Chapter 2: The Right Thing

A woman sat at a desk, staring down at a comically large red button. Just one press, and… She didn’t want to think about it. But…

–

When she first became the president, things were bad, she supposed, but she still had hope.

The world had always been a rough place, and it had been on a bit of a downward spiral towards reactionary movements, and there had been some pretty awful disasters like the Covid19 pandemic but…

She knew she could be better than those who had come before. She knew humanity could be better. She knew with all her heart that every little bit helped and that she could never give in and that morality, rights, freedoms, they were things that she could never let the world compromise on. Far too many politicians had let that happen. That’s why the world was the way it was.

She knew she was right. She would do the right thing. 

–

The decline started slowly. With her only a year into office, another disaster struck the world, and she had been forced to make compromises. It seemed stupid. I mean, really, a super volcano? It sounded like a joke, something that couldn’t really happen. One of those neat facts you looked up, about how some disaster could happen, and were like damn that’s terrifying and moved on. 

She used all the resources she had to do the best she should. That she was sure of. But… she didn’t really. She didn’t have the power she needed, the influence, the results to direct the funds in the right directions. Congress always got in the way when it seemed she needed it most, it was frustrating. Stupid. People were dying out there, unable to get food and water in a landscape buried in ash, the volcanic winter that settled across the world ensuring that there was simply not enough food. Or well, there 100% was, but she was unable to direct the resources and funds from different places in the world to truly fix things. There was no need for anyone to starve before, and there was no need for anyone to starve now. But they were. There was never enough space for refugees from places left inhospitable, and people were never accepting enough. She was overwhelmed.

Then the war came. That also wasn’t fair at all. Although… It was logical. From a certain perspective, much of the world was now weakened from the ongoing pandemic, and her country, well known for attempting to butt into things, was a bit distracted with the whole volcano situation. So… it made a lot of sense for some countries to use that chance to gain land and power. Even though she had hoped the world was beyond that at this point. 

She felt like the future was slipping from humanity’s grasp. She couldn’t just let things continue, just let things run their course as they got worse. She knew… There were so many other issues to focus on, that she had fixed almost none of what she had called for to be fixed when she ran for office, that there were certain things she couldn’t go back from. She knew that foriegn intervention focused on keeping places “free” and “democratic” had historically made things worse more often than not, and that any action that escalated things took things one step closer to nuclear war. She knew all that and yet…

 

She still joined the war. She still ordered the draft. The draft that still was far from fair or inclusive, that she had feared years ago would drag her away to “fight as a man” in a conflict she didn’t believe in, that she thought was honestly an archaic law that she thought should be repealed at some later date. How many like her would be forced to war, never knowing that the one who ordered such a thing was just like them? She had hid who she was to get this far after all, since her identity would have prevented her from winning any sort of election.

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And when things got worse and worse, she declared martial law. Because… she needed to.

She knew that she was doing the right thing. She had to be doing the right thing. She had told herself before that it was never okay to rationalize horrible things for the greater good, because doing so was a slippery slope, but that was a different time. A different world. Even with things like climate change that seemed almost inevitable and impossible to deal with without some concessions, it had been different. So, it was okay. She was doing the right thing.

–

When the magnetic poles shifted seemingly at random, and half the electronics in the world got fried, it hardly seemed of note. She knew it was a disaster and had untold effects around the world and such, but at the time she was much more focused on the war, the refugees, the increasingly erratic weather, the newest variant, or even “the big one” quake on the west coast and all the damage it caused. She half expected the other “big one” to go off in a second, the one made by the Juan De Fuca plate this time that is. So yeah, the whole magnetic pole shifting wasn’t too big of a deal, especially when a good amount of the technology she had access to was made to resist the effects of that kind of radiation. It’s true that was only because she was a world leader, and civilians and such had no such tech, but it meant that her schedule wasn’t too thrown off by the whole thing. Which was good, because the war had been getting worse and worse recently, and she needed to know every available update as soon as possible. 

At this point, she knew common “war tactics” weren’t exactly cutting it. Her enemies were more than willing to bomb civilian targets, use weapons that were very much so banned or should be banned, commit warcrimes and control their people’s more and more through propaganda, surveillance, and more. If she didn’t want to let a fascist dictatorships or countries control the majority of the world, she had to fight on their level. So she did. They also said they were democracies half the time, maybe that they were communist or socialist and planning to create a better world and such, but they practically were the same kind of thing as a fascist dictatorship with how they ran things. She couldn’t let them win either. And she couldn’t let something as important as leading the country that would save this world fall out of her hands, even when her terms were up. At this point, a little bit of modifying the constitution was justified. She would put things back to how they were after the war, after the disasters died down, and it wasn’t like the people had no power or anything. She had just had to… take some from them temporarily. 

But, things hadn’t died down yet at all. So here she was, sitting and staring at a button, a horrible horrible button, that well, it couldn’t solve everything, but it could solve A LOT.

Nuclear weapons… were horrible and she wished they had never been created. They also never went away, never weren’t a threat in the background throughout every world conflict, never weren’t an option. She had been decommissioning them before… but for a while now, it had only made sense to build more. And… There had been some breakthroughs. Nuclear war was mutually assured destruction, sure, but if you were fast enough… if you were able to destroy the enemy before they could even fire their weapons back… well, it wasn’t necessarily mutually assured. 

This world had so many problems that humanity needed to be united for. There were still so many refugees and issues from things like the eruption, the pandemic, and climate change. Humanity could not afford to keep fighting amongst itself. It needed to come together, and it needed to do so fast. But she also couldn’t just focus on that and let the enemy win, because that would be game over. The enemy couldn’t win at any cost. Not if the freedom and rights of the world and its people were to be preserved. 

So really, the right thing to do, would be to press the button. She had everything set up. Almost instantly, at speeds approaching light speed, her new weapons would destroy every obstacle she had left on this world. At the cost of… billions of lives. But it would save billions more. It would allow her to build things back, to fix things, to finally deliver on some of her promises now that some stupid war wasn’t taking up all her time and effort. And… every moment she delayed meant more deaths and sacrifices for a war she could end in an instant. Every moment she delayed was one less moment she could take reforming her country and the world once she was finally, truly in control. She was… admittedly a bit of a dictator at this point, but really if you thought about it, if a dictatorship had an ideal leader, it wouldn't be so bad right? She didn’t trust dictators but she did trust herself. She was just doing… the right thing, what she had to do, and once everything was fixed she would put things back. AND also deliver on her promises, finally addressing deep seated issues of discrimination and inequality. All these horrible crises sort of reset how the world was after all so maybe all those seemingly unsolvable societal issues wouldn’t be nearly as set in stone as they were in the past. 

All it took was a single press. She knew the missiles were fast enough. There would be no mutually assured destruction. And… the enemy could fire first at this rate if she wasn’t careful. Surely they were similarly desperate as her. She couldn’t waste a moment, she was going to save the world. She was going to do the right thing.

She pressed the button.