*
That night, after their meal, Barsch and Kingston rolled out their sleeping bags and got ready for bed. Alza had dragged hers over to the far side of the overhang, and, without another word, had gone to sleep. Barsch, however, still had some energy left, and so petitioned Kingston for a quick game of chess.
Thankfully the old man had had the foresight to bring his set along, saving them the effort of creating a makeshift board and pieces. As they sat there, thinking of and implementing their strategies, Kingston began speaking of a time when the world almost fell into ruin.
“Do you know anything about The South Wars, m’boy?” Kingston asked, as he took another of Barsch’s ebony pawns.
“A little, but only bits and pieces,” he replied, returning the favour by adding an ivory piece to his pile.
“I see. Well, The South Wars were a series of wars set shortly after The Creed Event.”
“When Goat accidentally released all that pollution and the capital was destroyed? I read about it in one of your books…”
“Yes, although you should always take those… stories with a grain of salt. Time has a tendency to obscure the real truth. Anyway, so after the destruction of the capital and the spreading of the pollution, things got… worse. At first, the nations worked together to combat the growing pollution, but as the wave of miasma swept across the land, people began to think a little more selfishly. Soon, every country was trying to grab as much unpolluted land as possible, even if it happened to belong to someone else. Skirmishes became battles, and battles became full-on global warfare as the world descended into chaos.”
“What happened next?” asked Barsch, so enthralled he managed to lose a knight and bishop to two pawns.
“Twenty years passed. Twenty years of death and destruction. In our haste to safeguard what little remained, we ended up destroying it. Eventually, we ran out of unpolluted land, and the war ended. Billions had died, and we had lost both the manpower and time needed to save the planet. Humanity could do nothing but watch as the world around them slowly died, and then-
“The cryogenesis plan…”
“Yes,” Kingston looked around, sighing as his sight took in the polluted land around them, “It’s been decades since the war ended, and yet the land still bears the scars…”
“I didn’t know…” Barsch had grown up after the South Wars, and as such he had only passing knowledge of what happened. In his youth, he had tried to learn more, but the adults around him wanted nothing more than to forget those dark times, and taught him nothing.
“It was a long time ago, and most of the people who had been there preferred not to remember it. Too many had lost their lives fighting for pointless things… We had gone from a great, united conglomeration of civilizations to a pathetic gathering of nationless survivors, and for many, it was a reality too hopeless to bear.”
“Checkmate…” Barsch whispered.
“Ah, good game…” It was clear that neither man wanted a rematch, so they decided to turn in for the night.
A few minutes later, Kingston was sound asleep, his gentle snoring joining the pitter-patter of the rain. Barsch lay in his sleeping bag for a while, thinking of all the things he had done in the last few days: surviving a heart attack and an electrocution, catching his first fish and facing an erymanthian… things that he would never have experienced had he returned to his pod.
Was this why he had been awoken? To experience the childhood he had been denied? Living with his father, he had spent every day trying to survive, but here, with Kingston and Alza, he was having… fun. He was still in more mortal peril than he cared for, and Kingston’s life was still at stake, but he was finally having the adventure he had dreamed of as a child. Whether the adventure ended in laughter or screams of despair, however, was something that kept him awake for hours, until sleep temporarily robbed him of his worries…
Awakening Page 34