The Millennial Falcon
In the Star Wars movie, whenever Han Solo needed to go somewhere fast, he would kick his spaceship into the faster than light hyperdrive. As I thought back on the pre-collapse world, there were two back-to-back events that kicked collapse into hyperdrive. The hurricanes that hit North Carolina and Florida in late 2024, and the fires in Southern California in early 2025.
The news media, having been trained to ignore the current and upcoming pandemics of that time, never even mentioned the dangers of the widespread infections that would affect the population for years to come.
It answered the question of why there were so few people left after the whole thing got rolling. Medical aid was decimated, hospitals were destroyed, doctors and support staff had their hands full trying to escape the disasters, or save their families and homes, and the general population had their immediate survival in mind rather than something they couldn’t see.
But it was the thing in the dark, the thing they couldn’t see, that eventually came for them and their families.
Covid had a party as it was allowed to spread unchecked and the previously slow, evolution of bird flu, given free rein, rapidly mutated to achieve, the much feared, human to human transmission.
Even as these events were happening, most people were still ignoring these dangers, and I’m convinced that the death of the old world had a lot to do with the intentional ignorance of humans. By the time they realized what was happening, it was way too late to even try to stop it.
Some people, like me, had avoided the virus and made it through, everyone else got sick and died because there was no one left to help.
When the people in positions of power and influence began to get too sick to function anymore than the whole societal structure broke down, it was madness from there on out.
I’m still not sure if I’m glad to be alive or not. I didn’t really mind the apocalypse because it meant fewer annoying people around, but there was also less food, less shelter, more dangerously unhinged individuals like the ones chasing us and, well, if I’m being honest, Dolly leaned toward dangerously unhinged, but at least he was on our team.
It was a game of Fantasy Apocalypse where you tried to pick winners to join your team in the hope of having folks around that would support your bid for the ultimate Super Bowl win in the end times. I held on to a little of my old world self-interest in that, as much as I liked this team and as much as my new-found altruism guided my actions I really wanted, more than anything, to find out if the Tiki Bar at the end of the world was still serving Mai Tais.
Please help people who need your help if you can.
We are collectively ignoring the problematique, ain't we‽