Containment by Keres

It's a system, of total energy conversion. No one can get past the math. As long as no one leaves The Containment, nothing else can ever get in.

The Hologram of his mother, Sally, turned to the Hologram of his father, Johnny, his image flickering between the young strapping man Sally married, and the collapsed, carved-by-war version of Johnny in his hospital bed.

It won't do you any good to leave. Learn from our time. Watch the reels we sent you. We've disguised them as fiction so no one around you will be the wiser while we catch up together.

Sally’s hologram looked back at John Jr. one last time before her image faded.

After by Vox

What most people don’t get, don’t remember, is that the Cold War wasn’t about giving the cold shoulder, it was about the Cold that covered the Earth, post nuclear war. Everyone’s been in bunkers so long, for so many generations, most have forgotten. Nuclear winter was unsurvivable. Many countries built tunnels; they knew what was going to happen once the technology was out there, once it was taught, shared - there was no way out and up, so we went down.

It’s been said the tunnels in China made mines, and the scientists there grew great diamonds and copper and gold, from the pressure of Earth and the iron from the Great Pacific Rim. But one day the humming of their machines stopped, and no one knows what lives there anymore.

Under the USA, we grew bunkers slowly, silently, for years, moving people and supplies and earth and sod. Moving cars and machinery. Technology appears to have stayed the same, only the aesthetics have changed with the decades since.

Europe had the brunt of the blast, with Africa and Russia setting it for a staging ground, and a barrier wall between them and Asia.

India tunneled south, but the waves tilted, and the ice grew thick.

That’s all we know about the Machine’s Projections, of who survived when and where. What’s most important to realize, John, is that you’re The Last American. The last citizen born from the old world without genetic modification and enhancement. Remembering Freedom, will be up to you.

Johnny Jr. by Keres

Johnny Jr. stood watching at the Rendition of his parents. Dust they are now, he sat, thinking to himself at the graveyard.