Everyone cheered the day the world ended. Everyone cheered the day he saved the world. I did not. Which would have left my family and me as corpses entangled on the barbed wire gate that segregated us from those reborn, carcasses whose breaths reeked of the waste water that snaked beneath our streets into the former Éastanacsa, or worse, eternally darkened like most who were not born anew.

But I rescued people, saved them from a fate that eclipsed death. Fast. Efficiently. And in this reborn world, speed kept you alive, and gave you a chance to die. Speed, and a willingness to work for those who thought you worse than garbage, or a traitor, even if they were those you cared about the most. But I had embraced that fate. My family was worth the burns and scars. My friends, the taunts and rumors. The peace and safety we had attained still pulsed as the now Ædsceaftebyht on whose recently arisen shores I stood upon.

For now at least.

Because the man who had saved our world had a tendency to wreck lives, families, even of those next to him, at the behest of progress, rebirth. But I would not let my family be reborn. My little sister Ellie had not suffered a bullet through her spine just to be reborn and lose everything she ever fought for. We ever fought for. I refused to believe that. I would not accept that fate. God would have helped me. I still held the hooks, baits, and nets in this renewed world.

Or at least I hoped I did.

The day the world ended, the day he saved the world, back when fire still did not rain upon our souls, was not when Yellowstone erupted. Not when the lands quaked and the nuclear power plants exploded. Not when the pandemic struck. Not when the crops and livestock withered and died. But when the Chairman spoke, the man who saved our Earthly lives, at the expense of those to come.

The Chairman faced the riverside remnants from where the pillar of his nightmarish dream would ascend to protect us all, standing at the top of the Hyhtwynn Tower’s highest roofed arch, still mantled by Yellowstone’s ash, in front of the building's spired windows, so that it seemed sunlight glinted from his arms and not the sky. Commanding the granite gargoyles at his feet, so that it seemed the elements acquiesced to his will and not that of God. Watching, staring at the insects beneath him, unfazed by the gales of such heights, so that it seemed he was a deity, even to his own son, who kneeled next to him. Waiting.

The Chairman had projected his hologram on the few smartwatches that remained. So all of humanity’s last hope could watch him. But none of the surviving huddled masses that had swarmed the Hyhtwynn’s base watched the hologram projection. They all gazed at the real him. Despaired. Wishing for a new savior. Looking for someone to grant them hope, even if the Heavens fell.

And he did. To the point that even the winds turned into a summer’s zephyr, and the sun’s light cowered in presence of his voice.

“You are in belief of our world’s demise,” the Chairman said. Charming. Calm. But with a void in his eyes that made you think he was talking to maggots instead of people. “Of hope’s dissolution. Of resignation’s inevitability. Of this great nation’s long gone glories. Of our capitulation to the European Federation and the Sino-Indian Confederacy.” He lost his coolness in that last phrase, but no one must have noticed. Too dejected to care.

“But I say to you: there is hope.” The Chairman’s voice, an arctic thunder blast that resonated as loud as the now silent wails of those he would slaughter, to the point a microphone would have humanized him. And he could not have that.

As the crowds had already deified him.

I had not. I did not.

“This nation shall ascend from the ashes that buried its cities, and the radiation that polluted its waters and skies. This world may have extinguished, languished, but a new one has ascended, from the tremors of the past. So let us hope for our future, our future that is now, our future that is our present, and become the founders of our rebirth.”

He shoved his son into the street, only for him to levitate in the last three seconds and land safely. Everyone watched. Awed.

The Chairman then plunged into the crowds who yearned for him, only to hover above them all, unreachable. “Behold. Our rebirth, my fellow friends, the present future, Eugenex.”

Eugenex. What it meant to be reborn. What it meant to stop believing in God, and forever damaging the brain regions linked to religious beliefs. What it meant to cheer for tyranny, and a fate that dwarfed death.

How easily people forgot.

Our world may have rested on a powder keg before, before the Chairman saved us all, but at least we were in control, at least we held the matches. At least, I was in control. Now, though, we had handed away our matches, and ceded control of our lives, of our fates, to him. And he could have set off the blast whenever he wanted.

Or at least, that’s what we wanted to believe. To comfort us. Because our prayers were long gone, and we just hoped for the god we knew.

But that was not the case.

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