Before July 3, 2112, no one could have imagined that human beings could be crazy to this extent, just like before September 11, 2001, no one could have imagined that a madman would hijack a civilian airliner to crash it into a skyscraper.
In Zhao Yu's time, Hollywood scriptwriters dared to have terrorists storm into the White House with guns and sweep around, kidnap the president, and use an entire city as leverage to negotiate with the government, but they didn't dare to actually destroy a city that existed in reality, let alone take out the whole of mankind; and if something like this had to happen, the culprits would have to be aliens, superpowered beings, natural acts of God... ...In short, it wouldn't be Earth humans, who are too crazy to go to this extent.
Until July 3, 2112.
World War IV was still going on, the exchange of technology in the European Community two years ago had stimulated all the forces on Earth, wars were fought in a more intense way, and the explosive growth of uncontrolled military organizations such as terrorist groups, mercenaries, and private armies had finally reached its peak on this day.
A group of extremists that had been fighting the United States continuously for over a hundred years, and that even the use of alien technology by the United States had not been able to eradicate, entered Wyoming the day before the Fourth of July in 2112.
And then they did what only in the craziest science fiction would an Earthling dare to do - they detonated the Yellowstone volcano.
Just as scientists had always feared, the super volcano, which had been dormant for more than 600,000 years, erupted like a super-giant bomb. The eruption caused seismic waves strong enough to disable half of the Earth's detection instruments, a massive shockwave that pushed everything within hundreds of kilometers away on the spot, ash that plunged the North American continent into darkness in a matter of hours, one-third of the Rocky Mountains disappeared without a trace, and the topography of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, which are neighboring Yellowstone, were almost completely altered by the quake, which spread further and further afield into North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and other states, and fifty million Americans were killed as a direct result of the catastrophe, with an additional twenty million dying afterward from air pollution, earthquakes, and other secondary accidents.
It was the worst man-made disaster in human history, known as the Great Eruption, and for a month the North American continent was covered in darkness when viewed from space.
The disaster even alerted aliens, and for the first time in history, the Batemans took the initiative, releasing large quantities of what they called "inhibitory particles" into the atmosphere, which kept the atmospheric dust and ash firmly confined to the North American continent, and prevented the long winter from spreading around the world. But Americans were not grateful to the aliens, because for the next twenty years the United States was in darkness.
Agriculture collapsed, ecology collapsed, and next came industrial collapse. If the eastern part of the U.S., bordering the Atlantic Ocean, was somewhat rescued, the western part of the U.S. became a complete Armageddon. Suppression particles would rip down everything that flew in the sky, and insufferable poisonous gases and magma were still raging along the Rocky Mountains, almost completely cutting off the roads to the west, with only a narrow corridor preserved in southern Texas to reach New Mexico, and then some help further west through New Mexico.
But a drop in the bucket, New Mexico's relief teams reached Arizona and California at best, and the areas further north, closer to Yellowstone, Nevada, Oregon, and so on, one could only describe how hellish it was over there through the lucky ones who had escaped intermittently.
In this situation, the new U.S. President made a decision: with the remaining forces of the United States and the European Community to unite in order to ensure the maximum rights and interests of the United States, and as good as a bottomless pit can not see the hope of the American West, need to temporarily ... give up.
Stop resupply, stop rescue. There is no saving the West, and in any case, that area is unlikely to be reestablished as a city in a hundred years. Instead of a steady stream of such desperate rescues, the survivors of the west should go to the east, and when the wounds of the United States of America have healed, then start building the west again.
But what policymakers forgot ... and perhaps intentionally ignored was that most of the western survivors had no chance of making it to the east alive. In contrast, after learning that the West had been abandoned, almost all the citizens of the West who were still alive were furious, and hostility spread like wildfire among the survivors, and during the twenty years from the tenth to the thirtieth year after the eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, the differences of opinion between the East and the West grew wider and wider, and finally a part of the surviving Westerners founded the "West Coast Republic", declaring secession from the United States of America. This, of course, provoked a strong reaction from the East, which, already slightly relieved, attacked the West, only to further provoke the West's fury: "When we were desperate, you gave up on us, and when we were struggling to survive on our own, you tried to stop us." "
More Westerners joined the West Coast Republic, and the era of "The Great Secession" reached its zenith. 2133 saw the outbreak of the Second American Civil War.
Fighting began in Texas and New Mexico, but as the weather stabilized on the North American continent, fighting began on the northern front as well, with eastern armies marching from the north, bypassing Canada, and the battlefront quickly splitting into north and south. But the eastern armies, who thought they were assured of victory, were confronted with a headache: the "West Coast National Army" they were facing remained fairly strong, and the quality of the soldiers did not look like they had suffered from several years of famine.
It was clear that something else was involved in the war.
The eastern policy makers, who had been busy restoring order in the country, looked up and realized that the world had changed.
Because of the eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, almost all of the U.S. military forces in foreign bases were trying to rush back to the U.S. mainland at the first opportunity, and the vacuum it left behind was rapidly being filled, for example, in Europe, where Russia had breathlessly extended its sphere of influence to the Balkan Peninsula, and where even the German border could be seen with the arrogant double-headed eagle flag, which was why the European Community was rushing to strengthen its ties with the U.S. --After a few years of fighting a world war in name only, the giant bears in the east have been going crazy waiting for this moment.
In order to counteract Russia, the European Community has had to shift more attention to the Eastern Front, and for the U.S., it's on its own to take care of the insurgents in the West.
But the West Coast Republic was not alone.
Hawaii had suffered a lot of damage from the tsunami caused by the Yellowstone eruption, but it had finally slowed down and had inherited a nearly complete Pacific fleet, a powerful naval fleet that was one of the West Coast Republic's greatest credentials, and with Hawaii as a relay station and rear base, a steady stream of aid from Asia was coming in.
Initially, Asia's aid to the West Coast Republic was mainly food, and after the West Coast resolved to hand over a number of military technologies, various military equipment was added to the list of aid they received. The situation in Asia is now very delicate, the Central Asian region is almost all controlled by Russia, West Asia is divided by several large forces, as for East Asia ... the dust has also settled now.
From the situation that Zhao Yu understand the whole process is like this: in the Seventh Fleet rushed to Hawaii, Japan can not wait to jump out, declared as a "no military abnormal country" has been too long, they want to get more rights in East Asia - - suppressed their own for a hundred years. -It is so encouraging to see that the dominant power that has held us down for a hundred years is gone! No one can stop us from rising again, and anyone who doesn't believe that, come and try our will!
But their tragedy was that there was another behemoth on the continent as a neighbor that had likewise put up with the Americans for a long time and wasn't about to give up the opportunity.
In all fairness, because of various previous mentions from the United States, the Japanese maritime military force is considered to be ahead of East Asia in terms of technological level, it is just a pity that when the quantitative advantage reaches a point, the level of technology doesn't work very well. Only three months time, the Japanese people in the power ratio of the several naval battles lost almost all the warships, woefully retreating to the mainland four islands, and when the warships flying the flag of the 81st Army fleet around half of Japan, appeared in the eastern part of the Tokyo Bay, the Japanese people are left with only one option, is to continue to be their dysfunctional country.
And that neighbor, while holding Japan down and beating it up, still had room to send the South China Sea Fleet to stroll around Southeast Asia to express a cordial and clear greeting to the coastal states: who else is not convinced?
The situation is very clear, after the Americans left East Asia, this area is qualified to be the boss of only one country.
What happened after that was not much of a mystery. The process of deciding the hegemony of the western Pacific coast took nearly half a year, but after this was done, the unification of this area took only a month. Now, the Western Pacific Alliance, or WPA for short, is the most important ally of the West Coast Republics, and its sphere of influence includes all of East and Southeast Asia, a part of Siberia (Russia for the sake of Russia), and a portion of the West Pacific. The WPA is the most important ally of the West Coast Republics, which include all of East Asia and Southeast Asia, a part of Siberia (Russia "trusts" about a million square kilometers of land in order to raise capital for its westward expansion), and India, which has joined by holding its nose (after having been similarly beaten up and losing a few states in the east), as well as two other countries that have expressed their willingness to "assist" the WPA, namely Australia and New Zealand. Australia and New Zealand, two peripheral countries that offered to "assist" the WPA, were partners of sorts. The WPA began sending aid to western North America even before the West Coast Republics were formed, and every month large quantities of supplies would be loaded onto freighters from Japan and Australia for shipment to Hawaii, and from there to the western part of the continent, and it was this aid that gave a reprieve to areas such as Oregon, Nevada, and other areas that couldn't be rescued from the east.
Of course, the WPA never did business at a loss, and the main price paid by the West was the technology, all of it.The WPA people (mainly Chinese) came to the West and took away everything they were interested in, from drawing data to the physical finished product of the equipment to the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford, all in one package, and some of the fortunate former western U.S. citizens (mainly technicians) were allowed to sphere of influence, and the WPA provided them with plants, manpower, laboratories, and funding - as long as you're working on technology that will allow humanity to escape the solar system, or defend against that big gamma bomb; you can also try to work on something else, and when you've done it, try to throw it at the Butterminds to take a chance on it, and it might just You could also try to research something else, make it, and throw it to the Batmans for luck, and maybe unlock some technology.
Of course, all of this seems too far away for those still fighting on the North American continent.
The Second Civil War in the United States has lasted for more than forty years, and the WPA, the Russian-led "Slavic United Front", and the "Atlantic Alliance" formed by the eastern United States and the European Community have all tacitly used this battlefield as a testing ground for various new technologies, especially for the Batmans. Technology testing ground, especially the "mutant" research, almost 90% of the research laboratories are located in the North American continent. No matter which side has no intention to stop the war - there are experiments on this land, there is technical power, there is order in line with civilized society, do we want to end all this and move the research labs to Africa and South America, where the fight is so messy? Those two continents are the complete dark zones now.
As for the two warring sides, the once united and most powerful United States of America in the world was long history, the soldiers on the battlefields had all been young men born in the war, and loathing for the other side was an unquestioned given; the East felt that the West was full of ill-advised Republican fools, and the West felt that the East was full of Confederate assholes who were taking advantage of the fire, and it was only those in their sixties or seventies or even older who were nostalgic for the pre-war days and voiced their hope that the country would be united again. Only those in their sixties, seventies, and even older reminisce about the pre-war days and dream of reuniting the country.
Lucky for Jo Yu, his freezer was stored at the University of Oregon - one of the few places under the direct control of the Batmans that the crazier Earthlings wouldn't dare, and couldn't, get into - and the destruction of the Yellowstone volcano hadn't hurt there, so Jo Yu had been able to wake up without any problems, in the order of the resuscitation list, which had by now seen the inhibitory particles worked for decades, the atmosphere was restored to a relatively survivable environment, and he escaped the hellish period of the first few years.
The problem for Cho-woo was that he had no empathy for the war that had lasted over forty years.
To him, there wasn't much difference between western and eastern Americans, he didn't have a lot of ill feelings towards aliens, and enlisting in the military was just a way to find more realism and a sense of being; after all, after being paralyzed in bed for several years, as a young man he still had to find something exciting to do. It wasn't like he was fighting a war against his own countrymen in his own homeland anyway, so what were the scruples?
So here he was now, in the cockpit of a Spider Warthog, having just evacuated one battlefield and on his way to a new one.
But now, for the first time, he found his worries turning into: why am I fighting this war? What does this war mean to me?
Is it the aliens' fault? But the aliens had no obligation to help the Earthlings, and it was even because of the aliens' FTL communications that the Earth had more than two hundred years to prepare, or else mankind would have waited until there was one more bright star in the sky before realizing what was going on, and by then it would have been too late.
Shouldn't Earthlings use war as a means to an end? But it was the only effective means Earthlings could find, and after trying dragged-out, tired, inefficient unions of all kinds, only the nearness of death and the constant emergence of unfamiliar technology could stimulate mankind, and mankind was running out of time to try anything more than that.
So who else is to blame? What else can be done? Is cursing God with the middle finger in the sky every day going to solve the problem?
Despite knowing from the beginning that war was necessary, after seeing comrades he had never known a day ago choose to die without hesitation in order to cover their evacuation, and fight with people who were originally fellow comrades, he felt a little heartbroken ... Of course, the more civilized way to say it was that he was more pretentious now.
"We might be in trouble." A voice interrupted Zhao Yu's thoughts.
Borg looked serious as he covered his headset and listened to the contents of the communication channel, "Ten minutes ago Sergeant Hartman and the others were attacked, and now the communication has been completely cut off.... Guys, get ready for another big battle."
Gabriel, who had returned to the cockpit at an unknown time, changed a magazine for his rifle, silently opened the cockpit cover and entered the firing position.
Zhao Yu stared blankly at the scene in front of him.
Suddenly a pair of hands grabbed his shoulders and desperately shook him a few times, ''Are you alright? You've been staring with a serious expression since just now oh?"
Zhao Yu looked into Kristin's eyes and took a few deep breaths, allowing himself to show a smile, "Some old man's boring worries are just ... no need to care."