the scientists still there looking for a cure
convinced the site commander to let the strangers help them, even
though all questions as to how the strangers had gotten there
undetected went unanswered. The strangers did state that they would
reveal how they gotten there but only if they were allowed to help
find a cure and then only after said cure was found. Finally after
consultation with government authorities back home, orders was
given to allow the strangers to help, but under close guard. In the
intervening weeks the strangers showed an impressive amount of
knowledge on the disease and its makeup. So much so that the
authorities began to suspect they may have been responsible for the
disease outbreak. Secretly orders were given that if a cure was
found, that the strangers were to be immediately arrested for
questioning. About six weeks later they had a cure for the disease
that the world was now calling the Antarctic Plague. It took an
additional couple of weeks to design and formulate an air borne
version of the antidote to dispense it all over the world. Once
this factor of the cure had been completed, the military proceeded
to the quarters of the strangers to arrest them. It was planned to
arrest them while they were asleep, yet when the soldiers got to
the strangers quarters, the strangers were gone. The base alarm was
sounded. One of the most intense manhunts in mankind's history was
conducted on the Antarctic continent, the surrounding seas, and
neighboring islands. How the strangers had gotten off the base
without being seen or detected was considered impossible. Meanwhile
the dispensing of the cure had commenced and it was working. So the
governments of the world, unable to explain how the strangers had
first appeared and then disappeared, decided to keep knowledge of
their help on the cure one of the most protected secrets in
history. Meanwhile a theory was proposed that there must be another
hidden structure on the Antarctic continent that the strangers had
come from. It was also proposed that these strangers had developed
the pathogen and released it on the scientists who were exposed,
somehow while they were outside The Structure in the open air.
There was just no other explanation for how the disease was
released on mankind. It was believed the strangers had, through
some way unknown to the military, had evaded them when they left
The Structure and had returned to their hidden base. After three
weeks of fruitless searching all efforts to find the strangers or
their hidden base was called off. It took the resources of the
surviving governments fully five weeks to saturate the atmosphere
of the earth to fully eliminate the disease. It was still years
later until all of the world surviving population was convinced
that the disease was dead.
It took the surviving governments of the
world eleven years to put the world back together. National
boundaries were changed to bring the collapsed nations back into
the world. After restructuring there were now only nine major
nations on the earth, although there was still dozens of small
countries, which refused to be integrated into another nation. The
nations in an effort to help each other survive got together to
distribute available resources so no one country suffered any undue
hardships, although there were hardships aplenty to go around. Out
of this joint effort, a new world council was formed called United
Earth, whose primary mandate was the preservation and rebuilding of
humanity. It was later determined by world scientists that the
disease that had devastated humanity had indeed been genetically
engineered, first to be undetectable by mutating and mimicking
other commonly known pathogens, and second to mutate it's victims
to another state of existence, the nature of which they now
believed was not human. All indications pointed to the fact the
disease had been engineered for another species of being. It was
humanity's misfortune that it was susceptible to it