“…the Council would like to say good morning to all citizens of Europa, and a heartfelt thank you to those who supported us in our cause…”

A clear, crisp voice announced through the public announcement system. Through the walls of his bedroom, Dr. Valm J. Stresemann could hear the muffled voice of the announcer, booming through the massive speakers mounted on poles.

It has been a week since the Progressive People’s Party overthrew their old government, and established a new group of men and women to rule their city better.

Led by the late and great Alexei Volkov, who was tragically killed in the coup, the revolutionaries stormed the capitol with the help of the army and seized control of the city. Despite the death of their leader, the party didn’t seem to lose sight of their goal, and the first week of their rule has been nothing but turmoil.

No longer were surveillance cameras placed in every room of every building. No longer were the streets filled with agents and spies. People now had more freedom, more power, and more productivity to help with the war effort.

Their previous government had been too paranoid about their people, spending resources and time to fight their people, and not their enemies. Because of that, they began falling behind in the war, and so a new government had to come in and take over.

His phone dinged, so he tapped the screen to listen to the voice message which he had just received.

“Morning, Dr. Stresemann, I’m parked on the side of the street a little ways down the road from the gate. The gatekeeper informed me that I can’t park in front of the gate, so I had to go somewhere else, sorry for the inconvenience.”

That’s his chauffeur, Jenia, who was assigned to drive Valm everywhere he goes after the Council showed interest in his work. Though much younger than Valm himself is, Jenia is well-mannered and generally a pleasant young man to be around.

Valm tapped the screen of his phone again. “That’s fine, I’ll be there in a minute,” he said as he threw on his coat. The phone dinged, signaling to him that his reply message had been sent.

He went over to his work bag, thick with all the folders and files of this research, and looped it over his shoulder.

On the way to the door, he scooped up his phone and keys, then switched off the air conditioner. Being a scientist, he is rather aware of the importance of conserving the precious energy resources they have left.

The walk through the massive apartment block took a good while. Several dozen stories high, apartments have become massive to house the growing population. Unlike their New Asian counterparts, Europa's surrounding geology doesn’t allow their city to expand much beyond its current boundaries. Being at the foot of the Alps, further expansion would mean leveling entire mountains.

When he got to the crowded morning streets he looked left and right, then spotted the sleek, black car.

“Morning Dr. Stresemann,” Jenia said as Valm approached, holding the door open for him to enter.

“Morning,” Valm replied, setting his briefcase down on the seat, and then getting in the car after it.

Jenia shut the door gently and walked around to the driver’s side. The door opened with a small clunk, and Jenia gracefully threaded himself into the driver’s seat with the fluidity expected from a good chauffeur. They set off quickly, the whirr of the car’s electric motor barely audible above the sound of rushing air.

The old, inefficient internal combustion engines had been done away with a long time ago, replaced by far more silent, efficient, and mechanically simple electric motors. In fact, the Council had been thinking of doing away with drivers altogether and making all cars self-driving.

“Have you heard that the Council wants to get rid of drivers?” Valm asked Jenia.

“Oh yeah?” Jenia said back, turning his head slightly while keeping his eyes on the road. “I think I saw that on the news yesterday. They want to switch to fully automated cars, I think.”

“Do you reckon it’ll actually happen?”

Jenia shrugged. “So far the Council has been keeping their promises. So… probably? All in the name of efficiency you know. Every single thing has to be optimized to the highest degree possible.”

“Are you not saddened by the fact that you’ll lose your job?”

“Of course not,” Jenia chuckled. “Without that sort of efficiency, we’ll never win the war. The way it's going now, by the time they actually make all cars autonomous I’ll probably be doing something else.”

“What else?”

“Aerospace engineer, hopefully. It’s my dream job, and it’s what I’ve been studying for my whole life,” Jenia paused for a moment. “Only problem is, I want to build spacecraft for civilian use. You know, exploring the cosmos, colonizing other planets, all that stuff that was going on right before the war started. But they don’t want civilian stuff, they only care about military stuff.”

“Because we are fighting a war right now.”

“Sure we are… It’s been going on for what? Like… more than fifty years now? Not a single bomb has fallen in my entire lifetime, and I haven’t seen a single enemy soldier outside of propaganda posters. Sure it’s a war, but that’s just because they haven’t signed a peace deal yet.”

Valm nodded silently. Their previous government had held their enemies at a stalemate for a long long time. After the first several years of fighting, the war cooled down. Though the armed conflict did not fully cease, neither city had the resources for constant raids on each other.

Their previous government focused a lot on defense, largely due to their conserved nature and low population. An intricate, interlocking system of anti-air missile launchers, lasers, jammers, and close-in weapon systems for shooting down enemy aircraft and missiles. The long-wave radar stations set up every kilometer along their perimeter wall ensured that no object in the sky, no matter how stealthy, could evade detection. The air force had largely phased out long-range strike aircraft, in favor of shorter-range interceptors and air superiority fighters.

But now, with the Council in power, that was about to change. the Council had promised to win the war for the people. They had promised to use new technologies to turn the tide in their favor, and if they were to stick to that promise, the time of peace they have now will soon turn to violence once more.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“But you know what the Council said, right?” Valm asked. “That they’ll turn the war around and destroy New Asia.”

“Of course.”

“You know that, if that happens, bombs will start falling once more."

“…Yeah…”

The rest of the short drive to his laboratory was quiet. Jenia and Valm exchanged few words, except to bid each other a nice day when Valm got out at his destination.

Valm watched from the sidewalk as Jenia drove away down the road.

He shook his head.

Young men like Jenia haven’t seen what it’s like when missiles fly and bombs fall. They weren’t alive back then to witness it.

Unlike Valm, most people in Europa weren’t alive when the war had just started when those atomic bombs laid waste to the cities.

He was just a middle school kid back then, yet he still remembers clearly. The atmosphere had been gloomy for many many months, talks of war seemed to be the subject of every conversation the adults had. But he was too young back then to understand the implications. It was not until the sirens started blaring and the skies were ripped open by the explosions did he truly understand.

It was a clear Sunday afternoon, Valm and his family were walking at the park when the sirens started to blare. People began panicking and his memories after that became a jumbled mess. Somehow, people knew that it wasn’t a drill.

He remembers them piling into the family car, a large off-road SUV, stocked full of MREs and tubs of water, and speeding down the streets towards somewhere. They got far enough away that the shockwave of the blast couldn’t reach them, and their car was able to shield them from the thermal radiation. But they couldn’t outrun the fallout.

They were stuck for hours on a packed highway, slowly trudging their way east, when the fallout began to drift down from the skies. Like blackened snowflakes the radioactive dust fell, slowly covering everything in its deadly blanket. His father was a nuclear physicist and knew that if they didn’t get away, they would soon die of radiation poisoning.

He remembers his father telling everyone to hug a tub of water and to squeeze themselves as far down the footwell as they could, into the protection of the metal side panels of their car. Then he floored the gas pedal, drove over the guardrails, and began speeding east over the grasslands.

Other cars saw and did the same too, and soon, the grassy plains became the highway. Like some sort of rally racing event, thousands of cars sped through the tall grass, kicking out mud and dirt behind them, like marauding tanks in a green desert.

Over the next year or so, they went from town to town, anywhere that escaped destruction, seeking shelter and food. People feared a land invasion from the east, but that never happened. People waited for relief from their American brothers, but that too never came.

When the city of Europa was established at the western foot of the Alps, their family was one of the first settlers to arrive there. Valm watched with his own eyes as the city rapidly expanded to what it is now. Along with New Asia, they must have been the most ambitious construction projects humanity has ever undertaken. In just two years, the massive perimeter walls had been erected, and in just two more, the city had completely filled the space inside.

While the fear of further destruction loomed over them, life was peaceful. Valm graduated high school and attended a university set up by the European government. But the radiation he and his family received during their escape came back to haunt them. Both his father and mother developed aggressive cancer and died within a year. Valm thought he too would meet the same fate, but his young body was able to repair itself.

Even with the medical technologies they had at the time, there was little anyone could do. There isn’t much to do in the face of the invisible poison of ionizing radiation.

Because of that, Valm swore to pursue a career in biology, so he could one day fix that problem, and make the world a safer place for people to live in. He hoped he could allow people to go back to their homes, and start rebuilding the world. However, people didn’t want that. No one wanted to go back to ruined cities and poisoned towns.

So after graduating from university, Valm began conducting research in the fields of biomechanics and cloning, as a possible remedy to the plummeting fertility rates due to the increased levels of background radiation.

Valm snapped out of his thoughts and realized he had been standing on the sidewalk unmoving for a little bit too long. Hastily he turned and walked towards the entrance to his new laboratory, built in a large warehouse, kindly provided to him by the Council after they took an interest in his work.

The minimalist glass doors leading to the entrance of his lab slid open as he approached. There are no big logos, no words explaining what this place is, and no fancy reception area. There is no need for such advertising since they are funded by the Council with a decent budget.

“Good morning, Dr. Stresemann,” a young man, standing in front of a coffee machine with several mugs in his hands, greeted Valm as he turned the corner.

“Morning, Jasper,” Valm nodded to the young man, one of his many subordinate researchers. All the people who worked at this lab are his subordinates since he is the senior researcher here. “You got here quite early today.”

“Yes, doctor,” Jasper answered eagerly, picking up another mug of freshly made coffee with his pinky. “We wanted to fix the gas-deposit printing head misalignment problems in the morning to conduct a full-scale printing test later today, so the team got up extra early today.”

Valm looked at the many mugs of coffee precariously hanging from Jasper’s fingers, which were probably for the team working in the adjacent room. “You know…” he couldn’t help but laugh a little. “I appreciate you guys’ eagerness, but I’d prefer if you got some more rest. Young minds like yours can really use that extra rest.”

Jasper smiled. “Yes, doctor, I’ll keep that in mind,” he said respectfully as he hurriedly crab-walked towards the door leading to the adjacent room, careful not to spill any of the hot coffee.

Valm followed the young man into the spacious testing hall, where a group of a dozen or so young men and women were crowding around a large mass of shiny metal, tubes, valves, cables, and pumps. Some of them had screwdrivers and wrenches, while others had laptops and tablets, hooked up to the machine through thick bundles of wiring.

“Doctor is here!” Jasper announced as he walked around the machine and handed everyone a mug of coffee.

Valm himself didn’t get a mug, since Jasper knew that he didn’t like coffee, and so didn’t bother with offering him one.

The flurry of activity stopped briefly as everyone greeted Valm and sipped their coffee. But quickly the activity resumed, and the steaming mugs were left still half-full on the floor.

“Don’t leave your drinks lying around!” Valm reminded them. “Any spill has the potential to be disastrous.”

Once again the flurry of activity stopped briefly as everyone shouted “Yes, doctor!” And carefully transported their mugs to a table at the corner of the hall.

The machine they were crowding around a moment ago is the center of Valm’s research; a state-of-the-art bio-printer, capable of producing artificially created organisms like never before. Instead of carefully plotting down cells and growing them into the rough shapes desired, this printer deposits individual atoms one by one, allowing it to create things as precise as individual DNA strands.

“How’s the calibration going?” Valm asked.

“We have gotten the deposit success rate up to almost thirteen percent.” Emily, one of the more experienced researchers answered. “With an acceptable error rate of ten percent of normal tissue, five percent for organs, and point-zero-one percent for DNA, that means we should be able to produce one viable human baby every 32 hours.”

“And if we fine-tune those boundaries?”

“We could probably reduce that time down to below 24 hours while maintaining a success rate above 95%, but I’m not confident about going any lower.”

Valm nodded. “We only need the alignment error low enough for one run, so don’t try to get it perfect. I want the machine adjusted and ready for a full production cycle before midday. Ethics survey and official permission from the Council are all sorted. Is that doable?” He asked the room.

“Yeah..?”

“Should be.”

“I think we can do that.”

Many murmurs of words rose from the researchers.

“Good. Report to me whenever you think you are ready. Emily, you’ll be in charge for now. Jasper, show me the images you phoned me about last night.”

“Yes, doctor!” Jasper and Emily said at the same time.