Patrick Gamblin

“It’s a strange world out there. The old timers tell stories from the previous century, of great submersible ships exploring lost sunken cities and huge aerial vessels journeying across the face of the world. Those were just stories to most people, though, until the Great War. Only just over twenty years ago, it was when everything changed. Sure, the Wrights had led us into the sky, and Ford’s cars were already crowding the cities, but the real breakthroughs came when the aliens, in their monstrous towering contraptions landed on that day in the summer of 1917. The war ended right there, as both sides immediately had bigger problems to deal with. Shoulder to shoulder, the countries around the world fought the alien invaders. “Things looked bad at first, as the invaders’ death rays slew men and armoured tank alike, but humanity held and held, until the Germans broke the stalemate. Yellow clouds appeared on the horizon as they released deadly mustard gas into the war zone. It was an indiscriminate killer, and many a soldier still has nightmares of that day, but it broke the alien lines. Within hours their machines had stopped moving. We had won. The war never started back up, what with the nations of the world temporarily being more interested in what they could learn from the technology scattered around the field of corpses. Tesla made the first breakthrough. He had been claiming he could build a ray capable of making an end of war. With what the aliens left, he was soon able to show he was partly right. He could make a death ray. It wasn’t an end to war,
however, and the Spanish can attest. “Since that time technology has been racing forward, death rays, flying packs, computation devices, robots, where will it end?” 

“I barely recognize the world any more.” 

– Allen Stacy, The Bugle