Pax Incorpora

Third Impact

The consequences of the Kessler effect were immediate in many cases. Without satellites, there was no satellite communication. No GPS, no telecommunication or television, weather prediction and meteorological tracking were lost entirely, and even ATM and digital transactions were unable to connect with banks and led to mass freezing of accounts across the globe. The networked world that had existed on the 12th of March and decades before had vanished within the blink of an eye. And those were only the immediate consequences.

Without these means of technology, attempts were made for workarounds. Boat captains turned to legacy systems, bringing out charts and compasses to navigate. Those who had traveled extreme northerly and southerly courses redirected to avoid the magnetic flux of the poles, now without GPS to ensure reliable movement. Landlines and old fibreoptic cables which ran under the ocean were used to pick up the intercontinental communication slack. Radio communication was still a readily accessible civilian choice. Even the internet, a necessity throughout the 21st century, was still functional at this point. In the days following the catastrophe it looked as though things were actually quite recoverable. As though those who'd be most severely affected would be those in remote areas who had truly needed satellites to be reached. This was a mirage though. In the days that followed the fibreoptics became overtaxed with traffic, private and federal and corporate agencies all trying to use the same long unmaintained cabling. Calls, if they made it through at all, were cut short. For radios it was even worse, the formerly regulated waveband frequencies devolving into an unregulatable mess of white noise as everyone assembled HAMs. Even the internet's web pages began to crash, one at a time, until going from a world wide webwork of communication to a massive 404-filled mess. Simultaneously to this, were the long lasting effects felt.

Docks became queued in the weeks following. Entire trade routes fell apart without specific navigation, and short range communication became almost impossible between ships outside of visual range for semaphores or morse lights. World trade slowed heavily at sea, with traffic leading to delays and the constant passing across time zones without GPS to check leading to a "time drift" that further jeopardized what little communication and coordination of traffic there was. Such also occurred in the air, but was even worse since planes frequently found air traffic passbands incomprehensible amid urban radio interference and frequently had to rely on visual and radar, and maps instead of precise geolocation. Several nautical and aerial collisions would occur in late 2097. The most damaging was the PEG595-WHZ122 collision above Belgrade, resulting in the loss of all 346 passengers and crew aboard the two flights and the additional deaths of at least 40 bystanders in the Republic square from the crash. After these events, the phrase "March Madness" took on a global, and very different, meaning.

Amidst all of this, the most powerful nations of the world were some of those hit the hardest by the disaster. Many of them had the largest territory of any single nation in the world, but so too did these dominant powers greatly rely on the global trade and communications network to sustain their large size. Canada, Iran, Russia, China, and the USA had already had occasional supply issues during the late 21st century. Now they were looking at a total collapse of the markets which kept them dominant. ASEAN was similarly struggling, its large and disparate naval trade network falling apart before its eyes. But amidst all this, some nations and federations did emerge stronger than before. For years now the African Union's members had been organizing national and domestic supply chains, and here they received incentive to double down on it. Similarly FONSUR, whose member states were not nearly as prepared in comparison, were able to sustain with their increasingly centralized Forum and union structure. Above all of this chaos was the Incorporation, watching and supplying their allies amidst a catastrophe of their own self-admitted creation. Retaliation was inevitable.