This is the way the world ends...

Wanna make 100k?

Fallout 3's release got me thinking: I love apocalyptic scenarios, especially the cleverly insightful ones which draw from the flaws of modern society as their inspiration.

I'm going to hold a very simple contest: come up with and shortly detail an end of modern society scenario (there can be survivors, or not), and the person who comes up with the best (in my opinion) will win 100k gil. It can be humorous, it can be serious, but it comes off as too preachy (i.e. cliche popular religion tripe) I doubt I'll enjoy it much.

So lets see those entries, you have a week.

meh, i know it's gonna be a shitty one but i'll try.

August, 2050, due to global warming and the excessive use of fossil fuels and deforestation, society has collapsed. The once mighty rivers have been drained, the vast lakes are now withered deserts. Nothing can grow, or has grown in the past 3 years, people are desperate. Many have resorted to cannibalism, and people have banded together into small packs to hunt for smaller groups, just for sustinance. The only town which still exists is a large colony by what is left of the mediterrainean sea. This city is called "Haven". The UN created this city to keep the most important politicians and smartest minds safe in hope of finding a way to replenish the earth to what it was, but the walls to the city are under threat of being broken, by the coaltion(sp) of outside survivors (or COS, for short.) With an army ready to break through the walls with their siege machines made from scavenged metal, the city must defend itself from this horde of cannibals and the upcoming inferno of summer weather to save themselves. One brave leader of the Haven Army must lead his men to victory, and with his best friend commanding a squad of the most elite soliders, find a way to stop the oncoming onslaught. To save humanity from turning into insanity. This is... Earth 2050.


Hope you liked it I know i won't win, but i've just got back from college and so have been drained of all creative thoughts =]

I can make this a short one.

Unless you mean humanity ceases to exist with "world ending". Anyways:

Financial Crisis. World leaders can't decide how it's solved or democrats/republicans simply don't agree. Several banks start plunging down. Can't grab any more money from your account. Since no one has money, no one can buy anything.

Instead of peacefully solving all of it, or waiting it out, peoples minds become clouded. They start robbing and plundering. Anarchy. Countries undoubtedly start waging war for food and resources. More anarchy and destruction. Education will become exclusive to the elite. Less people will be educated, leaving even lesss room for improvement of the world.

The gap between the elite and the people will grow wider and wider. The people will be poor, the elite will be rich. Elite will be safe, the people live in doubt and fear.

That'll be how all we know now, ends. Africa will be richer than all of the current west together, and simply because we've only plucked them like chickens, they won't lift a finger.


Nothing too preachy, i hope. I do like the idea of the Mayan calendar ending aswell. *Splat, Boom, Pow, Pfft, Burp or Poof*

That was less short than i meant it to be...

And i just made a complete fool of myself, didn't i?

The end of the word is when Lavos Destroys it.
Lee

/em waits for Nostrodamus to say something...

I can has cookie nao?^^

CJ

I'm not happy with the current number of entries, as such I'm extending the deadline another week.

Where's yours Ayv?

Science. That was the credo, way back when. Physics, chemistry, engineering, experimentation, empiricism. They built planes, cars—Lots of cars. You can still see plenty of them out on the Ruined Stretch. The only limit to what they could figure out was their curiosity, and they were curious as a monkey in a banana plantation. Discovery stacked on discovery and that bastard hairless ape called mankind went from grubbing dirt for food to nearly grasping the stars. That lasted about up until they hit something that science simply couldn't handle.

The thaum, they called it. They weren't happy with making things go, with making things blow up, with making things do whatever the hell else they wanted. They wanted to know how. They wanted to know why. Groups got together with all the money and fancy equipment you could ask for, trying to break bits into smaller bits until there was nothing left to break. When they got that, they'd try to break it too, just to see if they could. They figured they could explain all sorts of things this way; gravity, mass, time, dimensions, whatever other bells and whistles the world has. Don't ask me how, I'm no scientist.

They got interesting results. Ridiculous results. Impossible results. It turns out when you get down to the bottom of life, the universe, and everything, you find exactly what it is you expect to find... No matter what that is. In other words, they'd found that the underpinnings of the universe respond to us. That we can influence them just by thinking. By believing.

Science turned on its head, but righted itself quickly. Progress hummed along as they found ways to harness the reaction, to amplify it, to shape it. They called it 'Thaumic energy' because 'magic' sounded ridiculous. Everyone knew what it was anyway. Nobody could quite believe something so impossible at first, but it's awful hard to say "I don't believe in faeries" when you've got one staring you in the face. Progress exploded when they noticed parallels between new research and ancient alchemical writings. Turns out that hooey about the Philosopher's Stone wasn't just a pipe dream – In fact they named the first stable amplifier in its honor. Philos. Before the march of the thaum, entropy, conservation of mass, the laws of Newtonian physics themselves went out the window like yesterday's paper.

Thaumic catalysts sprang up left and right in the cities of the world. Think of them as coal furnaces for thaumic energy. In reality, they were more like lightning rods... But I'm getting ahead of myself. It was a second Industrial Revolution, and things were shaping up nicely. Unfortunately, not everyone plays nice. Back in the dark ages, terrorism was unheard of. One man with a sword couldn't threaten any more than another man. Then came guns and things got stickier. When it got easier to get ahold of explosives, things got stickier still. When one man with an amp and a bit of education can hold half a city hostage with earthquakes and freak electrical storms though, they were pretty much fucked. All it took was a handful of incidents to get the world leaders baying for blood. Well, some of the little guys happened to like seeing them off-balance and thumbed their noses. Cue invasions, enter military thaumic technology.

Which was, all things considered, a success. A huge success. The conflict was over in record time. Only problem is that it was so successful that things got a bit out of hand. Century-old stalemates and grudges flared back up with the promise of a quick and easy fix via complete, instantaneous annihilation. People used to live in the Radiant Wastes, you know. They called it Israel back then. Or was it Palestine... Nobody could really make up their mind. Anyhow, things were a mess on a global scale for a while there until an emergency summit put some regulations on how and when you could blow people up. The Brisbane Convention or something. Not important.

Things got a little... Strange in the aftermath. Folks complained about weird noises, ground zero of the bigger blasts took to glowing at night. They became known as the Glows. People who wandered out to have a look didn't always wander back, and the ones who did sometimes came back... Changed. Some in ways indefinable, some in ways horrifying. Turns out time and space itself warps like wire in a blender when you toss around too much thaumic energy. This was the first big red flag that maybe the thaum wasn't going to usher in the golden age people seemed to think it was, but by then it was already too late.

The first catalytic meltdown came scant years later. Like a chain reaction, they went off one by one by one, all across the globe. Refugees from the meltdown sites, the ones still sane, the ones still at all able to talk about what they saw, insist they saw creatures in the wreckage. Creatures not from around here. The thought of it was ridiculous, just like the thought of the thaum. Once again, they were surprised. The new Glows began to slowly spread. From them came the Critters.

I hear they call them Bogeymen in the British Isles, Wendigo up north. A few melodramatic sorts call them Wraiths. I don't care what you call them as long as they stay the hell away from me. The only thing we know about them is that we don't know a damn thing about them, and the farther away they are the happier we are. No two are the same, far as we can tell. We think they're alive, they move around and make noise. Truth is we don't know. They seem only half there, spectral.

While back, a religious group decided they must be the lost souls of the people killed in the meltdowns. They got a huge following too, I guess if you can believe in magic then you can believe in anything. Said we needed to atone somehow, apologize, show them the way to the pearly gates since they seem to've taken a wrong turn and wound up here. Great idea, really. Would've been fantastic if it worked. There are still a few survivors from the Great Reconciliation, but we mostly keep them tied down so they don't hurt themselves.

I've been to the edges of the Glows myself, and I have a theory. I don't much share it because it's not very encouraging and good news is scant enough these days. When you get to the edge, the land starts to change into bizarre, twisted things. But if you look far enough, it stops being so hodgepodge. It's nothing I've ever seen, but it makes sense in its own way. Something's changing here to there. Weather's been odd everywhere – We know, we still have enough communications to talk to others around us. Not much, but it gets us by. We're not going extinct, not by a long shot. At least not yet. We've lost our cities and a chunk of our population. Daylight hours fluctuate more than they ought to. Seasons come out of order. Crops are failing. And the damning thing is, the Critters look more and more solid by the year.

So close to the Glimmersands, survival ought to be impossible. The land's near poison here. The rest of the folks in the enclave don't know that and I'm not going to tell them. We're surviving, but only thanks to the skeletons in the closet. Thanks to Philos. It changes our dim little reality into something livable, and it's changing me too. I can't go out without heavy gloves anymore. I tell people I burned 'em bad on the machinery that keeps the place cozy. The machinery that conked out a good fifteen years ago. They accept it. They don't have a lot of choice.

Problem is, I've been hearing strange sounds sometimes. Faint ones. Seeing things out of the corner of my eye.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. Maybe it's to ease my conscience. Maybe I'm hoping someone will find it. Either way, it's better to die screaming than to face the slow madness hunger and cold bring. Or so I thought. I told the rest of the haven that we got the machines working again. God help us all on the day they find I've lied.

Ver that was awesome