World War III began on 2 August 2056, though historians would later argue it had been born decades earlier.
Unlike the first two wars, the third was not triggered by a single political incident.
It was the culmination of tensions that had been accumulating since 2036, slow fractures widening in silence.
And unlike the first two wars, where diplomacy had a brief chance, this war ignited almost instantaneously.
As Asian powers rose in strength, the West entered an inevitable decline.
Years of ruling the world and they couldn't bear the thought that soon they would be just like the rest.
So the United States did what it had always done best: it waged war. But it was no longer confined to a country or continent. It waged war on the world.
At first, the global community dismissed the maneuver as the flailing of a fading power.
But the world had forgotten one vital truth: a dying camel is still stronger than a horse.
America unleashed its hidden arsenal across the globe.
From the ice-bound glaciers of Antarctica to the blistering deserts of Africa, fear rained down.
Matter-Antimatter warheads, neutrino-penetration bombs, gravitational shear warheads.
Compared to these, even the Tsar Bomba of 1961 might be called harmless.
Panic spread. Fear turned to anger, anger to outrage. The damage done by America eclipsed any done before by man. But that was just the beginning.
Within hours every nation turned its weapons towards the United States.
For three days, America held. On the third day, defeat became inevitable.
General Bush, the highest-ranking officer left alive, disobeyed the Senate's orders.
He summoned all world leaders to Washington to negotiate America's surrender.
Once they were gathered, he activated the quantum tunneling warhead.
Turns out before the war the Americans had been experimenting on a new weapon designed to drill straight through the Earth's crust.
It was still experimental. When Bush used it he must not have even been sure if it would work.
Bush had likely intended one last act of defiance, burying his enemies along with himself. But the device worked perfectly… perhaps too perfectly.
It reached the Earth's crust and erupted, taking with it a quarter of the planet.
America, Canada, Mexico all the way to northern Brazil was wiped out entirely.
The region would then be known as Ground zero.
From orbit, most of the Earth looked intact, but one massive wedge had been ripped away.
Water and rock cascaded into the void, while the exposed center glowed like a miniature sun.
The planet's gravity shifted toward the intact side. Massive earthquakes radiated outward, and ocean levels fell toward the gaping depression, flooding coastlines and drowning cities.
In days, society as it was collapsed. Thousands died daily. Humanity's population was halved.
Expeditions attempted to explore the exposed core, but none survived even the edges of Ground zero.
Atmosphere there had collapsed, there was no oxygen. The heat erupting from the core surpassed that of any volcanoe.
Even if one could bypass these two limitations the whole area was full of massive EM surges.
And magnetic pulses strong enough to disrupt biological processes immediately. The heart and brain just stopped working.
Flora and fauna fared no better. Within five years, all non-human life on Earth had perished.
Humanity survived only through synthetic food. Produced by Julian Voss's Nutrigen industries.
Soon they would become the sole provider of food for all inhabitants of the earth. The greatest Monopoly known to man.
A simple stop in their operation and it would spell the eradication of humanity. All that power in the hands of a single individual.
By 2061, Dr. Adrian Shaw, former Dean of Bio-Mechanical Sciences at the Oxford Institute of Advanced Sciences, had formulated a theory.
The Earth's molten core was destabilizing due to fluctuating electromagnetic currents. If left unchecked, it would erupt within years, annihilating all life.
Shaw devised a web of synchronized nodes, each connected to the planet by arcs of pulsing electromagnetic energy.
The Core Stabilizer, as he called it, became humanity's last hope. Across the sky, colors twisted and bent, responding to the invisible currents Shaw had coaxed into order.
The molten heart of the Earth, once chaotic, now hummed in perfect rhythm.
This singular act would set Shaw on track to become one of the leaders of the New world.
For now, humanity had bought time. But the Stabilizer could not last forever.
One misalignment, one failure of a pulse… and the fury below would awaken again.
Yet Shaw was far from done.
The web was a prison, keeping both electromagnetic pulses from reaching the rest of the earth and curious explorers from reaching the core.
And so in the year 2063 Humanity's efforts turned to finding a new entry point. This marked the end of extraterrestrial missions.
All rockets and satellites were decommissioned and stripped down. Mankind would no longer look to the sky but within.
This resulted in redirection of human scientific efforts toward intensive oceanographic exploration, probing the depths of Earth's last viable environments.
For Shaw, as with the generations of scientists before him, nothing was more irresistible than the heart of the Earth itself.
But it was clear that they couldn't access the core through land that would just destroy the planet more.
And so the used the sea. Over 80% of the sea has never been explored in a meaningful manner. So they set out to fix that.
Shaw could turn any disadvantage into an advantage. He had never lost, not once, even in the most mundane matters.
Did Shaw regret his actions many would argue yes I would not. So then why did he do what he did?
Was it glory? He had already become the saviour of humanity. Was it pride? His actions had set him above every other scientist before him.
So then why would Shaw still search for another entry into the core. The answer lies in the famous words he had said, during one of the oceanic expeditions.
Shaw stood on the viewing deck of the research vessel Argus hands clasped behind him.
And when he was asked by one of the cleaning crew why he would go in search for the core. Now that the world was safe again.
He said, "Stability is not safety. And ignorance is merely a slower death. Understanding is the only true survival."
That obsession with winning, with discovering more and more would elevate him to godlike status in the New World.
Curiosity did always kill the cat. Shaw did find his entrance, Shaw did access the Earth's core.
Shaw did create machines to allows humans bypass the EM surges and the heat.
Shaw did make the biggest scientific leap in the history of mankind .
And Shaw did doom us all