Beilan Island

"The truth is much more complicated than you think."

This article is written from a Lore perspective. It contains spoilers and different reference materials might be contradictory.

Beilan Island (北兰岛) is a fictional island under the jurisdiction of the Shanghai municipal government in China, and the site of the two Beilan Island Incidents.

Origins

The relics site designated “Class A Technological Research Base No. 27”, where GAVIRUL was found in 1962, is located 67 meters under the ground of the island. The relics site was closed shortly after GAVIRUL's discovery when the site was deemed to hold no more interesting artifact. Several incidents had occurred during the uncaring exploration of the sites, releasing radioactive Collapse Fluid. The entrance to the relics site was completely blocked when buildings were constructed over it in 1974, during Shanghai's urban expansion.

First Beilan Island Incident

The First Beilan Island Incident occurred on 17 January 2030 and resulted in a century-long cloud of Collapse Fluid wiping out organic life in many regions on Earth and causing massive numbers of Eurosky Low-Emission Infectious Disease (ELID) infections, plunging the modern world into chaos and eventually causing struggling nations to start World War Three.

Background

The outer barrier of the forgotten relics site was breached during a civilian drilling operation, and the radiation contained in the site leaked to the surface, infecting humans with ELID. The violent infected were handled by the Special Circumstances Armed Police Force (SCAPF), operating under the name Extraordinary Circumstances Peacekeeping Police Force to avoid public outrage, and the administration of Shanghai simply quarantined Beilan Island and did not report the infections to the Chinese government, underestimating the gravity of the situation.

ELID cases died out after the quarantine and 15 months after the infections, the lockdown level of Beilan Island was lowered to class 4. This lack of control and supervision enabled the incident to take place.

Incident

The incident occurred at 15:17 on 17 January 2030. According to the Chinese government, seven middle schoolers had gone past the quarantine wall and were attacked by ELID infected. The SCAPF had deployed four agents equipped with AA-03D police weapon platforms. The small task force proved incapable of fighting the infected and tried to seal the relics site entrance with explosives. The explosion caused the entire site to collapse, suddenly compressing large amounts of Collapse Fluid. The heightened particle density suddenly increased the temperature inside the relics site, and resulted in an immense explosion that leveled Shanghai. The tremor of the explosion could be felt as far as Hong Kong. Tens of thousands of tons of Collapse Fluid were expelled in a large cloud into the stratosphere and over a hundred propelled storage crystals containing collapse fluid exited the atmosphere in the explosion and later landed in Eurasia or in the Pacific ocean over a thousand kilometers away. As ground zero of the incident, Shanghai became the very first Red Zone, making any investigation of the relic impossible for dozens of years.

Aside from Shanghai, the cities of Suzhou, Wuxi and Nantong were also instantly leveled while China's eastern seaboard was quickly hit by the collapse fluid cloud that expanded over a 1500 km-wide area, causing 400 million ELID casualties within the first hour. The total contaminated zone first estimated at 1.5 million square km was limited to 1.1 million square km due to a northwestern high-pressure anticyclone strengthening the westward wind. Thanks to telecommunications being usable because the explosion did not generate an electromagnetic pulse, 15 millions peoples were evacuated from the contamination zone while government members who had taken refuge in the Beijing bunkers moved into the new capital of Xi'an. About 870 millions died as a direct result of the explosion and panic spread in the region, with Hong Kong enforcing a curfew the same day to control looting.

The United Nations Relics Agency (UNRA) quickly became involved in the situation due to the presence of several members in Hong Kong at the time, including Raeder Rossartre. They launched Operation Noah to evacuate citizens from contaminated regions, but the Chinese government initially refused international help. Later investigations have put the true origins of the incident into question, due to the SCAPF team not having enough firepower to ignite the armored collapse fluid crystal capsules in the first place.

Aftermath

The incident would render about 36% of the world's surface unlivable (other sources mention “half of the world”). Regions in the collapse fluid cloud's path were devastated and nearby lands saw a surge in ELID cases. The cloud expanded into the stratosphere, blocking satellite communication in many countries. As the cloud traveled, industrial sites were lost and many companies had to shut down. Three years after the incident, venturing outside of closed environments was harmful to humans, sparking interest in robotics to take over as workers and soldiers. It took a century for the main cloud to subsume, but lesser Collapse Fluid clouds were estimated to keep being a threat to mankind for the next 100 000 years.

UNRA director Raeder Rossartre was a key figure in the aftermath of the incident. Rossartre participated in multiple plans to save populations from the collapse clouds, which fell through due to politics and social unrest. From 2031 to 2033, he penned the Beilan Island Incident Investigation Report, where he laid out his theory of the dark age promoting the formation of a world government to prevent the destruction of mankind. The disaster started a wave of conservatism worldwide. Europe started a new era of colonialism in Africa to compensate for lost land, while China and Russia focused on reclaiming contaminated industrial regions instead of abandoning them. Political finger-pointing and the rapid depletion of livable lands and basic resources worldwide degraded international political relations until World War Three broke out in 2045, further weakening nations.

Governments would only implement measures to evacuate populations from contamination zones after the end of the war, leaving many to die of ELID while searching for a Green Zone. Even then, weakened administrations and lack of financial resources led to poor resettling policies and created political instability. Only the rise of the URNC would eventually lead to the creation of effective refugees programs.

Another consequence of the incident was a drastic collapse of traditional faith systems worldwide. In the last United Nations world census in 2045, only 5% of mankind still adhered to a specific faith. Mass disillusionment was the result of the absence of salvation when the world was engulfed by what was equated to the apocalypse, and the rejection of self-redemption fueled self-interest and destruction. During and after World War Three, old faiths would be replaced by new faiths that promised transcendence instead of divine salvation, often through ELID infection.

Korea

Due to the westward winds, the second region to be hit by the expanding collapse cloud was the Korean peninsula, who suffered more than 10 million early casualties. The UNRA and the US garrison in South Korea quickly established dozens of safe zones which protected 1.1 million citizens by February 2030. American aerial surveillance reported that 5 millions inhabitants in North Korea took refuge beneath the Changbai Mountains. Later the same month, the US military left the area and moved to Japan.

On 3 March 2030, the Second Korean War started as North Korea invaded South Korea, forcing the UNRA to leave the country. Later in 2032, a UN congressional hearing revealed that the United States had tried to use the incident to pressure North Korea into accepting diplomatic demands, with the US army secretly preventing any North Korean citizen to cross to South Korea unless their government complied.

Japan

With the Korean peninsula lost to war, the UNRA's efforts focused on Japan, where the agency had many assets from the times of the Japanese Relic economic bubble. All regions of Japan up to the western border of Kanto were hit by the expanding collapse cloud, but the Kuroshio Current and a change of direction of the Far East winds shielded the rest of the country. Hokkaido was free of contamination and the Japanese government moved the capital to Sapporo, while authorizing the US military to use the island as their foothold in Asia. The silicon glass of the Tokyo subway and buildings made them easily convertible into radiation bunkers that sheltered more than 1.2 million survivors by the middle of April 2030, and the UNRA expanded its missions into studying the rapid changes in the local ecosystem.

Living conditions were still harsh for survivors and the Japanese government reluctantly agreed to a population transfer to Hokkaido through the Seikan Tunnel in May 2030 to preserve national unity. This only caused protests against accepting survivors in Sapporo, and the Japanese Cabinet, with support from USPACOM, elected against any more transfer. The local UNRA task force protested to the UN Security Council against American interference in Japanese politics, but before the General Assembly could convene, most of the pro-transfer members of the cabinet were arrested by US Marines on charges of endangering the Japanese Constitution. The cabinet denied any American interference and the Security Council was left unable to act.

On 24 May 2030, the Seikan Tunnel was demolished and the Japanese government warned the UNRA task force of the imminent sea, air and communication lockdown of Honshu, and sent US Marines to handle their evacuation as per Article 5 of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. The UNRA leader of the Tokyo Protected Zone, Sato Mayuka, resisted the Marines Colonel sent to order the evacuation and was shot in the leg. While most of the URNA staff was evacuated from Narita Airport, some like Rossartre managed to hide and stay in Tokyo. Now betrayed by their government and completely isolated from the rest of the world, the Japanese survivors organized in factions and infighting started, with the local JSDF servicemen being far too few to do more than keep control of Camp Mishuku. Using the Eastern Military Region’s communication group’s equipment to stay in contact with recon units in contaminated Japan, they learned of an ELID-immune individual in Nagoya, 16-years old Kawasaki Kazusa, and so the UNRA members and JSDF platoons launched a VIP protection operation in hope of finding a counter to collapse radiation, and save Tokyo.

The Tokyo soldiers met with Kazusa in the Shizuoka Mountains, where she had been evacuated by the Nagoya garrison after they had come under attack by fanatics who considered her the source of the contamination. After recovering Kazusa, Rossartre made use of his knowledge acquired as a relics scholar and tapped into the Russian nuclear submarine satellite communication network to contact Mikhail Tsvigun and ask for his help in evacuating the subject. Rossartre was outfitted with a Weight Bearing unit to reach Niigata, where they would be picked up and brought by sea to Vladivostok. As they departed on 19 June 2030, Camp Mishuku was attacked by the Tokyo factions who had learned of Kazusa from a JSDF traitor, and she was killed by a stray bullet. Rossartre brought her body to Niigata, where they were picked up at sea near Sado Island by the Russian nuclear submarine Alexander III. After learning the situation of Tokyo from Rossartre, Sato killed herself by jumping through the window of her hospital room. The fate of the Tokyo Protected Zone stayed unknown years after.

Russia

While the Russian Far East was spared by the collapse cloud, capsules of collapse fluid landed in the region, contaminating the Siberian Railway and Baikal-Amur Mainline, blocking rail traffic. Evacuation proceeded by air as the fluid leaking from the capsules didn’t reach the upper atmosphere. At this period, the new revolution that would bring back the Soviet Union was brewing. Thanks to Mikhail Tsvigun, Bolshevik groups gained sympathy in the Far East due to supporting the local populations with better information than the government. After saving Rossartre and shipping him to Moscow in July 2030, the Bolsheviks gained his insider knowledge on the Asian situation and also performed the autopsy of Kazusa's body, but did not found any counter to ELID.

After the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union in 2032, a reclamation project of the industrial facilities in contaminated Yellow Zones along the Siberian Railway started, christened the Siberian Lifeline Program. This program made heavy use of autonomous robots to ignore the issue of radiations and became a key component in the development of modern Tactical Dolls. The Soviets perceived the European Union's intervention in Ukraine in 2043 as an encroachment on their territory and replied by supporting East Germany during the German Civil War.

Americas

The collapse fluid capsules fallen in the Pacific ocean drifted to the coasts of North and Central America, from Alaska to Panama, and contamination started inland through sea breeze. In Canada, Yukon and British Columbia became contaminated zones.

In the United States, western cities from Anchorage to San Diego were the first hit by the collapse clouds. Unexpected collapse fluid explosions also occurred further inland, like in Salt Lake City and Phoenix. The FBI discovered that Relic technology companies had recovered capsules and transported them inland, where they had tried to open them through brute force. In August 2030, survivors fleeing the West Coast ran into infected areas inland, like Denver and Kansas. Washington had ignored the warnings of Rossartre in July 2030 because of his stint in Russia. Nevertheless, he was put to work on a plan for evacuation of the western United States. Incompetence from the Californian government and rejection of survivors by Green Zone populations led to the failure of the plan, and the US government built the New Boundary, a 2300 km long exclusion zone stretching from Port Arthur to Winnipeg. The New Boundary was complete by the end of December 2030, with little survivors managing to reach the eastern part of the country before it was complete. Rossartre would kill himself with a bullet to the head in Philadelphia on 15 January 2033, and his critique of the US response would lead to Washington expelling the UNRA from their New York headquarters.

The Latin American Alliance of 2038 was quickly dissolved, in no small part due to the intervention of the United States. Movements to bring down the New Boundary started in 2041, and in 2043 the US successfully invaded Canada and crushed anti-American movement in the Bahamas.

Europe

4 millions refugees had entered the Euro Zone by the third quarter of 2030. The arrival of refugees from Asia and the Middle East rapidly depleted European resources and formed cultural enclaves around refugees camps which bred conflict. Tensions appeared between members of the European Union which rejected refugees and those which accepted them. Winter 2030 was unusually cold and Europe was ravaged by snowstorm in December. Lack of heating fuel led to the death of an estimated 2 millions.

In 2035, spurred by the growing international distrust, the European defense-industrial complex experimented on collapse fluid compression in Northern Europe, causing the Northern Lights Incident. A new collapse fluid cloud destroyed the Scandinavian peninsula and was carried by ocean currents and seasonal winds from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea, causing further political turmoil and causing the exile of tens of millions of Central Europeans. This included most of Northern and Eastern Germany.

In September 2035, the European Union sought to transfer some of its refugees to North and South America, but no agreement was found. Southern Germany received most of the refugees, and when the German government decided to follow the neocolonialist movement of the EU instead of trying to rehabilitate the contaminated areas, violence started to brew between German citizens. Rumors of their political and industrial leaders leaving for the safety of Antarctica only worsened the situation.

In 2036, the European Union set aside their disputes with the Neo-Soviet Union and imported their skeletal frame Dolls to conduct the same disaster relief work the Russians were doing in Siberia. In just three months, critical transportation networks through Europe's Yellow Zones were established, enabling Green Zones to supply Yellow Zone survivors with protective equipment and vital resources to establish settlements and restart industrial production. Many countries introduced a lottery system to allow refugees to enter Green Zones. These contaminated regions far enough from critical areas were mostly spared the destructive effects of the war to come.

In 2042, the economic crisis in Ukraine, the largest non-contaminated country in Eastern Europe, led to an armed revolution in the eastern part of the country, and the Ukrainian Civil War broke out after the UN failed to mediate. When Kiev fell to East Ukraine, the EU finally intervened and mediated the split of the country during the Bucharest Agreement of June 2043, in an effort to stop a potential revolutionary wave in the rest of Europe. This was perceived by the Soviet as the EU encroaching on their territory. When the German Liberal Democrats and Christian Democratic Union invoked the National Emergency Act and conducted political arrests to stop the Social Democrats from dissolving the Parliament, the Republic Palace Murders took place on 14 November 2044 as protestors and the military police clashed, starting the German Civil War. The opposite factions being supported by the EU-US alliance on one side and the Soviets on the other side directly led to World War Three.

Antarctica

The relic hollow under Antarctica, found in 2025, became a prized shelter for the politically influential and the rich the world over. Due to the exploration and settlement project being entirely controlled by the URNA with the financial backing of private investors, the hollow was a politically neutral ground that would be left outside of a potential worldwide conflict. When World War Three broke out in 2045, a bit less than 10 million people declared independence and isolated themselves in the hollow.

Rest of the world

Afghanistan and Vietnam were among the first countries to be hit by the expanding collapse cloud. Refugees from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South Asia would pour into Europe after the incident.

Following the Northern Lights Incident of 2035, the surviving nations of the European Union turned desperate gazes toward Africa, which harbored expansive non-contaminated areas, and a new era of colonialism began. The EU was directly involved in the Lybian coup of 2037, which ended with Italy's full control of the country in 2041. The Second Algerian War started in December 2039.

Second Beilan Island Incident

The Second Beilan Island Incident occurred between 2094 and 2112.

Before the incident, the Antarctic Union's intelligence agency MID had learned that the Union of Rossartrism Nations Coalition were making efforts to enter the ruins of the Beilan Island relics site, a neutral non-militarized region. The site itself was not overly dangerous due to the release of its reserve of Collapse Fluid into the atmosphere during the first incident, but a resulting cloud had settled nearby and the United Nations Health Agency (UNHA) needed to investigate. The MID deployed agents to secretly infiltrate the UNHA team under operation Brief Blossom.

The observation mission went sour quickly when part of the UNHA team was killed by rioters, then the local Collapse Fluid contamination levels suddenly spiked, infecting multiple people with ELID and forcing local Coalition soldiers to kill the rampaging infected. A MID agent managed to transmit a message indicating the relics site contained GAVIRUL embryos before being killed. Beilan Island was later leveled by thermobaric bombs.

References

General List of Characters (Minor Characters) · List of Locations · Timeline · Rossartrism · Eurosky Low-Emission Infectious Disease · Epiphyllum · GAVIRUL Technology Assault Artillery · Automaton · Collapse Technology · Magrasea · OGAS · Parapluie virus · Pike · Relic Technology · Shrike · Tactical Doll · Weight Bearing Events Beilan Island Incident · World War Three · Operation Couatl · Incident Zero · Butterfly Incident · Safe House 3 Raid · Plan Parapluie · Great Retreat · Paldiski Incident · Fireworks Incident · Battle of the Dead Sea · First Antarctic War Factions 90wish · Antarctic Union · Fox Sisterhood · Germany · Global Rescue Foundation · Griffin & Kryuger · KCCO · Neo-Soviet Union · Pan-European Union · Paradeus · Sangvis Ferri · Union of Rossartrist Nations Coalition · United Nations · United States · Varjagers Corporations 16LAB · 42LAB · B.R.I.E.F. · Cyber Media · Galatea Corporation · Girard Group · I.O.P. · Svarog Heavy Industries · Ultilife · Universal Anything Services · WAVE