The Tomorrow War

Today: Venezuela / Tomorrow: The World

“Daddy, how long will we be at war?”

“Not that long, buddy. We have superior numbers and more effective firepower. Commander says two weeks, tops. I’ll be back before you know it.”

My son was snuggling his octopus plushie. I tucked the two of them in even more tightly.

“Will we have to be in charge forever?”

“No, we just need to lock down their nuclear sites,” I confirmed. “Once their kinetic capability is taken off the table, we’ll put our people in position to take over and manage the day to day. It’ll be a minute before they’re allowed to govern themselves again. We don’t want to repeat the same mistakes.”

He was at the age where peer pressure was a problem. “Some of my friends at school say we’re just stealing oil.”

My gaze sharpened. “First of all, that’s our oil. We laid claim to it a long time ago. They’re stealing from us. Second, we’re putting them down before they destroy the entire world. They’ve been pumping our people full of pollution for a century now. It’s important they no longer have a lodgment inside either hemisphere. Moving forward, we set the terms.”

The boy matured twenty years before my eyes. “I get it. I don’t want to be a bully, but they didn’t leave us any choice.”

I was proud of the young sage. “The Earth is an amazing place, buddy—and by right, it belongs to us.”

My son smiled ear to ear.

“I can’t wait to see the surface.”