Man's Folly

When man unleashed the power of the atom, he had unleashed the devil himself upon the world.   The first nuclear weapon detonated as an act of war in the Old Ages would begin an age of waiting. An age of watching the years tick by until man's destructive nature would consume himself. A force of nature in his own right, man had gifted himself the ability to destroy planets, to wipe out civilizations, and the residents of the Pre-Apocalypse, or the Prepocks as they're now scornfully known, proved as eager to destroy as they were to create. Although he tried to flee his fate, escape to his exploitative colonies on other worlds, man's nature followed him, and by the end of the 23rd Century, the wait had ended.   Earth was ignited in nuclear hellfire. Resource shortages, economic crises, constant war and popular revolt had finally tipped man off the edge. Across the world, silos were opened, missiles were launched, and civilization was obliterated. In the popular republics and corrupt dictatorships of Old Europe, in the bickering corporate-states and territories of Old America, and in the struggling techno-imperial and revolutionary fronts of Old Asia, the Apocalypse arrived in full force. The forgotten colonies on Luna, Mars and across the Solar System were cut off and left to die a slow death alone in the cold of Space. The old world died, and the new one struggled to be born.   But if man could do one thing better than destroy, it was refuse to be destroyed himself. A new world did awaken after the fallout had finally settled, and as quickly as it had, the struggles of man continued. In his arrogance, man had not ended the world as perhaps he had wished, but only created a new and more chaotic one than the last.   For when man unleashed the power of the atom, he had unleashed the devil himself upon the world, and, perhaps, that was Man's Folly.