The Last Silver Bullet Read online

  The usage of coke as fuel and the massive blast furnaces ensured that the humans could easily build a structure that represented SFLA’s victories and achievements. Paris was the place a wrought-iron lattice tower was erected with bolts and rivets. Being the first structure to reach a monstrous height of 300 meters, the Eiffel Tower was built using a staggering 7,000 metric tons of iron.

  With factories around billowing clouds of smoke that blanketed Paris, the SFLA top brass swelled with pride looking down from the tower – the condition of the city was their tour de force. They had come a long way from the time they had given fire to the early humans.

  Early Steampunk authors like HG Wells could sense that there was an invasion of Earth taking place. He wrote an action-packed novel – War of the Worlds – where the Earth gets invaded, though in reality, Earth wasn’t being invaded by Martians, but by a way deadlier and more persistent SFLA. It was the exact opposite from the sci-fi classic, with the humans unknowingly fighting for the invaders rather than against them.

  Around the last bend of the 19th century, SFLA played its trump card. They had tweaked the dead bodies of zooplanktons and other creatures that had been buried under the Earth’s crust because of the continental drift 175 million years ago. The tweaking turned their dead bodies into oil high on octane, the second most abundant liquid on Earth.

  Humans had already discovered the oil 6,000 years ago by the banks of the Euphrates River. They started using this sticky, black liquid as a waterproofing agent. It was also used in boat building and brick bonding. Ancient Egyptians used a processed version of the highly-viscous oil for embalming mummies, holding the walls of Babylon and constructing colossal pyramids. Even Moses had his basket coated with it, while Noah used it to waterproof his fabled wooden Ark.

  Things changed, when in the 1900s, Iranian chemists learnt how to distill this oil for bettering its fuel efficiency. This opened a freeway for engines that would be using the oil as fuel. First internal combustion engines for transportation were developed in Germany using a relatively volatile hydrocarbon obtained from coal gas. However, a new process was soon developed in Russia for breaking down heavier hydrocarbons present in the SFLA-made oil. This breakthrough led to the commercialization of the oil they started calling gasoline.

  1892 was the 400th anniversary of Columbus discovering America. The SFLA celebrated the occasion with the invention of the world’s first proper automobile. On the side, they also started preparing two brothers in the Americas by making them open a bicycle repair and sales shop to fund a dream.

  Within a year of the appearance of the world’s first proper automobile, the first gasoline-powered tractor was manufactured in America. The Blooman government misread this development as a beneficial step towards the day when humans fulfilled their destiny of becoming the protectors and nurturers of the Tree of Life. The multi-purpose agricultural paraphernalia turned out to be a tiller of bad times.

  Inventors around the world were now kicking up the dirt with a variety of automobiles. The 1890s saw motorized cars and bicycles reaching their modern stage of development. It needed no further changes in their fundamental principle in times to come. Humans loved the concept of these crank-and-go vehicles, and in a flash, these conveyances swept up on the roads of the world.

  Soon the gasoline was replacing coal as fuel for powering human navies and became the dominant source of energy in the industrialized world. It was to provide the means to the humans itching to fight devastating world wars. Victories and defeats were decided on the supplies of this black gold made by the SFLA, the hungry Dogs of War.

  The SFLA wasn’t going to mind coal getting replaced as fuel for transportation engines, because humans weren’t going to stop overusing coal anyway. While some humans did try to introduce electric vehicles, the convenience of gasoline swept them away, even from the history books. Gasoline was also going to give the SFLA more strike power with its ability of vaporizing and rapidly mixing with air, making it ideal for spreading fire that much quicker.

  As the 20th century dawned, gasoline gave wings to da Vinci’s dreams. The two brothers in America – Oliver and Wilbur Wright – had started selling and repairing bicycles to fund their dream of taking to the air. They were building the world’s first powered airplane. Though Wilbur didn’t receive his high school diploma, and Oliver had dropped out in the first year, they were quite ingenious enough to see their ambition through.

  A frame of lightweight wood was made and covered with a special muslin cloth. When they couldn’t find a suitable engine for their aircraft, they fabricated a four cylinder, 12 horsepower internal combustion engine in their bicycle shop within six weeks. The Wright Flyer soared 20 feet above a wind-swept beach in North Carolina for 12 seconds. The 120 feet it covered, had hurdled over all that was stopping humanity from going into overdrive.

  By now, humans were dancing uninterrupted to the SFLA’s tune, despite of being given ample warnings. There was a temple built in Southern India during the time da Vinci was drawing blueprints of flying machines in his journals. At the rear of the temple, the builders had made an inscription of how to design and construct an airplane. Along with that, they inscribed a piece of warning too, if you fly such a machine, it will disturb the skies and human beings will not be able to live peacefully. Once the sky is disturbed, psychological disturbances would become abundant.

  That is exactly what happened in a few years of the Wright Flyer taking off. A family feud in Europe sparked the First World War, killing over 16 million humans in its wake. It was the first concrete war of the mechanized world. Letting millions of humans die wasn’t going to be affecting the SFLA much, since their tried-and-tested puppets were already spawning the Earth in billions.

  WWI had profited the SFLA quite well. The warring nations and kingdoms had been quick about raising their respective air force, with fighter planes that would rat-a-tat bullets and drop bombs by the hoards – bombs that were at times guided by the SFLA to fall on Bloomans they wanted to eliminate.

  Da Vinci’s idea of a tank as a mobile fortress was taken to the next level with tracks giving them all-terrain mobility. No area was safe for Bloomans any longer; a tank could clank by anytime and crush whoever stood in the way. The full-blown carnage lasted for years but didn’t really get a proper closure. Humans were to fight another globalized war soon – a way deadlier 2.0. But first, the SFLA had to course-correct them a bit.

  They noticed that another aviation technology – perfected a bit before the Wright Flyer took its first hop off the ground – had been steadily gaining popularity. The Zeppelins, as they were called, were extensively used by Germany during WWI. SFLA found these machines useless to their schemes. After all, they were just balloons filled with helium for staying afloat, and would only use gasoline for propulsion and navigational maneuvers. The SFLA preferred humans used gasoline aircrafts rather than Zeppelins because aircrafts used a lot more gasoline compared to Zeppelins.

  By 1937 the SFLA had had enough of the Zeppelin business and wanted them scrapped. A diplomatic move by the United States gave them the perfect window. The U.S. controlled the only supplies of helium in the world at that time. Helium was used in the Zeppelins because it was non-flammable. When the United States decided to stop the export of the gas, the Zeppelin-loving Germany had no option but to switch to hydrogen gas which was highly-flammable. The SFLA saw an opportunity in the diplomatic development and acted fast. A 16-year-old human passenger, while travelling to New Jersey on a Zeppelin, was the first person to notice something fishy was happening onboard.

  Standing below the Hindenburg Zeppelin’s aft port engine, he smelled gas leaking out of a fuel tank. A SFLA sabotage team had created a breach in the fuel tank and was swift about igniting the leaking fuel, lest the passengers and crew got properly alarmed.

  The hydrogen gasbags were quick to catch fire, plummeting Hindenburg to the ground. Although the hydrogen finished burning relatively quick, the g
asoline continued burning for several hours more. The disaster killed 36 people in New Jersey and was extensively documented through photographs and videos.

  The downing of Hindenburg completely shattered public confidence in Zeppelins and the SFLA was satisfied to see an abrupt end to their use. Now they could get down to manufacturing another world war by using a painter they had been corrupting, just like they had done with da Vinci – only that this time, they were going to be creating a monster; a monster Nostradamus had seen in his prophetic visions.

  7

  Godspeed

  Since a long time, the SFLA had been keeping a watch on the developments of a young Adolf Hitler. He was dreaming of becoming someone important. The man aspired for a career as a professional painter and was trying to get admission in the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna. The SFLA think tank had the conviction that if they frustrated the secondary school dropout enough, he would leave his artistic ambitions and usher in another fruitful world war for them.

  Hitler wasn’t selected by the Academy despite trying twice. Having to struggle for survival in the city, he had to paint houses and sell his paintings, until WWI forced him to enlist as a German dispatch runner for the regimental headquarters. He held on to his dream of becoming a famous painter and carried fine paper and canvas with him to the war front, spending most of his leave-time drawing and painting.

  Even though he was highly decorated during his stint with the army, and injured twice during some of the fiercest battles of the war, the front line soldiers of his unit saw him as a non-soldier. They believed that his cushy role in the army ensured he was rarely exposed to the first line of fire. The image of an aspiring painter made him look even more soft-hearted in their eyes.

  Having ensured that Hitler grew steadily bitter, the SFLA employed a colorless gas to provide the finishing touches to their masterpiece. The sweet-smelling Mustard gas had been synthesized by using the petrochemical ethylene to treat sulphur dichloride. It gained favor in the war as part of a chemical warfare strategy employed by both the sides.

  The carcinogenic gas worked up large blisters on exposed skin, and inside the lungs. If someone survived the attack, the gas ensured a set of psychological disorders like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sexual dysfunction – that too, even after 20 years of being exposed.

  Corporal Hitler had been temporarily blinded by a British gas shell exploding in the German trenches on October 14, 1918. At the hospital, he was examined by a Jewish doctor, who insisted that the blindness Hitler was complaining about was only hysterical blindness of psychological origins.

  After receiving the initial treatment, he was transferred by train to another hospital – this time, to the psychiatric ward. The transfer to the ward far away was no accident. In the medical circuits of the time, soldiers diagnosed with hysterical symptoms were viewed as inferior human beings having faulty or degenerated brains. Hitler was marked as someone showing degrading and unpatriotic behavior – something that ticked him off permanently.

  The wartime artistry of his was the last he engaged in any creative endeavors. He went on to scheme up a vicious political career by cashing in on the societal climate of the day. This was his big ticket.

  Built around skewed ideas of racial superiority, Hitler animatedly dished out ultra-nationalistic speeches, and grudgingly put the blame on the people of Jewish faith for spreading misery. It took him right into a position where the SFLA had wanted him to be in.

  Next, they gave him a chronic problem of breaking the wind, just to ensure he wouldn’t spend much time with people, especially those who could possibly shake the fascist out of him. Whenever he would meet people, other than his yes-men, he was forced to leave their company for fear of being caught farting.

  When the Blooman government learned of Hitler’s evil intentions, they tried to stop by making him switch to vegetarianism. It was done with the belief that a plant-based diet was supposed to make people less aggressive and would give relief to the flatulence problem Hitler had developed.

  It was a failed move. He went on to rope in Japan and Italy for invading nations around them. Just like it was during the last war, the financial backing, for both Axis and Allied powers, was readily available. The fishy bit was that both the sides were bankrolled by a single family, the Rothschilds. It turned out to be just like they say, War is business and business is good.

  With all the preparations and alignments complete, the world was at war once again and control of the oil supply became paramount for gaining overall victory. Besides fueling the machines of war, it was an essential commodity used for making TNT, synthetic rubber, and lubricants for guns and machinery. The importance of oil became such that wars were to be fought for it in the latter half of the 20th century.

  Spitfires and Stukas fighters prowled the skies, while flying fortresses and thunderous artillery guns went about flattening entire cities. WWII was to end with a loud bang, a mushrooming one. Fat Man and Little Boy were nuclear bombs dropped simultaneously over two Japanese cities, turning them to dust, while the radioactivity messed up the genetic sequencing of everything that survived the detonations.

  During the shocking war, the hands-on killing units of Nazi SS took inhumanity to the third degree by murdering millions of Jewish people they were keeping in concentration camps. Among the worst ways they had devised for committing genocide, they used massive internal combustion engines for gassing the unfortunate souls. Though Hitler and his partners in crime lost the war, 70 to 85 million humans perished in its wake. The artist who wanted to wield the paintbrush had stained the pages of history with blood in the most grotesque of ways, including his own suicide and request for his corpse to be burnt so that no one could desecrate it.

  But Hitler wasn’t the only one the SFLA had prepared during that time. Their structural engineers had been looking for someone who could help them with the building of a new, colossal base for the SFLA, and a smaller one for future operation in India and China. On the other hand, their psychologists were on a lookout too. They were looking for someone who could devise a way for dumbing down the humans.

  Their respective hunts zeroed down to a single man – Dr. Thomas Midgley Jr. – who worked for General Motors. They viewed this chemist-slash-mechanical-engineer as the right person in the right place to accomplish both the things for them.

  General Motors Research Corporation had already been making a name for itself, with being credited for developing many features for cars and trucks, including the first electric starter. With the market for gasoline engines having matured by the end of World War I, Dr. Midgley discovered that the addition of tetraethyl lead to gasoline, made internal combustion engines knock-proof. The additive also minimized the possibility of engine failure.

  This was a game-changer and was instrumental in the development of engines which were more powerful and efficient, but what Dr. Midgley didn’t realize – or rather chose to ignore – was that the lead in the antiknock agent was going to harm many biological organisms, including humans.

  The Corporation was quick about opening a new plant, however, within the first couple of months itself there were cases of lead poisoning and deaths among the plant’s workers – hallucinations and insanity was also becoming pretty common. The management and Dr. Midgley – blinded by the lucrative commerciality of the product – kept mum about the presence of lead in it for a long time. Soon enough, all internal combustion engines were barfing out dangerous quantities of lead into the air, with many countries using the deadly leaded gasoline to this day.

  The SFLA psychologists were being lauded by the top brass for successfully administering the humans their Lead-Med since it gave them memory problems and intellectual disability. The large-scale stupidification of mankind had begun. They were going to be drugged by the SFLA and made to bury their heads in the sand, like an ostrich not wanting to see the danger it is in.

  Even though a Roman civ
il engineer, Vitruvius, had warned of the dangers of lead 2,000 years ago, Dr. Midgley conveniently tuned out all the signs and went about holding press conferences, brashly inhaling the antiknock agent’s vapors for a good 60 seconds to fool people into believing it wasn’t hazardous. He would even go about dramatically washing his hands with the antiknock agent to mislead the scientific community.

  It didn’t take long before Dr Midgley had to be treated for acute lead poisoning – he eventually contracted polio because of the high levels of lead in his blood, leaving him severely disabled and weak. In 1944, he died of strangulation after getting entangled in a device with an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys he had designed to get himself off the bed.

  The lead-based antiknock agent wasn’t the only deadly idea hustled by Dr. Midgley. In the late 1920s, air conditioning and refrigeration systems were using certain compounds as refrigerants which were effective but proved to be toxic, flammable, and in some cases, explosive. Dr. Midgley and his team came up with chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, as the replacement refrigerants. They were highly effective and weren’t as harmful.

  What the world didn’t know was that if CFCs didn’t affect the humans directly, they were going to destroy the ozone layer of the atmosphere so vital for keeping high levels of UV radiation from reaching the Earth. Breaches in the ozone layer, and the subsequent influx of UV radiation, compounded the risk of developing skin cancer and cataracts in the humans.

  But, what worked in CFCs’ favor was that it was no longer going to be, When in Rome, do as the Romans do. You could now have an ice cream in the Sahara instead of a tea, and chill instead of sweating in infernal heat, that too, without worrying about getting blown to pieces.