Erwin blinked at her. “So…what do you know, if anything, about the beginning of the Second Dark Age, which many call the Great Disaster?”
She followed his lead, taking a long, calming breath to focus and remember what she’d been taught. “I know it was terrorists who released something over old Texas that was supposed to burn fuel and die, but something went wrong. The factories exploded, and the Dust went up into the sky and spread over the whole world. It burned all the fuel, everything, and when it went out, it took everything with it. Energy didn’t work anymore. The first Sparks were special soldiers, and they tried to control the Dust, but they couldn’t.
“People who lived in the huge cities suffered the most and the fastest. They couldn’t get food. And the water stopped flowing. Most of them died.” She swallowed. “And everything went dark for a long time. Almost fifty years later, Mark Peller went out and collected Sparks and formed the First Council.”
Erwin held up a finger, indicating she should stop her recitation. He pulled a tube closer to himself and unrolled it, revealing a map. He moved the edge of it closer to her as he spoke. “That is a very basic, and incomplete, understanding of what happened—take that side there and pull it toward you—but at least it’s not terribly tainted by Council propaganda.” He gave a loud, indelicate sniff.
With the map spread before her, she could see the nine Zone divisions. Entire swaths of the green and brown of the land were covered with neatly inked, tiny black x’s—most of the west coast of the country and a huge area sweeping up from the curving shoreline of the south. The ugly slashes crept away from the fat body of the inked areas in long, sinuous arms stretching across the country in every direction. Those tentacles represented the refinery-rich and pipelined Hell Cities and the lands surrounding them that had burned to slag. No one survived.
Erwin set a heavy ball of glass on one corner and a large and jagged black rock on the other. His hand ran across the map, gesturing like a magician about to make something appear from nothing. “This is the world as it was, two hundred and twelve years ago. Or at least our side of it.” He pointed at the top and moved down. “Canada. The United States. Mexico. Central and South America further down.” He stared down at the map and blinked several times. “The combined population of these three countries was 560 million people. Ten years after the attack, 300 million were gone. Ten years later, another fifty million. And on and on, the dying went. Starvation. Hard winters. Bad water. Illness. The influenza that struck the East Coast relocation centers devastated the population—and to this day, we on the Western fringes are stronger.
“By the time Peller and his cronies gathered together those few tens of thousands left alive in each of the relocation centers—if you can call what they were doing living—they were grateful for any chance. They would have agreed to anything. And the first Sparks did exactly that.”
Erwin leaned back in his chair and the wood creaked and moaned, as if as disturbed at the loss of life as Erwin seemed to be. He shook his head. “That is what happened. But what caused all of this devastation?” He raised his brows at her.
Lena shook her head. She’d answered him already, hadn’t she?
He smiled faintly. His chair creaked again as he shifted his weight. “The terrorists released nano-robots. Tiny, tiny metal machines too small for the human eye to see. In this case, programmed to destroy fossil fuels. They were specifically designed to work around safeguards, to be self-sufficient, self-replicating. Instead of a kill switch, they had an adaptation switch. The terrorists who made them did everything everyone in science had agreed to never, ever do. We have no idea why.”
Her eyes narrowed. Tiny robots? Little machines?
“They might have only affected our fuels, if not for the government’s response. You see, once they figured out what was happening, they decided to try to use their experimental nano-response team—”
“They had a team of tiny machines?”
“No, they had a team of soldiers, trained to reprogram the brains of the tiny machines.”
“The Sparks.”
“Exactly. They were chosen because of the strength of their brain waves, the ability to control things. And then the scientists manipulated their bodies to make it stronger. Their minds could contact and control nanobots. But by the time they were sent out, it was too late. When the explosions began—the refineries, the pipelines—the nanobots were sent into the atmosphere. It was already over. It took five days, roughly, for the nanobots to circle the Earth, a little longer for them to reach the Southern Hemisphere. Everywhere they settled, wherever they came into contact with pure fossil fuels, nightmarish fire. Even synthesized forms smoldered. And the nanites reproduced. It was over. They were everywhere. In the air, in the water, in us. Everywhere. The world was in flames.”