Look at the world. It hasn’t really changed that much. It looks much the same as it always has. It’s still spinning, which might actually surprise a few people. True, there’re a few more brown patches, that sandy colour where there aren’t any trees but where there should be. But there’s still green too, there’s still white, the poles are still hanging in there; and there’s still one hell of a lot of blue!

Look at all the countries. Or maybe not all of them, actually, because I can’t tell you what happened in most of them. In any of them…except my country. See, after the Explosion, everything, everywhere went crazy. Wars spread and they just kept getting worse and worse. Then the news basically stopped, because we shut off our borders. We didn’t let anyone come from Across the Seas, didn’t let anyone come from the North; we wrapped ourselves in a big cocoon, hoping that might help. So I really don’t know what happened anywhere else.

Look at my country. It panicked after the Explosion after the borders shut: they put soldiers with machine guns everywhere; and we were told there were terrorists everywhere… it’s really not that hard to work out why, when I think of terrorists, I see soldiers. Things changed fast and when you’re scared, like the entire world was, you just accept these things. Everyone was a suspect, because who knew who‘d got in before we shut the world out… everything was dangerous, abandoned bags, bins, cars, even tin cans eventually became scary… every idea was subversive, the people who questioned too much were the ones fuelling the bombers, fuelling their extremism…

Things could change so quickly in those days, maybe it happened everywhere, I really don’t know how far the Terror War reached. But with bombs going off every few days, pictures of burning buggies, of cars slamming into airports, of a mushroom cloud over the Houses of Parliament, of twisted up buses…in times when the world is blowing itself up no one is watching the powerful that carefully; they’re too busy watching the man standing beside them on the bus. Once the evil were those of the Faiths, they were the ones who had started this war, yesterday they were the thinkers and the knower, the agitators who were implanting “radical” ideas into the heads of “impressionable youth”. Today the enemy is me, the “impressionable youth”.

Look at my city. Look through the razor wire fencing that separates each county. The New Capital, closer to the Border, far from the wasteland the nuke made of the Old Capital. Look back two years, please…look in the gym hall of what used to be my school, before they closed the schools…look there at the back…that’s me; I’m taking the only exam I’ll ever take, the Test, the only Result I’ll ever need. I guess that’s how they sold the idea to us.

The Test didn’t just filter out the dangerous minds, the terrible personality flaws of free will and independence, didn’t just harvest the good ones, those who would obey blindly, who would hurt, would hate, would kill; the Test made also every other exam pointless… how the hell were we to know that would be a bad thing! Your Test makes you, brands you, decides whether you will succeed or fail in your life. You’re them and you pass, congratulations, you’re accepted, you’re a Model, you’re a Mode. Or you’re me and you fail, you’re worse than useless, you’re dangerous, you’re an Internal Exile, you’re an
Int-Ex…congratulations, you’ll be dead very soon.

Look at the people. There’re fewer now, fewer than there were when the War started, fewer than a year ago, fewer than a week ago, fewer than there were yesterday. Because people Disappear; there’s no telling who’s next, it might be your sister, your brother, your mum, your dad, your bus driver, your boyfriend…it might be you. It’s nearly always Int-Exs, hardly ever the Models. Why wipe out your own people? They run this country, have done since the nuke went off, when the old laws were blown up with the old politicians. The General leads them and all of us, General Luc Cadell, a man who uses our bloody righteous hate against us, says we’re trying to disestablish the “peace” he’s brought. Alright, there’re less bombs going off, not ours, there’re plenty of ours going off; but peace can’t be tolerated with such a high cost…not like this…

Look at the people. Me, I’ve lost everyone; my parents and my brother, Max. Grace, she’s lost everything; an Int-Ex in a Model family, the disgrace! Kes, he’s just lost; he was screwed from the start by his journalist father and writer mother, though she’s dead too. There are hundred of us, people who have lost everything, lost everyone, there’re others like Kes who just lost themselves in all this madness, others who Re-Appeared, children of the Disappeared… we are the “impressionable youth” they used to prattle on about and now we are dangerous, we are the reasons they made up to make people afraid of us in the first place… we’ve taken the name, the insult that the Modes forced on us; see, we’re not just Int-Exs, now we’re Insects.

Look at me. I was four when the Explosion came, when the sandcastles collapsed. Did no one else think they looked like sandcastles? Alright, not castles, towers, big grey sandcastle towers, without turrets. I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen kids, younger than ten, killing and enjoying it. I’ve seen so-called people do things to other people that should never even be in nightmares. I’ve seen a world crumble and fall because of giant grey sandcastles.

I’ve seen too much of them to believe in humans anymore. I’ve seen too much that’s been done in the name of the Faiths to believe in the Gods anymore. I’ve seen too much…but even now, I have to hope this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This can’t even be what the “people” who destroyed Parliament, who blew up the sand-towers wanted. It can’t be what the General or his Lieutenants or his soldiers wanted. It can’t be what anyone wanted. Even now I can’t believe that anybody could be stupid enough to have wanted this to happen.

Look at the world. I’m not telling you lies, if you look at it from very, very high up, it hasn’t really changed that much.