After the Oiligarchs

It 2285, and it has been fifty years since the Last World War. Civilisation as we knew has to most intents and purposes collapsed. The nuclear wasn't as bad as many people expected, as most weapons weren't launched due to poor maintenance thanks to the scarce resources available prior to the war. The ensuing nuclear winter has also been less severe thanks to the global warming which had taken place over the preceding centuries. The global climate is a mess however, and exacerbated the Great Migrations that had begun in 2198. Deserts have spread out across swathes of the Earth, while other areas have become beset by floods and frozen winters.

What was once the United States has been ravaged. The North, along with the vast majority of Canada are almost perpetually frozen, with annual flash floods. Blood drenched khanates extend across the Midwest, raiding the overpopulated cities of the coast. Texas remains somewhat stable and plays host to the US remnant government and is dominated by the vast resources the oil (more correctly, human oil) companies had to hand by the time of the Last War. Most of cities expanded into vast suburbs before the war, and when their centres were destroyed, the suburbs became the core of new city-states. The collapse of the US government was seen as a blessing by many of these city governments who had long resented the corporatocracy of the US government over the 21st and 22nd centuries. The city-states have concentrated themselves, and dug into the ground to provide more living space and live off very grey, simple foods. The countryside between the cities are very sparsely populated, the occasional subsistence farm or tiny village being the only signs of civilisation. Most of the population are hunter-gatherers or nomadic herders who follow their deer across the landscape which is being reclaimed by nature. In the South, cannibal tribes have become less ubiquitous, but you still hear stories. There are far fewer city states and more fortified towns down here. The Neo-Malthusians govern a shaky state in New England and around the St Lawrence River, but they are really more of a sturdy coalition of city-states than any coherent nation-state.

This pattern is followed around the globe to one extent or another. There is certainly less of a taboo around cannibalism. After all, the rich oil companies were rendering down human bodies into cheap fuel for 174 years before the Last War, and everyone knew about it. And as food distribution collapsed, cannibalism broke out and that was 39 years before the Last War. Religion as we would recognise it collapsed, as millions lost faith in any benevolent God. New religions, focussed around personalities, ancestors, cities or nature emerged.

There are a few stabler states around the globe. In the Middle East is the Mesopotamia Republic, founded by the mercenaries and US occupying forces in Iraq after the Last War. Eventually, the military government came to an accomodation with the occupied population and a shift to some kind of democracy began. The mercenary forces control of the human-oil supply was invaluable and as the government was built, there was no shortage of dead bodies, and various criminals who could feed that supply.

In general, those parts of the world which had high concentrations of human-oil processing plants performed well. The Alaskans survive in their underground shelters, far from the frozen surface thanks to a steady fuel supply. The Colombian Empire rules about half of South America, bounded by the irradiated mess of Central America and the Great Amazon Desert. The New Sokoto Caliphate rules the Niger River and stretches to the Chad Saltflats.

A few places came out well due to their alternative means of survival. New Zealand is shakily surviving thanks to nuclear power, and has annexed coastal parts of desertified and nigh-uninhabitable Australia. A new Dynasty is emerging from the mess of China, their age old civilisation having seen many catastrophes. A rump Russian state survives in Siberia, the warmer climate having given them great farming capabilities. They are mostly Turkic in nature these days but still venerate the Great Father, Vladimir Putin.

On the Moon, a glittering base shines. A hundred steel towers stretch into the airless sky, the undimmed light of the sun reflecting off a thousand crystal windows. This is the great triumph of the oiligarchs. They were the wealthiest men the world had ever known. The seventy years long depressen from the 2020s onwards had seen them take over the United States economically and politically and by the Last War, they were the largest economy on the planet. Seeing the tide turning, they established their new home here. This was a home for the elite, and all menial tasks were automated. This was to be paradise, far from the hell of Earth. It hasn't turned out that way. A solar flare a decades back fried electronics on Earth, but things had gone so badly, it didn't effect it too much. On the Moon, they were hit by the full force. The automated systems broke down aside from those with lots of failsafes like life support and food production. Nowadays, the towers are run by vying gangs of marauders who scavenge technology and fight for dominance. It seems even here, man's achievements have been rendered to naught.