Nobody knows what started the Final War — it was over too fast, fought with the last of the belligerent nations’ nuclear stockpiles, and the ones who pulled the triggers didn’t survive. It was the Final War because after that there was really nobody left who wanted to fight; we were all too busy surviving. Half a century of wars using nukes, bioweapons, nanoweapons, and even kinetic-kill weapons, gave us the Empty World: population 100 million and falling fast.Who’s to blame? Depends on who you are, but you could just as easily blame the weapons industry; by the end, virtually every arms dealer in the world was owned by Amalgamated Corporation; while everyone was fighting they’d been buying up what Karl Marx used to call “the means of production,” and in the end missiles on both sides proudly wore the AC label.Hell, in the end AC made just about everything, AC Sportsdrinks, AC Icecream, AC Battlegear, even AC Happytabs. I miss those. AC even gave us our wonderful mutant problem; the “v