4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Cargo Ships, tanks, planes, bombers, bullets, shells and more.
EDIT: It wasn't about what britain could afford. It was about what britain could produce.
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
- Start date
EDIT: It wasn't about what britain could afford. It was about what britain could produce.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, things they can't produce, but need anyway, would be things they can't afford after running out of money.
The big question I was thinking to ask is which things Britain would be outright obliged to surrender without. Cargo ships being an obvious possible example. Bombers, maybe not so much.
obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
I've never seen anything specified. This is the broad impression of the consensus in what I've gathered from my own history of reading WW2 histories by both "pop" and specialist historians who don't seem to have any particular ideological or nationalist hatchet to grind.
EDIT: I should note that lend-lease wasn't exactly "free" for Britain either. In addition to the more obvious issue of debt, the political bargaining around lend-lease led to stuff like British companies being forced to sell their American assets at fire sale prices to American companies. There was plenty of bellyaching amongst the British elite about this, although the more perceptive of them followed Anthony Eden's observation that "Our desperate straits alone could justify its terms."
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4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Lend-Lease was a lend and pay later scheme. It was specifically "hey,
Obliged to surrender?
Liberty ships - kept supplies flowing despite the massive sinkings by U-boats
Bombers - Operated (amongst other things) as anti-u-boat patrols as part of british Coastal Command, and made heavy use of US Medium Bombers supplied by Lend Lease
Naval Warships - including light carriers and escorts which were used, amongst other things, for convoy escort.
He's enough of a Crusade Larper he thinks of the Catholics the way he thinks of Nazis - aesthetically bad but righteous in their hate - so he'd never accuse them of such a... crime.
Episcopalians? When's the last time the Episcopalians sacked a
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- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Episcopalians are the prototypical liberal denomination in America. The have women priests and are okay with gay marriage and stuff.
SpiritFluid
Spooky, and Gay
- Location
- The Sun from which The Shadows Cast
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
I should be focusing on the effect that gods damned british chapter had on my brain, that its whole "we should all love the british monarchs, they keep the people together" ("the people outside getting eaten alive?" "Yeah") had a command grip on my disconnected canadian ass for the longest time, the casual and absurd pageantry of its ridiculous and cartoonish set-up, like. Things of import, really.
But no, I'm sitting here spiralling over "the Inca, the mountain kings of walled cities with rope bridges that fundamentally demanded one by one transport and who's most famous archaeological find was hidden retreat cities higher and more hidden in the mountains still, didn't know what sieges were, ignore that their entire singular economy was wholly and utterly fielded around having immediate stockpiles within easy access so we can gear up and be able to last out for sieges even longer. Nah, they don't know about this at all. Fuckign' WINDSOR AND BUCKINGHAM, THO,,"
This is my personal Yonkers, this is me staring in the insanity that is "an m1 garat is superior in every way to an ar15", "don't wear armour or helmets my guy its not worth it", that's.
This isn't just "talking about europe like its a theme park", this is praising how insurmountable the fucking matterhorn rollercoaster is compared to the himalayas as an aside, and just diving into deeper nonsense.
That's impressive.
More relevantly that's not me ranting about the most insignificant of tiny sins in a work that's like. Not even a top 5, maybe, of absurdities in this book, but incredibly evocative writing in the whump whump section. Is genuinely baffling that in this horror novel where entire governments go "yeah let zombies eat the poor while we set in comfort and opulence (but occasionally use a shovel)", it spends so much time and energy about how this unspeakable nightmare of countless left begot and eaten alive is just, "Hey here's how swell and happy we were in a world where the dead hunger and roam the earth".
That one paragraph has so more bite than so much of what Brooks wishes he could deliver, and the read as a whole has done a great job in staying to that general principle. Has been great stuff!
But no, I'm sitting here spiralling over "the Inca, the mountain kings of walled cities with rope bridges that fundamentally demanded one by one transport and who's most famous archaeological find was hidden retreat cities higher and more hidden in the mountains still, didn't know what sieges were, ignore that their entire singular economy was wholly and utterly fielded around having immediate stockpiles within easy access so we can gear up and be able to last out for sieges even longer. Nah, they don't know about this at all. Fuckign' WINDSOR AND BUCKINGHAM, THO,,"
This is my personal Yonkers, this is me staring in the insanity that is "an m1 garat is superior in every way to an ar15", "don't wear armour or helmets my guy its not worth it", that's.
This isn't just "talking about europe like its a theme park", this is praising how insurmountable the fucking matterhorn rollercoaster is compared to the himalayas as an aside, and just diving into deeper nonsense.
That's impressive.
More relevantly that's not me ranting about the most insignificant of tiny sins in a work that's like. Not even a top 5, maybe, of absurdities in this book, but incredibly evocative writing in the whump whump section. Is genuinely baffling that in this horror novel where entire governments go "yeah let zombies eat the poor while we set in comfort and opulence (but occasionally use a shovel)", it spends so much time and energy about how this unspeakable nightmare of countless left begot and eaten alive is just, "Hey here's how swell and happy we were in a world where the dead hunger and roam the earth".
That one paragraph has so more bite than so much of what Brooks wishes he could deliver, and the read as a whole has done a great job in staying to that general principle. Has been great stuff!
- Location
- Within the Light of Hope
And the fact Episcopalian was named Claoca is just disgusting have some fucking class or respect lind or just keep ranting until time has enough and kicks your biological clock dead and save us from your insanity.
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm...not sure what you mean by this? The only mention of Peru is that they barely had any trouble with the plague, Machu Pichu and Vilcambamba didn't even get besieged.
SpiritFluid
Spooky, and Gay
- Location
- The Sun from which The Shadows Cast
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
Britbong says "Oh, the Inca? They never had a real siege". I, a person with a marked interest in precolumbian civilizations and history, feel a brain vein pop because sieges are quite possibly literally everything that defined the Inca in architecture and general empire design of the Inca as a whole.
It's like if I quite like... I don't know of a good example to usr here without falling victim to further flanderized pop history and such, but the best I'll tentatively hazard is someone out of hand going "The Molgolian khanates never understood the principles of calvary", or like some similarly insane "whatbthe fuck are you talking about" take as a casual aside, before discussing their own expertise in a tangentially related manner ("Yeah, I know about crossing terrain fast or stuff, ya know, I use a motorbike").
It's hard to communicate across, but it's just. A ignorance that is staggering in that it literally made me stagger, in showing that they don't know shiiiiiiit. Which should be obvious, they talk about Europe like there's a castle every hop and scotch and it has a fucking college professor going "oh chip chop cheerio good lad, i'm a medevial enthisiast, can you tell since i'm wearing a claymore while sketching a castle", but like.
It being much smaller, much more out of hand, much more. Stupidv? Just fucks with me in specific.
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obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
Okay, caught up now. Not gonna even try to do the "IC" thing, because I don't have the first clue how me or my family would come through in a late-2000s/early-2010s zombie apoc, so take everything I post as OOC.
Well, that doesn't sound so bad. Even accurate to an exte-
... Nevermind.
I'm pretty sure the intended meaning, from both the interviewed in-story and Brooks out of it, is that the zombies never really besieged it. Not that the Inca's never faced sieges from their enemies back when they were, ya know, around and hadn't been conquered by the Spanish yet. The entire paragraph seems to be the guy reeling off "oh, these are the historic fortresses during the zombie war in the America's and what happened to them" because Brooks wants people who might be curious to know or have some idea.
Well, that doesn't sound so bad. Even accurate to an exte-
... Nevermind.
I'm pretty sure the intended meaning, from both the interviewed in-story and Brooks out of it, is that the zombies never really besieged it. Not that the Inca's never faced sieges from their enemies back when they were, ya know, around and hadn't been conquered by the Spanish yet. The entire paragraph seems to be the guy reeling off "oh, these are the historic fortresses during the zombie war in the America's and what happened to them" because Brooks wants people who might be curious to know or have some idea.
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- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't think he's saying "the Inca, as a civilization, never experienced siege warfare." That would be a ludicrous assertion even for him. He's saying that Incan fortifications were never besieged during the zombie war, which is pretty reasonable.
- Location
- The Usual Room
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So, not done reading yet - I am on page 8 of 36 - but I am loving this, both the main Commentary, and the IC stories by other people in this thread. God, the ship one by Kadmus was just so fucking good.
I should probably be getting sleep, but I need to know about Yonkers...
I should probably be getting sleep, but I need to know about Yonkers...
Spector29
It Only Gets Worse From Here
IC:
Hey, glad I could catch up on this. It's a bit of a fraught situation; everyone around the college still has the pre-war mindset of the authorities being able to monitor every keystroke (which we should've known was BS even then, but what can you do?).
My story is a little...weirder. I'm a midwest kid, born and raised in South Dakota. I only give that up because I'm behind a VPN we made ourselves (after way too much trial and error), but it's kind of relevant to how we actually made it out. We're just a small college town, except we were on the NSA's top five schools in the country to study Cybersecurity at. I'm sure the school liked the admissions bump, and it injected exactly the kinds of people that dreamed of working at the fuckin' NSA into our otherwise liberal college enclave in a sea of rural conservatives. However, what it also injected was a shitload of money. Just a titanic amount of money went into building a special little lab for the NSA, with big steel walls and secret rooms you needed a security clearance to even be on the construction crew for.
Can you guess where we holed up once the wave of dead came rolling?
Surprisingly, it wasn't there. At least not at first. See, we also received the signal from Uncle Sam to 'Go North' with very little other direction, and I'm sure some students did after driving home to be with their families. But we were a Top 5 School; everyone who flew from around the country to get that nice government job? Effectively stranded here. Those of us who didn't want to go home for other reasons weren't a small group either. (I'm one of the 'lucky' ones, I suppose, in that I had convinced my Mother and Father to flee the 'burbs and come to me.) So we called a meeting; this was a tech school, the nerds outnumbered the 'normal' people here going for teaching and business degrees even before those people fled to god knows where with their families. I don't begrudge them that they didn't stay, of course. I'm sad that, communication lines being what they are, I'll never be able to talk to them again.
Anyway. We had a plan. We had several plans, really; pretty much everyone had thought about what to do in a Zombie Survival situation. Hell, as VP of Gaming Club, I organized the annual game of Humans vs. Zombies. It was just tag and nerf guns then. I can't even think about the game anyone without retreating from the memories of what it was actually like. I even played Patient Zero in the game a few times. Just...
Anyanyway. Plan. There were tunnels; I don't remember the reason the tour guy gave us for why there was a series of tunnels connecting all the buildings on campus when he brought it up during the Campus Visit tour when I was a prospective freshman, but every single one of us knew that those tunnels would be the key to us surviving this. They weren't huge, about two and a half people wide, but they were well lit and didn't have many turns or blind corners. So long as we could keep the lights on, any ghouls who made it in would be seen from a mile away; we could sound the alarm and have Zack taken care of in minutes. Of course, then we'd have to clean the tunnels, and that got...dicy, as we settled in.
But we did it. Scavenged solar panels, repurposed batteries and engines. Turned the Quad into a garden. Lots of buildings had ceiling to floor window panes (the fancy NSA building's walls were basically all windows with the shades perpetually drawn) which compromised some of our options, but for every Science Center that got immediately overrun (and it's tunnel entrances sealed and given 24h video surveillance) we had a Liberal Arts building that, since the basement was basically just the tunnel entrance, an accessibility elevator, and a stairwell, it was trivially easy to block up Zack's entrances and leave the rest of the building accessible.
Sorry, I think I'm going too much into our logistics. What can I say, I'm excited to scream into the digital void again. Suffice to say, those of us already above the snowline did survive by hunkering down in place. It wasn't comfortable, and diabetes nearly killed me more often than Zack ever did, but we made it.
The government is here, now. We're still not in a location of much value, the only reason they're here at all is the cell tower one of our most mad of lads repurposed into a...radio thing? I admit I wasn't ever in with the hardcore engineers. Still, it keeps Uncle Sam in contact with their bases in the nearby cities, so as long nobody blows up the tower we'll all have to deal with a little bit of boot leather.
But it's not all bad. None of those comms fucks even know what a VPN is.
Hey, glad I could catch up on this. It's a bit of a fraught situation; everyone around the college still has the pre-war mindset of the authorities being able to monitor every keystroke (which we should've known was BS even then, but what can you do?).
My story is a little...weirder. I'm a midwest kid, born and raised in South Dakota. I only give that up because I'm behind a VPN we made ourselves (after way too much trial and error), but it's kind of relevant to how we actually made it out. We're just a small college town, except we were on the NSA's top five schools in the country to study Cybersecurity at. I'm sure the school liked the admissions bump, and it injected exactly the kinds of people that dreamed of working at the fuckin' NSA into our otherwise liberal college enclave in a sea of rural conservatives. However, what it also injected was a shitload of money. Just a titanic amount of money went into building a special little lab for the NSA, with big steel walls and secret rooms you needed a security clearance to even be on the construction crew for.
Can you guess where we holed up once the wave of dead came rolling?
Surprisingly, it wasn't there. At least not at first. See, we also received the signal from Uncle Sam to 'Go North' with very little other direction, and I'm sure some students did after driving home to be with their families. But we were a Top 5 School; everyone who flew from around the country to get that nice government job? Effectively stranded here. Those of us who didn't want to go home for other reasons weren't a small group either. (I'm one of the 'lucky' ones, I suppose, in that I had convinced my Mother and Father to flee the 'burbs and come to me.) So we called a meeting; this was a tech school, the nerds outnumbered the 'normal' people here going for teaching and business degrees even before those people fled to god knows where with their families. I don't begrudge them that they didn't stay, of course. I'm sad that, communication lines being what they are, I'll never be able to talk to them again.
Anyway. We had a plan. We had several plans, really; pretty much everyone had thought about what to do in a Zombie Survival situation. Hell, as VP of Gaming Club, I organized the annual game of Humans vs. Zombies. It was just tag and nerf guns then. I can't even think about the game anyone without retreating from the memories of what it was actually like. I even played Patient Zero in the game a few times. Just...
Anyanyway. Plan. There were tunnels; I don't remember the reason the tour guy gave us for why there was a series of tunnels connecting all the buildings on campus when he brought it up during the Campus Visit tour when I was a prospective freshman, but every single one of us knew that those tunnels would be the key to us surviving this. They weren't huge, about two and a half people wide, but they were well lit and didn't have many turns or blind corners. So long as we could keep the lights on, any ghouls who made it in would be seen from a mile away; we could sound the alarm and have Zack taken care of in minutes. Of course, then we'd have to clean the tunnels, and that got...dicy, as we settled in.
But we did it. Scavenged solar panels, repurposed batteries and engines. Turned the Quad into a garden. Lots of buildings had ceiling to floor window panes (the fancy NSA building's walls were basically all windows with the shades perpetually drawn) which compromised some of our options, but for every Science Center that got immediately overrun (and it's tunnel entrances sealed and given 24h video surveillance) we had a Liberal Arts building that, since the basement was basically just the tunnel entrance, an accessibility elevator, and a stairwell, it was trivially easy to block up Zack's entrances and leave the rest of the building accessible.
Sorry, I think I'm going too much into our logistics. What can I say, I'm excited to scream into the digital void again. Suffice to say, those of us already above the snowline did survive by hunkering down in place. It wasn't comfortable, and diabetes nearly killed me more often than Zack ever did, but we made it.
The government is here, now. We're still not in a location of much value, the only reason they're here at all is the cell tower one of our most mad of lads repurposed into a...radio thing? I admit I wasn't ever in with the hardcore engineers. Still, it keeps Uncle Sam in contact with their bases in the nearby cities, so as long nobody blows up the tower we'll all have to deal with a little bit of boot leather.
But it's not all bad. None of those comms fucks even know what a VPN is.
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Around the World, And Above
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Around the World, And Above
Radio Free Earth saved an awful lot of lives over the course of the apocalypse, and the fact that one of the premier documentaries about it is the one that places it in the same breath as the "Prince Regent's Address" that the Royalists put out from the Isle of Man feels grotesquely unfair.
It's kinda weird how Micronesia had a totally fine war, but then their immediate post-war was fraught; lots of countries came looking for their old naval ships. Curiously, the Americans less than a lot of others - a number of American ships within the Pacific Continent remained loyal to the American government even within places like Ulithi, which gives the Americans some pull they might lose if they try to take their ships back. And they'd have to maintain them, which they don't want to have to do.
There's been a little kerfuffle about who has a claim on the Ural.
I think doing this sort of work; combatting misinformation, trying to give people the best chances of survival, worldwide, all at once… you need to believe the virus story. You need to make yourself believe this is all rational, possible.
Outside of that - she's right. The deliberate and constant refusal to tell the public anything, anything at all, made this an apocalypse, rather than just a difficult few years.
Radio Free Earth was what the Americans called it - not necessarily as the annoying Cold Warrior concept that it sounds like, just… it seemed to appeal, a tongue in cheek little reference.
We always called it the World Service, so I can't claim to be immune to this sort of barely-even-humour.
There's quite a contrast between the two South Africas, isn't there? The USSA in the Cape with their Redeker plan, and the Republic in the East, their supplies shot to hell and refugees streaming across this new border they suddenly have through the middle of their country, still trying to save as many of their citizens as they could.
The Republic of South Africa's pre-war government continued these broadcasts until their enclave was overrun, and they were resumed by the largest of the survivor communes still living once they found out what had happened.
South Africa had some really niche myths going around - the secession of the Cape obviously fuelled some of them, but "racist Afrikaners invented zombies" wasn't the most out there of the theories they had to address, nor was South Africa the worst country for theories and claims.
The Ural was a goddamn marvel - they coordinated the entire radio system through her computer banks, and you could barely detect a static hiss even in Britain, about as far from where she was moored up as you could get.
The satellites obviously were also pretty vital, but the Ural did so much in those first few years of broadcasts.
Ships are incredibly complicated. A pretty solid chunk of the old Royal Navy was docked in various ports we claimed, and with a few exceptions, we couldn't get them working reliably enough.
We did get a lot of rifles in exchange for those ships, so they weren't a total bust.
As far as the Ural - the general exodus of Russian ships from Vladivostok as their government increasingly moved down the trans-siberian railroad towards them, becoming more and more of the theocracy it is - was impressive enough that there's a number of books about it, and a film is being talked about, I believe.
She's lucky. Not just to reach the camp - although there were only about six million Indian refugees to be allowed into Sri Lanka total - but also to make it through it; the Sri Lankan Indian Refugee camp had about 30% casualties, some because they'd been bitten before they came and had to be put down, but a lot from the disease and malnutrition which comes inevitably from trying to stuff so many more people into an island with a population of 20 million already. Honestly they didn't do too badly - a 3 in 10 attrition rate is about average. But still; she's lucky to have survived, spent the war on the Ural instead of Sri Lanka.
I remember listening to this, before Bristol; learning how to make potable water, how to grow food inside… it wasn't enough but it helped, you know?
We never got the mold spore thing working, though. Really, like… borderline impossible, actually. To make penicillin pure enough that it works properly without a lab. I guess it worked in Bristol, so maybe it was for that - for the new governments which lacked institutional knowledge.
The fact that the Americans sent in data bragging about their stupid axe-shovel is just so wild - why would anyone need to know about it? Why tell everyone about it? Were they expecting people to try and replicate it? Leaving aside that it's terrible - reproducing something from a radio broadcast? Are you joking?
Letting people know Phalanx was worthless was good, though - there were a lot of places where people assumed if the Americans had been using it, it must've been worth using, and they'd trade guns, ammunition, actual medicine, for this worthless placebo. I don't know how many lives they saved with that - it's impossible to know, because how can you tell who would've bought Phalanx and didn't, and of those people, who would've been careless about getting bitten if they thought they were safe?
There's the inverse problem, now - there's an entire generation which - to survive - has atrophied our natural empathy. We do not need to dehumanise our enemies now; we are primed to believe a monster can wear a human face, to believe we can kill them without guilt or concern.
It isn't good - you can see the consequences in the footage coming out of Central Europe, Siberia, South America. Battles are a lot bloodier than they used to be. There's a lot less surrendering now.
I heard about a guy - an officer in the Red Guards, not my unit - who kept a little ghoul child with a muzzle and oven mitts, tried to train it with little bits of meat. He was so sure it was getting to understand what he was trying to train it to do. Eventually someone found out and he got a court martial.
No one has been able to keep a consistent story on who that ghoul had been to him, before it was a ghoul.
I never read the civilian survival guide - we didn't have many copies in Britain, but as I understand it, the stupid thing was actively harmful to most people who did, so.
The personal firearms thing is real; a lot of Americans are really confused when they find out that, I don't know, the defenders of some school in some small town in rural England couldn't just "arm up" once it all froze over. The idea that every house in a rural town wouldn't have at the very least a handgun was baffling to my wife.
This is good of her. A lot of people love to talk about these things as though they are somehow justification to condemn entire peoples, and conveniently forget that there wasn't anywhere where people covered themselves in glory on the "don't engage in disastrous traditional solutions which will not help" front.
There were pogroms in an upsettingly large number of European Cities, is all I'm saying, and the CSA in America couldn't decide if they were blaming the Jews, Catholics or Queers. This isn't some "oh those savages in Africa" or whatever.
Two hundred million ghouls along the Ganges, give or take - it isn't completely clear, because when it was cleared by the expedition out of Nepal, not all the ghouls remained in fit state to be identified. A ghoul hit by a mortar shell is a greasy smear in the dirt.
They didn't even kill them all - there was a concerted effort to draw ghouls away, down deeper towards the Deccan, where there was no one still alive to suffer them.
From what I know of them, God's Lambs were bad. Like, deliberately contriving to turn in large public spaces, contaminating blood banks with ghoul blood, sabotaging ammunition production bad.
We didn't have people like them, not exactly. We had a lot of people who blamed minorities for the spread; lots of scare stories about mosques full of ghoulified young women because "the muslims" wouldn't let their women go to see a doctor or whatever. We didn't have many actual religious fanatics, just a lot of bigots pretending we did.
God, the sky in those early years. It felt like the end of the world. It wasn't as bad for us as for a lot of places, but even still, it was always cold, and the sun was weaker than you imagined it should be. Nights felt longer, summer felt shorter.
I don't want to talk about the rest. We all know it happened - for some people, all it took was that they had the excuse, the death sentence of the bite already burning through their blood, and they took the opportunity to use it. It was never as localised as people want to think.
There's different sorts of danger.
Also, everyone seems to believe most people had a harder war than them - on the front lines all the time, sweeping and clearing buildings.
Most survivors, obviously, survived because they were in low risk situations - they lived somewhere that a survivor state rose up, or a retreating government, or they just lived somewhere rural, and missed the whole thing.
I don't know. Collectively most people want to argue they had an "easy ride" of the war. Until, I suppose, you reach a certain level of "this fucking sucks" - then you start to talk about how you had the hardest war. To hear people tell it, no one's war was average.
They were already in communication with Bristol by the time I was there; they wanted intelligence on what Britain was like, what we knew about the ghouls here. Every once in a while, command would send out orders and someone would have go out and do something pointless and stupid - I spoke to a girl who said her squad was sent out to, like… a field? There had been a rabbit warren there that the ghouls had dug up and they wanted to know what made this one different from all the others.
… Apparently the rabbits had myxy. Poor things were blind and helpless, unable and unwilling to run. That's why the ghouls were able to chase them down. Not sure what information that gave them, though.
I smashed my radio the first time I heard something like this. I hadn't used it for coming up on a month - the government stations played the same thing over and over; "Shelter in place, wait for relief, do not panic, do not flee." and the Bristol station was still just asking people to come to Bristol on repeat - but I was bored walking on the A 34, and I decided to play with the dial, looking for a channel playing music. I thought there probably had to be one, left on repeat or something.
Instead there was a little boy sobbing down the line. His dad had pushed him into the attic of their house, pulled away the ladder and told him to wait for daddy to come back, but Daddy was back, and he was "not right" and he was scared, and there wasn't any food and someone had to come help him, come help him please.
I was only fifteen, and my radio couldn't even transmit, it was just a receiver, but the guilt still clings. I could've done something.
Instead I threw my radio off a bridge and kept walking. I try not to think about it.
Never listen to the Buenos Aires final broadcast. It will break your heart, and that's if you have no emotional connection to the lullaby. From what I understand, it left such a scar on the Argentinian psyche that they only got the population of Buenos Aires over a hundred thousand this year.
No one wanted to go back.
I don't know if they could've done better for these people. I don't think we will ever know that - there are, after all, none of them left. But we can remember their sacrifice, and that will need to be enough.
Enough of this maudlin; next up is Korea.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to the UNS Ural Museum Ship on their website [HERE].
AN: This interview going as hard as it does has absolutely no right to be placed between monarchism man and unsolicited, like, borderline phrenology about North Koreans. Let me know what you think of it.
Article: Ulithi Atoll, Federated States of Micronesia
[During World War II, this vast coral atoll served as the main forward base for the United States Pacific Fleet. During World War Z, it sheltered not only American naval vessels, but hundreds of civilian ships as well. One of those ships was the UNS Ural, the first broadcast hub of Radio Free Earth. Now a museum to the achievements of the project, she is the focus of the British documentary Words at War. One of the subjects interviewed for this documentary is Barati Palshigar.]
Radio Free Earth saved an awful lot of lives over the course of the apocalypse, and the fact that one of the premier documentaries about it is the one that places it in the same breath as the "Prince Regent's Address" that the Royalists put out from the Isle of Man feels grotesquely unfair.
It's kinda weird how Micronesia had a totally fine war, but then their immediate post-war was fraught; lots of countries came looking for their old naval ships. Curiously, the Americans less than a lot of others - a number of American ships within the Pacific Continent remained loyal to the American government even within places like Ulithi, which gives the Americans some pull they might lose if they try to take their ships back. And they'd have to maintain them, which they don't want to have to do.
There's been a little kerfuffle about who has a claim on the Ural.
Article: Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now. Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as, say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world's citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons.
I think doing this sort of work; combatting misinformation, trying to give people the best chances of survival, worldwide, all at once… you need to believe the virus story. You need to make yourself believe this is all rational, possible.
Outside of that - she's right. The deliberate and constant refusal to tell the public anything, anything at all, made this an apocalypse, rather than just a difficult few years.
Article: When I first joined Radio Free Earth, it was still called the International Program for Health and Safety Information. The title "Radio Free Earth" came from the individuals and communities who monitored our broadcasts.
Radio Free Earth was what the Americans called it - not necessarily as the annoying Cold Warrior concept that it sounds like, just… it seemed to appeal, a tongue in cheek little reference.
We always called it the World Service, so I can't claim to be immune to this sort of barely-even-humour.
Article: It was the first real international venture, barely a few months after the South African Plan, and years before the conference at Honolulu. Just like the rest of the world based their survival strategies on Redeker, our genesis was routed in Radio Ubunye.
There's quite a contrast between the two South Africas, isn't there? The USSA in the Cape with their Redeker plan, and the Republic in the East, their supplies shot to hell and refugees streaming across this new border they suddenly have through the middle of their country, still trying to save as many of their citizens as they could.
Article: What was Radio Ubunye?
South Africa's broadcasts to its isolated citizens. Because they didn't have the resources for material aid, the only assistance the government could render was information. They were the first, at least, to my knowledge, to begin these regular, multilingual broadcasts. Not only did they offer practical survival skills, they went so far as to collect and address each and every falsehood circulating among their citizens. What we did was take the template of Radio Ubunye and adapt it for the global community.
The Republic of South Africa's pre-war government continued these broadcasts until their enclave was overrun, and they were resumed by the largest of the survivor communes still living once they found out what had happened.
South Africa had some really niche myths going around - the secession of the Cape obviously fuelled some of them, but "racist Afrikaners invented zombies" wasn't the most out there of the theories they had to address, nor was South Africa the worst country for theories and claims.
Article: I came aboard, literally, at the very beginning, as the Ural's reactors were just being put back online. The Ural was a former vessel of the Soviet, then the Russian, Federal Navy. Back then the SSV-33 had been many things: a command and control ship, a missile tracking platform, an electronic surveillance vessel.
The Ural was a goddamn marvel - they coordinated the entire radio system through her computer banks, and you could barely detect a static hiss even in Britain, about as far from where she was moored up as you could get.
The satellites obviously were also pretty vital, but the Ural did so much in those first few years of broadcasts.
Article: Unfortunately, she was also a white elephant, because her systems, they tell me, were too complicated even for her own crew. She had spent the majority of her career tied to a pier at the Vladi-vostok naval base, providing additional electrical power for the facility. I am not an engineer, so I don't how they managed to replace her spent fuel rods or convert her massive communication facilities to interface with the global satellite network.
Ships are incredibly complicated. A pretty solid chunk of the old Royal Navy was docked in various ports we claimed, and with a few exceptions, we couldn't get them working reliably enough.
We did get a lot of rifles in exchange for those ships, so they weren't a total bust.
As far as the Ural - the general exodus of Russian ships from Vladivostok as their government increasingly moved down the trans-siberian railroad towards them, becoming more and more of the theocracy it is - was impressive enough that there's a number of books about it, and a film is being talked about, I believe.
Article: I specialize in languages, specifically those of the Indian Subcontinent. Myself and Mister Verma, just the two of us to cover a billion people . . . well . . . at that point it was still a billion.
Mister Verma had found me in the refugee camp in Sri Lanka.
She's lucky. Not just to reach the camp - although there were only about six million Indian refugees to be allowed into Sri Lanka total - but also to make it through it; the Sri Lankan Indian Refugee camp had about 30% casualties, some because they'd been bitten before they came and had to be put down, but a lot from the disease and malnutrition which comes inevitably from trying to stuff so many more people into an island with a population of 20 million already. Honestly they didn't do too badly - a 3 in 10 attrition rate is about average. But still; she's lucky to have survived, spent the war on the Ural instead of Sri Lanka.
Article: We had worked together several years before at our country's embassy in London. We thought it had been hard work then; we had no idea. It was a maddening grind, eighteen, sometimes twenty hours a day. I don't know when we slept. There was so much raw data, so many dispatches arriving every minute. Much of it had to do with basic survival: how to purify water, create an indoor greenhouse, culture and process mold spore for penicillin.
I remember listening to this, before Bristol; learning how to make potable water, how to grow food inside… it wasn't enough but it helped, you know?
We never got the mold spore thing working, though. Really, like… borderline impossible, actually. To make penicillin pure enough that it works properly without a lab. I guess it worked in Bristol, so maybe it was for that - for the new governments which lacked institutional knowledge.
Article: I'd never heard the term "quisling" or "feral"; I didn't know what a "Lobo" was or the false miracle cure of Phalanx. All I knew was that suddenly there was a uniformed man shoving a collection of words before my eyes and telling me "We need this in Marathi, and ready to record in fifteen minutes."
The fact that the Americans sent in data bragging about their stupid axe-shovel is just so wild - why would anyone need to know about it? Why tell everyone about it? Were they expecting people to try and replicate it? Leaving aside that it's terrible - reproducing something from a radio broadcast? Are you joking?
Letting people know Phalanx was worthless was good, though - there were a lot of places where people assumed if the Americans had been using it, it must've been worth using, and they'd trade guns, ammunition, actual medicine, for this worthless placebo. I don't know how many lives they saved with that - it's impossible to know, because how can you tell who would've bought Phalanx and didn't, and of those people, who would've been careless about getting bitten if they thought they were safe?
Article: What kind of misinformation were you combating?
Where do you want me to begin? Medical? Scientific? Military? Spiritual? Psychological? The psychological aspect I found the most maddening. People wanted so badly to anthropomorphize the walking blight. In war, in a conventional war that is, we spend so much time trying to dehumanize the enemy, to create an emotional distance. We would make up stories or derogatory titles . . . when I think about what my father used to call Muslims . . . and now in this war it seemed that everyone was trying desperately to find some shred of a connection to their enemy, to put a human face on something that was so unmistakably inhuman.
There's the inverse problem, now - there's an entire generation which - to survive - has atrophied our natural empathy. We do not need to dehumanise our enemies now; we are primed to believe a monster can wear a human face, to believe we can kill them without guilt or concern.
It isn't good - you can see the consequences in the footage coming out of Central Europe, Siberia, South America. Battles are a lot bloodier than they used to be. There's a lot less surrendering now.
Article: Can you give me some examples?
There were so many misconceptions: zombies were somehow intelligent; they could feel and adapt, use tools and even some human weapons; they carried memories of their former existence; or they could be communicated with and trained like some kind of pet. It was heartbreaking, having to debunk one misguided myth after another. The civilian survival guide helped, but was still severely limited.
I heard about a guy - an officer in the Red Guards, not my unit - who kept a little ghoul child with a muzzle and oven mitts, tried to train it with little bits of meat. He was so sure it was getting to understand what he was trying to train it to do. Eventually someone found out and he got a court martial.
No one has been able to keep a consistent story on who that ghoul had been to him, before it was a ghoul.
I never read the civilian survival guide - we didn't have many copies in Britain, but as I understand it, the stupid thing was actively harmful to most people who did, so.
Article: Oh really?
Oh yes. You could see it was clearly written by an American, the references to SUVs and personal firearms. There was no taking into account the cultural differences…the various indigenous solutions people believed would save them from the undead.
The personal firearms thing is real; a lot of Americans are really confused when they find out that, I don't know, the defenders of some school in some small town in rural England couldn't just "arm up" once it all froze over. The idea that every house in a rural town wouldn't have at the very least a handgun was baffling to my wife.
Article: Such as?
I'd rather not give too many details, not without tacitly condemning the entire people group from which this "solution" originated. As an Indian, I had to deal with many aspects of my own culture that had turned self-destructive.
This is good of her. A lot of people love to talk about these things as though they are somehow justification to condemn entire peoples, and conveniently forget that there wasn't anywhere where people covered themselves in glory on the "don't engage in disastrous traditional solutions which will not help" front.
There were pogroms in an upsettingly large number of European Cities, is all I'm saying, and the CSA in America couldn't decide if they were blaming the Jews, Catholics or Queers. This isn't some "oh those savages in Africa" or whatever.
Article: There was Varanasi, one of the oldest cities on Earth, near the place where Buddha supposedly preached his first sermon and where thousands of Hindu pilgrims came each year to die. In normal, prewar conditions, the road would be littered with corpses. Now these corpses were rising to attack. Varanasi was one of the hottest White Zones, a nexus of living death. This nexus covered almost the entire length of the Ganges.
Two hundred million ghouls along the Ganges, give or take - it isn't completely clear, because when it was cleared by the expedition out of Nepal, not all the ghouls remained in fit state to be identified. A ghoul hit by a mortar shell is a greasy smear in the dirt.
They didn't even kill them all - there was a concerted effort to draw ghouls away, down deeper towards the Deccan, where there was no one still alive to suffer them.
Article: Every country had a similar story. Every one of our international crew had at least one moment when they were forced to confront an example of suicidal ignorance. An American told us about how the religious sect known as "God's Lambs" believed that the rapture had finally come and the quicker they were infected, the quicker they would go to heaven.
From what I know of them, God's Lambs were bad. Like, deliberately contriving to turn in large public spaces, contaminating blood banks with ghoul blood, sabotaging ammunition production bad.
We didn't have people like them, not exactly. We had a lot of people who blamed minorities for the spread; lots of scare stories about mosques full of ghoulified young women because "the muslims" wouldn't let their women go to see a doctor or whatever. We didn't have many actual religious fanatics, just a lot of bigots pretending we did.
Article: Another woman - I won't say what country she belonged to - tried her best to dispel the notion that sexual intercourse with a virgin could "cleanse" the "curse." I don't know how many women, or little girls, were raped as a result of this "cleansing." Everyone was furious with his own people. Everyone was ashamed. Our one Belgian crewmember compared it to the darkening skies. He used to call it "the evil of our collective soul."
God, the sky in those early years. It felt like the end of the world. It wasn't as bad for us as for a lot of places, but even still, it was always cold, and the sun was weaker than you imagined it should be. Nights felt longer, summer felt shorter.
I don't want to talk about the rest. We all know it happened - for some people, all it took was that they had the excuse, the death sentence of the bite already burning through their blood, and they took the opportunity to use it. It was never as localised as people want to think.
Article: I guess I have no right to complain. My life was never in danger, my belly was always full. I might not have slept often but at least I could sleep without fear. Most importantly, I never had had to work in the Ural's IR department.
There's different sorts of danger.
Also, everyone seems to believe most people had a harder war than them - on the front lines all the time, sweeping and clearing buildings.
Most survivors, obviously, survived because they were in low risk situations - they lived somewhere that a survivor state rose up, or a retreating government, or they just lived somewhere rural, and missed the whole thing.
I don't know. Collectively most people want to argue they had an "easy ride" of the war. Until, I suppose, you reach a certain level of "this fucking sucks" - then you start to talk about how you had the hardest war. To hear people tell it, no one's war was average.
Article: IR?
Information Reception. The data we were broadcasting did not originate aboard the Ural. It came from all around the world, from experts and think tanks in various government safe zones. They would transmit their findings to our IR operators who, in turn, would pass it along to us.
They were already in communication with Bristol by the time I was there; they wanted intelligence on what Britain was like, what we knew about the ghouls here. Every once in a while, command would send out orders and someone would have go out and do something pointless and stupid - I spoke to a girl who said her squad was sent out to, like… a field? There had been a rabbit warren there that the ghouls had dug up and they wanted to know what made this one different from all the others.
… Apparently the rabbits had myxy. Poor things were blind and helpless, unable and unwilling to run. That's why the ghouls were able to chase them down. Not sure what information that gave them, though.
Article: There were millions of wretched souls scattered throughout our planet, all screaming into their private radio sets as their children starved or their temporary fortress burned, or the living dead overran their defenses. Even if you didn't understand the language, as many of the operators didn't, there was no mistaking the human voice of anguish. They weren't allowed to answer back, either; there wasn't time. All transmissions had to be devoted to official business. I don't want to know what that was like for the IR operators.
I smashed my radio the first time I heard something like this. I hadn't used it for coming up on a month - the government stations played the same thing over and over; "Shelter in place, wait for relief, do not panic, do not flee." and the Bristol station was still just asking people to come to Bristol on repeat - but I was bored walking on the A 34, and I decided to play with the dial, looking for a channel playing music. I thought there probably had to be one, left on repeat or something.
Instead there was a little boy sobbing down the line. His dad had pushed him into the attic of their house, pulled away the ladder and told him to wait for daddy to come back, but Daddy was back, and he was "not right" and he was scared, and there wasn't any food and someone had to come help him, come help him please.
I was only fifteen, and my radio couldn't even transmit, it was just a receiver, but the guilt still clings. I could've done something.
Instead I threw my radio off a bridge and kept walking. I try not to think about it.
Article: When the last broadcast came from Buenos Aires, when that famous Latin singer played that Spanish lullaby, it was too much for one of our operators. He wasn't from Buenos Aires, he wasn't even from South America. He was just an eighteen-year-old Russian sailor who blew his brains out all over his instruments. He was the first, and since the end of the war, the rest of the IR operators have followed suit.
Never listen to the Buenos Aires final broadcast. It will break your heart, and that's if you have no emotional connection to the lullaby. From what I understand, it left such a scar on the Argentinian psyche that they only got the population of Buenos Aires over a hundred thousand this year.
No one wanted to go back.
Article: Not one of them is alive today. The last was my Belgian friend. "You carry those voices with you," he told me one morning. We were standing on the deck, looking into that brown haze, waiting for a sunrise we knew we'd never see. "Those cries will be with me the rest of my life, never resting, never fading, never ceasing their call to join them."
I don't know if they could've done better for these people. I don't think we will ever know that - there are, after all, none of them left. But we can remember their sacrifice, and that will need to be enough.
Enough of this maudlin; next up is Korea.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to the UNS Ural Museum Ship on their website [HERE].
AN: This interview going as hard as it does has absolutely no right to be placed between monarchism man and unsolicited, like, borderline phrenology about North Koreans. Let me know what you think of it.
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Damn that goes hard. especially the bit about the IR operators and the narrator talking about the boy she didn't try to save.
globalwarmth
ruining the weather.
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- Polar ice caps
Ah yes the nuclear ships. Just a blessing during the war but a peacetime nightmare due to almost no one knowing or being able to service a naval reactor.
There is that Ohio-class sub moored in Veracruz that the junta has been demanding the return of
There is that Ohio-class sub moored in Veracruz that the junta has been demanding the return of
Jenny
anonymous user
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- maryland
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- She/Her
From what I've found, Brooks wrote World War Z in part to cope with his mother's death from cancer. It kinda shows in this interview, which is probably why it goes as hard as it does.
Like, much of the book is pulp (and not even good pulp, a lot of the time), but every so often, Brooks is channeling his own fear and grief.
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One of the most damaging claims around the South West was that you had to burn a zombie or it'd get back up days after a head shot. The issue is a lot of guys did not know how to set fires safely, and we ended up with several ships, buildings and large areas of moorland on fire.
I must admit it's pretty funny seeing a bunch of the Darings sailing around under Spanish colours.
How much things have changed post war, despite the number of hotspots remaining (mostly from oceanic swarms, though I suspect some of it is that most royalist units who get stuck with sweep duty don't have the stomach for it) the royalist government is already talking about trying to disarm the populous, or at least moving to zombie only weapons like shotguns and pistols.
Everyone's heard the stories about the 'guy who can't let go of their infected kid' but in my experience there were also some sick freaks who wanted to control zombies and figured zombie kids would be more manageable. I remember one time we were running a salvage op in rural Cornwall and we ran across this cabin with a seriously unfriendly dude in it. He was being very cagey, but also trying to keep us talking. Any time we'd try to leave he'd re-engage, open up. He was definitely trying to keep us there for something. After a bit, we decided to just leave before it got dark.
It turned out that the sick fuck had like, a dozen zombie kids in buried cages, and he let them out on us once night fell. Unfortunately for him, we were a lot better armed and trained than the average refugees by that point, so after we'd got rid of them we returned and knocked on his door with a grenade. We never found out if he'd infected the kids himself or just found them or what. He wasn't in much of a position to answer questions after we were done breaching his house.
I've actually heard that at least some enclaves are using swarms for military purposes now, which is ghastly.
As an RTO, you had to learn how to not listen to stuff like that. I couldn't ever entirely stop myself, so I tried to listen only at certain times of the day, or only for work, noting down frequency and strength, triangulating sources and marking them up on a map. Try to turn it just into something unemotional. Into work.
It helped me stay sane at least.
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This book has a weird place in my mind. When it's good, it's really goddamned good - this interview and the one with the woman with the mind of a child in particular both gave teenaged me nightmares - and then there's dumb bullshit like Mr. Cosplaying English Nobility and all the deepthroating the jackboot of Hard Men Making Hard Decisions.
As for your take on this interview, it's good. I liked the mention of how she threw away her objectively invaluable radio after hearing the kid. Gets me thinking about those poor bastards on the Ural, hearing that kind of stuff constantly for years... No wonder they all killed themselves.
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- Earth, probably.
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I only found this thread when it was recommended yesterday, but I wanted to say that you're doing a fantastic job re-contextualizing WWZ, and that you've done a great job getting me emotionally invested in the world in a way that I really don't remember being when I first read the book.
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
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- Occupied Cascadia
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IC: Got bit by a quiesling once, had to drag the poor bastard all the way back to base to keep them from shooting me.
Spent two weeks in quarantine, excessive, but not like I blame 'em.
Cleaned the wound with ethanol daily (hurt like a bitch) and still almost had to amputate....
Reasonably happy ending, dude ended up our mascot of sorts, a "tame ghoul", survived the war. I wonder how he's doing now?
Spent two weeks in quarantine, excessive, but not like I blame 'em.
Cleaned the wound with ethanol daily (hurt like a bitch) and still almost had to amputate....
Reasonably happy ending, dude ended up our mascot of sorts, a "tame ghoul", survived the war. I wonder how he's doing now?
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
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- Devon
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OOC: Yeah, this particular interview hit me like a brick to the teeth the first time I read WWZ, and I've never forgotten it. It's one of those bits that elevates the book from 'just a waste of paper' to 'holy shit dude so you can do it if you try'. The Buenos Aires bit is the first thing I think of any time anyone mentions this book.
SemiSaneAuthor
Powered by Snark, Spite, and Tea!
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- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
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- They/Them
You know, just had a look, it's been a while since I've read it ... But linking a World War Z fanfic about North Korea it's a one shot just over 8,000 words. Depending on how North Korea goes, having a look back at that fanfic might be interesting.
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Yeah, this goes hard. It made me tear up. Occasionally, the man really has bangers, and so do you.