Intriguing details about the (alternate timeline) world's pre-apocalyptic history are discussed...

A/N: As I suspected, the rest of last week kept me busy with my birthday celebrations and work, but I am back now for my 450th total chapter in Chyoa (and 105th for this exact branch), and I have been meaning to talk about these interesting world-building details I had been developing for a LONG time, so I hope you all enjoy it. I've never really seen these types of possibilities being explored in other zombie apocalypse stories, so I hope you find it new and intriguing, and it's just part of the set of reveals to come for the rest of this arc so, happy reading, everyone, and please remember to review.

Michael's POV

The radio crackled to life, and Lieutenant Mills' voice cut through the static with the crisp efficiency that had become her trademark. "Command, this is Strike Leader. We have successfully cleared the social area and the first five floors of Vista Nova. Two survivors recovered, both unbitten. Allison Smith and her father, Frank. Maintenance room held."

You felt the tension in your shoulders ease, exchanging a glance with Foreman, who stood at your side with her clipboard pressed against her chest like a shield. Around you, the patrol spread out along the barricade, Kira and Laurel flanking the perimeter while Divya kept watch on the steep incline below, the twilight painting the abandoned street in shades of amber and deep blue.

"Copy that, Lieutentant," you said, your thumb pressing the transmit button on the handheld radio. "Excellent work. What's your status?"

A pause stretched through the static, and you frowned. Mills was not one for hesitation.

"We're making a tactical retreat outside the building, Command. We'll regroup and reassess before assaulting the lobby horde. There's a significant number of them trapped down there, and the approach is bottlenecked. I want fresh eyes on the problem before I commit more of my team."

"Understood. We'll be waiting at the barricade."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Command, I also have some...sensitive information I discovered during the operation. Information that would be better suited for a personal debriefing with the Lord Commander."

Your frown deepened. You could hear the careful weight in her words, the deliberate choice of phrasing. Beside you, Foreman's eyebrows knitted together, her professional mask cracking just enough to show curiosity.

"Copy that, Strike Leader. I trust your judgment. We'll be here."

You released the transmit button and lowered the radio, staring at the device as if it might offer up more answers.

"What do you think that's about?" Laurel asked, padding up beside you with that easy, confident stride she had, her hand coming to rest on your forearm. The contact was warm and grounding.

"I don't know," you admitted. "But Mills isn't the type to dramatize. If she says it's sensitive, it probably is."

Divya turned from her position near the barricade, her brown eyes thoughtful in the fading light. "Could be something about the building. Structural issues, or maybe she found something useful down there."

"Or someone," Kira added, her voice flat, though there was a glint in her dark eyes. "Someone who's not a zombie."

The possibility hung in the air, and you considered it. The strike team had cleared the first five floors and found only Allison and Frank. But there was still the second half of the building to fully explore, even if most of the remaining undead were to be found in the lobby horde below. It wasn't inconceivable that there were other pockets of survivors scattered throughout the tower.

Yet something about Mills' tone nagged at you. There was a guarded quality to her voice, a carefulness that suggested whatever she had discovered was not simply a pleasant surprise. It was something that needed to be handled delicately, away from the radio waves, and from prying ears.

You paced along the barricade, your eyes examining an overturned sedan down below their hill on the street beyond. The wind picked up, carrying the distant moan of a few zombies somewhere in the city not too far away, a reminder that even with the approaching brightness of the midday sun, the streets were not safe.

Foreman stepped up beside you, her voice low and measured. "Sir, if I may. Lieutenant Mills is a consummate professional. If she says the information is sensitive, it's likely tied to operational security. Something that could affect the mission or the group's safety, hence why she may have wanted some time to reassess her options before committing to an attack on the largest of the trapped hordes."

You simply nodded and then continued with your vigil as the minutes stretched on, the brightness and heat being dimmed slightly by a passing cloud overhead. Shaking your head, you quickly used the radio to call for Melissa Carter, telling her that the strike team was successful for the first stage of the mission and they are coming back to rest before continuing, so if she wanted to see her son Jonathan, to please come to the barricade with some water bottles for the squad. The mother sighed in deep relief and said she would be there right away before hanging up. You turned back to the street below for a couple of silent minutes after that. But you saw nothing worth alarm, so before long, you scratched your chin as your attention drifted back to the building you had sent your people to essentially conquer. Somewhere within, your strike team was carefully making their way back, carrying with them two new survivors and a secret that Mills felt needed to be shared face-to-face. And, somehow, you were starting to get the feeling that your day was about to get increasingly interesting, and in more ways than one, too.

Before your mind kept turning over the possibilities, however, you noticed that Divya's eyes had turned up towards the clouds with a very thoughtful expression after her eyes had widened, as if trying to extract mysteries from them the way a miner might try to extract metals from a mountain. She seemed surprised by whatever it was that caught her attention.

You raised an eyebrow at that. "Is something the matter, Divya? You look like you just got hit by an epiphany or something."

Divya blinked, her eyes still fixed on the clouds as she processed the question. Then a slow, almost sheepish smile spread across her face. "I think it actually was an epiphany, Master. I mean, I haven't really stopped to think about much beyond survival since the dead started walking, you know? But with the Lieutenant's talk of sensitive, perhaps classified information that needs a personal debriefing..." She trailed off, gesturing vaguely at the sky. "It just made me wonder about something."

"Go on," you prompted, curiosity piqued.

She took a breath, gathering her thoughts before pointing a finger up. "It's about humanity's space colonies. The cislunar orbiting stations that are basically interlocked into a floating capital city by this point, Artemis City on Luna, and our more distant and, by necessity, independent colonies on Mars' surface and in the Venusian clouds. All of them. I remember reading about how unprecedented the international cooperation was. Countries that had been at each other's throats every now and then for centuries suddenly agreed to start pooling resources and talent into expanding humanity's presence off-world and throwing loads of money at it since the end of the Cold War. I always thought it was hopeful, you know? That humanity was finally getting its act together to try and reach the stars, even if there was still the occasional war here and there. But what if it wasn't hope and optimism that drove them?"

The question hung in the air as she finally lowered her gaze from the sky and met yours.

"What if they knew?" Divya continued, her voice dropping. "What if some of the higher-ups in the governments involved knew years ago that something like this was coming? Maybe not zombies exactly, but perhaps some sort of ultimately unavoidable pandemic and an accompanying social collapse or some other kind of world-ending event? And that's why they pushed so hard to get us off the planet, to make sure humanity was able to survive somewhere beyond Earth?"

You felt your eyes widen as the weight of her words settled over you. Your gaze drifted upward, tracing the scattered clouds that drifted lazily across the pale blue sky. The same sky where Luna's colonies and the cislunar stations orbited beyond. The same sky that Mars-bound ships had crossed, as well as those seeking to resupply the Venusian cloud colony.

And the more you thought about it, the more her theory made a terrible, perfect kind of sense.

You had always found it strange, personally. Not unwelcome, but strange. The Cold War had ended in the early nineties, nearly six decades ago, and while political rivalries had persisted and occasionally flared hot again, the world's major powers had somehow found enough common ground for uninterrupted support when it came to space exploration and expansion. Massive investments, joint missions, shared infrastructure. Billions upon billions of funds were being annually poured into establishing self-sustaining colonies on the Moon, in cislunar space, on Mars, and even in the climatologically more bearable upper atmosphere of Venus high above its hellishly hot surface. It was the kind of consistent cooperation that should have been all but impossible given the bitter history between so many of those nations.

You had loved every moment of it, of course. Following the launches, the breakthroughs, and the first permanent settlements. It had been a bright spot in an otherwise complicated world, proof that humanity could achieve great things when it worked together. But intellectually, you had always found the timing curious. The sudden pivot from rivalry to cooperation, from competition to collaboration, so soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was almost as if there had been an unseen hand guiding them toward that unity.

Or, as Divya suggested, an unseen threat.

You opened your mouth to voice your thoughts, but Laurel spoke first, her brow furrowed as she stared at the sky with a look of genuine concern. "Do you think they're dealing with zombies up there? The colonists on the Moon and beyond, I mean. Are they isolated from whatever started this madness here on Earth?"

Silence fell over the group as they all contemplated the possibility. Kira shifted her weight, her expression unreadable. Foreman's fingers tightened around her clipboard reflexively, and Divya chewed her lower lip.

You shook your head, a helpless shrug rolling through your shoulders. "That's hard to say. We still don't know how this plague works on a scientific level. We don't know if it's airborne, waterborne, transmitted mainly through bites, or something else entirely. We don't know where it originated or how it spread. Until we have those answers, we can't know what the colonists are facing."

You paused, letting the thought settle. "But I guess it's possible they're fine. As long as they didn't receive contaminated shipments in the days before the world went dark, they might be completely unaffected up there. Isolated from the source. So hopefully they aren't dealing with zombies off-world."

"Maybe, but even if they're safe from the zombies," Foreman interjected, her voice measured and quiet, "they won't be safe from the consequences."

You turned to look at her. She was staring at the ground, her professional mask firmly in place, but there was a tightness around her eyes. "The colonies are self-sustaining in the sense that they can produce food, air, and water, with some limited manufacturing capability based on the resources they can safely mine or gather from their respective off-world environments. But they still rely on Earth for specialized manufacturing, for some crucial replacement parts, for new technology, heck, for a hundred little things that keep a space colony running especially smoothly. If all governments on Earth that had industrial spacefaring capabilities have collapsed, not just the United States, then their supply lines are completely severed. That means they're going to have an absolutely miserable time trying to achieve true independence out of necessity."

She looked up at you, her dark eyes steady before shaking her head. "And before you ask, no, I don't have any classified information about zombie-related pandemics or secret government plans inspired by awareness of potential threats guiding space program expansions. I was a communications specialist Sergeant, not an intelligence one. You would have better luck asking Sergeant Meyers if we ever find her and Captain Dorne somewhere in the city. But either way, if any higher-ups knew something, they couldn't have possibly shared ALL these potentially destructive details with the enlisted ranks. Something of this magnitude would have been leaked by a whistleblower eventually, legal penalties be damned."

You nodded slowly, absorbing her words. The implications were sobering overall. Even if humanity had survived off-world, they were now trapped there, disconnected from the homeworld that had birthed their civilization and underpinned their survival.

And here on Earth, the rest of humanity was struggling to survive one day at a time.

You let out a long breath, dragging a hand through your hair. Noon deepened around you, forcing you to look down again so you didn't hurt your vision, the shadows of the barricade growing thinner. Somewhere in the distance, the faint moan of a zombie echoed through the abandoned streets, a reminder that the dead did not rest, and therefore neither could you without careful planning.

"That's a heavy thought for a patrol," you said, offering a wry smile. "But one worth carrying. If humanity is going to rebuild in full, it will be here on Earth more likely than not, even with all the zombie-related dangers. It is, after all, our natural habitat, and I am sure that there are still many thousands of times more surviving humans out there somewhere on this world than there would be among the colonists, even after everything. Hopefully, though, we will be able to reconnect with our fellows stranded off-world one day. And the long journey towards rebuilding and stabilizing our situation enough to make it easier to get to that point starts with safer homes, secured supplies, and clearing out the buildings that still hold survivors before banding together. One victory at a time, with all of them working together gradually to compound upon all of our efforts."

Foreman and the rest nodded at your words before you glanced back toward Vista Nova Tower and nodded almost imperceptibly as you saw your team starting to exit the building through the fire escape they had used to enter in the first place, safe and sound from the looks of it, even if they were sweaty, bloodied from zombie blood, and clearly tired. "Either way, Mills' report might be more important than we initially thought. So, stay sharp as they arrive, everyone. I don't want any walking dead catching us off guard while I am being debriefed."

A/N: This may have been as random as it was huge, plot-wise, but like I have said before, I have been looking forward to exploring the origins of the zombie apocalypse in this branch for world-building purposes that will end up driving part of the narrative forward. This information about the expanded space program in this world's alternate timeline by the year the zombies rose here (2049) is a crucial part of that. But more on that later. We've got more explanations to come from the apparently superpowered Swedish bombshell, as some of you have put it, to deal with next. And more besides. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoyed it, and if so or if you have questions for me, feel free to leave a comment down below