The shield

Abstract

A young boy grows up in a future world buried under snow, a great factory and research lab with his father at the head. As he grows he is torn between the desire to be like his beloved father and the equally strong desire to get out from under his shadow in the eyes of those around him, in a world where there is nowhere else to go. Between chapters of this story, a trio of smaller stories set in the present day tells the tale of how the world reached the state shown in the future. Each is the same basic story of the invention of the titular shield that brought about mankind's collapse, told from the perspective of a different observer: once from the shield's inventor, once from a government agent who helped make it a weapon, and once from a former spy recalling parallels to historical events. In viewing parallel events from each of these smaller pieces the reader is able to see how all of the individual actions are rational despite the wholly catastrophic result, and the works also fill in the blanks in each other's stories of what happened as a whole.