Short Story: Unintended Consequences...

Unintended Consequences… …

Through the mist, a long cigar shaped vessel sliced noiselessly through the Potomac on a swift and unerring mission.
. .
The sleek Chinese submarine, one of the Ho class, equipped with advanced breathing apparatus, the most modern communications and powered by an advanced nuclear reactor that enabled the Mao 1 to cross the Oceans from Shang hai to Washington DC without surfacing, silently inched up to its predesignated birthing location near the Rte 50 overpass.

Pulling up adjacent to the bridge, the conning tower opened without a sound and four three man teams decked out in black wet suits moved swiftly to waiting rubber boats for the short transit to the land, hardly twenty or thirty yards away.. If one looked keenly enough, they could see that each member of the team carried a small container and a fold up apparatus. The teams landed, unfolded their frame like cycles, put on their breathing masks and took off silently. Each team had a specific mission to accomplish. .

The teams had been well-trained at Shang-hai’s special university for clandestine services better known as CCS.. Each man was trained individually not to reveal their mission for the Archival Division of the Ministry of Truth, a secret group at the highest levels of government charged with amassing data for the clandestine record. What that meant was not understood by any outside their division. The Archival Division was the most secret of the secret groups that dominated the clandestine section of China’s government.

These dedicated warriors had made the hazardous journey for one reason: To uncover among other things why vaporous clouds still hung in the air over Washington and to gather as many relevant records as they could from the remains of the buildings still standing…

It had been more than twelve years since the War had ended, a war that lasted barely one day, a day that most will never forget although most still living did not know how it started or for what reasons and how trivial those reasons really were.…

At last count, more than 47 million people had died in the US alone. DC was uninhabitable as was most of the surrounding area. Nevertheless, the outcome had not been totally bleak. In fact, the individual State governments had tried to hold things together as best they could but people had to get along on their own as best they could. .

The new leaders had transitioned to a form of a communal Parliamentary system that allowed the people to demand a vote and eliminate governments that had other agendas than the public good. This was necessary to quell the outbreaks on the street and to establish a plan for survival if we were to survive at all.

In retrospect, everyone’s memories were foggy. No one was quite sure what had happened; it seem to have happened so quickly with first one country issuing a threat and then America striking out without realizing that other treaties were in place that impelled other countries to strike back with their inventories of weapons; yet, in many respects, it was not unlike the entangling alliances of World War One where countries seemed to have become locked into a process that they could no longer control that began with the assassination of the Arch-Duke..

What truly differentiated this one was that there was no assassination, no long standing feud, just the realization that the country had been dragged into a vortex because it naively believed that it could be something that it couldn’t. Later, it was said to have been an unfortunate miscalculation; some called it simply reckless while others still shook their heads long months after the War broke out and destroyed everything that had become part of our history, our tradition.

It had been predictable. That much was sure. We were arrogant. We believed we could do anything. We didn’t care about others; only ourselves. And we instituted pre-emption that made everyone feel insecure. Moreover, we had the power and the linkages to turn anger into destruction in a matter of minutes. What more did we need to auger an end game strategy?—especially when our leaders didn’t think it was necessary to discuss the buildup to war!

It was too bad that no one had taken the psychologists profile seriously. They thought that the profile of the leader had been exaggerated; that he would not go to war over something so trivial to prove a point. And yet that was how it unfolded.



It had begun in the age of pre-emption which meant that one power could declare war on another before being attacked.

If we make the effort now to look back, we would have seen that the new administration bore little relationship to the party in power before. These were a different breed of men.

This was a cabal of former leaders who had no doubts about anything they did or what they wanted. . They knew what they wanted to do and they were clearly not going to let anyone stand in their way. The leader was perhaps the most arrogant of all believing that he had the power to rewrite the truth so that it would fit his perception and he did so without regard to reality. By repeating a lie often enough, the teller may forget that it was a lie but in the end, it is still a lie and lies do not go conveniently away; not in the age when every word, every pause, every eclamation point is recorded! . And that, in the end, was what led to his downfall and the War that followed.

This kind of person was the most dangerous of all—a person who believed that the only truth that existed was the truth that he manufactured. The people should have known better than to trust him. . Putting an egoist with super inflated views of himself was like giving the gift of credit cards to someone who was in bankruptcy all of the time. It was a prescription for disaster.

In the process of fulfilling their own needs and ego drives, they literally alienated everyone—even former allies. As a result, America was virtually alone on the world stage and they luxuriated in their power—especially their military power since they never resorted to dialogue to fix any problems if they could beat the opposition into submission with their military might.

This was, viewed long term, as a dangerous prescription that could terminate in disaster inasmuch as the newly installed power base still controlled literally thousands of powerful nuclear weapons that could be launched at a moment’s notice.



But nobody listened and the outcome was predictable.

China and India, the two leading world powers, had dominated the world’s power balance after America had initiated the War creating alliances and relationships of their own.

Later, during a secret meeting years after the fall, the Chinese Archives Society held a secret meeting and it was then decided to launch an expedition that would find out the answers.

What they discovered was that the origins of the War traced back to the twentieth century towards the end of the 70’s and the beginning of the 80’s.

That was the approximate time that the most powerful western book of all time had begun to make its impact felt. A book that swept people away with its assumptions and changed the course of the world more than any other book in man’s history.

No, it was not the Bible; it was a fairy tale that told us what we wanted to hear. It told us that we could be even greater than we were; it allowed us to swell our egos in believing that anything was possible only setting us up for the downfall to come..

It told this great power that it could be even a mightier power if it heeded the author’s advice. The book was a prescription for transforming a society into something new, like a Nirvana, an age where everything would be easy and clean and we as the most masterful power on the planet would control and monitor all of its information. The old industries were considered unclean and not worthy of this new white nation that would set a new standard for what a world could be like.

Some of us smirked at the audacity of such a claim; nevertheless, it seemed an innocuous enough premise. It was time for America to move on; but somehow it unleashed things that could not be anticipated. And what all of us failed to see was that it contained the seeds of the destruction of the planet.

It was curious how it all unfolded. In a very short time, it took on the power of biblical prophecy. We were willing to follow its premises into the wilderness of our own understanding. But we were naïve and believed in good news in the same way we believed that every story had a happy ending. But it wasn’t so we were to learn. While it cleverly and subtly praised America for all the good it had achieved as if almost by some magical sleight of hand, it enhanced the story by comparing what had happened in the age of communications after the printing press was developed. The New Information Age had the power to transform the planet, create jobs in third world nations and further empower the already great nations.

And the trigger in this new world order would be the Information Age. With our knowledge of computers and technology, we could let go of our manufacturing which was only dirty anyway and move to the next plateau, the clean and wholesome Information Age.

Well, it sounded good and everyone bought into it. What did we need manufacturing for anyway people rationalized.. Those dirty jobs could be moved to third world nations and we could concentrate on what we were best in, innovation and knowledge business.

Sure, we glossed over the flaws in the logic when the economists started buying into the idea. In the blink of an eye, business saw the immense benefits and moved its jobs off shore without hesitation.. .

In the meantime, workers were getting ready for the next move up the ladder; only they didn’t know quite how to go about it. How were they going to learn the things they needed to know? How were they going to become Information Age workers when only yesterday they were operating a press or a drill? These were the unanswered questions. We were too busy becoming the New World Order to realize that in order to become an information age worker, we needed certain skills that seemed to be in short supply. Also, as we were to discover, America did not have a monopoly on those skills.

The New York Times had followed up by saying that the exodus of manufacturing jobs would be replaced by equivalent Information Age service jobs. They didn’t pay attention to the facts; that service sector jobs associated with manufacturing were not the same thing as lower level service sector jobs that would replace those jobs in manufacturing; moreover, that there would be no multiplier effect in the economy to turn one dollar into six in the marketplace.


Nevertheless, new euphemisms were starting to make themselves felt. There was downsizing the seemingly innocuous term for fleecing people of their jobs. For what reason? So that the new partners would be able to fatten their Golden Parachutes? That only emerged much later when those who had been promised jobs for life found themselves out on the street..

Then there was off-shoring which meant it was okay to ship jobs to far off lands that paid poverty wages and gave no time off. And that was happening at the rate of thousands of jobs a month. Salaries for senior staffers was going off the charts. At about the same time, statisticians noted that there was a corresponding redistribution of income. Now, fewer then ten percent of the population controlled more than sixty percent of the nation’s wealth. It was also noted that the top five percent of wage earners earned more than the bottom forty percent of the population after taxes. This was unheard of in western countries and people were raising their eyebrows.

During the election of 2000, the country skidded into a deep recession. The way out according to the Bush presidency was trickle down economics that we already knew didn’t work. But that didn’t stop the now self-appointed monarch from giving a tax break to the already rich and powerful.

This helped to increase the burden on the Middle Class but as long as home equity was going up and credit lines were being expanded, it still looked like the American dream was still possible. This despite the fact that the better quality jobs seemed to be fleeing our shores and most of the new jobs created were at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.


This is where things began to collapse and Americans found themselves without jobs and no way to rebuild the economy they had given up so easily…

Things went from bad to worse, when banks started to tighten up credit and the housing sector began to show signs of a radical slow down.


It all spelled a disaster in the making. Without the prospect for good jobs--and there was no program ongoing to create them--and without equity in one's home or credit to borrow, what had happened to the rosy future predicted by the economic bible we were all so willing to follow to the ends of the earth?

There’s a very good chance, too, that taxes would have to be raised to support war adventures that were spreading all across the globe. That should guarantee our one way trip to the poorhouse. Too bad that our best and brightest didn’t see this coming as this poor ole’ boy who just kept his eyes open.

And to add insult to injury, it seemed clear that the appointed leaders and their cabal were more interested in seeing jobs take root there then creating a good climate for business in their own land.

Some began to wonder where the man’s loyalties were? And if these self-appointed leaders were perhaps frauds with ties to the Middle East.

But our King-leader’s remarks only exacerbated the bad feelings of the worker and the belief that we were rapidly descending into a climate of despair where workers would not be able to support themselves on their meager incomes and radical changes would have to take place just to maintain the status quo. Our Highness said that he was happy he sent the jobs to India. He was happy that the Indian economy was doing well! He also alluded to the fact that Americans had better jump on the bandwagon and start training for the jobs of the 21st century.

What were these? We learned that the skills most in demand were for Assistant nurses and food handlers.
It was time to lower the jib and ask him what is he going to do to keep food on the table for most Americans who no longer had good job prospects and could not afford to put food on the table and pay for their pharmaceuticals.

But it was the very trade deal with India and the failure to extend a similar offer to our friends in Pakistan that set off the chain reaction. China and Iran intervened on Pakistan’s behalf and the Chinese concerned that if they were to wait any longer, India would be too strong to capitulate in any future conflict. As a result, they triggered an expedition to take over the provinces north of the Indian border and Katmandu which led to a reaction that brought in Iran. Ultimately India saw that it had no other choice but to exercise its options. At the same time, Israel would not permit Iran to gain nuclear parity. And when Israel quashed the Iranian effort, India found itself in direct conflict with Pakistan an ally of China.

China brought up some of its medium range missiles from the North to rain down destruction on Northern Indian Cities. Taiwan went on full alert.. India struck back at Pakistan and Pakistan retaliated against India. The leader tried to talk moderation but didn’t try hard enough; eventually they found themselves on the side of India against China. America never realized that the Chinese missiles could reach the United States and when NORAD spotted their trajectory and number, our nuclear submarines and our hardened missile bases unleashed a payload of destruction never to be matched.

It all happened in a mind-boggling matter of minutes actually—some ninety minutes of destructive firestorm…and then it was over. But the clouds covered the sun for twelve years and the trees and most things green died except in the Southern Hemisphere and we had to begin again.

We had been warned about what might happen but none of us believed it til it happened. Now, we knew. We had experienced a nuclear winter which killed another seventy million people around the world.

Now, we were not much beyond the stone age except for the Chinese who held onto their advantage in land and sea to cruise the world with their fleet of nuclear craft policing it against a resurgence of American hostility.

Those Americans who were left planted what seed they could come by and tilled the land hoping that the land could be made fertile again while most others simply tried to rebuild their lives.

Twelve years and a quarantine instituted by the government that accomplished nothing but to keep us separate from each other for now truly we knew that the real enemy was ourselves.

In the end, America had misjudged its power and paid the ultimate price. Death on an unimaginable scale. We should have learned our lesson but we were too eager to believe in good fairies and our own strength. And too eager to put our trust in untried entities whose credentials might have told us everything we needed to know if we had the foresight to invest time in understanding who we were electing to represent us.

Now, we had to be content to grow things that others could use and barter with friends and neighbors so that our families could survive. In the end, this is all our false ambitions bought. Some books were saved and scribes started to retell the tale. Religion failed to save us. And we failed to save ourselves. Had we studied the past we might have avoided this future. And there is a lesson for us all in that.

At the end, of the day, the four teams returned with their papers and film and gathered in their little boats to return to their craft. The silent ship backed out of the channel and those of us who had watched from the shore line saw the black conning tower slip deep into the waters of the Potomac for their return voyage.

Most of us just stood there and stared after them. It had been the first contact we had made with another life form in twelve years and yet not a word was exchanged.
We turned around and headed back to our hovels for tomorrow was another day to cut into the earth and try to bring back life…

Les Aaron