Map Thread XV

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Update on this WIP. Main areas I'm working on right now: Persian-Turkish rivalry (mostly just not sure if what I have is adequate), Spanish and Portuguese Empires-in-exile in South America (I'm working on my knowledge of brazilian history and geography now), and some Pacific Islands stuff. I think I'm done with America (USA America, Canada isn't done yet) and Europe. Also, thinking of creating a DMZ in Panama and Israel/Palestine.
 
I had an idea where the modern US is ISOTed to the old world, So I did a thing where I transposed 2000 municipalities from the lower 48 states onto positions in the Old World: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kf1XnTZVUjwcpT7S6xIoQv_8944&usp=sharing

The map is searchable. Latitudes are exactly the same for all cities, but longitude is... funny. I tried to (1) preserve relative longitudes so that a city to the east would stay to the east and vice-versa, and (2) position cities so that they ended up in a place that's survivable and not in the middle of a desert or ocean. To that end I used a spreadsheet with the latitudes and longitudes of both old world cities and new world cities and did a bit of matching. However, my goals began to contradict each other and I ended up with some weird results, like some cities in Maryland being west of some cities in Iowa. Even so, the east coast is on the east coast and the west coast is on the west coast, and cities on water are not too far from land.

You just dumped Los Angeles, Phoenix and Albuquerque into Syria. That is going to be an interesting twist to the civil war!

Also Long Beach has lost it beach but gained a whole lot of ISIS filled Iraqi sand...
 
PA, VA, and NC more populated than NY? Interesting. Are upstate and downstate separate *states?
New York City had a nuclear power plant built right by the city (because the fascist government wasn't big on cities). This reactor had a meltdown. The city was evacuated. Philadelphia received the bulk of the evacuees (many later moved elsewhere), followed by Boston. (This leaves the biggest cities as LA, Dallas, Chicago, Houston, and then Philly. LA and Chicago are about the same size as OTL, while the other three are are all quite a bit bigger.)
Needs more stuff (but then I always think that. :biggrin: )
Alright.
Okay, I don't know why I thought that then.
I was living in Thunder Bay for a while.
 
gyTS7Sc.png

Update on this WIP. Main areas I'm working on right now: Persian-Turkish rivalry (mostly just not sure if what I have is adequate), Spanish and Portuguese Empires-in-exile in South America (I'm working on my knowledge of brazilian history and geography now), and some Pacific Islands stuff. I think I'm done with America (USA America, Canada isn't done yet) and Europe. Also, thinking of creating a DMZ in Panama and Israel/Palestine.

That's quite the Francewank.
What year it it?
Has Canada been fully incorporated into Britain? or just no dominion colour.
Is California Dutch or just a similar colour?
New Zealand?
 
That's quite the Francewank.
What year it it?
Has Canada been fully incorporated into Britain? or just no dominion colour.
Is California Dutch or just a similar colour?
New Zealand?

Napoleonic victory. Year 1900, or thereabouts. Canada has been fully incorporated into Britain after the loss of Wales and Scotland. California is just a similar color, I'll probably do something to differentiate the two better. New Zealand should be British, I forgot to correct the color.
 
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Just a map I made not long ago that I felt like sharing. I think my only goal here was for a more powerful China - the PoD being that Empress Dowager Ci'an merely has a stroke instead of the fatal brain hemorrhage she suffered in April 1881, and survives to push for further reforms in the Chinese government. This leads to a less humiliating loss against the Japanese, who are weakened enough for the Russians to enforce status quo ante bellum. They then enter the Great War even more confident than in OTL, only to get crushed, leading to a peace more favourable to Germany later on. China begins exerting its influence over its neighbours - first the humiliated Russians, then Korea, and then they are involved in the liberation of other East Asians from the European powers during a severe depression.

Notes:
  1. Jamaica became the 10th province of Canada in the 1920s, to be followed later by Newfoundland.
  2. The Federal Republic of Central America hopes that the third time is the charm, and so do their Chinese allies.
  3. Colombia has been forced to turn to Germany and Italy for protection from its ambitious neighbours.
  4. Argentina continues to claim the Falklands as an integral part of its territory, but Germany is not willing to let them press these claims.
  5. Ireland reluctantly joined the Commonwealth as a compromise to the Loyalists who wished to remain connected to Great Britain.
  6. Belgium collapsed as a state during the war, and France and the Netherlands were quick to reunite with their linguistic brethren, in addition to the Netherlands re-establishing a personal union over Luxembourg.
  7. Finland remains a close ally of Germany, which serves to fend off Russia.
  8. Poland may be independent, but with neither sea access nor Vilnius within reach, the Poles still believe there's a long way to go.
  9. Austria-Hungary was unable to survive the aftermath of the Great War, and was forced to devolve even more powers to its constituents.
  10. Turkey is interested in aligning with anyone that will help them reclaim the territory lost by the Ottomans.
  11. It's not a matter of when the Soviets will come, it's a matter of when. China is already preparing to declare war on Russia to liberate the Ukrainians.
  12. After the Italians played a big part in securing independence for the Mashriq Union, the latter expressed their gratitude by invading Libya. Italy is not pleased.
  13. Nigeria is falling apart to separatist movements, not-so-covertly supported by the Chinese in an effort to further weaken the UK.
  14. After Belgium's collapse, the United States stepped in to create the United States Trust Territory of Inner Africa. In theory an autonomous self-governing territory under American protection, in reality an anarchic war zone that nobody else wanted.
  15. Germany managed to secure much of Britain's colonies as a compromise for the loss of Posen and Elsass-Lothringen.
  16. The Boer State voted to separate from South Africa, and promptly fell into the German sphere.
  17. Ethiopia managed to further its territorial ambitions in the Horn of Africa, thanks again to the Great War treaties.
  18. The Turkic states serve as a buffer for China against the outside world in general, and are slowly being integrated into China proper.
  19. The Federation of the Indus-Doab is a chaotic mess of revolts and feuds, but many agree that it's better than being subjects of the British.
  20. The Crown Colony of Madras remains the sole British territory in their former crown jewel, and like hell are they going to give it up.
  21. China admires Thailand's resourcefulness in fending off the British and French, and thus allied them instead of subjugating them. Their joint project of Champa in what was southern French Indochina is an example of their friendship, but not one of their ability to create stable client states.
  22. After the Philippines were granted independence, they remained close to the Americans, much to the chagrin of China.
  23. The Netherlands and Portugal continue to be paranoid that the Chinese will come knocking for the rest of the Spice Islands one day.
 
Just a map I made not long ago that I felt like sharing.

Pretty cool! A few implausibilities, in particular 15: Britain isn't going to give Germany shit to trade for Posen and Alsace-Lorraine. At best they get back already Germany colonies that Britain seized during the war.
 
A map/scenario for
Andrela

In 1995, the Universal Mutagen (Also known as the Blue Taint, Der Blaue Tod, ohyde indygo, Aoi Jigoku, etc.)arrived on Earth, in the area where Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic intersect, in the form of a meteor shower of unknown origin (not associated with any known source within the solar system) which deposited chunks large enough to reach the ground along a line some 120 miles long from near Chemnitz to the outskirts of Chojnow, where one took out the vegetable garden of one Maja Smolek, retired forklift operator. Most fell in Poland or Germany, with only one landing on Czech land. Nobody was killed, although some windows were broken by the concussions and a few automobile fender-benders were caused by startled drivers.
As with many meteorites, their passage through the atmosphere had been fast enough that while the outer layers had vaporized in transit, the cores of the meteors remained almost as cold as space, preserving an icy blue substance, which quickly turned into a blue, slimy fluid as the meteors thawed. In a number of cases meteor hunters found them before this happened, and in others the blue pockets of fluid remained contained with the carbonaceous matrix in which they had arrived, but in others the fluid leaked into the surrounding soil.

Various scientists and investigators soon got their hands on the mysterious meteors, and were soon entranced. Some others, mostly meteor hunters with a lack of appreciation for scientific procedures and the dangers of contamination, got their hands on the meteors – and the mysterious blue slime they contained – rather more literally. They would before long be rather worse than entranced.

Scientists soon observed the blue fluid to be an extremely complex compound, comparable to advanced biological life on Earth, although without anything resembling cell structures, and with something resembling not so much as a genetic structure as several hundred seemingly incompatible but constantly recombining information-bearing strings based on a variety of sugars and bases and “proteinoids.” It was homogeneous and holographic, any small sample mirroring the structure of a larger one. It was viscous, but rapidly spread to coat any exposed surface. It also tended to aggressively combine with any terrestrial organic material: the creation in Petri dishes of a new breed of dark blue fungi was alarming, but when some lab mice started turning blue as well, alarms were sounded, but by that time it was getting rather late.

Around the same time reports began to come in about grasses turning dark blue around meteor craters, and the first case of a human being checking into the hospital with extensive blue patches on his hands, twitching eyes and slurred speech came in a week later. Alarmingly, it was a hospital in New York: the victim had been on a trip to Germany three weeks earlier when he had handled one of the meteors.

The news media got ahold of enough details a week later to cause a panic by the start of the second month.

The Blue Taint was, unlike most zombie-generating diseases (not that it was exactly a disease), highly eclectic in its choice of hosts, indifferently contaminating plants and people, herbs and hedgehogs, beets and badgers, trees and trinocular shrimp. Bacteria and the even more primitive Archaea seemed to lack enough living space, so to speak, for the Taint, but most terrestrial life on Earth proved susceptible to infection (sea life remained largely unaffected, the Taint not surviving well in high-saline conditions.) It was also highly contagious, with near-microscopic quantities coming in contact with the skim being enough to begin contagion, with (depending on the amount of the Taint originally absorbed) the appearance of visible symptoms varying from a couple weeks to as much as a month in human beings. It spread in fine capillary lines through the soil, and was produced as a byproduct of the metabolism of infected life, so about 10% of the mass of fully infected animal life and about 5% of infected plant life being the Taint itself, all bodily fluids and secretions and oils being contagious.

If the Taint had been a mere symbiote, existing peacefully within its victims, it would be tolerable, but the Taint did far more than turn its victims various shades of blue. The fact that plant and animal life became inedible and toxic after full infection was in fact a plus, in that untainted animals who ate them dropped dead of poisoning rather than spreading the Taint further [1]: no, the real problem was the mutations. Tainted life forms began to genetically change, physically and behaviorally modifying in ways almost never beneficial to human beings. Plants, aside from growing larger than normal, tend to develop luxurious new sets of thorns, hooks, spikes and sharp-edged leaves, and a variety of new toxins to supplement the existing toxicity of the Taint itself (Tainted poison ivy will give you rather more than an itech) and the pollen of Tainted plants has been known to cause massive anaphylactic shock in people previously free from any allergy problems. Animals also grow larger, and become toothier, spinier, faster, and far more aggressive.

A certain percentage tend to become aggressive towards everything, even other Tainted animals of their own species: such breeds tend to naturally die out rather quickly, but also tend to act as “berserkers” emerging from Tainted areas to violently attack anything that moves. (Most Tainted animals tend to remain in areas where Tainted life predominates, and if they become Tainted outside such an area tend to seek them out, which does help slow the spread of infection a bit.)

Infected human beings themselves undergo mutation, their intelligence declining to little more than that of gorillas and chimpanzees, and becoming, like most Tainted animal life, utterly hostile towards the non-Tainted. (The Tainted are far more dangerous than your standard movie rage-Zombie: besides being quite infectious through sweat or saliva, they’re smart enough to use knives and clubs, throw rocks a hell of a lot better than chimps do, and generally are faster and stronger than normal humans. And they understand hiding and ambushes).

Writing After The Fact, a number of talking heads have suggested a sufficiently rapid and energetic application of atomic weapons to the area would have been effective in stopping the Taint from spreading. This is probably correct, but it would have required action well before the full danger of the threat became clear, and in those times, as a result of the recently ended Cold War, there was a level of fear and hostility to the use of atomic weapons which may now seem quaint. (And in any event, the sheer megatonnage required would have exposed roughly twenty million people to lethal levels of fallout, which even in these days, when the full existential peril is well known, might lead to some casting around for alternate solutions).

Attempts were made to contain the problem through quarantine methods were largely useless: unknowing infected humans had travelled far and wide, and infected birds and insects spread it more slowly but far more unstoppably. (Fortunately, insect life, aside from an inexplicable tendency to swarm regardless of species, did not change its behavior much, probably due to the primitive nature of their brains: Tainted ants and wasps and mosquitoes as savagely aggressive as, say, Tainted squirrels, probably would have Tainted almost all the human race within a year). A new, hostile and alien ecosystem had established itself on Earth, and was slowly but steadily assimilating it to itself. The task of decontamination was quickly taken on by the initially infected nations plus concerned neighboring states and the US armed forces, but it would not be long before new outbreaks elsewhere in Europe, the US and elsewhere soon left Germany, Poland and the Czechs largely dependent on their own resources. In a year’s time the Taint had made its appearance on every continent: in five years, it had appeared in every major nation.

The Taint spread more slowly in deserts and polar regions, due to the combination of a lower density of targets of infection with Tainted organisms requiring a higher level of energy inputs than native life forms in resource-deprived areas, and fastest in tropical zones, in part due to the abundance of insect life. Infected mosquitoes largely depopulated large areas of Africa, while blackfly and similar nasty little biters had devastating effects on Canada, the northernmost US, and much of Siberia. (If insects were no more aggressive than normal, normal aggression levels were quite enough. About the only good part of it was that the smallest biting flies and mosquitoes often failed to transmit enough of the Taint to cause a full blown infection, so your odds of surviving a single bite were good. Much of the globe has been practically bathed in DDT and worse by this point, and a wide variety of extinct bird species is considered merely acceptable casualties. Swamp-draining has wiped out the majority of the world’s wetlands, and not a solitary rubber tire lies on its side with water pooling in the gaps for mosquito larvae to breed in. Having a potential mosquito breeding spot in your yard is something people have been shot for. )

Early on, tests showed that the Taint tended to shrink under intense heat into tiny, resistant pellets each protecting a fleck of the Taint from breakdown: only very high temperatures or extended heating would finish the job. Poor communications between lab and field meant that for quite a while (and much longer in third-world countries largely outside the information loop) Tainted plants and animals were disposed of through outdoor burning, “cleanup” crews unaware that the smoke and ash contained countless specks of “encysted” Taint small enough to be carried off on a moderately strong wind, and often simply spreading the Taint further. (Modern disposal methods call for “cooking” Tainted organics so to maintain internal temperatures of over 300 degrees for multiple hours, or flash-burning with copious quantities of white phosphorous).

The early prosperity of the early 90s soon yielded to an increasingly grim recession as hundreds of thousands and then millions of Germans were forced to move ever further from the expanded core area of the Taint, stalling the German economy and with it Europe’s economic engines. Ever-increasing shares of national economic output had to be plowed into looking for signs of Taint outbreaks, evacuation, sterilization, disposal, etc. as well as dealing with the expanding national panics as the Taint continued to spread and crop up in an ever-increasing number of locations. As huge swathes of contaminated farmland went up in (counterproductive) flame, food prices soared.

At the end of four years, in spite of all efforts, the Tainted area in Central Europe covered over 45,000 square miles, and more than 50 daughter Tainted Zones covering over 100 square miles dotted the face of the globe like a pox, while “small” zones no larger than, say, a few hundred acres were almost uncountable (given the appearance of the Taint in poorly surveyed areas such as the Siberian Taiga and the Amazon Jungle, probably actually uncounted/uncountable.) Something Had to Be Done, if only to be seen as Doing Something.

In a project only comparable to the Maoist Four Pests campaign, and on almost six times the scale, 2000 was the “wack-a-blue” effort, in which governments from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe armed their population with DDT sprayers, nets, birdshot rifles, and other minor-league weapons of destruction to kill as many as possible of the infected small birds, animals, and insects that were the Taint’s main spreaders: there was some degree of success in wiping out Tainted birds and(including, alas, a great many non-Tainted birds of a dangerously blue complexion, or simply laying blue eggs)small mammals, outside of areas so completely rotten with the Taint that citizens not wearing full biohazard warfare wear would only go in with government guns pointing at their backs [2], but insect life, with its prodigious breeding rate, was another issue, aside from high-vulnerability species (such as many butterflies) inhabiting narrow, localized niches (again, a great many normal but Too Blue bugs suffered for their Tainted kin’s sins). Within a few months popular enthusiasm flagged, at least in part due to the increased risk of being contaminated in going out after Tainted life rather than staying home with the windows shut. Wack-a-Blue temporarily raised popular hope and enthusiasm through the scale of the effort and mass participation, and produced a great many cultural products, such as the best-selling My Apocalyptic Year , but in the end at best slowed the growth of Tainted areas. In the subsequent pause, or drawing of breath, before a new panic could set in, the US government made the decision to bring Project Pluto into full deployment.

From early on efforts were made to find ways of neutralizing the Taint, using a variety of agents organic and inorganic, and it soon became clear that while only the most flesh-eating of chemicals could neutralize Taint-infected organics, atomic radiation caused it to break down rapidly. This was no relief to those in the process of infection, since enough radiation to penetrate the body core and eradicate the Taint usually killed the patient, but it offered some promise for fighting the spread of the Taint in the wild, limited by the supply of radioactives. (Atomic weapons by this time had been employed by the Russian government on an experimental basis on Siberian Tainted areas: the main difficulty was that unless the blast was powerful enough to irradiate the entire area, the heat flash and shock wave some distance from Ground Zero might simply distribute Tainted material to new areas).

The Taint did not flourish in salt water, either, but again curing patients by adjusting their electrolytes tended to be even more lethal than using radioactives. Flooding with huge amounts of salt water needed engineering on a massive scale, unless you already lived below sea level; the Dutch cleared off several areas of their country with controlled flooding, but the salt-soaked soil would take years to recover. The Israelis developed a remarkable “anti-irrigation” system using Dead Sea water, although this proved rather more effective at decontaminating Taint-infected soil and preventing new Tainted growths establishing themselves than dealing with existing Tainted vegetation, let alone Tainted animal life.

The US government had responded with some alacrity to the problem, even as the US government was shaken by Republican efforts to impeach Bill Clinton on a combination of being Weak On Taint and Lying About Sexytimes, with an all-out scientific-industrial assault on the problem, and a big military buildup (much of it entirely useless) directed at eliminating dangerous Tainted animal life. The most important was a huge effort to produce synthetic radioactive materials (which incidentally gave a massive boost in the arm to the nuclear industry), which although initially opposed by many of the political left-of-center, soon became a lot more acceptable as Tainted regions continued to sprout up like mushrooms in the rain. Project Pluto’s exact objectives were kept quiet, and it is widely accepted by modern historians that its implementation was delayed until it became clear that Wack-a-Blue was largely a bust, thereby making it politically possible to do what nobody could have conceived [3] before 2000: the deliberate exposure of large parts of US (and allied) soil to massive quantities of artificially generated atomic fallout.

The next decade saw a global war in which the governments of the world launched an ongoing atomic assault on their own soil, and often torn apart by unrest as their populations reacted poorly to atomic contamination of their own homes and farms, mass evacuations with no tolerance for those unwilling to move. Many simply refused to believe there were no better solutions: others decided it was the Apocalypse and it was simply useless and even a defiance of God’s will to try to stop the Taint by such methods: others were gloomily sure that the radiation would kill the world even faster than the Taint. Some Deep Green types even decided that the Taint was nature’s revenge on human civilization, and Project Pluto and it’s children merely the “From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee” of a sore loser willing to take the whole world with them rather than surrender gracefully.

And there was some truth to their argument: if the mass use of radioactives failed to kill off the Taint faster than it could spread to new locations, the end game would be nothing left but radioactive wastelands.

Although it would not be statistically confirmed until later, a turning point was reached in 2007: the Tainted areas were being destroyed faster than they could spread. One element in this was the steady out-competing of Tainted insects by regular insects, which aside from being rather more radiation-resistant than their so very blue counterparts, had a simple metabolic advantage in expending energy more slowly, and therefore being better prepared for situations of food shortage or necessarily enforced low mobility and activity. Another was one of the blackest events of the era: Project Zdravyy Smysl, or “Common Sense”: a joint Russian-Chinese project to forcibly export large amounts of fine powdered radioactive to neighboring countries unwilling to accept voluntary assistance of that sort with their Taint problems. The exact truth of what President McCain knew remains unknown to this day, but it is clear that Soviet and Chinese long-range bombing technology had received a great deal of assistance upgrading from the US 2002-2004, and that the US knew well beforehand what was being planned: it would provide US political cover for similar action, carried out with the justification that they if they didn’t do it, the Chinese and the Russians would – with far more brutality and less concern for dangers to civilian populations.

No less than eleven brutal wars took place to smash the capacity of local dictatorships to fight back against “taking their medicine.” It is still widely argued to this day that this was unavoidable: no country without the capacity and/or will to stop its own Taint infections could be allowed to remain a growing center of infection through some fooling attachment to local sovereignty and not having its citizens irradiated by foreigners: this would be more convincing if such brutal methods were not usually applied to third-world nations, with developed nations getting a much more velvet-glove approach. (Atomics-phobic Norway was bullied into accepting the irradiation of the Trondelag forests with an embargo, not smart missiles).

Of course, the Third World was disproportionately hit in a variety of ways, notably by hunger: large scale destruction of any Tainted crops (often accompanied by the contamination of further areas due to uncontrolled burning) cut into global food supply, and food prices rose sharply through the later 90s. As food tends to follow money, what surplus there was tended to move towards, or simply stay in, the wealthier nations. Third world states that exported food closed town trade to keep the food at home, only to fail to pay their own farmers enough to make up for the loss of the foreign market (enough, in other words, to make it worth selling the food to the cities rather than eating it themselves).

Famines had begun in Africa by the end of the 20th century, and would over the next decade ravage that continent, and inflect lesser but still dreadful suffering in Latin America, most of Asia, and the Middle East. Even Russia would suffer outright famine for the first time since 1947, leading to the rise of the Lebed dictatorship. (Hi there, Pellegrino!)

In 2017, the Taint has been reduced to scattered areas too small to make large-scale radioactive dumping rational, not since new neutralizing chemicals have come into mass production: although more lethal varieties are available, varieties which only slowly kill Tainted life are preferred so there is time for plant life to take it up through their vascular systems and allow for the full breakdown of the Universal Mutagen throughout. After a careful initial application of nerve gasses to kill off larger animal life, chemical sprayer trucks follow massive plant-cutting machines which slice paths through the thorny tangle of Tainted plants. The ongoing cleanup remains dangerous, and expensive: in 2016 130 square miles underwent initial-stage decontamination at a cost of around $300 billion USA.

Initial-stage, you say? The fact is that chemically breaking down the Taint by soaking an area in neutralizing chemicals doesn’t mean that there aren’t deep underground pockets of the deadly blue goo that is still untouched: intensive surveying and digging and sinking deep sampling rods will go on for years before a formerly tainted area is cleared for human re-settlement.

And of course the situation is worse in the large areas where radiation was employed to kill off the Taint. Although the US and imitators tried to use quick-decaying isotopes with half-lives short enough to decay to harmless levels in not many years, there were always other isotopes as bi-products of the creation of desired isotopes, some slow-decaying, and too expensive to separate out given the already horrendous costs of the mass production of the radioactives. Indeed, in early years there wasn’t that much consideration to separating out even unwanted different elements. Combined with the sheer quantity of radioactives used, it will be decades longer before many areas are again habitable: it is estimated that it will be the early 22nd century by the time the European Dead Zone is again habitable.

(Of course, some countries have different standards on what is “habitable.” The Chinese government generally declares its radioactively contaminated areas “safe” far sooner than seems plausible, [4] and independent use of Geiger counters and such is a crime against the state. In many of the poorer and more wretched parts of the Earth, peasants faced with the choice of farming radioactive soil or starving choose the greatly heightened long-term probability of death by cancer, etc. over the short-term certainty of extinction.)

The Taint is now curable, more or less. A combination of the new neutralizing chemicals and radioactive titration can slowly eliminate the Universal Mutagen from the body of the Tainted with a probability of death less than 20%, but if the treatment is delayed until after physical changes have taken place, the biological modifications are irreversible. Most countries do not allow their citizens to opt out of treatment if infected.

Europe is a wounded land. Vast regions of Germany and Poland and some of Slovakia are an uninhabited radioactive wasteland (wind and water runoff have spread the damage of radioactive toxins well beyond the former Tainted area), while so much of the Czech republic is gone that it largely has ceased to exist as a country, most of its people living outside of the small rump “official” state. As the center of the original infection, Europe suffered from a density of outbreaks beyond anything elsewhere, only partly compensated by a greater economic and technological capacity to respond. What is left of Germany, along with France, northern Italy, etc. is blotched and pockmarked with radioactive no-go zones. France – a left-authoritarian, technocratic, Neo-Gaullist (the neo being for the left wing tendencies) – dominates what’s left of the EC. Fearful of Tainted refugees, fearful of being forced to pay, in the midst of a deep global recession, for much of the struggle to keep Central Europe afloat, and just generally associating the European mainland as a whole with the Taint (if mostly on a subconscious level), the UK broke with the EC in 1999. The post-2000 expansion of OTL largely did not take place, with only Malta, Hungary and Slovenia joining (Slovakia and the Czech republic have a special “free association” status as essentially EC protectorates, while Poland is kept afloat by the USA). With nobody really giving a crap, the Yugoslavs held onto Kosovo by expelling two-thirds of the population, a minor humanitarian crisis among a hundred larger ones. With Europe devastated for the third time in under a century, there is a morose and nihilistic mood, with black jokes about WWIII being too popular to have been derailed by merely the collapse of one side of the Cold War.

Still, the European Community can count a few triumphs as well. Although there was much grumbling, the resettlement of tens of millions of refugees from one part of Europe to another took place with remarkable good will, within families from Lisbon to Venice taking in as temporary house guests displaced families and children, and largely unused office space throughout being commandeered by the government to make into new housing. Europe managed to actually take in several million non-European refugees potentially contaminated with the Taint with less freaking out than OTL Europeans taking in refugees potentially contaminated with salafism. (The cynical might point out that while the Tainted will turn blue in the quarantine camps before long, Secrit Musleems never turn green no matter how long you watch them.)

Even more importantly, Europe was at the heart of hunger-fighting efforts during the Famine years. While many of the technological and scientific innovations behind the creation of new, relatively Taint-proof food supply were pioneered in the US, the combination of greater need arising from early and more extensive infection combined with a greater degree of comfort with socialized costs meant that in terms of actually application and production, the European Union was well ahead of the US until late in the struggle. Indoor tower farms, extensive hydroponics, sealed aquaculture growing tanks, yeast vats, etc. all were developed to a high degree, and by 2002 European scientists were able to announce the creation of the world’s first purely synthetic food of non-organic origin. Containing all necessary nutrients (well, you’d have to eat it and only it for over a year before problems began to crop up) and tasting, in the words of a connoisseur, like “sweetened library paste”, the Omnifood Bar never became cheap enough to make to be sold without government subsidy, but it meant to many people more than a mere way of enriching manufacturers: it was a proclamation that no matter how bad things got, Europeans would at least not starve to death. (And Europe would help other nations: synthetics less expensive, if less universal in their ability to replace regular food, began to be exported in large quantities to starving nations within a few years. Germany began producing a variant made from its own coal, which some considered to be sort of cheating).

The US, the world’s greatest agricultural exporter, an ocean away from the origin of the Taint, the world’s greatest industrial power, with capacities no other nation could match, was best positioned to ride out the bad years with a minimum of trouble. Unfortunately, it was initially slow in preparing a response due to overconfidence in that Ocean, and by the time the gravity of the situation really sank in the Taint, brought by human travelers, insects aboard ships, migrating birds, etc. was making itself at home in the farms and fields of North America. While the US never saw true famine, there was a long period of rationing and belt-tightening and “alternative food”, and among the poor and already food-insecure, a fair number _did_ die of hunger, but gradually enough that most people weren’t too exercised about it. Still, there was a great fear abroad in the land, and President McCain’s Tough Guy act wasn’t really enough to convince people everything would be alright. The Religious right became quite convinced, understandably, that the End of Days was at hand, and while they were willing to put up with McCain, when in 2008 the vote was split by the theocratic candidate being too radical for the Republican party and the Democrats made a comeback, it was clear the Antichrist had arrived.

(Thing had reached a turning point by then in the battle with the Taint, and government experts were saying so by the time the election rolled around, but perceptions are important, and from the point of view of many things were getting worse, not better. Background radiation kept going up, as did the amount of synthetic food (“guaranteed untainted and nutritious!”) in people’s diets.)

Combined with an already smouldering and increasingly violent anger in the countryside (the government’s efforts to make sure everyone Shared Alike the limited food supply necessarily ended up with a lot of farmers having “excess surplus” they were keeping back for themselves confiscated), the results of the 2008 election triggered what officially are known as the Troubles, but among many is referred to as The Second Civil War or even The Second American Revolution. The fighting, which did not really come to an end until 2014, was heavily downplayed by the media (heavily government-influenced thank to the many “emergency powers” the government had taken on since 1995), but still ended up killing over 250,000 Americans, with several cities virtually wrecked by fighting between government and rebel groups, and local units of the national guard, police, and even units of the military joining the rebellion: even parts of New England, not really sympathetic to the fundamentalist and “strong constitutionalist” groups, rose against the government in protest against the massive restriction on civil liberties. The National State of Emergency was not (partially) put to an end until 2016, when in a move of heroic principle (or sheer stupidity, some said) the Democrat-dominated government allowed free national elections. To the surprise of many, Americans were tired of fighting, aware that the Taint was more or less under control, and really didn’t want to start Round Two of a civil war: in spite of a plethora of deeply insane candidates, the winner was a Republican who could speak coherent sentences and was willing to let Jesus arrive in his own time. (He has been taking legislative steps to screw over the cities in a favor of the country, though).

The world has seen a slow recovery from the late 2000s as the Taint slowly withdrew, but much of the world remains a mess. Large areas of Africa, Latin America, and SE Asia are still under foreign occupation due to the collapse of local authority in the face of populations ravaged by insect-borne Taint. Civil war and other disorders which might give the Taint a chance to reestablish itself are strongly frowned upon, and people are not picky about how order is maintained. In some parts of Africa regional warlords essentially have been confirmed in power by the international community as long as they keep an eye out for new Taint outbreaks and don’t complain about the background radiation level. If they keep order, it is fine: nobody feels like questioning how it is kept.

Famine, death, and government incapacity in dealing with the same provoked civil wars and the breakup of some nations: in some areas regimes survived because the populace was too busy starving to revolt. Massive population relocations have taken place as people fled from heavily Tainted areas to regions of safety (or assumed safety). Population distributions have changed, in some places radically; in Peru, almost everyone lives on the nose-bleedingly elevated Altiplano nowadays. The Amazon jungle is currently having a breather from deforestation in those areas not toxic with radiation: most of the population fled the area when it became the government couldn’t handle the many fast-growing and hard to access Tainted regions, and the US started the large-scale deployment of Project Pluto.

(Since the return to more-or-less normalcy, much of the third world has seen the rise of the Union of the Global South, an international political movement driven by anger at the high handed way the developed nations handled bringing the Taint under control in poor nations, often involving invasions, occupations, or simply dumping thousands of tons of radioactive materials from twenty thousand feet. The US, China, etc. argue this was simply necessary, but it is hard for people who have seen entire families die of radiation poisoning be objective. The spread of the Union has been limited by the fact that vast stretches of the Third world are simply still too dependent on the global North, or are simply run by warlords in foreign pay. Still, the Union of the Global South is influential in a number of countries, including, to First World unease, three countries with developed nuclear industries.)
The Saudi Civil War [5] made a fragmented mess of the Arabian Peninsula. (Saddam Hussein is doing alright, thank you: he managed to wiggle out of most of the sanctions regime while people were way too busy with Taint-related affairs to pay much attention).

China has at least in part returned to its socialist roots, mass mobilization politics and state run anti-taint mass manufacturing both having been needed in a situation where things could hardly be run on a normal for profit basis and the capitalist part of the economy having been hurt by a sharp reduction in foreign trade. (The Taint had arrived, after all, only six years after Tiananmin Square). Much of the old rhetoric returned during the long struggle, and China in 2017 is an alarmingly mobilized state: while over the last decade, as the global economy slowly revived, China has moved energetically back into the world capitalist system, it seems unlike to become the pseudo-gilded age economy of OTL anytime soon.

North Korea, ravaged by famine 1995-1998, with outbreaks of the Taint from 1999, and increasingly little aid available from abroad, essentially invaded South Korea and collapsed simultaneously in 2001, with the country divided up between China and South Korea.

Japan essentially turned Tokyo and a few other cities into giant clean-room sealed environments: following the airtight connecting tubes and tunnels, one can now walk from one end of Tokyo to the other without ever seeing sunlight. Some of the new generation are positively terrified of the idea of going outside, and there are projects to extend the city further by going deeper underground.

SE Asia, hit hard by insect-driven Taint spread, is a mess and occupied mostly by foreign forces, with the exception of Vietnam, which managed to maintain control at the cost of a countryside so chemically poisoned that 1 in 5 children born has some sort of visible malformation. Many of Indonesia’s smaller islands are covered with slowly cooling radioactive dust, and most of the Chinese minority has been expelled. Strict quarantine and isolation kept the Taint out of New Zealand until the Murder Sheep outbreak of 2002.

In case all efforts to stop the Taint ended in failure, some emergency backup options were explored during the long war against the Taint: the US explored the possibility of establishing self-sustaining colonies off Earth, leading to the successful launch in 2009 of the only sort of spaceship getting enough stuff off the Earth fast enough, an Orion atomic push-plate ship. (By that time it was becoming clear the fight was being won, but bureaucratic inertia is a powerful thing, as are long-term contracts with lots of state pork attached). There are plans for sending model 2.0 to Mars (the first design unfortunately hadn’t quite mastered the whole landing thing): the issues of a spaceship design which depends on a steady stream of nuclear explosions are much less in a world where everyone is pretty much resigned to alarmingly high background radiation levels. The Europeans, on the other hand, noting the Taint’s poor survival rates in sea water, got to work on a sea-floor settlement program: there is substantial debate whether the 5,000 people currently occupying the shallower parts of the Bay of Biscay are a terribly expensive boondoggle or The Future.

The Russians tried to do some settlement in the interior of Antarctica, where no Taint-carrying life form could survive. They tend to be rather close-mouthed about the results of this effort.

Radiation, like the occasional Tainted rat trying to gnaw your face off, is a fact of life. Expensive homes have elaborate filtration systems to clear the air: poor ones do the best they gain with fine-weave cloth and wishful thinking. A breathing mask worn outside is de rigeur, and goggles for that annoying bit of radioactive grit landing in your eye. The more paranoid go for full radiological warfare suits if they can afford them, if not they fix up something with plastic bags and duck tape. The public bath house has returned to Europe: thorough washing, showering, cleaning off the dust, is life, is health: clean uncontaminated water is precious. Some YOLO types scorn such measures, claiming that where _they_ live is clearly not too badly contaminated. The plants and so on look fine, right? And indeed a fair amount of the globe isn’t too badly contaminated, and the radiation level is dropping steadily – but perhaps half the world’s population when it dies will die of cancer or some other radiation-related illness, and some places are much worse off than others. In North Burma, where the Chinese were ruthless in stopping the spread of the Taint through the jungles when the Junta proved incapable, lifespans are brutally short. In central Europe, a vast swathe of cities stand empty, abandoned: some have burned down. Extensive areas in the tropics are almost human – baseline human- free.

Humor tends to be black, and artwork has tended to take on an obsessive interest in death and morbidity, as in the days after the black plague. (With exceptions: Russia, for instance, has banned all such manifestations of “morbid, anti-human art.”) People tend to nervously watch the skies, and the US government recently passed the budget for a multi-billion, decade-long program of obsessively scanning said skies for alien radio signals, the flare of interstellar starship drives, the infrared glow of Dyson spheres, etc.

The world is poorer, even in the most advanced nations, and rather more authoritarian and police-statey even in the most democratic of states. It is by necessity more socialized, as governments are forced to take responsibility for millions of displaced internal refugees the free market is incapable of handling fast enough. Everyone gets their ration of (synthetic) government cheese, the world is full of hastily thrown up and already crumbling “people storage” apartment complexes, (where the government hasn’t simply split people’s houses in two to make room for refugees) and it seems nowadays that every family has at least one person working for the government. However, it’s also a bustling time for the small entrepreneur as people scramble to Make Do and require all sorts of services that aren’t immediately available where they’ve turned up.

Blue is no longer a boy’s color, or for that matter anyone’s color: only edgy assholes wear dark blue colors, and only the suicidal use blue makeup or hair dye. (There’s always at least one idiot who gets shot every Halloween).

The most hated and feared of terrorists (Muslim terrorists aren’t really looked upon any worse than Christian fundamentalist terrorists or national separatist terrorists [6]) are those who try to spread the Taint: the Taint growing out of control again is the one great existential terror of the era. Some have “normal” objectives, and simply are using the Taint as the ultimate terror weapon while simply assuming that it won’t get out of control nowadays: they are looked as dangerous fools but not pure monsters. That is reserved for those who want it to get out of control again: Deep Green and related Humans Will Kill the World loons who see the Taint as nature’s solution to the Human Problem, apocalyptic thinkers who think destruction by the Taint as God’s Will or at least think it needs to kill a lot more people before Jesus/The Mahdi/One Punch Buddha comes back. And then there are the real weirdoes, starting with the Church of Oblivion and going downhill from there. (At least the Disciples of Jeff always greet you with a big smile.)

Religion certainly has received a bit of a shakeup, although the Catholic Church remaining quite firm on refusing to predict when God might decide to wind things up has ultimately strengthened its position. New religions have sprouted weird and wonderful (if occasionally horrible) and many people have turned to religion for reassurance in a poorer, more dangerous world where so much that seemed certain and solid has been thrown into chaos. Religious devotion is in, millenarianism is to some extent out (the world did not in fact end, and people are now somewhat resentful towards those who looked forward to it or even took steps to speed it along) although among Hindus a strong movement that claims this is now the Age of Kali Yuga for sure. (Since it theoretically could last for billions of years, it’s hard to call them on this). Jews are happy that at least during this last global catastrophe very few people actually blamed them for it (although of course they were blamed for profiting off it or directing which areas got the heaviest unwanted radiological deliveries).

Tainted humans remain a problem. While the great majority had been killed, some still survive in deep forests and wilderness, spreading the Taint and murdering any humans that they may stumble across. While that is a problem that is being solved with hounds and semi-automatic weapons, a less tractable problem is those which have been captured alive. As already mentioned, by the point they have become visibly transformed, the biological modifications are irreversible: although after months of treatment they may return to a normal coloration, and the skin (after some horrendous peeling) becomes less leathery, those enlarged bones, deformed jaws, and gruesome teeth aren’t going away. Higher brain functions don’t return, and they remain abnormally fast, aggressive and strong, if no longer universally murderous towards non-Tainted animate life. All surviving captured specimens, even after decontamination, must be kept in high-security institutions under the most stringent security. They are usually sterilized or at least separated by sexes: the children of the “cured” will be (mostly) genetically normal humans, and will not live long in the care of their parents, while those still Tainted and blue will produce children Tainted from birth (not something anyone wants to allow).

There are advocates for those who have been permanently damaged by the Taint, but they have a hard row to hoe. The tragic case of Dr. Clayton, who taught one of the “decontaminated” inmates sign language and established what she considered to be a close rapport, only to be murdered and partially cannibalized when she and a security guard grew trustingly careless, has only recently departed from the air waves, and probably will be refreshed in people’s memories when the movie comes out next year. Many countries exterminate human Tainted outright, denying that they are, in fact, human, or anything than very dangerous animals. In those countries which keep them alive, much lobbying for their continued preservation comes from surviving relatives, who hope their humanity may be restored some day.

This hope is fed by the advances in genetic engineering that have come from the study of the Universal Mutagen, the blue goo which is the active agent of the Taint. Dangerous as it is, it’s bizarre mutagenic properties make it too fascinating as a subject of study to simply mix it with some polonium and destroy it: even though a dozen or more researchers worldwide are infected annually, some incurably so, the struggle to interpret its mysteries continues. Genetic therapy is rather more advanced than OTL, and in those countries which haven’t been scared by the mutagenic nature of the Taint to ban genetic manipulation altogether, new “improved” plants and animals are coming onto the market with increased frequency, and a Taint “vaccine” is promised by the year 2020 (not that most people, when polled, trust the idea enough to take it). It is a Brave New Future out there, and there have emerged a number of post-Humanist lobbies that proclaim genetic engineering to make a superior, Taint-proof human is the only way that the human race will be ready to take on the challenges that no doubt await us out in space.

(The Taint at the very least proves life, or something like it, exists beyond the Earth, and some say it proves intelligence as well. That the Taint is someone, or something’s, artificial creation is a view roughly equal in popularity to the idea that it represents a sort of ultra-parasite that infects entire ecosystems rather than individual species. That it was deliberately targeted at Earth is a more contentious idea; after all, if destruction was the aim, no more than a dozen or so source infections on the scale of the European one would have been enough to bring down civilization and doom humanity before it could rally. A cynical sub-sub group suggests that it was just a weapons experiment: whether humanity lived or died was a mere datum, genocide no more than the intent of the experiment than testing a germ on lab animals is a deliberate attempt to wipe said animals out. )

[1] Animals who ate a fair amount, anyway. A small quantity of Tainted plant or animal tissue, taken orally, won’t kill you: it will make you violently ill and convert you into a Tainted in a week, but it won’t kill you!
[2] Aside from “Jackass” contestants. Russia was the only country to come close to the US in “drunken, heavily armed idiot tries to single-handedly take on the Tainted ecosystem” incidents.
[3] Outside the “the government created AIDS and faked the Moon landing and will turn us all over to the tender mercies of the UN” crowd, of course.
[4] Admittedly, even the US in this timeline rates “safe” levels of radiation rather higher than in our world. Necessity is the mother of bare-faced invention.
[5] Partly set off by the Saudi government importing large numbers of infidels to help deal with their own Taint problems. Wasn’t it obvious that the Taint was a divine test of faith and calling on the aid of polytheists instead clearly blasphemy?
[6] There was no 9/11: although the Taint seems to have done wonders for his health, it rather shortened the terrorism career of one Osama Bin Laden, last seen chewing the face off a fellow jihadist. However, the effort by one extremist splinter group within Hamas to use the Taint as a terror weapon against Israel led to the Great Expulsion of 2011, in which the Israelis simply expelled most of the Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank into surrounding Arab states.
 
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