Greetings and salutations.
A take on the old-school “Planet of Apes” (late 1960s and 70s movies and their derivatives) giving a somewhat impressionistic view of the planet Earth just before things go to heck for the human race.
Planet of Apes: Just Before the Apocalypse
In the year 2014, the global situation is tense. Apes are revolting (no, not that way) in several nations, the environment is a mess, and atomic weapons are plentiful. Will any be alive in twenty ten and five? Opinions differ!
This world diverged from ours in the year 1969, when the development of a new âphoton driveâ based on an entirely new principle made the Apollo project obsolete even as it was landing on the Moon. NASA would not even get to use the new technology: it was relegated to satellites and near earth work while a separate organization, ANSA (The American National Space Administration) was created to handle the ultra-secret technology. With it, Americans landed on Mars in 1970, and in 1971 sent a spaceship onwards from Mars to Jupiter to âclaim itâ for the US (a move much condemned by by the Soviets and even some US allies, given that doing so violated existing space treaties: Nixon was feel his oats (and drugs) at the time.).
(The technology was the result of three decades of struggle to reverse-engineer something which had crashed near Roswell in 1947. [1] Theyâd finally managed to get something that worked, but they still hadnât quite figured out the dangers involvedâŠ)
The Hasslien time theory built on Soviet cosmologist Andrei Strugatskyâs theory of deep-space wormholes, arguing that a ship travelling close enough to the speed of light could penetrate such wormholes and travel either into the future or the past (relative to its point of origin): although a potential danger to interstellar travelers, it could also serve as a way of travelling to vastly distant stars and then return to the Earth of the present or near-present. According to his initial theories, the first interstellar ship, the Liberty, would arrive at Centauri some seven hundred years into the future, from the âpoint of viewâ of Earth, but only 18 months ship time, and would return merely a few years after it left. His theories did not predict it colliding with itself returning from the future, and ending up back on Earth – some two thousand years in the future.
After the return of sentient apes from a future in which humanity had become little more than animals on an ape-run planet (a fact that the US government very carefully covered up), and another ship returned with everyone dead from alien bacteria, interstellar travel was put on hold for a long time. Regular expeditions outside the solar system would not resume until the 1980s, when theoretically advances made travel a bit more predictable and less prone to temporal excursions. Nonetheless, exploration was curtailed again during the next administration, with future missions being confined to more detailed examination of nearby solar systems and using known âsafeâ trajectories.
Otto Hassleinâs final work was on theâChurchdoorâ project, which would eventually produce the âAlpha-Omegaâ bomb, capable of destroying an entire planet. The justification was unclear to those outside a very small circle: after all, what point to using a weapon that would destroy the USSR as well as the US, along with everyone else? Rumors within the somewhat wider circle that knew about the weapon (knowledge of which was never released to the general public) was that the brief, final burst of long-range interstellar exploration had uncovered something that had scared the president and his advisors badly: something that required a deterrent, a deterrent that would make existing nuclear weapons look like firecrackersâŠ
The alien bacteria actually proved to be a boon to Earth biotech, their rather unique capacity for genetic restructuring putting a powerful new tool in the hands of terrestrial genetic engineers. Super-plants and uber-cows and such would triumphantly sally from labs and onto supermarket shelves within a decade. (Admittedly there were a few oopsies, such as the accidental release of a bioengineered disease from a lab. Fortunately, it was designed for the labsâ experimental animals, and killed no humans, although 99.9% of the worldâs dogs and 99.5% of the cats died off).
The most remarkable breakthrough was the uplift and modification of apes to create the first simps ( (âsuperchimpsâ: named after a concept by SF writer Arthur C Clarke) as servants and laborers by the late 1970s, a jump ahead in biotech more impressive than anything else achieved at the time. [2]
(The chimps were modified in ways other than intelligence: they were modified to improve their manual skills, to stand in an upright position for long periods of time, and made far tamer and less aggressive than their frequently genital-mutilating wild cousins. Gorillas were modified behaviorally as well, while some of the odder experiments took place with orangutans, which were genetically different enough to make modifications rather more difficult- for reasons mentioned below).
Although the Soviets did not manage to get their hands on ion drive technology until nearly the End, the more widely distributed genetic engineering tech was soon stolen by their agents, and Soviet biotech work was soon matching US efforts. Perhaps Stalinâs interest in creating man-ape hybrids indicated some underlying Soviet fascination with monkeys (more so than the Nazis, in spite of all the Nazi apes in comics), but in any case the Soviets were creating genetically upgraded apes of their own by the early 80s. The expansion of âsmart apeâ projects in the west was to some extent a by product of this worldâs ongoing cold war, for nobody, after all, wanted an Ape Gap to develop. (Dr. Hassleinâs furious protests were ignored until his death in 1994 due to very rapid rise in body temperature.)
Ape labor became truly important after the Short War of 1994, in which a bit of a computer oopsie led to the loss of over two hundred and sixty million lives in the USA, China, Europe and the Soviet Union. Grunt labor on a massive scale was needed for reconstruction, especially labor that was cheap, labor that didnât need to be paid, labor that was expendable, labor that would remove endless tons of radioactive Earth and rubble without knowing that it was slowly killing them. Combined with the decline of democracy world wide in a situation of global economic collapse and necessary âemergency measuresâ in almost all situations, the floodgates of unrestricted ape breeding, unrestricted ape exploitation, became possible.
In 2014, the North American Union, the successor to the old US, is what can politely described as a âNeo-Fascistâ state. Including Canada and various âusefulâ bits of Mexico and Central America, it is divided into a number of âregional unionsâ and âurban districtsâ run by Governors with dictatorial powers: like Nazi Germany, itâs sort of a collection of fiefdoms run by local strong men, satraps of the President-for-the-duration-of-the-emergency, who controls the core military and the heavy weaponry. Every(man) has a uniform/suit which ranks them socially, and the news is tightly controlled.
Quebec is under military occupation and the âMarxist revolutionariesâ are being exterminated with extreme prejudice. Sometimes itâs oddly difficult to distinguish between said revolutionaries and regular old Canadienne nationalists.
(One positive point about the dictatorship is that it doesnât have any particular hostility to black people, whose position at the bottom of society has been taken by the apes. Although the NAU isnât a post-racial paradise, African Americans can climb high in the Party of Government as long as they mouth all the proper dogmas. Hispanics, due to the uncooperative nature of various conquered areas to the south, are less trusted.)
The most notable city in the NAU is Central City, rebuilt at the edge of the ruins of Old New York City at great cost in New Dollars and lives (ape lives, mostly). A fully planned city, it is grim and brutalist and ultra-modern, and the underground bits go down for miles.
It is currently mostly on fire.
Much of South America has been taken over by Marxist revolutionaries in the wake of the global economic collapse, and currently multiple proxy wars are ticking along.Marxist Brazil and neo-Fascist Argentina have obtained atomic weapons and are waving them at each other. In a push to industrialize, Soviet-style, the Brazilian government is cutting the Amazon rain forest even faster than OTL.
The race war in South Africa grinds on. Africa as a whole is a mess: although the continent wasnât a military target, the global economic collapse hit primary product-producing countries hard, and although there werenât too many states that outright fell apart, much of the place is grim dictatorships of one kind or another. The man simply referred to as âThe Generalâ, who took over Zaire/Congo again after he arranged for Mobutuâs plane to explode midair, is a sadistic, charismatic monster with a fondness for collecting his rivalâs severed heads, but on the other hand he genuinely is trying to modernize the Congo (the trains run on time, so to speak) and his removal of âEmperorâ Bokassa was a definite relief to the inhabitants of the former Central African Republic.
The Persian gulf oil states, which had avoided atomic bombardment because the Soviets were hoping to grab the oil themselves, are richer than ever with shrinking oil supplies elsewhere, and have embraced the use of ape labor with a will, a sort of return to traditional slavery with ape labor replacing human slaves. This will of course come to bite them in the ass, and sooner than they think.
Israel, which lost over a third of its population to Soviet and Iraqi nukes in WWIII, has expelled its entire Muslim and Arab population, and is digging even harder than the Chinese, while burying everything on the surface in many layers of cement. Itâs pretty wretched economically (for one thing, the US isnât subsidizing it economically anymore) but the current paranoid regime plans to nuke-proof the country if they have to eat grass and bitter herbs to afford it. They havenât really considered germ-proofing it sufficiently, and havenât really thought of ape-proofing it at all.
The Arab world is currently divided between a conservative block headed by the Saudis, and an Arab union which has managed to unite most of North Africa. To the east, Iran post-Shahs has expanded into the crumbling underbelly of the former USSR and is riding on a nationalist âAryanâ high, although worried about desertification.
The old Soviet Union is gone, divided between the United Peopleâs Republics (a pragmatically brutal military dictatorship in occupation of the ruins of central and eastern Europe as well as much of European Russia) and the Siberian Soviet, which sort of tapers off west of the Urals and the central deserts. While the UPR is a pragmatic âwhatever worksâ dictatorship, the Siberian Soviet is a fanatical Marxist-technocratic-posthumanist state which has secretly been messing with human as well as ape DNA.
Some say China lost a lot more people than official figures or even NAU estimates indicate. Data is hard to obtain: informationally China is a black hole, and even satellite images have been less useful since the Chinese started digging like crazy.After a limited opening to the west during the 70s, it returned to hardline Maoism after WWIII. The Iron Ricebowl is often filled with genetically engineered grow-everywhere weeds. (You wonât starve, but you have to go through a lot of roughage.)
Europe is a mess, with those parts of central Europe not occupied by the UPR being depopulated and rather mad-maxish. Functional dictatorships allied to the NAU exist in Iberia and southern France, while those parts of the Balkans not under UPR control are generally a mess of feuding ethno-states outside of the relatively stable leftist colonelâs dictatorship in mainland Greece. (The Soviet-US proxy war in Yugoslavia in the years leading up to WWIII was …messy). The insane north Italian neo-Trotskyite âperpetual revolutionâ regime has collapsed, leading to a NAU âhumanitarian interventionâ from its south Italian bases, and the Free City of Venice is is close to an anarcho-libertarian paradise (or a ânest of pirates and smugglers which needs to be rubbed outâ, as various local governments claim.)
(Albania is currently divided between Tosk and Gheg regimes backed by the UPR and the Chinese respectively.)
And then thereâs Britain, a weird survival-focused totalitarian regime, centered in Scotland, which has eliminated all radios and constantly drums into its subjectâs heads the propaganda message that no matter how awful things are, the rest of the world has it much, much worse. Drugs are used to keep the people pacified, and you never know when one of those damn mysterious giant balls is going to roll up, engulf someone, and take away what is now a non-person.
(Drugs are pretty widely used globally, in fact. It keeps people pacified and the tax on sales brings in some needed government income).
There are various kinds of apes. Chimps are the most standardized and âadvancedâ: gorillas have proven more difficult to bring up to spec, orangutans even more so. (They say thatâs because theyâre more different genetically from humans. So they say). There are relatively placid and pacific heavy-labor gorillas, and more aggressive ones for policing and corralling other apes (chimps modified for aggressive tasks didnât work out well: baseline chimps are close enough to being sociopaths as it is.) The latest generation of orangutans seem quite intelligent and tractable, but upon longer experience it turns out they are somewhat alarmingly skilled at avoiding work when not constantly watched. There are other varieties, less common ones. Pint-size chimps with prehensile tails, for space work. Amphibious apes, for sea-steading work. Outsized gorillas for heavy construction. Most of these are less than entirely successful, and some are classified. Apes capable of speech have been created, more than once: they have been invariably been destroyed when they proved insufficiently tractable. And there are rumored ape-human hybridsâŠ
There are a considerable number of apes outside of human control. In countries with considerable areas of rough and thinly populated wilderness, a runaway ape has a good chance of finding refuge, and upgraded apes are intelligent enough to keep themselves hidden. In countries outside of the tropics, survival in winter months is difficult, but apes do understand âlayers of clothing.â
There are quite a lot of apes now in the Amazon jungle.
Apes, at least those bred en masse (initially mostly in the tropics and exported from there, but nowadays increasingly in more temperate regions), are generally confined to fairly simple and repetitive manual labor, although the more intelligent specimens of chimpanzees can be trained, given time, to do a variety of household chores and even cooking (results using poorly trained and/or conditioned apes tend to be, shall we say, messy). There are in fact rather more high-level apes than people are aware of: supposedly too-intelligent apes are to be killed (euthanized) or at least sterilized, but in many cases they either conceal their intelligence or find protectors who consider an ape trainable for complicated tasks too valuable to kill and indeed there is a fair amount of illegal breeding of smarter apes in areas where government control is weak. Itâs not like theyâre smart enough to talk, right?
In fact, a lot of apes can talk, but with their fingers. Training apes to use sign language predated any genetic engineering, and is often used to instruct apes in preference to teaching them to understand human language. Sign language is also used by apes to relay human instructions to other apes, rather than, say, recorded human speech. The fact that apes do a lot of âtalkingâ between each other troubles some people, but itâs just basic sign language, right? Developed for the deaf and dumb, who arenât proper ânormalâ people anyway, right?
Apes have developed a lot of signs of their own.
The environment is in poor shape: the environmentalist movement never gained as much traction as in our timeline, and the post-WWIII authoritarian regimes have pursued reconstruction and redevelopment with a heedless regard to side effects.Pollution is horrendous in much of what passes for the âdevelopedâ world. Damage to the ozone layer, worsened by the effect of atomic weapons, has gotten bad enough for large parts of the Soviet and Canadian arctic to see large-scale die off of vegetation, and although theyâve finally got rid of the flourocarbons, skin cancer rates among Inuit, Lapps, and other arctic peoples have skyrocketed. (We donât talk about the mutant penguins. Or the mutant fish, for that matter. Or the mutant skinless bears. Really, with all the synergistic effects of chemical pollutants, itâs mutants all around in some places.) And if there was a loss of population in the north, it has more than been made up in the global south: the general breakdown of democracy and economic turmoil have not been good for womenâs rights, and birth rates remain higher across the planet than OTL.
Science and technology are in some ways more advanced than in our world, although oddly backwards in others. Computers are large and clunky, and computer screens are black with green text. People have things like teeny walkie talkies instead of cell phones, and nobody has ever heard of a laser disk. On the other hand, thereâs a cure for cancer – in fact, several cures, which is a good thing, given the residual radiation from WWIII, not to mention the occasional nuclear reactor meltdowns. Some really huge computers are getting close to genuine AI, and while solar power panels are less cheap and effective than in our world, both the NAU and the UPR have ambitious plans for major space-based solar power stations (the whole âdeadly microwave beams from spaceâ thing is merely a means of getting the power back to Earth, not a space weapons program, government officials reassure. )
Biological engineering moves forward in non-ape sectors. Cloning is very much a thing, now that theyâve gotten to the point where they can lab-grow human bodies to adult size without ever letting the brain develop beyond âvegetableâ level. Transplants are quite developed, although reports that the Chinese have mastered putting human brains into the bodies of gorillas or bears are dismissed by most as anti-communist propaganda. The Chinese, aside from the success of their work in edible weeds, claim theyâll have rice capable of growing in the high Himalayas before you know it. New bio-recyclers can transform a load of garbage -or a human body- into useful slurry in under 24 hours. And work on biological weapons is ever more refined, with new germs targeting specific phenotypes and genotypes.
Psychic powers have been proven to exist, although countries trying to weaponize them (the NAU, the UPR, Japan, China, etc.) have found them frustratingly hard to enhance (for one thing, it doesnât scale well: multiple psychics working together tend to interfere with each other more than they help). Crystals and pyramid power remain a load of hooey.
The Soviets before WWIII made considerable strides in space in spite of being unable to duplicate the USâs futuristic propulsion system. Besides radioactively contaminating large parts of northern Siberia, more conventional nuclear rockets propelled cosmonauts to the Moon and Mars, and the old USSR even beat the US to Saturn, albeit a one-way trip with a monkey passenger who failed to survive the trip. After WWIII, the Siberian Soviet inherited most of the old USSR space program, due to having most of the launch facilities on its soil: today the United Peopleâs Republics is mostly confined to near-earth work, a few space stations and a bunch of satellites (spy, weather, and None of Your Business). Nowadays the NAU and the Siberian Soviet maintain bases on the Moon and Mars, but since WWIII deep space exploration has been largely on the back burner.
Beneath seemingly empty boreal forest, beneath boring parts of the Moon, spaceships wait. Some are Soviet: they finally managed to steal or back-analyze from distant observation enough technology to get near-c, wormhole-traversing ships of their own in the mid-2000s: they have kept that achievement carefully secret until they can build enough space capacity to establish âfacts on the groundâ in space: and quite a bit of their limited capacity has gone into building an escape hatch. If a genuine anti-missile shield cannot be created before the (highly likely) WWIV breaks out, and the âstay deep undergroundâ strategy fails to pay off in the long term, Soviet Man (and Woman [3]) may yet survive under distant suns.
(The US has its own such survival plan, which is comparable in scale but rather smaller compared to their total space program)
[1] Not Grays. The technology had travelled a long way, but in time, not spaceâŠ
[2] Of course, the genetic engineering of superior ape species was dependent on the use of genetic material of two dead but carefully preserved sapient apes from the future. The snake bites its tail.
[3] Unlike the doofuses in ANSA, the Soviets are aware that three men to one woman is a poor way to start off a space colonization program.
