War 3.0 (nanO)

Every single one of us citizens were limping along with donut spare tires and our check engine lights on. There was nothing to be done about the Middle East, in fact, there never was. It was up to them. All of them. Religions, artifacts, holy ground and all that. In one of the largest cities on Earth, we were surviving.

A presidential election was a year away. A fight between two men who should’ve been put out to pasture to enjoy their years of philanthropy and golf. Viruses unknown still wreaked havoc on our trust in one another and just before Christmas 2023 masks were mandated again. This time there was no kind Fouci to enlighten us with his calm grey-haired smile. This time it was the military suggesting that a new strain had been identified using our sewage and that it was more deadly than all the past viruses and might in fact be microscopic nanobots.

It was unknown if the nanO-virus was centrally controlled or if they were autonomous unseeable dust specs of death. The first confirmed nanO death was pronounced two days into the new year in Florida. It took them an extra day to sound the alarms because the elderly woman who died was non-verbal. She was brought in from the sunning yard after she began to wheeze for breath.

News spread fast. Local Florida politicians blamed everyone. The ailing healthcare system, full of retirees, collapsed after only a few weeks of the onslaught. No one believed the new nanO-proof masks were necessary. And here’s the thing. Because we’d been insulated by the first pandemic, governments across our planet began to caution against overreaction. The nanO-proof masks took a bit longer to produce in mass, so at first mainly the East Coast states got them as they were imported from China. Really, there’s nothing that China doesn’t produce for us. Perhaps even the nanOs were from there.

11-23-23

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