Over a year later, seven thousand villagers and refugees lived there.

The village just happened to be en route to a handful of bigger cities – places with hospitals and other critical infrastructure – but as those cities themselves filled to capacity and began experiencing civil unrest as a result of the overcrowding, refugees from further afield often ended up staying at off-highway townships that had little to offer other than a general store and a bed and breakfast.

Now, thousands of people lived in these little towns, and for as many towns that skyrocketed in population, at least twice as many were entirely abandoned. Cars would fill the streets and gridlock every neighborhood.

I knew the cities would be overcrowded, but I also knew I couldn't survive alone for very long. Rural areas were running out of clean water and the purifiers couldn’t keep up with demand. Most crops were dying or withered, or even toxic to eat if they grew in the poisoned soil after the burn. Even if the rations persisted, my mental health would likely not. I watched as my little town, which was ironically bigger than Dunn Barre, turn into a ghost town as the residents either left or passed away.

I packed a couple bags and slipped my cats into their harnesses. The two felines, a tortoiseshell girl and a cream tabby boy, rode in a pet trailer that hitched to my bicycle. It had an enclosed, ventilated section with a clear top so I could check on the cats and a short bed for luggage. I tossed the duffle bag in the trailer and latched the chest straps of my backpack before pedaling through mountain roads toward the nearest city until I found civilization in Dunn Barre, about thirty-five miles from where I started.

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The United States was split into three nations: The Republic of California held the west coast and Rocky mountain states, Texas as a nation included most of middle America and chunks of the south, and the Atlantic coast and Midwest were now part of Appalachia. Hawai’i was granted total independence and a stipend to help them grow and recover as a nation.

With the growth of the African Union and support from Texas and Russia, about 30% of the geopolitical borders were redrawn across the African continent and the Middle East, with several new sovereign states having formed. The new borders accounted for how the people on the land have historically grouped themselves, rather than arbitrary lines made up by imperialists who had never set foot in the country.

This was the closest humanity had ever gotten to world peace. We had finally learned to respect and accommodate each other's differences without losing our own autonomy and identity. NATO didn’t entirely dissolve, but lost a significant amount of power. A successor to the United Nations formed, called the International Union of Earth. The earth went five years without any major political conflicts before they first visited us.

It was the year 2099 when we were contacted by aliens. They were a lizardlike predator species, but not hostile to humans. Humans can't pronounce their language, but the aliens agreed to the human-given name for their species: T’kana. Their vicious appearance fooled many into believing they were attackers, but in truth they sought communication and trade as equals. They were peaceful and overwhelmingly generous, but that only provoked people's suspicions about potential ulterior motives.

At the turn of the century, at midnight in all the respective time zones, explosives detonated at key locations for most widespread damage. Not material damage to structures or people, but chemical damage – places that would put lethal toxins in water supplies, in the air, in the ground, everywhere. This wasn't just harmful for the aliens; it was killing humans just as quickly. Then, twelve hours later, malware shut down Internet servers worldwide permanently. Bricked the system entirely.

The planet was poisoned and in a flash, everyone was disconnected from one another. For a few days, most people tried to live their lives as normal, but of course it was impossible to maintain. We couldn't even get the news anymore and very quickly realized we… well, we couldn't take care of ourselves. Not in the society we had built that so wholly relied on Internet technology.

It took a couple weeks for the deadly pollutants to thoroughly saturate the water cycle. Rain and fog started burning our skin, and in dense enough quantities looked sickly yellow.

The contamination of the ground, air, and water with toxic chemicals took a heavy toll on medical systems everywhere, and severely affected the elderly and immunocompromised. Livestock and wildlife everywhere began dying off, crops were failing, and communities were in desperate need of clean food, water, and medicine. It was only about three months after the burn that food cleaning processes were discovered that could extract most of the toxic waste from plant and animal matter, but the process also disintegrated the food’s structural integrity and often left it slightly bland or sour.

10G cell service relied on satellite technology, but the public utility cellular provider also relied on broken Internet servers to run even their phone service, thus rendering their services useless. I believe most governments switched to the old, land-based radio to communicate between each other and attempt to reach the public, with mixed results. Rural areas often remained in the dark or received news later than everyone else.

The t’kana already had the means to navigate toxic, foreign planets. Humans did not. However, officially, the t’kana simply ceased negotiations with Earth. Their government no longer responded to attempts at communication and had blacklisted Earth from diplomatic relations. Not all t’kana agreed with their leadership’s passive approach, though. A t’kana militia formed to retaliate against the humans, and so began the Human-T’kana Conflict – sometimes referred to as the T’konflict colloquially. A ‘conflict’ since war was never formally declared on either side, but a conflict is a just a war hiding behind pretense.