MORNING ARRIVED AND SO did a message from a friend. Sofia walked into Rick’s bunker, appearing flustered.

“What’s up?” he inquired. “Bad news?”

“It’s building. Yaz dropped by today on his horse. He was carrying no devices to avoid direct tracking, as usual. Said he was in town yesterday and a guy stopped him in the store. Dude started asking questions about where he lived and who else resided in the area. Yaz picked up on the fact that he was interested in us. It wasn’t clear to him if the interest was because he mentioned our gardens business, or for other reasons of the autocratic governmental kind. Not somebody truthful and apparently hiding something.”

“Did he mention what this person looked like?”

“Anglo. Mid-thirties. Not a hybrid or mech by the looks of it, although looks don’t matter much on that account.”

Rick’s brow furrowed. “Any discussion whether this person would come visit us unprompted and uninvited?”

“Apparently not, but you know these types. Slick as a whistle, as deceptive and underhanded as their AI gods enable them to be while the algos whisper sweet nothings in their ears. You can’t tell who’s genuine and who isn’t, or what ‘genuine’ means these days.”

She noticed his perplexed look. “You’re pressing your lips together again.”

“Uh huh. These events are too coincidental. It’s possible they are genuinely concerned you’re bartering too much stuff. But hey, when is the last time you did that in a big way except for that nice blanket or occasionally trading food for wood? Not enough to justify flagging or reprogramming, much less a visit. Damn it, I hate this constant post-Debacle surveillance cloud we live under and wish we had the ability to go back forty years for a do-over.”

Sofia walked to Rick’s chair, placing her hand on his. “I fear it would have evolved to this even without that event, dear. Regardless, I don’t see how this changes the plan. You need to stay on top of it. Whip through these last few as fast as you can, assuming you don’t go hoarse from blabbing. How many did you say remain?’

“Ten or fewer,” he snickered, “and I’m truncating my other concepts given the rush. I’ll get started this morning and bang out as many as possible.”

“Agreed. Let me know if I can assist in any way.”

“Sweetheart, you assist in every way,” he confided, patting her hand.

* * *

“I danced around this topic, the one that is so hard for me to regurgitate, on the state of the world and humanity nearly four decades after the Great Debacle. I avoided the topic because I had to work myself up to it. The various stories you’ll find in the other material I’m sending will provide different perspectives on what happened and what has transpired since that week in October 2037, that terrible week. I’ll give you a sense of it given my intention to inform you as per my purpose of this transmission.”

“As I may have stated previously, Sofia and I were in the mountains. We were camping and had ample provisions. Our first indication of the cataclysm was from another camper a distance away from us. He saw our smoke and yelled to douse our fire else we’d be accosted by people fleeing the cities for the mountains.”

“It’s too painful for me to describe my personal experience or Sofia’s during the following years of anarchy. If I can share anything, it’s that we got separated on two different occasions. The only reason we eventually found each other was that we had agreed to meet on particular times in that same camping location. It was no identifiable location, save for a few geologic idiosyncrasies in the mountainsides.”

“If I get the chance, I’ll cover our experiences of torment and despair at a future date. Suffice it to say that we saw the best and the worst humanity has to offer, with an extreme emphasis on the latter.”

“The lack of a few unifying, common ethics for humanity became vividly apparent to me during those years. Lawlessness reigned supreme, as did weaponry and other survival skills. Cunning was the key to survival along with sheer luck and chance. Although three billion were rather instantly slaughtered by the specially constructed viral agent, another billion-plus were killed by secondary effects.”

“Those effects are a heady list of misery and misfortune – nuclear arsenals unleashed, nuclear plants imploding, wars of power, local skirmishes, oligarchic struggles, group murders, rampant vigilante justice, rape and pillaging. Typical human travesties and rationalizations from time immemorial. Social structures eroded completely. I could go on, but I choose not to.”

“Instead, I’ll describe where we are today. A select few of those with financial or political control over the world before the Debacle were among the ones to ultimately gain control after the Debacle. Though certain of the pre-Debacle power mongers died in that event, many had previously established and executed their escapes to safe houses and eventual resurrections. Their stories can be summarized in a single page of woeful text.”

“In my opinion, the most visible effect of the Debacle was that humanity dispersed geographically. This shift began as early as the Coronavirus plagues of the 2020s. But with half the population now gone, the earlier inclination to live rurally became mandatory.”

“We had democratized new weapons of mass destruction. We had super-enabled virulent creations. And we had no other choice but to mitigate the risk of passing it on to each other through direct contact or airborne means. This meant the obvious human migrations away from anything like large population centers.”

“Mind you, nobody ever uncovered the true creators of the virulent agent involved. Some still pin it on a presumed, unseen alien presence associated with the obelisk’s appearance a few months before the event. But it’s clear the agent could have been constructed with the gene editing technology available to us in 2037.”

“For heaven’s sake, we had children in elementary schools at the time who were modifying the genetic code of microorganisms as a part of their biology classes. Granted, this activity was mostly bacterial in nature, but viral agents were often used as carriers of the modified code. Multiply this innocent usage in schools by hundreds of thousands, then combine it with untold numbers of garage tinkerers and lab personnel, whether well-intentioned or demented. It was an accident or intended debacle just waiting to happen.”

“But it was 2037. Nothing of note had occurred as yet, not beyond the obvious international finger-pointing in prior pandemics like Coronavirus in the early twenties. So, we kept proceeding on our merry way.”

“While the genetic tech and its useful applications quickly multiplied and got highlighted in the media, there were lots of unreported, off-target mishaps in back alley parlors. These produced a multiplicity of genetic freaks, accidents, misery, and death, but none of that was massively dangerous to the populace at large.”

“Then the obelisk arrived, or so the story was told. I never personally saw it, but many stories exist about its origins. It’s hard to know what’s real.”

“Sadly, we were just beginning to see positive fruits of our scientific advancements, the benefits of technology’s infinity curve in the latter stages of its upward climb. The varint community had grown from nominal numbers in the late twenties to hundreds of millions globally by 2037. I won’t go into detail on what was happening there, but for me, a thirty-eight-year-old, it was vivid, exhilarating, exciting.”

“I had a girlfriend sometime earlier who’d delved into transgenics. A ‘clipper,’ as society would say. Her sense of sight was amazing, garnered from the DNA of prey birds. She loved birds and through gene therapy grew colorful feathers on her back.”

“In other respects, some of my friends were chippers who used Wi-Fi-enabled, integrated chips to link instantly into various databases via direct visual or frontal cortex connections. Their knowledge and application of information was sheer wizardry. However, the ease at which this was now doable created a fine line from there to being directly controlled by expanded human-machine interfaces and the AI beasts behind them.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Then there were grippers and variations on that theme, often called ‘mechs.’ These hybrids used integrated robotics to complement their genetic modifications. Further to that, grippers and mechs were often tied directly into their own special databases and social networks. They could process facts and logic as well as perform physical feats beyond the imagination of most humans.”

“Whether one calls them varints or hybrids or transhumans or posthumans, I rarely met an augmented human I didn’t like. Most of them used their enhanced capabilities for positive ends, as if something within was driving them to be more universally, outwardly concerned than self-concerned. I personally saw these changes as valuable and hopeful for the future of our race, however hybridized it would end up becoming.”

“Their enhanced world perspective made sense to me. Think of being functionally tied into a worldwide database of information with the ability to easily recall our penchant for self-inflicted damage. That hybrid should have a broader view of how we needed to move forward as a species. Contrast this to a typical non-hybrid fed more by the innate insecurity, fear, and ignorant self-absorption of humanity, warped and amplified by belief-confirming media consumption.”

“Yet this new, hyper-hybridized world was rapidly degrading even before the obelisk arrived. For a variety of reasons, be it employment competition or jealousy or God knows what excuse, unaugmented humans felt threatened by the varint classes. Social media, as out of control and biased as it was at that time, became the strongest purveyors and distributors of this division and discord.”

“That dynamic had started much earlier in the century, where demagogues and other money and fame-grubbing political whores would actively pit race against race and peoples against peoples. All this corrosive narrative, while the media giants failed to police themselves, albeit purposely and profitably. By adding this new hybrid element to that already volatile mixture, division and dissent exploded like a gigaton nuke through the proverbial roof.”

“Then the obelisk crash-landed in Saskatchewan in August 2037. As one might expect, that event exacerbated the pre-existing discord between every group. Given the new threat from marauding aliens, everyone had their own deviating opinion. Many competing groups began to argue ferociously at each other, often leading to death and destruction.”

“An old friend of mine I’ve mentioned previously, Peter Scott, had a podcast in Boston at the time. Shortly after the obelisk landed, he and his small team set out to expose the various alternatives being discussed to defend Earth against such marauders, should they ever appear.”

“I understood from Peter that some of the alternatives pushed the edge of credibility. He blamed himself unreasonably for the growing global discord, claiming his podcast fanned the flames of division among humans and varints. He also blamed himself for loss of his friends, lovers, and family. No matter how I tried to dissuade him from that gloomy self-reflection, he was inconsolable.”

“A good Stoic might say to move on from there and face the stiff wind with a clenched jaw and grimace of perseverance. That’s the approach I took to the Debacle, though not Peter. I do miss the man, however, along with our energetic discussions on the meaning of life, science, you name it. I also miss Rodney, my Navajo friend, who was red-flagged a decade ago and is presumed dead.”

“Is Peter still alive? Perhaps. Can I contact him? No, not without compromising my plan. Though he would never willingly expose my existence, nobody is safe with the mind control and brain-reading mechanisms that exist today. Monitoring technology has gone hyperscale to devious ends.”

“Back to the obelisk, then. Here we were, in a time when technology’s infinity curve was shooting northward with every tick of the clock. Suddenly, a damn platinum-gold alloy obelisk shows up to pour gasoline onto the bonfires of burgeoning disharmony. You can read what happened after that time from the other sources. I can’t dwell on the topic, as it will take days I don’t have.”

“I want to summarize a few of the lasting effects, however. Cities became anathema for obvious reasons. Populations in close quarters were at severe threat, so humans and hybrids dissipated to rural areas. I doubt any true cities in the original sense are even left in the world. Consider all that investment gone to waste. Centuries of life and struggle; a true wasting of human endeavor.”

“The face of the Earth is now an extended matrix of smaller networks interconnected by roads and pathways. I doubt any local gathering of humans exceeds fifty thousand, and that would likely occur over an area of many square kilometers. Distribution networks were established to accommodate transit of food and manufactured goods.”

“In other words, there was an immediate migration of survivors to rural and unpopulated areas of the world, save for dry and desolate areas like the region in which I live. At least the native peoples in North America retained most of their land holdings as the original legal structures for the country rapidly devolved into what they are today.”

“It’s sad that we allowed the oligarchs and technocrats to seize control. I’ll talk more on that later, how Westrich was established, and the outward appearance of adherence to constitutional norms and personal rights. Right now, I need to expose the virulent creations we nurtured to life for death. Nurtured to life for death, indeed.”

“For context, a quick view of the challenges each of today’s technocracies faces. First, the United States, which had existed for three hundred years, morphed into three separate nation-states. Yes, each of us carries our own nuclear arsenals, but those are anachronisms at this point. Humans have discovered more devious, immediate, and sure-fire ways to formulate their apocalypses. To top it off, the distributed network of humans runs less efficiently than it did when many of us were in cities. That increases the burden of humanity, of course, but also limits the effectiveness of such arsenals if deployed.”

“Second, in understanding the cause of the last Debacle, governments are forced to spend inordinate treasure ensuring that constant outbreaks of genetic death are immediately mitigated. A related thread of paranoia and prevention weaves through the fabric of how every individual manages their day. It is the most valid and accepted rationale for why the government must overtly and covertly control and monitor its constituents.”

“Costly measures like air sampling stations and agent mitigation efforts have been implemented across the oligarchies and most certainly in Westrich, which is among the wealthiest technocracies on Earth. Again, this only adds to humanity’s burden.”

“Third, the planet remains frozen in fear regarding the possibility of a long-awaited alien invasion and human extinction event. As each day passes, anxiety grows at this possibility, at least for some. As a Stoic, I think little of it. May as well worry about the Sun exploding. I can do nothing about it.”

“Do I need to regurgitate the other detrimental aftereffects of the Debacle and how we are only in the initial stages of resolving the most adverse issues forty years hence? Perhaps another time, but you get my point.”

“From this description, can you imagine what it’s like to raise and protect children in this world? To provide yourself and family with housing, food, and health care? You can see why so many of us chose not to have families and to refrain from once natural desires. We are fatalistic because we have seen direct, nauseating evidence of what we did to each other. Fatalism, paranoia, and despair pervade all that humanity is today.”

“Now, back to the intent of this segment about our virulent creations. As you will discover, humanity possessed no truly existential threats prior to the last century, before the creation of nuclear arsenals. Sure, we could have blown each other up with ordnance and similar weapons, but those were weapons of attrition, not weapons of annihilation.”

“Weapons of attrition were massive things. Whereas these methods of killing were once physically large, like tremendous catapults to fell castle walls or swords to slice a body in half, we are now adept at using weapons that are microscopic. If you set nuclear weapons aside, most of our existential threats today are those of the biologic and nanotech kind, and these come in many forms.”

“For more context, synthetic biologics have been used for great purposes. Genetic engineering has helped many humans on the planet and continues to do so. Similarly, nanotechnology is widely used in medicine to heal and repair. These are the technologies of a benevolent God or the gods, assuming the purveyor is benevolently god-like.”

But humans are far from god-like. Those same small units of biological, synthetic, or machine tech are easily weaponized. This was happening anyway, long before our latest technology started taking hold in the twenties. Nerve gases and other biologic agents like smallpox and the plague? Sure, even last century. But most of these were self-limiting for various reasons and clearly not democratizable for your average Joe.”

“Today is far different. Portable kits are available to create your own, custom, AI-designed volatile agent on your home 3-D printer. Nanotech is similarly common, with the ability to invade or infest anything within its heady, tiny grasp. Presumably, all surreptitious activity is watched carefully by the powers that be. However, the tech has been so democratized that no surveillance state could possibly contain or counter all threats.”

“I can’t go into more detail on this because, well, I’m no expert. I do lasers. The point is not the technology, though it’s easy to get lost in that and obscure the underlying intent. Despite the existential threat the average Joe now presents to every citizen, we still have no established, agreed upon global ethic for how we should get along. We never did and never will.”

“The closest we came to this was in establishing the United Nations, which, for a time, helped us crawl forward in the right direction. That was long ago, and the hope for such a positive global movement is now deadwood.”

“Skepticism is in high regard these days. Consider the existential threats to our species that I just outlined. Our collective gray matter bathes in a churning sea of paranoia; our minds sinking in its acidic waters. And the paranoia is well-founded. Imagine every human being on the planet with the ability to create devastation delivered on a wisp of wind. That is our world in its waning months.”

“And what arises from such paranoia? What are the effects in the aftermath of our fears and entitled ways? I will not discuss now, but I’ll cover later as the weight of this recounting, this remembrance, weighs heavily on my Stoic heart.”

“Too often, I imagine what we might have been given all that was within our reach."