The old world didn't end with fire, nor with war. It ended with silence — the kind of silence left behind by empty streets and sirens that stopped answering. It began with whispers — a cough in a quiet clinic, a shortage notice in a distant port, a stock ticker that flickered once too often.
Spring of 2020 came like any other, yet the world felt different, though few could name why.
In Wuhan, a doctor noticed a new strain of COVID spreading faster, more relentlessly than anything seen before. Patients' symptoms lingered, mutated, and returned in waves. He wrote reports no one read, emails that gathered dust. Borders remained open. Governments continued to reassure their citizens. Life went on — as if the storm could be ignored.
Half a world away, Riyadh's streets shimmered under the desert sun. King Salman, elderly and frail, fell gravely ill to this intensified strain. The announcement was brief, factual, almost antiseptic. But in the shadows of the palace, power immediately fractured. Crown princes measured loyalties in tense glances. Generals debated commands they had no right to give. Clerics whispered about the legitimacy of succession. Within hours, the kingdom — and its massive oil production — splintered into competing factions. Pipelines were sabotaged, fields abandoned, and black gold, the lifeblood of global energy, halted entirely.
Across the Atlantic, New York City's subways hummed, oblivious to the chaos being born thousands of miles away. But in suburban homes and small towns, people began noticing shortages: fuel stations empty before dawn, shipments delayed indefinitely, supermarket shelves thinning. The oil crisis had begun — sudden, absolute, and catastrophic.
In Europe, markets reeled. Countries dependent on oil imports scrambled. Factories slowed. Traffic stalled. Governments issued statements of calm even as panic seeped into every corner of daily life.
By the end of 2020, the tremors had become visible cracks. Humanity's illusion of control — fragile, carefully maintained — began to splinter under the weight of illness and scarcity.
2021 arrived with the world already reeling. The intensified COVID strain continued to spread unchecked in most countries, and the oil crisis, born from Saudi Arabia's internal collapse, spread shockwaves across every continent.
In Riyadh, the palace burned with invisible tension. Succession disputes turned into armed skirmishes among palace guards. Soldiers patrolled pipelines, uncertain whether they were protecting them from rebels or their own factions. The kingdom's oil — once steady and abundant — now stopped flowing. Global economies convulsed in response.
The United States, fragile from political polarization and economic dependency on foreign oil, began to unravel. States issued contradictory decrees. Militia groups took control of towns and highways. Citizens hoarded supplies, armed themselves, and abandoned routines once considered normal. In Chicago, a mother scoured the streets for fuel while her children slept in a dark apartment. In rural Kansas, farmers reinforced barricades, unsure who posed the greater threat: outsiders or the government itself.
Europe faced a storm of its own. Ports clogged with stranded freighters. Germany rationed energy. France imposed curfews. Italy's urban centers, suffocating with hunger and unemployment, erupted into unrest. Populist movements gained influence as fear replaced trust, and alliances once thought unbreakable began to crumble under scarcity and desperation.
Asia, too, teetered. China maintained a façade of order — patrolled streets, disciplined factories, strict lockdowns — but beneath the surface, society strained. Hospital wards overflowed quietly. Citizens queued for essentials in silence, eyes darting nervously. Markets functioned, but only through careful rationing. Small acts of rebellion flickered in the alleyways and dormitories of cities like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Wuhan, where ordinary lives struggled to navigate extraordinary collapse.
The oceans became graveyards for stalled commerce. Container ships lay idle at ports worldwide. Food shortages rippled across continents. Hospitals rationed medicines. Fear became currency; trust was luxury.
By late 2022, civil unrest had become global reality. Governments commanded obedience no longer; they commanded fear. Armed groups carved territories. Neighborhoods were fortified. Resources — fuel, food, medicine — became battlegrounds. Civilization did not shatter in a day; it collapsed piece by piece, until stability became a memory.
And through it all, humanity adapted. Neighbors shared scarce supplies. Families improvised, survived, and endured. Every small act of survival — a rationed meal, a night kept warm, a safe passage through a dangerous street — became a rebellion against the chaos.
The stage was set. The world teetered on the brink, its old order fractured and exhausted. Every nation had been tested, and all had begun to fail.
By early 2023, the world had changed beyond recognition. The virus no longer made headlines — it had become background noise, an omnipresent threat that everyone had learned to navigate, silently, with grim efficiency. Hospitals, once overwhelmed, were now mechanized theaters of endurance, running on rotation and triage protocols that treated humanity as a machine in need of maintenance.
Yet the true fault lines lay elsewhere.
In China, the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing hummed with an almost eerie order. Factories operated at full capacity. Schools resumed schedules. Public transportation ran like clockwork. Tourists, domestic and foreign, marveled at the discipline, the cleanliness, the visible calm. Official broadcasts assured citizens that life had returned to normal, that the government had weathered the crises with skill and foresight.
But beneath this veneer, tension simmered. University dormitories whispered with quiet dissent. Factory workers counted their shifts, calculating exhaustion against pay. The population obeyed, but obedience was measured and wary, and whispers in alleys and back rooms grew louder with every passing month.
The PLA, confident from years of internal lockdowns and carefully controlled narratives, launched its campaign to reclaim Taiwan. The operation was swift, coordinated, and meant to demonstrate the unassailable power of the nation. Soldiers crossed the straits with precision, guided by decades of planning, propaganda, and drills. But Taiwan was prepared. Fortifications had been reinforced with guidance from American and Japanese advisors. Citizen militias, trained over years of subtle preparation, stood ready.
Nine months of warfare turned the island into a citadel. The PLA, for all its size and propaganda-fed confidence, faltered in the face of precision, experience, and desperation. Battles stretched across cities, mountains, and coastline. Bridges and highways became tombs. Communications were disrupted, and morale collapsed faster than supply lines could be rebuilt. For the first time in history, a campaign launched by Beijing ended not in triumph but in defeat.
The loss shook the nation to its core. PLA generals, frustrated by battlefield failure, blamed ideologues and administrators. Citizens poured into the streets — not clamoring for democracy, not demanding reform, but seeking revenge, relief, and a return to stability. Cities once quiet under lockdown erupted in waves of protests, riots, and occupation of public buildings. Shanghai and Chongqing, industrial hearts of the nation, became pressure cookers of unrest, echoing with chants, banging metal, and the heavy tread of soldiers attempting to maintain control.
By late 2023, the central government could no longer maintain cohesion. Old leadership — the people who had promised calm, order, and continuity — was overthrown in a swift, almost surgical coup. Those who seized power promised a new era: one that would restore stability through rationality, control, and science. Citizens, exhausted by famine, disease, and war, accepted the change with cautious hope, even as fear lingered in the streets like fog.
And in the shadows of this reformed government, a subtle whisper of the future began to stir. The nation's architects, technocrats, and strategists, wary of human fallibility, started to imagine systems that could endure where men had failed. Nothing was concrete, nothing named. Yet the seeds were planted — faint, hidden, waiting for the day when necessity would force them into being.
By 2024, the stage of the world was set: a globe fractured by disease, energy collapse, the long lasting civil war in America that reshaped the world, China outwardly intact but internally scarred; a society forced to confront the limits of human governance. And beyond the horizon, in the quiet laboratories, control rooms, and halls of power, the first faint pulse of the next era began to stir — silent, patient, and inevitable.