As he stood on his palace’s balcony looking at the view, Spectre reviewed what he had learned since returning to Earth.
In 2110, when most of Earth’s population had been wiped out by the impact of the two Destroyers, nearly all of the Earthbound heavy industry and agriculture had gone with it, leaving a few locations where the howling winds and thousand-foot tsunamis did not reach. But even with a few cities intact, the Meme who took form as Blends had retooled what they seized. Farm machinery became the height of technology on the ground as staving off famine and then breeding more human underlings became the priority.
Each of sixty-four new Blends became overlords, calling themselves kings or pharaohs or presidents, dividing the spoils among them. Purelings imposed ruthless order, enslaving or killing all they found. For a time, humans were hunted and caged, then bought and sold for their labor, their skills, and the use of their bodies.
Over the next fifty years, human society was remade and reinvigorated, if not restored to what it once was. Survivors endured and were forced to breed, but they remembered and they taught their children about the old days, before the Meme and the Yellows came.
If not for the Eden Plague, the first generation, the breeding stock, would have died out and solved the Blend overlords’ problems for them. But with the longevity the virus conferred, dissenters found each other and formed an insurgency, carefully salvaging what technology they could as they recruited for the eventual day of liberation.
The Blend overlords had children, expanding their oligarchy beyond its members’ easy recognition. Rae and her two surviving children were able to walk among them, or take off the yellow and pass as ordinary humans slaving for the benefit of those above them. A poor Londoner of the nineteenth century or a Russian, North Korean or Chinese worker of the middle twentieth would have felt right at home in one of these feudal-industrial states.
This was the world Spectre had inherited. He’d spent an inordinate amount of effort over the past two months bringing the mishmash of the Blend’s police and military forces to heel, executing at least a fifth of them outright. Once EarthFleet replaced the loyalist orbital defense forces, liberal use of laser bombardment convinced the holdouts their former masters had abandoned them.
The rest the Skulls took care of, mercilessly.
Using the hardcore insurgents as his political cadre, Spectre conducted a terrifying purge, mitigated only by the ability to subject subjects to biological interrogation to confirm their change of loyalty. Without that, he would have ordered killed anyone he was not certain of.
Not surprisingly the lowest classes, the powerless slaves who toiled on the farms and in the factories, were overjoyed at their newfound freedom. They were not quite as happy to learn that they had all been drafted into EarthFleet as militia, but those born after the Third Holocaust had not yet broken the habit of obedience to those who wore the yellow, and so, in less than two months, Earth was once again militarized.
More and more of the children of the original Meme Blends had joined Spectre, multiplying his abilities enormously. Once he had thoroughly ransacked their minds to ensure their sincerity, he put them to work doing the same to others. Eventually he was confident all remaining Blends at least grudgingly accepted his rule.
The others, he executed. He had no time for rehabilitation. The enemy could appear at any moment.
Now Spectre gazed out over what had been Gilgamesh’s palace perched at the highest point of the Protectorate of Shepparton, pleased at the buzz of hundreds of people coming and going below him. The city’s self-titled Lord Mayor had ruled it with a bit more wisdom and benevolence than the average Blend, and had developed it into the largest metropolis in Australia with over one million people. Shepparton had been spared the worst effects of the worldwide cataclysm due to its inland position.
Spectre had taken it for his own, making it his world capital, nerve center of his operations, connected to the other sixty-four former dictatorships by liberal use of satellite communications. Now, Earth had one government again, under martial law.
Still, he shook his head in disgust at how little he had accomplished. In many ways he felt like he was back in one of the Central American countries as a Green Beret, trying to turn barefooted peasants into insurgents against their anti-American regimes or drug cartels. As then, he could call on a limited set of high-tech resources, air and space assets to leverage what he had, but he didn’t have enough of the basics: assault rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, much less lasers or EarthFleet-style pulse guns. Even the PVNs on Ceres had limits. And few of Earth’s downtrodden workers had ever even considered picking up a weapon. They had to be taught a new mindset.
One man’s propaganda is another’s inspirational theme.