Mad World Band
Synopsis

by Danielle L. Parker

I’ve always been fascinated by alternate history. No imaginative person can read history and not think... what if Alexander the Great had kept going to China? What if D-Day had been a colossal failure? What if Rome had lost to Carthage? Try it. It’s an absolutely fascinating game. I can play it for hours every time I read a history book.

Given that interest, of course, it was a natural that at some point, I would try to write an alternate history story. In the case of “MWB-11,” however, it’s a future history of sorts, and a cautionary one, because I had other themes in mind too. We, on this Earth — and if Scientific American can write about alternate Earths as serious science with a straight face, so can I — face a number of disquieting issues that I wanted to echo in my story. For example: are preemptive military actions (“preventive wars”) morally justifiable? Can war be tempered by moral and ethical limitations, or will it (must it, in the need for survival) become total, and degrade into torture, assassination, and other acts we now call “crimes against humanity”? What justifies eugenic practices and genetic tampering, if anything? Some of these issues are already hinted at in Chapter 2.

As our story opens, our young protagonist Dorn, from the post-nuclear alternate Earth called Soltri, is faced with the difficult task of infiltrating another alternate Earth. The Soltrians refer to this nearly equally advanced world as “MWB-11,” whose slightly sinister prefix means “Mad World Band.” MWB-11 is an Earth on the edge of a precipice that Soltri has already fallen over. It’s convulsed by a global war between an Eastern bloc referred to as the “Sinoasians” and a Western, America-alternate called the Union.

Soltri would prefer to stay out of this conflict, but MWB-11 is on the verge of developing a technology that would let them travel to alternate Earths such as Soltri itself... or to distant planets in their own galaxy. Unfortunately for all concerned, MWB-11 has innocently targeted a distant interstellar world which may host a species of horrific aliens that have already destroyed one alternate Earth.

Maybe, in this alternate galaxy, the distant world referred to as Demeter Five is empty and harmless — or maybe it isn’t. Soltri knows what could be out there — and fears it.

But if Soltri warns MWB-11, our weakened, post-apocalypse Soltrians will be forced to reveal their existence to another potentially deadly rival — the battling human combatants of MWB-11’s global war. Dorn is not looking forward to this assignment!

Copyright © 2006 by Danielle L. Parker