I have seen the future of humanity, and it is war.
War on a scale unprecedented.
War that will consume the world, leaving millions slaughtered in the mud of Europe.
War that will cause misery untold as nation fights nation with all the might of the industrial age. A generation of humanity blighted by the worst of us.
Then, a mere generation will pass before the world is plunged once more into darkness unceasing. Conflict on a scale un-reckoned by our night-mares, embroiling all in its embittered grip. It will wrap the world in choking hands and bring suffering to all it touches.
Factories of death, the dreams of madmen will be built. Trains will carry men, woman, even children to their gaping maws. Marching them in their millions to chambers of slaughter, a systematic butchery of a race.
More machines will fill the air, raining down their payloads upon the great cities of Europe, to leave them nothing but shells of their former glories. Their broken remains scorched and chard by the firestorms.
Meanwhile better bombs level whole Asian cities in single blasts. Leaving nought but invisible death in poisoned air behind them.
Such a weapon once conceived can never be forgotten, and the world will find itself waiting on the abyss of a single button. Tottering on the edge of it owns end when the mad shall be the only strategy.
Ideologies of east and west will clash, in a century of blood, ceaseless in the undertaking of little wars that keep humanity on the edge of annihilation. While the world’s people will suffer evermore under the yoke of tyrants both overt and hidden. Until the cause of money becomes the foremost of all ideology’s.
An ideology that eats away at the earth itself. Burning it up to feed the ever-growing appetites of those few who extend their power over the many with the propaganda of technology. Feeding lies through invisible transmissions that saturate the minds of humanity, reducing them to cattle for the factories of the rich.
Ripe for the slaughter.
Ripe for exploitation.
All to keep the system of war and hate moving forward.
All the advancements of the ages, all the wonders of humanity’s devising, all the ingenuity of man turned to one sole purpose. The slaughter the weak, to feed the vanities of the strong.
Would that, in one action, a simple changing of the past, this future could be averted.

(prologue form the forth coming The Wells of Time: A Hannibal Smyth adventure )