The explosion took me by surprise, even though it shouldn't have. I don't know if frogs really sit around in a pot that gets heated up slowly, but people sure do. Well, I sure do. I've been reading about mass shootings, bombings, and other elaborate forms of suicide my whole life. Frankly, even though I had all the right attitudes about gun control, mental health, and so on, I've never paid much attention to the news.

We’d gotten an honest-to-God corporate headquarters a couple of years earlier. Nothing too flashy, we just occupied an empty office building a couple blocks away from Austin’s grocery store. We’d also occupied several other old warehouses and factories in the area. In addition to just, well, space, we’d been buying up other companies too. Sometimes just a license, but I’d found that when we were looking for synergistic opportunities it was usually easier to just find an applicable startup or someone who already had machines and processes in place, and buy them out entirely.

For example, the first company we nabbed was a little startup that had been building a new “disruptive” autocad system. Intuitive, user-friendly, powerful, etc. and blah blah blah. But Akins, Austin, the Beards, and the stable of engineers on staff drooled over it, and pretty soon we were using it for all our design work. I don’t really see how it helped, but I was told it cuts costs, sped design time, and reduced the likelihood of failed prototypes.

We’d also started building cars. Well, not cars really, but trailers, tractors, mine trucks, forklifts, and other industrial and commercial-type vehicles. And we owned a few thousand acres of farmland – mostly in Minnesota but there were chunks throughout the country too. What else? Shipping, we were incorporating our own freight company. We built enough large and oddly shaped goods that running our own shipping line looked necessary. Construction, of course. And, obviously, our manufacturing lines had only grown.

Meanwhile, police forces worldwide were using less and less-lethal force. But people were assaulting cops far, far more often. Mass shootings were skyrocketing. Where it had been a monthly or maybe weekly thing when I was a kid, it wasn't terribly uncommon to hear about multiple active shooters on a daily basis. Same for suicide bombers – numbers were sharply on the rise there, too, despite gutting the actual terrorist organizations.

At the time, I’d been overlooking these trends entirely. Some bits I’d noticed, like a rise in domestic violence and addiction, but the more dangerous items were easily disguised by more favorable trends. While the number of incidents was on the rise, bombings and shooters were killing fewer and fewer and doing less damage – when they targeted a military target or other hardened installation bombs and shooters often did no damage at all. There was infrastructure being built in even full civilian zones that reduced bomb impacts too. Short Plasma Steel walls channeled explosions upward without making open spaces feel enclosed, Plasma Steel posts along sidewalks prevented cars from getting too close to buildings, Plasma Steel doors that couldn't be shot through; it all reduced body counts even as more and more people destabilized. And of course, cops could wade in and deal with offenders with all the confidence they could strap on. But no one really talked about most of that when we designed or sold it. The walls were handy because they were far easier to keep clean – you could take graffiti off a Plasma Steel sheet about as easily as you could remove dry erase marker. The posts would look pristine no matter how often an inattentive driver scraped past. Doors didn’t get dented or scuffed by feet and boxes.

The other reason I didn't notice how much had changed was plain old desensitization. Shootings and bombings had been dominating the news since before I was born. Sure, lots of people liked to talk about how much worse things were now, but they've always talked like that. People still read, people still shopped, people still wasted time on entertainment and people still found ways to be proud of their lives. People also found ways to ruin their lives, to hurt the people around them, to get themselves lost in nihilism and despair. Movies and video games weren't any more shocking than they were a few decades ago, so clearly violence wasn't different either.

When the bomb threw my car up into the air, the only emotion I remember feeling was embarrassment. There was some pain, sure, but not much. The whole car basically jumped a few feet up and then crashed back down. I was wearing my belt, and the force of both the bomb and landing basically just shoved me into the bucket seat. I wasn't even shocked, or I didn't feel like I was shocked. I knew it was a bomb – as soon as I’d started to pull out of my parking spot it went off.

The embarrassment was because I really didn’t think there was a good reason to target me. Wasn't I the largest employer in the country? Wasn't I going out of my way to take care of the people I put out of work? I was constantly listening to my accountants, led by boring little Ashley, whine about how much money we were wasting on non-productive employees. Never mind that we were still a privately held corporation (meaning no shareholders beyond the five owners, who all didn't care about profit for various reasons), and never mind that we literally had more cash than we could invest meaningfully. Sarah seemed to take it personally that I didn't want bigger bonuses. I was happy to pay for a few thousand engineers who just brainstormed expansion ideas all day long, or mechanics who babysat machinery that never broke down, or even office drones who spent an hour or two a month updating forms. I wasn’t even the face of the company. Dr. Hansen was still the largest shareholder, and it was almost always him or Alan who went to the various press events.

The talking heads had been using the term 'extinction burst' a lot, lately. When a person doesn't get the response he expects from a behavior, humans tend to just repeat the behavior more aggressively and frequently. Think about the way you hammer your keyboard and click your mouse when your computer freezes. Now imagine that same sort of reaction when violent protest movements are failing.

Add in the intense economic dislocation, and that Plasma Steel Manufacturing was basically the face of all the changes, and there had been plenty of entirely credible threats on my life. The only surprise should have been that this was the first attempt to actually get through. Even though a dozen different people and groups had been arrested planning my assassination, it never really registered on me, emotionally.

I had been warned, sure; I had even been trained, sort of. We had security staff, and they had lectured me to death about what to do if an attack happened. If a shooter was in the building. If a shooter was outside the building. If there was a bomb threat. Or an actual bomb. Or a bomb inside, or outside, or multiple shooters, or if I was taken hostage, or if another shareholder was taken hostage. You'll have to forgive me if I started tuning out the contingency planning started as much as I tuned out the news reports.

Which is probably why I did exactly what I wasn't supposed to when my car hit the ground again. I shook my head, looked around – the cars on either side of me had been flipped onto their sides – and got out of my car. The car was one of ours. It looked kinda like a flying saucer – the inside had four bucket seats that could swivel to face each other and very few controls. It drove itself and ran on an electric Plasma Steel motor. The rounded saucer bits were the necessary crumple zones, though they could be used for storage too, although the cab itself was fully armored. They hadn't tested nukes on Plasma Steel yet, but cars just like mine had survived strikes from Tomahawk missiles. So in the event of an attack, I was supposed to stay inside.

Maybe I was more stunned than I remember because the building's security had begun responding by the time I got out. I had barely straightened up before I was tackled by a big white form. Getting tackled hurt way more than the bomb did. I broke my tailbone and wrenched my back hitting the pavement. I had to fire the guard after that. It was a very professional protective tackle, keeping me from cracking my head and covering me from lines of fire. Which is why I rehired him as a personal bodyguard when the board demanded additional protection for me and the other executives in the company.

I probably swore a bit and might have expressed more anger at the guard, if someone hadn't started shooting. I never saw the shooter until months later in court, but the cracks of the gun and the pings of ricochet were unmistakable. Action movies totally fail to prepare you. Gunfire is somehow both far louder and less impressive than movie gunfire. Maybe it was just the parking garage, but it seemed way louder than it ever did on a shooting range. The sound is still simpler, somehow. Just a sharp bark, not an explosion.

While I was thinking hard about the nature of the sound of gunfire and the pain in my back, building security got things taken care of. There were two shooters. One was disabled with a taser, the other attacker was wearing a cuirass that made it difficult to place the darts. Security was prepared for that though, they played gladiator and got him tangled in a weighted net.

In the end, it turned out that they were just two kids. They had gotten themselves riled up on various extremist forums online and fixated on me. I should remember what group it was, but there’s no way I could tell you what flavor of extremist they were without looking up the old news reports. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Islamic. Doesn't matter though. Things were getting chaotic – I had threats coming in from people who had lost their jobs, who missed the way the old world was, from white supremacists who hated my politics, from Islamicists who felt like I had enabled a new crusade, from conservatives who didn't like that I broke old industries, from liberals worried about the increased police power inherent in the armor. And on and on.

I wasn't the only one in the crosshairs. Every public figure and institution was getting targeted the same way. It was like a switch got flipped, and people had to find something to try and tear down. Ironic, then, that we could now build monuments that were proof against destruction.

It was weird. So much of my planning and behavior was driven by fear, except I wasn’t ever afraid. It felt like common sense. I stopped going anywhere outside of my armored vehicles and ensured that any staff close to me was fully vetted. We started delving into our employees' personal lives to an embarrassing degree. And there wasn't any push-back, either. Investigating everyone's internet history for extremist connections only started because there was a literal petition from my employees demanding that we do so. Over four-fifths of my workers literally asked me to investigate them. Awkward as it was, I didn’t feel like I could have said no; it was only a relief that I didn't find any problems. Other companies were doing the same thing, though investigations were usually top-down, and found and fired more people than I did.

I was surprised that no one else was bothered by bodyguards. El and Alan hardly seemed to notice their team. Austin immediately began working to socialize his – they had to watch hockey with him, and were required to have informed opinions on games, players, etc. And Hansen delighted in a couple of troopers who cheerfully chewed him out for social missteps, while he frequently demanded their hands and labor in this project or that.

John Akins, our armorer, didn't get a bodyguard, but he wasn't a public figure, either. He was suggested building a new HQ building, something unique to us. He wanted us to combine our manufacturing, offices, and even living quarters into a single building. I think he was actually getting bored with armor and wanted to test out some of the architectural possibilities that went beyond what were admittedly just pre-fab buildings. We could actually build large enough now to make an arcology a reasonable proposition. It would centralize our operations, it could be built modular to allow for expansion and redesign, it could showcase various techniques, it would allow for more collaboration between departments, and it would be far easier to defend. I wasn't entirely sure I liked the idea, but arcologies are cool. So we got started on planning it.

Another thing I found ironic, I got death threats because I lobbied against criminalizing extremist connections or further decriminalization of terrorist behavior. Things like Inciting violence, funding terrorism, and making threats, and building bombs were already against the law. I didn't see any good reason to punish people for their google searches. I felt like people would calm down as soon as social norms worked themselves out again, eventually people stop hammering on the keyboard. Besides, it was pretty easy to mitigate any damage that terrorists could cause. I mean, as bad as the violence appeared, domestic violence and suicide still took more people than random mass shootings and bombings.

Just look at what happened in Korea. Seoul went nuts over our new buildings, and they loved the drones too. There's actually a popular anime right now in Japan, starring anthropomorphized building drones. I'm not sure why, the drones are just a crane on tank treads, with some armature that allows it to climb the building its working on, and a mechanical arm that places the fittings.

Most developers built our buildings where new buildings were needed. Korea and Japan embarked on an incredible building program instead – they actually tore down their entire skylines and rebuilt them. Japan was a bit slower, taking the time to design their buildings and maintain their cities' unique skylines. Korea just went for speed. I honestly hated it – Seoul turned into an incredibly ugly city, reminiscent of soviet concrete blocks. Big, rectangular buildings with large windows. The same facings, the same shapes, the only variation was a building's footprint size and height.

But then they took advantage of their northern neighbor's isolation and skepticism. China was preoccupied with massive unrest and what may have been turning into a civil war, which meant that the North Korean regime was more on its own than normal. South Korea gave their citizens notice and began an airstrike campaign.

Predictably, DPRK artillery opened up, targeting Southern cities and installations. I don't know how much attention you pay to history, but North Korea's artillery installations were some of the most extensive in the world. I've seen video of the counterattack. It's pretty incredible, and I suspect it looked pretty similar to what some old WWI battlefields must have looked like. Booms and smoke filled the streets of Seoul. Some of the streets were filled with several feet of debris. What was more remarkable was that none of the debris was from fallen buildings, or pavement, or normal rubble. They lost a lot of greenery, but the debris itself was pretty much entirely made of shrapnel and dud shells. Imagine firing so many weapons that you fill streets with half a meter or more of just the bullets. No glass, no building rubble, no bodies. Just scraps of steel and brass covered with dust drifting down between pristine white buildings.

It was the greatest sales pitch Plasma Steel ever had.

The world got lucky, too. North Korea only fired four nuclear missiles. One of those missiles hit and blasted a military base just south of the demilitarized zone. I think some of the Plasma Steel doodads on the surface may have been damaged, but it was hard to tell, as most of those doodads got blasted into orbit when a conventional attachment failed. But the bunkers held out just fine, and only about a hundred soldiers caught on the surface were killed. As long as it was properly anchored, Plasma Steel in the middle of the two hundred fifty kiloton blast came out looking like new. The stuff didn't even hold the residual radiation, just rinse it with water and a piece of plasma steel would read perfectly clean to a Geiger counter.

A second missile malfunctioned and fell into the ocean. A third was shot down over Japan without any damage. The fourth was intercepted and exploded over the Pacific on its way to Hawaii, killing two fighter pilots. It looked like North Korea may have had more missiles, but the airstrikes took care of them before any more launches could happen.

In the end, South Korean troopers forcefully reunified the country with remarkable ease. A few Northern resistance movements added to the violence of the times, but I don't think anyone minded much. In the end, the only real political fallout that the Korean government faced was complaints about the evacuation order given before the bombing began. After seeing how it all turned out, people wanted to have watched from the windows on the top floor of their buildings instead of in dark interior bunkers.