The Collapse: Chaos After VITAS [Technothriller Shadowrun]

[Daddy Warpig]

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“The Collapse: Consequences of the VITAS Pandemic”
Task Group Archives
The Office for Strategic Analysis
01 January, 2032

File #002 - The Collapse (Annotated)

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The Collapse: Consequences of the VITAS Pandemic

VITAS was the epochal moment in human history. Worldwide it killed 20% of the population, and its after-effects killed 30% more. VITAS shattered the existing economic and political order, casting the globe into chaos.

For all the shock and tumult caused by the Awakening, the effects of VITAS were more profound and more transfiguring. VITAS vaporized the global economic system, broke apart countries, and rewrote common assumptions about the relationship between government, industry, and private citizens. Even the emergence of orks, dragons, and astral spirits didn’t provoke such historic consequences.

This brief covers the immediate consequences of the plague for the economy, the medical system, national infrastructure, and civil order.

> It’s impossible to overstate the impact of VITAS. A more deadly and far reaching plague than any that came before, it simply washed over the world, destroying everything, leaving the detritus of civilization in its wake. The present-day global order coalesced out of that chaos, and every aspect of internal politics and international relations were affected by the disease.

VITAS made the history we’ll have to live through for the next millennium.
- PoliSci Perpetrator

Origins of the Collapse

During the 20th century, modern nation-states grew to depend on infrastructure that was ever more complex, inter-related, and fragile. Problems in one area very often caused effects in other areas, and those effects spread.

At the time of the VITAS pandemic, world society was in the grip of a recession cause by mortgage lending practices. Questionable housing loans were made by quasi-government agencies and sold to banks. Based on these, the banks traded derivatives and engaged in credit-default swaps. This made them vulnerable to billions in damages when a tiny percentage of the loans defaulted (less than 3%).

The defaults occurred, which triggered penalties, which caused bankruptcies of major firms, some more than a century old, which caused a run on the banks. Banking officials claimed that, had they not stopped trading, the world economy would have collapsed.

What did ensue was a strong recession, which threw many people out of work, reduced the number of jobs available, nearly caused national debt defaults in member states of the (then) European Union, caused millions to withdraw from the labor force altogether, reduced Federal tax revenues, caused a collapse of the housing industry, caused countless personal mortgage defaults and bankruptcies, and other effects too numerous to name.

An initially very small error (affecting less than 3% of mortgages), grew to destroy storied lending institutions and almost brought global economic chaos. It did bring two years of recession, and economists claim the recession could have lasted for years more, had not VITAS intervened.

VITAS was a far bigger inciting event than mortgage lending errors, and had a far larger effect on the world economy.

Quarantine

During the 1919 Spanish Influenza epidemic, international, national, and local quarantines were put into effect. Local sovereignties banned public gatherings, closed schools and churches, shut down inter-city travel, sequestered the infected in their own homes, and in general deliberately isolated the general population from each other. Similar measures were taken during the polio epidemic of the 1950’s.

VITAS was first identified in mid-August of 2010. On September 1, the Federal Government interdicted travel (including flights and ships) from known infected countries. On September 14, this ban was extended to all foreign countries. Red Days, the US death spike, began on October 4.

> Quarantine was immensely controversial. Businesses protested to Congress, civil rights organizations brought lawsuits, and defiance of internal quarantine procedures was widespread. Several lawsuits were launched, but were still working their way through the courts by the time Red Days began and rendered the cases moot.
- XDA

China was the source of vast amounts of US consumer goods. The popular Apple iPads and iPhones, for example, were entirely assembled in China. Chinese state factories manufactured goods for countries across the globe. Chinese goods being shipped to, for example, Germany were sailed in freighters to the West Coast of the US, loaded on trains, shipped to East Coast harbors, loaded back on ships and carried to Germany. The Sep 1 quarantine of China cut off all this trade.

Just-in-time inventory management made businesses far more efficient. It also made them far more vulnerable to disruptions in their supply chain. Quarantine disrupted global trade and travel, and immediately bankrupted many economic powerhouses (as well as thousands of small businesses). Those bankruptcies threatened the lending institutions who made them loans, businesses that sold goods to them, businesses that bought goods from them, and consumers. Business and bank failures began to cascade.

By the time VITAS arrived in the US, the economic chaos caused by quarantine was already reverberating through the business sector.

Labor Shortages

Red Days (the VITAS "death spike" or lethal period) lasted for two weeks, during which approximately 20% of the US population died. Casualties overwhelmed medical services.

In the weeks after, another 12% of the population became functionally crippled and an additional 12% became sporadically crippled. Those workers with deaths in their families were quarantined in their homes, by law (amounting to another 8%-10% of the workforce). And many who hadn’t experienced any deaths quarantined themselves voluntarily, to avoid contracting the disease (the numbers varied by industry and specific business in question, but are estimated at no less than 33% of the workforce).

With businesses already failing, an 85% absenteeism rate (at minimum) caused yet more businesses to shut their doors. These failures caused their own subsequent effects.

The quarantine shut off foreign oil imports, which caused many refineries to run dry and shut down. When a company that refined oil shut down, its fuel production was cut off. Gasoline became more scarce and more expensive. This raised costs for any company using gas-powered vehicles and for consumers. Similar situations arose in many other industries.

Food companies, fast food chains, and grocery stores shut down. WalMart (the largest general retailer of the time) went out of business. Department stores went bankrupt. And the goods they supplied became ever more scarce.

As supplies of food, fuel, water, and power dwindled people began ex-migration out of large cities. Civil disorder, including riots and looting, broke out. And the chaos spiraled out of control.

The Collapse began before VITAS, with the quarantine, and only grew from there.

Casualties of The Collapse

Economic

The first casualty of the pandemic was trade. Trade depends on drivers, seamen, and dockworkers. It depends on factory workers, farmers, and craftsmen. On researchers, engineers, and designers. On salesmen, managers, bankers. All of these died en masse, with consequences for their companies and the rest of the economy.

Travel restrictions were put into place, cutting one country off from another. This halted the flow of infected individuals (though too late), but also prevented trade. Via ship, airplane, truck, or train, international trade was interdicted completely. (The sole exception being smuggling and other criminal endeavors.)

Oil in the Middle East could no longer be shipped to other countries, such as China (the largest consumer of Middle Eastern oil). China itself could no longer manufacture electronics for the West, as components sat on the docks in Singapore or Korea. And, even if the items could be manufactured, they couldn’t be transported to other markets.

There were no exports, there were no imports. The global economy slowed, sputtered, then disintegrated. Factories were shut down, banks closed, corporations collapsed. Stock markets cratered — destroying the retirement plans of governments, companies, and private citizens — then closed.

Governments went bankrupt. Public debt payments were suspended, causing further chaos to the banking system. Public aid programs, such as Britain’s National Health Service or America’s Social Security, collapsed. Welfare payments ceased, unemployment benefits were cut off.

The tax base collapsed, and governments paid for supplies and manpower with fiat currency or simply seized them. Widespread use of fiat currency hypercharged inflation rates. Annual inflation rates climbed into three, four, or five digits.

People were thrown out of work, with no public aid, and remained unemployed for a significant length of time.

> It’s hard for people to understand just how destructive and widespread the economic collapse was. To isolate one economic element, corporations: no multi-national companies survived the Collapse. Corporations that had been household names and economic powerhouses — Apple, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil — were swept away in the chaos and are now all but forgotten. Every single major corporation in existence today was founded post-Collapse.
- Lost Cause

> Founded, in most cases, after the Argentinean Model. Governments seized the property of defunct companies and sold them to qualified investors on a mortgage plan. The investors were to operate the companies and pay back the government the cost of their facilities out of their profits (usually in revalued currency, like the Japanese nuyen).

The plan gave investors capital goods (like factories, raw materials, or land) and enough money to pay workers for about a year. This created jobs, allowed unused capital assets to be put into production, and created income for the government.

This solution pleased no one — right-wingers considered it Socialism, left-wingers Corporate Welfare — but it worked well enough to restart the (legitimate) economy.
- PoliSci Perpetrator

Internal trade was also hampered, sometimes by quarantines, sometimes by civil strife. Goods couldn’t reach markets, including consumer goods, medicines, and food. People fell back on what they had on hand, or what could be acquired from black market sources.

Those who had local supplies were safe. Those who didn’t, starved. Even emergency supplies, often distributed by the military, weren’t enough in many areas. In the US, a plurality of secondary effect deaths (about 30 million) were attributable to starvation.

Medical

The second casualty was the medical community, on the front lines of the epidemic. Health services, governmental and private, were overwhelmed by a combination of casualties, demand, and the breakdown of public order. As circumstances deteriorated, it became impossible to get treatment for any medical condition. Travel restrictions (and swiftly dwindling fuel supplies) limited the amount of medicines available, and pharmacies soon ran out.

At the same time VITAS was killing billions, hundreds of millions were dying of other diseases that would, at any other time, have been survivable. Secondary outbreaks (such as the flu or cholera) became common, and without treatment they became full-fledged pandemics in and of themselves.

> VITAS happened 22 years ago, and though we still don’t have accurate models of how it worked on a cellular level, we know what it did. But during the pandemic, it was a complete unknown. No one knew how infectious it was, how it killed, or what prophylaxis might work. It was a mystery killer.

Those who went to work, whether medical professionals, soldiers, or workers, were very much heroes. They had no control over whether they lived or died, knew it, and went to work anyway.
- Broke-Down Back-Country Doc

Restoration of medical infrastructure happened slowly. With limited access to modern equipment (such as ultrasound machines or MRI’s) Doctors were thrown back on 50-year-old medicines and surgical procedures. Though tried and tested, they were more risky than modern methods, and many patients suffered.

In terms of pharmaceuticals, the United States was the first country to recover, though it took until after the NAN War for that to occur. When recovered, the industry focused mainly on manufacturing known compounds; in a crippled economy it was difficult to fund research into new medicines. Without new antibiotics (or other medications), sulfa became the drug of choice for fighting bacterial infections, including resistant strains such as MRSA.

Among the economic chaos of the Collapse, and the hardship of the Long Depression, the US drug industry was one of the few economic bright spots. In the aftermath of VITAS, China became a manufacturing superpower, India lead the software and high-tech industries, and Mexico controlled much of the world’s petroleum and minerals markets. Without a significant manufacturing base, and with even domestic mineral and oil production increasingly owned by foreign industries (such as Mexoil), pharmaceutical manufacturing was one of the few areas the United States could excel in.

Structural

The Collapse had a devastating effect on national infrastructure — electrical grids, sewage, water, natural gas, phone service, and the Internet. Though none collapsed as thoroughly as the banking system, all became overtaxed and unreliable, failing completely in many areas.

Responsibility for most such services was held by local monopolies or municipal corporations. They all depended on intricate machinery and computer monitoring systems, which (if damaged) required spare parts, stocks of which were running low due to the international travel embargo. They also depended on specially trained engineers to repair the equipment and restore service, and like all other industries, they suffered from deaths and worker absenteeism.

The electrical grids proved the most vulnerable. From October to December of 2010, power to much of the country was gone. There were exceptions in specific areas (such as those serviced by Niagara Falls Hydropower and the Hoover Dam, and even there power was sporadic and unreliable due to equipment problems), and efforts to restore power were constant, but electricity was rarely available, especially in cities.

Even when power was partially or wholly restored, problems in the integrated grid were difficult to diagnose and repair, and electrical surges or losses of power were common. Such surges or brown-/blackouts affected industries, domiciles, and government buildings.

> The power system is the jugular vein of a modern industrial society. Cut it, and no matter how healthy everything else is, it all dies. (Which is why the first facilities Reclaimed were power plants. The second were oil refineries.)

Let me demonstrate:

In August 2003, a powerline in northern Ohio brushed against some trees. This single incident set in motion a series of events culminating in a blackout that affected 6 states (New York, including all of New York City, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania) and the Canadian Province of Ontario. 10 million Canadians and 45 million Americans were without power for up to 16 hours. That one single accident knocked out power to 15% of the US.

Let’s tally the damage: Power went down. Given. Factories shut down. (The auto industry didn’t return to full production until a week after power was restored.)

Cellular towers went down (despite backup power sources). Cable television off-lined.

Water pumps went down, leaving water running but allowing contaminants (such as sewage) to leak into water mains. “Boil or die.” (Plus shutting down beaches. Imagine a day at the beach, complete with wading through sewage-infested pools. It’s called “cholera”.)

Trains stopped in their tracks. Airports shut down. Gas stations shut down. Worse, East Coast refineries went offline, meaning supplies of gasoline became constrained. The outage killed 11 people and cost $6 billion.

(The one thing that didn’t happen was a crime wave. NYPD reported 100 fewer arrests than usual during the blackout. Sometimes people surprise you.)

All of this from a single blackout, caused by a single power-line and a single tree. VITAS hit much harder than that.

Everybody involved—two national governments, many giant corporations, and several state agencies—pinky swore to fix the problems. They established committees and made regulations and everything.

A report issued a few years after the Blackout concluded that, to no one’s surprise, the power system was just as vulnerable as in 2003.
- Lost Cause

> To be fair, the above is a archetypal Black Swan event. Bugs in software caused monitors to go offline, wires hitting trees caused a surge, which knocked out the NE grid. Everything’s vulnerable in ways we cannot anticipate or prevent, and they cause long chains of unpredictable responses.

Like a programmer mistyping one letter in one line of code out of 10 million, which caused the 1990 AT&T telephone outage in Manhattan, which eventually prompted the Secret Service to raid the offices of a game company in Austin, Texas.

The world isn’t a linear place, and we can’t predict or prevent the majority of what eventually comes to pass. The Awakening proved that.
- PoliSci Perpetrator

Power restoration was a key goal of Reclamation, and the focus of the majority of Emergency Military Supplies Acquisition Program (EMSAP) resources. Even so, it took three months to partially restore power and 6 months to mostly restore power. This had consequences for nearly everything else.

Communications & Internet: Without power, communications went down for most of the country. No radio, no TV, no phones, no cell communications, and no Internet. (And at the same time, fuel shortages made it difficult or impossible to travel long distances). The communications blackout lead to much of the social unrest that would later plague the country.

All local ISP’s experienced at least some outages, and many simply ceased to exist as companies (further isolating those in their service area). Even after power was restored, power surges damaged critical equipment at ISP’s, hosts, and cloud service providers, equipment that was hard to replace post-Collapse. (Power surges also damaged personal computers, leaving their owners without Internet capable equipment.) Restoring communications took months, even after power became available.

> During the communications blackouts, which lasted well into 2011, military units and bases used satellite communications or (where present and intact) fiber optic lines to keep in contact. Internet service was provided through these comm links, using the Defense Information Systems Agency and U.S. Army Research Lab root servers. For a time, Milnet was almost totally independent of the Internet.
- Lost Cause

Similar problems plagued the other infrastructure services. No single utility collapsed completely, and none stayed down permanently. But all experienced severe problems, and were kept in operation by skeleton crews of employees, many working 18- or 20-hour shifts.

> During Reclamation, a lot of grunts griped about having to “clean up after civilian p******”. Fraggin’ idiots. We didn’t land until a week after the Red Days began, and weren’t on the ground in force for another two weeks. That’s three weeks of outages and chaos, and the only reason anything survived to be Reclaimed was because 5%-10% of the local workforce ignored a clear and present danger to their lives and came to work anyway.

My platoon was assigned to oil duty on the East Coast, prepping refineries for oil shipments from the NSPR. An abandoned oil refinery is a massive explosion and firestorm waiting to happen. When we got there, the refineries were offline, but they hadn’t just been abandoned. Their crews had shut them down with maximal attention to safety, so whoever came after could get them up and running with a minimum of fuss. (Compare that to the fires that tore through Corpus Christi.) They didn’t panic, they just did their jobs and probably saved some ungrateful sorry-ass grunts their worthless lives.

I never learned who manned those refineries, but if I ever meet ‘em I’ll buy ‘em a round or ten. They deserve it.
- Ell-Tee Charlie Six

Infrastructure was one of the two chief focuses of the first phase of Reclamation. While some units secured materiel — food, fuel, and spare parts — others took command of power stations, sewage plants, and heating oil/natural gas facilities. Workers for these industries were some of the first “hired” by Reclamation Command under the auspices of the EMSAP. The last group of soldiers, and in the beginning not the largest, focused on security for the first two endeavors.

Social Order

The fourth casualty of VITAS was civil order. Whether manifesting in individual crimes, looting, riots, mob violence, or outright civil war, in the wake of VITAS one form or another of civil disorder struck every single country on the planet. In many cases, entire governments ceased to exist, some of which have yet to be reestablished; unorganized or denationalized territories exist on every continent.

In the short term, the United States avoided the more violent forms of disorder that plagued other nations (such as China’s civil war). During the Collapse and Reclamation, there were armed clashes with well-armed criminal gangs or rogue military units, but these were small in scale, typically involving fewer than 30 combatants on either side.

The real violence didn’t arrive until the start of the NAN War, in December of 2011. Howling Coyote and his followers began a guerrilla offensive, backed by powerful magics, that killed tens of thousands of US soldiers, bankrupted the federal government, and succeeded at creating a secessionary state for the first time in US history.

Causes of Civil Disorder

Civil disorder was often the result of pre-existing ethnic or national conflicts (such as Kurdistan’s struggle for independence or the Tamil guerrilla war in India). In other cases, it was the result of the disintegration of law-enforcement organizations (many of which broke apart just as companies did).

In the United States, civil disorder was triggered by the following four causes.

1. Organizational collapse: All organizations suffered from VITAS, including the police, National Guard, and the military. 20% of their members were killed outright, and varying percentages of survivors went AWOL.

This meant that police forces, if they survived at all, were hard pressed to patrol their usual jurisdictions. In many places, the police forces didn’t survive. Such areas were quickly overtaken by criminal gangs or came to be ruled by self-appointed or community chosen vigilantes.

> Under martial law, local jurisdictions were empowered to enforce the law as best they could. In places where trials were still held, they were invariably quick and informal and the punishments were usually severe. Scanty supplies meant prisoner populations couldn’t be supported, so most places enforced four tiers of punishment (none of which involved incarceration): confiscation of goods (sometimes varying according to the seriousness of the crime), exile from the jurisdiction, hard labor, or execution. Looters, murderers, and rapists were typically hung, hoarders punished with confiscation of goods or exile. Other crimes were punished as the local authorities saw fit.

Such trials rarely respected civil rights, especially the right to legal counsel. People were forced to give testimony, and the standards of evidence were low. There were no doubt many miscarriages of justice, but the dire straits people found themselves in simply outweighed such concerns. With winter coming, and food running short, people were more concerned with starving than with niceties of due process.

In the aftermath of Reclamation, a blanket Presidential pardon for all crimes committed during the Collapse and Reclamation (even by local authorities) was a necessary expedient to restore a semblance of order. Even so, hard memories and feuds lingered on. In many places, revenge killings were common for years.
- Blue Blood

2. Communications outages: Structural difficulties, most especially lack of power, resulted in a communications blackout to much of the country. No phones, no Internet, no television broadcasts, and little radio communications.

Without communications, local jurisdictions were isolated from the rest of the country. No one knew how widespread or lethal the pandemic was, if a second wave of deaths was likely, or whether the government, or any government, existed at all.

This forced local jurisdictions to keep the peace on their own. Many locales simply sealed their borders (to the extent this was possible). Mass migration out of the larger cities lead to severe cultural clashes, sometimes involving violence, and though aid was sometimes available from both military and civilian sources, critical supplies were scant and hard to come by.

3. Limited transport: Fuel became scarce prior to the Red Days, and regular supplies of diesel and gasoline weren’t available until well into Reclamation. (Even then, fuel was reserved for military or EMSAP use.)

Without vehicular transportation, distances suddenly multiplied. At 60 miles an hour, a car could travel 480 miles in a single day (8 hours). A healthy man would cover the same distance in 24 days (20 miles a day).

Transportations difficulties combined with the communications outages to isolate most communities. Trade and travel almost wholly ceased, as did the flow of news and policy. At best, news was replaced by rumors passed on by travelers. At worst, communities found themselves wholly alone.

4. Migrations: Large urban areas were the hardest hit by secondary effects. High crime rates and famine lead to the collapse of local governments, and mob violence became common. Warring gangs seized control of inner cities, ruling and terrorizing residents. Rural areas, especially those with local farming, never quite fell into chaos, and even moderately sized urban areas survived largely intact.

The largest cities became war zones, driving out-migration to record levels. Tens of millions of people left urban centers for the suburbs, smaller neighboring cities, or the countryside.

> Where did they go? They headed for any place they thought would offer food and shelter from the oncoming winter. Many times, they just headed south.

Sometimes — more often than one would expect — they found shelter and food, if they were willing to pitch in. Sometimes they found cities who had sealed their borders. There were clashes, and people died. Sometimes they found bandits or renegade military units. And sometimes they found nothing, and starved or froze.

People moved into abandoned houses, barns, gas stations, sheds, greenhouses, empty factories, office buildings, malls, parking garages. Sometimes they took what they needed, sometimes they took charity.

They cut down trees for warmth, and ate anything they could. Store shelves were stripped bare, orchards and fields denuded. They hunted deer, birds, rabbits, gophers, and eventually horses, dogs, cats, and insects.

When Reclamation began, they crowded army units, begging for food. There were riots, and people were shot.
- Lost Cause

> The outmigration of the cities hit everyone hard, but most of all urban dwellers. Secondary effects claimed 5% of VITAS survivors in rural areas. They killed 50% of the surviving urban population.
- Broke-Down Back-Country Doc

> Of all the cities in North America, Los Angeles suffered the worst. After its water and power cut out, returning it to desert, the majority of the city headed elsewhere. Fires, set by rioters, burned the city down, turning the LA basin into five hundred square miles of charred ruins. LA refugees suffered over 90% casualties from causes like the Great Angelino Fire, dehydration, heat stroke, starvation, disease, and banditry.

Today, it’s a small city of 55,000, Nuevo Angelino, clustered around the NA California Coast Guard Base (formerly the Port of Los Angeles). An unknown number of squatters occupy surviving buildings in the rest of the city, but California lacks the resources to police or Reclaim it. “Charred Angeles” is a Barrens, like Redmond in Seattle, only with far fewer occupants.
- Blue Blood

Displaced citizens were the most challenging aspect of Reclamation. The military lacked the capacity to set up camps to house tens of millions of refugees. Eventually, military units began reclaiming abandoned suburbs (driving off criminal and vigilante gangs), ringing them with fencing, and setting up aid camps there. People could move into permanent housing, not tents, with water and heat (and intermittent power), and receive the bare essentials of food. Those agreeing to work in various Reclamation or EMSAP projects received ration coupons for additional food, power, and even fuel.

Conclusion

These, then were the challenges of Reclamation: a populace ravaged by disease, economic disintegration, a medical system in collapse, infrastructure in disorder, and a breakdown in civil order. Local leaders held onto order as much as they could, and the overseas Redeployment provided a core of soldiers that could begin to stabilize the country, reestablish infrastructure, and restore order. Even so, Reclamation was a difficult process and, when on the verge of completion, was interrupted by the NAN War, from which the federal government has yet to recover.

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[Daddy Warpig]

If not immediately apparent, the above is part of my Alt-History Technothriller Shadowrun Campaign. More information on the campaign can be found in the linked thread.