3024 Nova Arcis A 4
“The Un-Fired Shot
While the image of the Mego Reveers segment lingered for a moment—the fiery, ironic wreckage of his own autonomous car—before fading from the 3D-media-stream. In the broadcast garden, the stark, ambitious portrait of the Titan of Mars dissolved, replaced by a new, far more graceful image. A stunningly detailed, antique model of a Boeing 747, its elegant wings swept back, floated gently in the golden light between the two hosts.
LYRA.ai regarded the beautiful, now obsolete machine with thoughtful appreciation, understanding what it once meant. “And while Mego Reveers fought a loud and public war of words against ITT,” she began, her voice a calm counterpoint to the preceding story’s chaotic energy, “the technology itself was waging a quieter, more decisive war against an entire way of life.” Cokas Bluna reached out, his hand hovering just above the curved fuselage of the model, a look of profound, academic fascination on his face. “The Airpocalypse,” he said, the single word heavy with a millennium of technological upheaval. “It’s one of the first stories we learn as children in the history of transport media. A genuine paradigm shift.” He shook his head slowly, a historian marvelling at the sheer scale of the disruption. “We see it in the archives—the profound cultural shock. We have recordings of the last pilots. They talk not just about lost jobs, but about the feeling that the very sky, the concept of a horizon you could fly towards, had been stolen from them. But the collapse of the airline industry, LYRA, that was just the most visible tremor. The real earthquake, the one that reshaped the bedrock of civilization, was happening in secret, in the quiet, terrified briefing rooms of the world’s great powers.”
This was it. The untold story. The great historical anomaly that the subsequent centuries had taken for granted.
LYRA.ai nodded, her gaze turning from the 747 to Cokas, inviting him to elaborate. “You’re speaking of the ‘Great Pacification,’ as the Varna-Papers refer to it. It’s a period the public archives of the time barely touch upon, lost in the noise of the economic and social upheaval.”
“Exactly,” Cokas said, leaning forward, his passion for this hidden history clear. “Everyone focuses on the commercial aspect, the logistical revolution. But think about it from the perspective of the early 21st century. For seventy years, they had lived under the shadow of the Bomb, a doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that was the absolute centre of global power. Their superpowers were super because they could destroy the world. And then, in 2024, a physicist in a slum in Mumbai invents a technology that makes their entire arsenal, their entire claim to power, completely and utterly obsolete.”
The 747 model dissolved, replaced by a stark, schematic map of Earth, circa 2025, showing the traditional spheres of military influence.
“The generals and the presidents, the ones we saw in the last segment,” Cokas continued, “they understood the implications immediately. ITT wasn’t a new kind of airplane; it was the ultimate first-strike weapon. The ability to deliver a multi-megaton warhead to the centre of a rival’s capital with zero warning, bypassing every satellite, every missile defence system… it wasn’t just a game-changer; it was the end of the game.”
“So the question the archives never properly answered,” LYRA interjected, guiding the narrative, “is the most important one of all: why didn’t it happen? Why wasn’t there a World War Three, a frantic, secret war to control this new, ultimate power?”
“Because,” Cokas said, a look of deep admiration on his face, “Amara Varna and Darius Voss were not just a genius physicist and a brilliant entrepreneur. They were the most audacious social engineers in human history. They saw the abyss, and they orchestrated what can only be called the Grand Deception.”
Having spent entire cycles in her youth studying the restricted Varna-Voss archives, LYRA was able to recall and project a key document from memory. A redacted document appeared on the 3D-stream, a fragment from Varna’s original ITT patent. “This is the key,” she explained. “The so-called ‘Varna Axiom,’ a piece of code embedded at the deepest quantum level of the technology. The public knew of it as a ‘kill switch’ to prevent misuse. The reality was far more profound. It was a fundamental law she had woven into the fabric of her own physics to prevent any Kessler effect.”
Cokas explained its function in simple, stark terms. “The Axiom made it physically impossible for an ITT translocation to complete if the payload contained a critical mass of fissile material or a certain volume of chemical or biological agents. It wasn’t a bug. It wasn’t a software patch. It was a universal constant within the technology itself. The universe, through her code, simply said ‘no.’ She had invented the ultimate weapon and, in the same breath, had rendered it incapable of being used for the ultimate crime.”
“But that knowledge was a closely guarded secret,” LYRA added. “The world’s powers only knew that their own attempts to weaponize the technology were failing in inexplicable ways. And while they were struggling in their secret labs, Darius Voss was executing the second phase of the plan: the strategic coup.”
The map behind them came alive again, showing the rapid, explosive rollout of the 52 StellarLink ITT hubs across the globe between 2030 and 2035.
“It wasn’t just good business,” Cokas said. “It was a pre-emptive strike. By embedding their ‘pacified’ version of ITT into the core of global logistics, making it the indispensable backbone of the world economy in less than a decade, they forced every nation on Earth to adopt a technology that had been secretly neutered from birth. They won the war before anyone even knew it had been declared.”
“Their public feud,” LYRA stated, “the ‘Best Enemies’ myth, was a crucial piece of this theatre. Varna played the pure, detached scientist, keeping her ethically unimpeachable. Voss played the ruthless capitalist, absorbing the public’s anger and making the necessary backroom deals. And while the world was distracted by their soap opera, they quietly, and completely, disarmed it.”
The consequences, as Cokas went on to explain, were total. The entire doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the foundation of 20th-century power, evaporated. The new superpowers were not the nations with the biggest armies, but the corporations—StellarLink and its energy partners—that controlled the flow of resources. A nation could be brought to its knees not by a missile, but by having its supply chain turned off.
“So the military didn’t collapse overnight,” LYRA clarified, “but its primary purpose—state-on-state warfare—became strategically obsolete. Over the next three hundred years, we see its slow, painful, but inevitable transformation. From armies of conquest to forces of planetary defence, then to regional policing, and finally, to the role they largely serve today: highly organized, technologically advanced relief and rescue services. The ‘firemen’ and ‘paramedics’ of the galaxy.”
Cokas smiled sadly, looking again at the model of the 747 that had reappeared in the studio. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? The Airpocalypse, the event that seemed so catastrophic at the time, was just the visible symptom. The real story of that era wasn’t about the death of the airplane. It was about the quiet, un-mourned death of total war. A death orchestrated by two brilliant, terrified individuals who saw our self-destructive nature and had the courage to save us from ourselves.”
He looked back at the camera, his expression inviting the audience to see the following clip not just as a story of technological change, but as a requiem for an entire, violent age of human history. “A feeling captured perfectly in this archival piece from 2040.”