Cloverfield, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Throw the Mystery Box into the Sea
Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t seen the films, obviously. Had a little Cloverfield marathon this weekend, and thought it might be fun to have a crack at piecing the world of the films together. I know the jury’s still out on the degree to which the films properly overlap – alternate dimensions ahoy – but figured I’d try and weave it together into one unfortunate world.
Haven’t really done anything like this before, so thank you to
@Mumby and
@Japhy, your list styles in particular were of great help in constructing the final product.
---
America still bears the scars of 2008. The economy, already on the verge of overheating, never fully recovered from the annihilation of New York. Any remaining trust in the political system crumbled overnight when the Bush administration gave the infamous early-morning order to initiate Hammerdown and throw every MOAB within range at Manhattan. As bedside alarms went off, and It stubbornly refused to die, George W. Bush became only the second president in U.S. history to authorise the deployment of nuclear weapons. He remains the first and only to use them on American soil.
When the dust finally settled, It’s corpse lay motionless in what had been Central Park. We still don’t know what it was. A replica of It’s skeleton went on display at the Smithsonian in 2013 – It’s real bones are far too irradiated for a public exhibit – and drew record crowds, but we have been able to ascertain precious little about It. Whatever It had been, it had reduced New York from the “City That Never Sleeps” to a graveyard in less than eight hours.
Meanwhile, hell descended on Washington. Millions marched in the streets demanding to know why the government hadn’t been It coming, or arguing either for or against it’s fallout management strategy. Congressional Democrats wilfully threw the book at the White House. Bowing to popular demand, an impeachment process on rocket boosters raced through the House of Representatives, although the president would be given a metaphorical stay of execution given its proximity to election day. Barack Obama, on the cusp of the Democratic nomination when It arrived, would sweep to victory in November and end John McCain’s political career.
The economic recovery proved extraordinarily difficult. The NYSE stock exchange had set up shop pretty quickly in Chicago, but the domino effect of insurance companies going under, followed by several of the big banks, overwhelmed the White House. The economic migrants from the tri-state area alone prompted a rat race for what jobs remained in cities across the country; the mayors of America’s largest cities became celebrities overnight as their available work forces surged, even as employment plummeted. Neither the assassination of Osama Bin Laden – by Seal Team, drone strikes seeming too close for comfort after Hammerdown – or the dumping of Jim Webb made an impact on the president’s abysmal approval ratings. And when Mitt Romney crumbled under the pressure during the Republican primaries, victim of a groundswell of anger at The Politicians! And Bankers! Who Had Failed To See It Coming, the right’s unity ticket took to the stage in Tampa. Nobody was surprised when the Huckabee campaign swept through the swing states – the early calls of Ohio, Florida, and New York were the death knell for the ailing Democrat campaign nationwide.
Nobody remembers much about the first few years of the Huckabee administration. Much like with the second Bush administration and 9/11, students of political history were prone to skip the malaise of 2013, 2014, and 2015 and turn straight to the chapters on the Lake Charles War. Nobody much knows how that one started, either. Conspiracy theories abounded again, but They were gone as soon as they’d arrived. A series of gradually wider blackouts preceded Their appearance over Lake Charles, Louisiana. They detonated something caustic over Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, and set about on a bombing campaign over Cajun country. Local police and the National Guard swiftly stood aside as the White House rolled the military in town, but they weren’t much good against what dropped from Their ships either. Within hours, much of Louisiana, and later Texas, became a battleground. In many places, the air hung toxic. Crops rotted. Animals died. People burned.
Through brute force, although less gung-ho than in 2008 for political reasons, the military managed to take back the southern seaboard. We’re all familiar with the stories of that – the raising of the flag over Minute Maid Park; the naval bombardment of Galveston; the burning of the Texan oil fields; the heroism of the New Orleans search rescue teams (petitions to put Bayou, the nation’s favourite German Shepherd, on the twenty dollar bill had surprising grassroots traction). As Huckabee remarked after They died, we know little of God’s creation, but we know much of human nature. It had all the makings of an American success story until their defeat prompted the frying of all electronics as far as Appalachia. Urban areas shut down, what remained of the economy went into freefall, and Americans huddled in the dark until, when things returned to something approaching normality, they trudged in line to boot Huckabee from office.
Economic stagnation and energy crisis brought with them fresh challenges. The Villaraigosa and Walsh administrations invested heavily in fields of solar panels in the western plains, only to meet head-on the intransigence of western Republican governors and elected officials. Protests erupted yet again, and Montana’s governor was propelled to political stardom for his “take those shining bastards down” comment, caught live on CNN as the president flew into Billings. Villaraigosa himself would resign just over eighteen months into office, as the gold of the L.A. boom turned an ugly shade of dehydrated yellow amidst a bribery scandal, but President Walsh kept the administration chugging along, beating back an ultimately anticlimactic Republican challenge in 2020 but failing to garner much enthusiasm either way.
Then again, American politics in the late-2010s and early-2020s was not a particularly enthusiastic place. The population looked elsewhere for that, especially when they finally replaced their TVs and iPads. Eccentric billionaire Elon Musk was the source of much of that, amazing enthralled fans with new technologies at a time where life consisted of rebuilding much of the old. His collaboration with various global governments on manned and unmanned orbital launches, and his regular appearances on Colbert, Kimmel, and Taylor, made him by far the most popular man in America. His “Look Up” ethos and insistence that America’s energy future could be secured out there in the cosmos through technological innovation caught the moment. Was it entirely realistic, or sensible? Not a jot. But it tapped into the optimism that Americans hadn’t truly felt for over a decade. His 2020 donation of $1 billion to the Treasury to help pay down the national debt – described by the man himself as a “wedding present for the nation” after his marriage to MacKenzie Tuttle (née Bezos), and a cheap stunt by his detractors – was the news event of the summer. Both the GOP and the Democrats (to Walsh’s uneasy attention) wanted him on their ticket – enough to push through the Equal Opportunity to Govern bill, ironically only after Orrin Hatch himself had vacated his Senate seat for Mia Love. Musk would pass on a slap-dash 2020 bid, and keep himself busy at NASA during Walsh’s rather lacklustre second term.
Musk would walk it in ’24, of course. He was hardly one of America’s best presidents, but he was one of the more fun. Stymied at home after eschewing party labels to win the White House as an independent, he focused his attention on foreign policy, with the Shepherd programme the forefront of the Musk administrations’ international efforts. The pact was signed at the G8 in Montreal, with only minor rumblings from the Kremlin, still transitioning to a post-Putin political system, and Tom Mulcair, disgruntled at being overshadowed in his own backyard. The groundwork had been laid under the Walsh administration, and Musk wasted no time in pushing the Montreal Pact to action with the enthusiastic support of Johnson and Hamon. The mandate of the International Space Station would be extended further to include work on a particle accelerator and a plan to finally crack the riddle of perpetual motion. The world was watching – and kept watching, given the rate of failure when the Shepherd went online. Rumours that Musk pressured NASA and partners for more frequent testing, pushing the machine harder and harder in the run-up to the 2028 election, cannot be confirmed.
On 4 February 2028, the Shepherd team tried again. For a brief, wonderful moment, hope. There’s a famous snap, lost to history now, of President Musk standing on the Resolute Desk, arms outstretched in triumph, a beautiful snapshot of the twenty-six second period where a better world seemed, finally, to have arrived. And then the dimensions cracked, the ISS vanished, and It appeared on the South Lawn. As major cities around the world suddenly found their CBDs occupied by beasts from another dimension, the world sighed, wearily, and lurched back into crisis.
List of Presidents of the United States (2001-)
2001-2009:
George W. Bush (Republican)
2000 (with Richard B. Cheney) def. Albert A. Gore, Jr. (Democratic), Ralph Nader (Green)
2004 (with Richard B. Cheney) def. John F. Kerry (Democratic)
2009-2013:
Barack H. Obama II (Democratic)
2008 (with James H. Webb, Jr.) def. John S. McCain III (Republican)
2013-2017:
Michael D. Huckabee (Republican)
2012 (with Newton L. Gingrich) def. Barack H. Obama II (Democratic)
2017-2018:
Antonio R. Villaraigosa (Democratic)
2016 (with Martin J. Walsh) def. Michael D. Huckabee (Republican)
2018: Resignation of President Antonio R. Villaraigosa (Democratic)
2018-2025:
Martin J. Walsh (Democratic)
2018: Senate confirmation of Terrycina A. Sewell (Democratic) as Vice President
2020 (with Terrycina A. Sewell) def. Ryan K. Zinke (Republican)
2025-present:
Elon R. Musk (Independent - 'Look to the Stars')
2024 (with Randall M. Hultgren) def. Louis B. Gohmert, Jr. (Independent Republican), Carlton W. Reeves (Independent Democratic)
2028: Declaration of nationwide State of Emergency