» Sat Apr 06, 2013 12:24 pm Most of my influence and inspiration has come, instead, from video games.
I would like to propose a story and gauge a reaction from some of my fellow gamers, tell me if I'm getting anywhere with this.
This is the prologue to a novel I've spent a few years on. It has received little review and that may show. Anyway, I would love to know your thoughts.
Thank you.
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“Man knows nothing,” my grandfather told me long ago. “Understand that as quickly as you can.”
I think he underestimated his own advice. I know I did.
They say it began ninety-seven years ago-- a suspiciously specific thing for “them” to know. The smartest minds alive had no idea what was happening
until it got bad. But if that magic number were somehow accurate, then it started when I was sixteen.
It was a sickness. So slow, so subtle. I was well into my twenties when the symptoms, rather symptom, became too big a problem for the world to keep
ignoring. Amazing how a disease that wasn't even deadly could dethrone leaders and bring about the collapse of society. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This disease infected the testicles and ovaries, consuming sperm and eggs.
Since the disease did not cause any sort of pain nor deformation to the body, and was not known to be affecting very many people, our government
(known at that time as the United States), made minimal efforts to uncover and quarantine the virus. But the disease mutated and spread faster. By 2025,
everybody was all too familiar with what became known as the Hephaestus Virus. The birthrate had dropped to fifty percent by then. But the effects of this
were not fully realized until 2037.
In that year, job openings were growing difficult to satisfy, and the first in a long chain of American corporations filed for bankruptcy in November, and
didn't last the winter. Families weren't being made. Houses weren't being sold. Property value was plummeting. This led to the fall of the mortgage industry.
Shareholders dumped their stocks for whatever they could get, which pushed super corporations of the housing business over the edge, and they simply
began to vanish one by one. Homeowners were forced off their property due to sanitation problems in the empty houses that surrounded them. They were
relocated to complexes that could better be maintained.
Things were not getting better. The birthrate was still dropping. In less than ten years, the world's population will have been halved. Abortion and stem
cell research were universally outlawed.
Looking back, so many laws were passed as a result of Hephaestus. Regardless of what people thought of them, any controversy was short-lived.
People don't even care to know how the virus started anymore. They're just too busy... recreating the world. How can I blame them? There still aren't enough
people to fill the demands of the past. That's their biggest mistake. They work so hard trying to hold on to what was.
But once again, I'm getting ahead of myself.
In 2046, thirty years after the infection supposedly began, an assassination attempt was made on the American president. Under interrogation, the
would-be assassin confessed that he had been hired by Lester Senco, the CEO of America's last major corporation. Senco had personally begged the
president for a seven billion dollar subsidy the month before, and had been emphatically turned down. No evidence involving Senco in the attempt was ever
found. The would-be assassin and five police officers were killed by an IED en route to trial. No culprit was ever found. Senco's company went bankrupt the
following year.
Many young people stopped working as the inheritance of an entire family funneled into a small amount of heirs. The government tried to get some of
the money back. They put heavier taxes on funerals and made social security harder to collect. Civil liberty unions, in partnership with attorneys at law the nation
over, put heavy limitations on the government's ability to do this.
These were just a few issues leading up to the catastrophe of 2065. The country had become so divided as its numbers dwindled, and the country itself so
cut off from the world, people stopped obeying the government altogether. Taxes were impossible to collect, the guilty impossible to arrest, let alone prosecute,
and the disease was only beginning to show signs of improving. The government had no choice but to act. And so, in 2066, the Founding.
The order was non-negotiable. All American citizens were required to relocate to one of seven cities and the suburbs that surrounded them. Their options
were Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. The government sent the military to gather all the people and bring
them to these seven cities. The first to arrive were allowed to choose their job and location. Everyone fourteen to seventy were required to hold an occupation.
What was once known as the United States had now become the Seven Cities of America. The global market had fallen apart, and a world that was becoming
integrated had receded back to isolation among nations.
I was sixty-six when I was taken to Baltimore. They put me right to work. I was working for a local relocation and renovation company, the National Homeowners
Association or NHA, to help the city accommodate the flocking migrants.
In the summer of '68, I was diagnosed with cancer. The company had the courtesy to ask me if I could continue work-- the cancer was not severe and the effects
of it were minor. The Medical Establishment of Baltimore argued with the NHA that I should not. I remember there was a big to-do about it. Made the papers. I ended
the rebuttal when I decided, much to the company's dismay, to remain at home.
In autumn of '72, the cancer went into remission. I had my life back, and was passing the requirement just as they boosted the work age limit to seventy-two
years old. Since I was only to be that age for another month, once again, the company asked if I wanted to continue work. Once again, I turned them down.
Now is the year 2113, and I am a hundred and thirteen years old. The disease is still upon us, but abated, and the population has stabilized. The three cities to
the west; Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, are overseen by the Governor of the West. The three cities to the east; Manhattan, Pittsburgh and Baltimore,
are overseen by the Governor of the East. Each of these six cities is managed by a skylord. Chicago does things differently. I'm not sure how. No one from the outside
is allowed into the city, or even to communicate with it.
I am about the oldest man in my city, certainly the oldest I know, possibly the oldest in the country... what's left of it, anyway. I am the only one who fully understands
the history of the old nation-- of the old world, having witnessed the tail-end of it in my childhood. They don't teach children that kind of history anymore, and they have
their explanations for that, of course. They have their explanations for everything. The world began when the virus did. Everything else is dying.
Including me.
Looking back at what I've written, it seems I had less on my mind than I thought. There were other personal things I had planned to include. But they're not so
important to me anymore.
It would give me some comfort to be able to write the history of the world, if only the shards of it I know, onto these pages, along with my philosophies and beliefs, with the
assurance that these pages will survive long enough, or be taken just seriously enough, to be read by someone. Anyone. But I don't have that assurance. And I'm running
out of time. A nurse hovering over me, longing to be somewhere else, a thousand years worth of change between us. Out the hospital window, my people press on.
Jesus, let goodness find this broken land. Before something else does.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Last-City-of-America/426169624142875?fref=ts
