EN: Due to the nature of this story, I feel it necessary to state a few things. First, this is a completely fictitious tale based on the idea I came up with for this situation and NOT on the desire to see the President of any country, current or otherwise, dead. Second, I do not intend to insinuate that the President in this story is our current (US) President, nor had I even considered him when writing this. I suppose that’s it.

I’m going to begin by confessing that I did, in fact, assassinate the President. Guilty as charged. Hang me or electrocute me if you like, because I know I did the right thing. I am willing to lose my life here and now to avoid the future that I experienced first-hand. I don’t expect you to believe me, but what’s important is that I saved the world, and my life is worth that, and no amount of disbelief can make it any different.

Having said that, I will try to explain myself. My name is Daniel Grey. Don’t look for a birth certificate or social security number; I don’t exist yet. Not for another twenty-five years. And I won’t look like I do right now for another fifty years. The irony is, even if you do kill me, I’ll be alive again in less than three decades.

The reason I am here is because of something I call the ocular effect. When someone is standing at a certain distance from an atomic blast, they will receive a super-heated gust of air called a blast wave. If you are just the right distance from this, you may survive the blast and suffer from the ocular effect. Your eye balls will pop out of your head.

The man who is your President will be the one person to end the world. Now, I understand that it is hard to believe that a single man could bring about the world’s destruction without anyone trying to stop him, but you must understand that it was a gradual thing.

It started easily enough with World War III. Now no one knows for sure what caused this to culminate, but most of us suspect that the President was dealing secretly with several different countries and playing them against each other. At any rate, in about seven years, the world will enter a stage of violent turmoil. The President, through clever deception and confusing rhetoric, will convince the public that a bill granting the Commander in Chief of the country emergency powers in wartime must be passed. Note that a bill allowing congressmen to receive raises (without the well-known amendment stopping the raise from taking effect until next term) is put through at the same time under the public’s radar. Congress is anxious to pass everything.

As World War III climaxes, the US manages to gain control of the war for the Allies and claim absolute victory under the “esteemed leadership” of the President. Public opinion is positive. The propaganda begins. Extremely subliminal and subversive at first, everyone is slowly led into believing that dictatorship is the new democracy. It is only the scholars of the country that realize what is happening, but it is too late. That’s fifteen years from now.

The Secret Service becomes a military. Political activists are slandered and silenced, until they stop showing up altogether. The few remaining dissenters, including my family, escape overseas. That was twenty-five years ago, or as many from now. I was practically born on the plane.

The next five years involved increasing propaganda and a steady buildup of negative sentiment for local countries. Just before the President took the rest of the continent, the border countries were labeled as terrorist nations. Next, they were colonies. Finally, divided into new portions of the mother country. The propaganda was so persuasive that the majority of the old citizens of these countries became residents already believing that they had been saved from a tyrannical rule.

Then the move into the southern hemisphere. By the time I was ten, it was freedom in the eastern hemisphere and control in the western hemisphere. Any country not under our control was a threat so the President tried to move his borders overseas, but something wonderful happened. Something that gave us all hope. The many nations of various race and religion set aside their differences. The Allegiance for Regaining Control was formed. ARC involved every single country which had not been sucked into the darkness.

World War IV began. It was gruesome and battlefields spanned the globe. People who years before would have been friends were ripping each other apart. My father was lost in the battles. We never found his body; there were too many pieces and parts strewn across the battleground. And yet the fighting continued for years upon years. People forgot what Peace was.

Then, the fighting reached a stalemate. Present day, forty-nine years from now.

When you reach a stalemate, you can’t push anymore. So you climb. And the world climbed up the ladder of weaponry. The first day saw more than twenty 15-megaton nuclear warheads dropped. There was no sanity left. I watched my wife birth a stillborn fetus. That was seconds before she died. Her gums were bleeding uncontrollably from radiation poisoning. I had been out of town when the bomb hit. Somewhere, leaders in bunkers continued to drop nukes. I was living with my family when I found the way back here. My wife’s death had driven me to research.

As I prepared to go back, air raid sirens sounded. Moments before the shockwave must have burnt my mother and sister into nothing, killed all my friends, and taken away everything I knew (what little it was), I came here.

So now you see why my life is worth this. I don’t want to see any more empty skulls, anymore of my children die before being born, and more of my wife’s blood spilled. Now you see that I had nothing to lose and still have nothing. I don’t care if you believe me, because your belief is not required. Though no history book will ever remember my name, I’ll die a hero. We can hope, anyway.

Edit: Changed the story to be slightly more realistic. Originally there were over A HUNDRED 5000-MEGATON WARHEADS dropped. Wouldn’t be much Earth left to save, would there?