They say you can hear it in the distance. They say it starts as a calm melody. Nobody has actually lived to say anything, not after the bomb of course.
I decided to avoid the draft. I went to my local church and signed up to become a missionary. I don't even believe in God. How could you when he would let these things happen to his own creations. I arrived in the southernmost tip of India, far from the conflict.
Alaska had been lost to the nuclear clearing decades ago. Every country had decided that they needed to dispose of nuclear weapons. We knew the danger in them. We evacuated the citizens in Alaska and many from West Canada. They sent every nuke there and simultaneously detonated them. The politicians wouldn't listen to the scientists. They were only interested in "the good of humanity," not the good of the land. With that explosion, came dust, darkness, and destabilization. Alaska was gone, science lost, and ignorance won. Every country with nukes had all the research destroyed, and those with any knowledge on the bombs were killed. Those who had killed them were also killed. A few thousand deaths to save the lives of billions. So they say.
In the light of the new musical revolution, they had invented emitters that could broadcast sound hundreds of miles in all given directions. No matter where you were in the world, you could hear them. They were beautiful, they traversed entire countries and captivated everyone who listened to them. Music finally had meaning again in the world. The lyrics actually mattered now. They held a deep sentimental meaning in anyone's heart.
North America and Russia went to war after this period. Both armed with the technologies of the speakers and the lyrical abilities of the revolution. They developed stronger, more powerful speakers. Powered by the sun, they broadcasted. Due to the loss of Alaska and a small chunk of West Canada, the war was waged across the arctic. The pacific was too risky, our borders were too close together, nobody wanted to be affected by their own bombs.
About a month into my journey throughout India, I heard it. It was distant. And I could it understand it. It sounded to me like Russian folk music and a Russian man singing. No... wait. He wasn't singing... The US had tried to send a bomb to Russia across the antarctic. They had flubbed the launch and undershot it. Probably due to the insanely little amount of money going into scientific education. The bomb was just a song accompanied by a speech. The next two days were accompanied by a few mysterious deaths. Nobody in the region had thought much of them, and they began to fear the bombs less and less.
I was at my home in California with you, my missionary service had ended early due to the US bomb that undershot into India. That was when we heard it. The Explosions in the Sky. A speech accompanied the music, everyone listened, and everyone took it to heart. It covered the value human life, and just how little it mattered in the end. What's human life in the grand scheme of things?
The speech had finished, but the music was still playing. We drove to the bridge that led across the Atlantic. I stepped out of the car and watched the sun set, you by my side. In the end I took Your Hand In Mine. We said our final goodbyes. And we jumped. We spent Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean. We sent the rest of our days there as well.
This wasn't a war of destruction. It was a war of sound. A war of words. A war of the mind. Only the dead knew the peace from this. Soon the weapons and speeches would become more powerful and be translated to more languages. After this point, the earth became a Cold Dead Place.