Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

sad and depressing grey mess. It was only a matter of time before the oppressed rose to fight. And fight they did. In any way they could.

More blood had soaked into the soil of the world in the years leading up to the Great Collapse than in all other conflicts combined. Between ecological disasters, deadly pathogens, broken industry providing insufficient food, electricity and clean water, failing healthcare systems, and then the armed riots, bombings, terrorism and the plain old-fashioned brawls, over ninety per cent of the population of the world didn’t make it. Over fourteen billion people perished.

When France, the first of the two remaining nations, fell in early 2176, the world looked nothing like what the history books described. The surviving one point four billion people, scattered around the world, which a few decades earlier had housed over eleven times as many, were confused, terrified and desperate for someone to take the lead and show them the way. The anarchy was rough on everyone, further decimating the population. The World Government faced no opposition when it formed on the 21st of June 2177. Token resistance to the constitution proposed the following year was brutally squashed.

The World Government was not benevolent. It didn’t concern itself with individuals, blaming egocentric, self-centred focus for what had happened to the world earlier that century. The Governing Council of the World Government saw themselves as the saviours of the human race. They diligently studied the past and were determined to avoid the mistakes their ancestors had made at all costs. The sentiment was noble, the means to achieve it… not so much. Those who objected to the new rules, or were too slow implementing them, died on the spot. Anything that even remotely resembled the vices of the world that had literally gone up in flames during the Great Collapse was exterminated with extreme prejudice.

Given the preceding years of scarcity and disease, resistance to the World Government’s rule was weak and poorly organised. The majority of the surviving population welcomed the guidance, because with it came the end of anarchy, the comfort of safety and their basic needs being met. Not many people could afford the luxury of holding on to their moral beliefs when surrounded by the ashes of the old world. The majority didn’t even try.

Decades later, as the world was beginning to recover from its wounds, awakening to a new image under the watchful eye of the World Government, people returned to Lyon and other ruined cities. Interestingly, the human race showed yet again that it preferred to build a new civilisation where the old one used to stand rather than start in a fresh spot. The legend of the phoenix, where something beautiful is reborn from ashes, comes to mind.

The world that emerged at the end of the 22nd century was nothing like the one the human race had left behind. It was the older generation that had destroyed the world, and the new generation desperately desired to be anything but. They applauded the World Government and the salvation it promised.

Reborn from ashes, the world and humanity had a lucky break. The salvation the World Government had offered was real. It came, however, at a steep cost. For Lyon, it meant forgetting its past, traditions and culture. Excavations and archaeology, among many other things, had been strictly forbidden. The new city had literally grown and expanded upon the rubble of the old one and it blossomed in a way no city could have dreamt of in the past. And there would always be room to grow, for birth rates, as well as other aspects of life, were tightly controlled by the World Government’s philosophy and the strict rules, and would remain constant for a very long time.

By 2314, when the World Government generously relinquished its control, granting sovereignty to the South American Association and the Asian Coalition of the Free Nations, and renamed itself the Afro-European Alliance, Lyon had been enjoying the re-growth of modern architecture at its finest. Just like in ancient times, the two rivers served their vital function. The city had settled, yet again, between the confluence of the two and spread to both sides and to the south. And then the growth stopped, as those who had wished to abandon the countryside had all relocated and there was no one else incoming for whom to expand.

The third nano-tech revolution started in the mid-24th century. Progress was swift and ground-breaking despite strict safety measures. By the 2370s, nano-meds had become widely available, used not only to treat what had been considered untreatable by 21st-century doctors but to actually prevent a human body from getting sick in the first place. Babies, upon birth, were given nanogenbot-guided therapy—nano-sized robots capable of gene manipulation that virtually guaranteed a long and healthy life. The world seemed like a perfect dream of happiness and progress and any protests against the suffocating rules imposed first by the World Government and now the Afro-European Alliance were few and far between.

Whether the world that had emerged was as utopic as the founders believed will be judged by the historians. But even the best utopia cannot last forever.

The perfect bubble of a dream shattered in 2467, when a child died because their parents couldn’t afford the nano-therapy needed to correct a random birth defect. The public’s outrage was as fierce as it was futile. Apparently, it had been the parents’ fault for not having the financial resources.

Soon, more people began to die, while shelves in hospitals and pharmacies overflowed with nano-meds that could have saved them. The oh-so-perfect society shattered, the wealth gap growing at a disgusting rate. The steady decline led, yet again, to the creation of a class system. The rich had more than they needed, while the poor died because they couldn’t afford the basics.

Pursuing survival, the poor emigrated away from the heavily automated cities where they could find no jobs. The countryside, virtually abandoned for over two centuries, looked scary and uninviting