The newspaper is missing from the doorsteps of homes and hotel lobbies. The stores are shuttered and the railway, stalled. Inside a store, a TV flickers the news, but not the local news – reporters never bothered to show up.

This is South Korea, less than 24-hours after Blizzard released the StarCraft 2 Beta on an unsuspecting public.

South Korea, known for an exceptionally high national APM rating (actions per minute), now stands like an ant hill, a barren exterior enclosing a population busying beneath with menial labor.  But while an ant colony’s actions provide for the greater good, these South Koreans engage in self-centered Player vs Player matches, unflappable in their pursuit of nothing more than a  commendable win/loss ratio.

“There is no time for productivity,” says a young man, his fingers clacking on a keyboard. “By day, we practice. By night, we humiliate Americans.”

Incumbent President Lee Myung-bak, the last man, twists open the folding shades to his penthouse loft and observes the streets below him, noticing the sudden  surplus of stray cats. It will be only hours, he suspects, before felines take the city — days before South Korea becomes a kitten nation.

Not every citizen received a beta key. As President Lee Myung-bak peddles his bicycle across the empty city, he hears screams followed by gunshots, then almost-silence of digits clicking at hot keys. The streets are quiet as personal wars rage in the homes. Brothers fighting brothers. Mothers slapping daughters.

The President’s bicycle rolls around the wooden barricades of Kunsan Air Base, the United States military installment. Myung-bak has had his share of problems with the installment: that it is run by a couple brats from Texas, a place he knows and cares little about. These “cowboys” are his only hope now. Them. Their fort. And their military-grade EMP.