Life Before Lysander

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Sophie Cummings 13RRB   5/9/2007

Life Before Lysander

        The news reports on the TV shortly before it happened showed the smiling faces of scientists in their crisp white coats, proudly congratulating each other for the creation of this new chemical, represented in the images before my eyes as a tiny cylinder filled with an evanescing yellow gas. It seemed harmless to me really, just an extra concentrated form of a new chemical compound. Developed secretly in America, its very existence had only just been officially declared by the U.S government, because it was deadly in smaller doses than sionide, and more easily spread than anthrax. Lysander 3, it was called. That was the first time I heard it. That name, those two little words which would change our world forever.

It was April when it happened. Just a bright flash, that was all, just a white flash in the sky, no explosion and no noise. It all seemed to happen so fast, and from so far away, that I didn’t even have time to jump, and no one really knew what was going on. For a few glorious hours, people just seemed to laugh it off, going about their daily lives, oblivious to their horrific and inevitable fates.

        But then it started. Emergency news reports slicing into broadcasts simultaneously on every channel, news reporters calmly explaining that a phial of Lysander 3 had been stolen by a new radical terrorist group called Avalanche. Their faces were sullen, but their voices shook with barely contained fear, the panic to which they long to succumb being fought back before my eyes. At that moment sitting there in my bedroom I knew deep down that things would never be the same.

        From that second, the creeping fingers of this new terror wound their way around society’s throat, suffocating it, pushing it into a state of screaming panic. Britain, Avalanche’s target, didn’t stand a chance. A weapon of that volatile nature is always a thing to be feared, but in the hands of someone capable of holding the world to ransom, playing apathetically with millions of human lives, it’s a travesty. They don’t call them terrorists for nothing, I guess.

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        No one really knows what happened, but I can only guess that Avalanche didn’t get what they were looking for, because at around 14:00 hours on April 29th, 2117, a suicide bomber managed to detonate a bomb containing one phial, one single phial of Lysander 3 over the city of London. And that was enough to spell the devastation of all who came into contact with it.

        For a few days after that, nothing really seemed to happen. Of course, due to a lack of testing, no one really knew what to expect, so society began moving on in the ...

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