James Smythe - The Testimony

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

That night, trying to go to sleep, I told Simon about my parents’ house, in Brecon. He listened, and then said that it sounded perfect. Will your parents mind? They’re dead, I said, and I told him the story, and we agreed that it sounded like the perfect place. Sometime in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went and watched television and drank chamomile, and saw that London was on fire, a home-made bomb – unrelated to the attacks in the US, the press jabbered to tell us, to keep us all calm – having hit Leicester Square, starting a fire on a gas main, gutting outwards on the points from that, up Charing Cross Road, towards Covent Garden, towards Piccadilly Circus. Let’s just leave, I said to Simon when I got back to bed, first thing. We’ve just got to get out of here.

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

They didn’t formally tell us about how bad the attacks got for the entire journey. We didn’t know about the evacuations until we docked, you believe that? They knew – when we got off, we worked out that they must have known, because they had radios, and were in touch with people at the docks – but we didn’t have a clue. We were on a boat in the middle of the sea. None of us had phone reception or internet or anything, and the radios were down. But the crew knew, and gossip started, but none of them would confirm anything. We didn’t exactly see much of them anyway – they were pretty conspicuous by their absence for the most part. We sat there for seven days, me being sick, Katy worrying, fucking rocky ship on those fucking waves. What did you do during the war, Mummy? Well, I sat on my arse trying to think about anything other than spewing in my handbag, actually.

Two days in Katy asked me if my being sick might be classed as a symptom of whatever it was that people were dying of, and I suddenly realized that we’d not had a single death on the ship yet. I asked around, but there wasn’t a one, so we had a chat about it in the room we were in. This tiny little woman at the back – I mean, honestly, looking at her from behind you would think she was a child, she was so wee – piped up and said, Maybe whatever it was that those terrorists put into our air, maybe it’s finally dispersed? Aye, probably, I said, knowing full well that those things weren’t exactly a science, that sort of weapon, and then, sweaty man said, Or, what if people were dying because He abandoned us, and now, in His infinite wisdom, He has returned?

And the worst part was, there was no argument for either side of that. Fucking logic.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

I looked back behind me, in the rear-view mirror, just for a second, and I saw the light as it hit out from behind New York, spread like a bloom, like a flower, a halo, and I kept driving. Because I knew, right then, that there wasn’t going to be any going back. I don’t know how far from New York we were when the plant blew, but far enough, I hoped.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

We didn’t have body counts of the numbers of dead when I left office; we didn’t have estimates, even, because there were so many. Worldwide? We were expecting the results – this was, assuming that we picked ourselves up afterwards, dusted ourselves off, counted the dead, assuming that we were in any shape to do math – but we were expecting the results to be catastrophic. We didn’t talk about it, not in these exact terms, but we were expecting the numbers to nod toward what we usually use the Torino scale to measure. We use that scale for asteroid impacts, looking at the numbers of deaths it might cause were a collision to happen. Our best estimate, based on the illnesses we did keep track of in the US, was a billion people, accounting for everybody who might have died in countries with less health-care than we had. If you stopped and thought about it for a second, about the implications of that number, it was heart-breaking. We take everything for granted, and then we watch telethons and we see starving people in Africa, or homeless people on our own streets, and we say, Sure, give them $10, because it appeases our conscience, because it makes us think that we’ve saved our brothers. But when somebody thinks that you might have lost a sixth of the world’s population, more, if it was a bad day, that’s something else. You can’t even compute that.

Livvy and I stayed below decks and watched as the cloud from the ground sat in the sky, the colour of piss and bile, and we held each other. The water shook, little waves coming from the shore even though we were the only people there, and it’s always still, as still as anything you’ve ever seen, but we watched it ripple from the edges, and we felt the boat rock slightly. We sat still and waited and waited, because we didn’t know what was happening or when it would stop.

I’ve never felt so useless, I said to Livvy – I had, at that point, been in service to my country in one form or another for nearly twenty years – and she said, At least you’re alive. And that was something, I suppose. At least I was alive.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

In the morning we watched the evacuation of America – alright, of key cities, but it felt like something bigger, I have to say – we watched it as we ate breakfast. This was Piers’ version of morning, of course, some revoltingly vulgar hour that I only ever saw on the clock when I was slam in the middle of electioneering; but he made eggs Benedict after bullying me out of bed, so I forgave him. I was thrilled that we were leaving, and I told him that as he packed his bag. He had adopted one of my old hiking rucksacks as his practical bag, and was stuffing it with tinned food from the cupboards. I don’t want to end it here, like this, I said. He thought that I meant us when I said that, and I did; but I meant everything else as well. I meant that I didn’t want to end my life sitting in a dingy little house wondering what could have been; it felt like everything was coming to a close, and I wanted to spend my last few days surrounded by beauty instead of chaos and memories.

We hadn’t been long out of the house when China played their hand, and Piers drove even faster after that.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

The last bit of news that came through on the intranet that I bothered to pay attention to was about China; that they, in conjunction with the UN, were threatening to step in unless we, America, the brave, the beautiful, stopped all attacks. Israel had been the tipping point. There was half an hour, I reckon, where I watched the intranet feed, waiting for some indication of what was going on. It wasn’t an instant reaction, which meant that somebody somewhere was arguing that we should ignore them. They weren’t listened to, and eventually it was announced that we had fired our last missile. That was that; the end of it, totally over.

Next thing I knew, a spokesman for the Office of the President was announcing that we could confirm the deaths of the primary leaders of the terrorist cell responsible for the deaths, and that all strikes against Iran would be stopping. It wasn’t a surrender, from our point of view: it was a result . Afterwards, for years, it would be referred to as the moment when we accepted the surrender of Iran for terrorist crimes. What really happened, with China being the hero? Forgotten, or brushed aside.

Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai

They sounded the Public Warning System at ten or eleven in the evening, when I was just falling asleep on Mr and Mrs Ts’ao’s comfy chair. It was the first of the month, so we thought – because they sounded it every month, on the first, to make sure that it was working – we thought that it could be a test, or my body did, when I woke up. And then it kept going – usually we get three tones, and they’re happy – but this kept going and going. Mr Ts’ao ran from the bedroom in his dressing gown. You have to get up, he shouted, we have to get out of here, but then I heard the shower going. You’ve got ten minutes! he said, then just took the robe off and went into the bathroom. I got my laptop off the floor, took it off sleep, logged in. The dwarf was playing videos from America and Europe, of smoking cities, and all the characters were standing around and watching. I thought that it might have been a joke at first, so I logged out and used the web – which I never did, because it felt so archaic, so clumsy, like news delivered old-style – but there were so many more videos, all showing the same thing, just from different angles. I wondered why they were all so far away, all taken from miles outside of a city, or from a helicopter circling the plumes – I thought back to that video after September 11, when there was the camera on street level, with the smoke coming toward it as the man ran, you know? – and then I realized that, well, they were all dead. Anybody in the cities who could be filming, they weren’t there any more. That was it for them. So I googled about the warning horns here, what they were about, and this pro-Chinese peace site had a news item. We believe that the Chinese government are ready to launch strikes, it said, they have sounded the warning horns to alert the population. Please, stay inside, and try not to panic.