The Russians

The year was 2050 and Russians ruled the Earth. Any bit of the world not destroyed was now decorated with the trash of drinking binges and sunflower seeds. The planet reeked of dried fish and mayonnaise.

Those alive didn't quite understand how things had gotten to be exactly the way they were, but it was clear enough that life sucked and hope for something happier was, for the foreseeable future, a sad and useless exercise.

Something had gone terribly wrong with the doctrine of mutual destruction. That is to say, only one side appeared to have been destroyed in a (what really was quite inevitable) little nuclear weapons exchange. Owing to a perpetual nervousness stomped into the Russian DNA by thousands of years of bad weather, worse food, and geographic purgatory, the Motherland seems to have been just that much quicker to respond to a flicker of the world's computers in late 2045, when human history was dumped into a vat of borscht.

The hobbling masses that live on today, of course, know very little about any of that, as, in a nuclear holocaust, the flow of information is less a world wide web and more a rumor floating in the wind. Plunged into this isolation and ignorance, most people, oddly enough, still managed to arrive at a common verdict: some alien race from a distant sea-planet had conquered the Earth and fed somehow on the joy and hopes of human civilization.

But they were wrong. It had only been the Russians.