on the other hand, were all at one level, distinguished into fine strata only by the size of their paychecks. No matter how poor, an Upper family would always be an Upper family. They were too recognizable, too defenseless in Lower society. A child of the Uppers had no last name, and at birth had a microchip installed under its skin that was read by any public or private place that the child would ever visit. Identity theft was eliminated nearly overnight, though it took many older Uppers a while to get used to being just a name, but mostly a number.

There were advantages and disadvantages to both sides. After a hundred years of careful breeding, Uppers had become so genetically fragile that reproduction happened almost exclusively in test tubes. While a live birth was rare, if an Upper wife did go through a pregnancy and birth without problems, she was elevated to the rank of hero and her child seen as a miracle. By the year 2600 (the year of Christopher’s birth), there had been no successful natural pregnancies for the past two hundred years. Lowers, on the other hand, were able to grow families without any problem, and wealthier Lowers could marry without any fuss into Upper families. Both sides longed to be the other, though secretly, vengefully. The war was still raging and might always rage, but within people’s hearts, envy consumed them. To think that it was all their own doing, this separation of social class, was as impossible as pretending that there was a plausible reason for war to have occurred in the first place.

Thus, it began: a never ending war about nothing, about child’s play, about arguments. About who had the bigger gun, or the most money, or the bluest blood. After a time, no one could remember anything but hate.

In January of the year 2559, the Federation is led by Jennet III, and the Coalition by three men and two women who descended from its first leaders. The wealthiest of these five was Arthur III, the richest man in the universe besides the amassed wealth of the Federation government, and the owner of approximately thirty-five percent of all solar system property.