[Pripyat, Soviet Union. 26th April 1986]
Open on an INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX INTERIOR, as the workers are going about their daily business, when a harsh ALARM sounds. Instead of causing panic, the workers continue their conversations and slowly file outside, lining up casually while young management figures earnestly write things down on a CLIPBOARD, clearly eager to impress. It's a FIRE DRILL.
Close in on one worker in the courtyard, lagging behind. As his co-workers stream back inside, he hangs back, getting one last puff on his cigarette before heading back into the imposing building to work. The camera follows him as he nods acknowledgement to his colleagues, and he sits wearily back down at his workstation.
Glancing down at his vintage monochrome green-tinged monitor, a look of surprise comes across his face at what the readout says. He turns his head and opens his mouth to confer with a colleague, but before he can get a word out his surprised face is lit up with a blinding white FLASH OF LIGHT as we cut to-
Interior, Soviet-era tenement block. A harried looking woman sits in her chair as two SMALL CHILDREN noisily run around the cramped flat, prompting ire from their harassed mother. A photo on the threadbare dresser indicates that this is the wife and family of the previously shown worker.
The same flash of light illuminates the apartment from the small window, followed by a low, echoing boom as the porcelain figurines on the dresser shake and topple over. The children stop their game and turn fearfully to their mother, who hurries to rush OUTSIDE to get a view of what's happening.
Outside, the whole neighbourhood is bunched up outside the building, with looks of shock and disbelief on their faces. The mother raises her hands to her mouth in shock, then holds her children close to her, as the camera pulls out and swings around, across a city skyline complete with newly-constructed FERRIS WHEEL, to what they're all looking at – the enormous power plant dominating the horizon, with one whole corner of the outline missing and black smoke pouring from where reactor 4 used to be, with dazzling rainbow-coloured flashes of light seen streaking between the gaps in the clouds. The camera pulls up through the clouds, showing off some of those rainbow-coloured light flashes as we pass through, and continues to pull up above the plume, eventually pulling out to a global level where we see the entirety of the European continent, with the ominous radioactive cloud gradually completely enveloping it.
CUT TO BLACK, TITLE CARD.
***
We've reached post number 23 now, and if this were a TV show this would be around the time when we'd get an origin story episode. Of course, if this were a TV show then the critics would be raging about the episode that only lasted long enough to ask the single question about the Lady Gaga lyric, but still. While the above was happening thousands of miles away, a young couple in Scotland were expecting their first born child, no doubt fearing what kind of world they were bringing him into while the news warned of nuclear death-rain born of an accident half the world away. It would all be much easier and neater if I could point to a huge, world-shaping international incident that set my path in life before I had even so much as drawn my first breath, but beyond a punchline of “that explains a lot” for making jokes about the worst industrial accident known to mankind, it doesn't provide any answers for me.
I was a healthy, normal kid growing up in the western cultural golden age of the post-Reagan era 90s – well, as normal as you would expect anyone to be who carried the seeds of what I'd eventually become. I was scared of the fire drill at school, had a pet goldfish (called Tricoloure) and liked to build roads out of pencils for driving my toy cars around, perfectly happy and healthy – until one fateful school trip to the science museum. While I was separated from my group, I felt a soft tap from something dropping on my shoulder, before a small pinch and I was blinded with pain, from the bite of a RADIOACTIVE GENETICALLY MUTATED SPIDER! Unfortunately since this is real-life and not Hollywood or comic books, instead of developing superpowers it just made me critically ill and destroyed my immune system for life, leading to my physically weakened state while my mind grows ever stronger, fuelled to new and terrifying power levels by my hatred of the unfairness of humanity, waiting to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Mwahahahahaaa!
Sadly, the truth is a lot less interesting, and a lot less suitable for adapting into the screenplay of a summer blockbuster. Up until I was 13, everything came so easily to me, problems always had a clear answer and my memory was as clear as a photo album, until... it just wasn't any more. Everything clouded over. To me, I was just worried about how hard school had suddenly become, but according to my parents it concerned them just how tired I was all the time. It could have come from a vaccination, a medication that I was on, or just a failure to shake a common cold, but while everyone else around me powered through these minuscule hurdles, I tripped, and have never caught up. I've learned to adapt and find ways to live my life outside of the regular path, along my “Scenic Route”, but I'm not sure that I'll ever have an answer as to why for some reason all of my early promise just faded away.
I feel like I should end on some sort of high, some sort of pearl of wisdom about how it's all made me stronger or that I'm a better person for having known suffering, but it wouldn't be true. I had a lot taken from me, and I still don't think that it was fair. But there's no-one to fight, nothing that I can blame for it all. There might have been mistakes and in the heat of the moment there can always be something to pour all the anger into for leading me here, but it doesn't change that it happened, and it happened to me. And no, that's not fair, and it's not ok. And it never will be.
