It's happening.
You don't know what it is. Yet. But it's happening.
Something's happening.
Something not very nice.
You've all seen the news reports. Things have been going wrong for days. Storms, earthquakes, wild beasts, pestilence, and no shortage of explosions. Maybe you were one of the ones who thought it was the end of the world, or the ones who thought it was the wrath of god, or the ones who thought it was just global warming. It doesn't matter now.
Now you know it's the end of the world.
I can't tell you why. I can tell you that, in the future, if there is a future, one question will always be on the lips of anyone who meets a survivor (if there are survivors):
"What were you doing when it happened?"
Jilladilla:
Your name is Ana Light. You are in the garage, working, as always. These last few days have been strange, but you feel good. Grounded. Like the earth beneath your feet somehow also has your back. Well, you always did believe it would, if you needed it, but this is so much more than you imagined.
An ominous tremor runs through your feet, and you think you know. Something. What is that feeling? Is something... coming? Maybe you should leave. You glance around nervously, tensed and ready to run with nowhere to run to, and then you glance at the car you've been trying to fix. It's nice, sturdy, fast. And it's not finished.
Maybe you should hurry.
Rahx:
Your name is Luatyr Theosia. The world is ending, you have just been struck by lightning, and you are in a parking lot. There are zombies. There are zombies everywhere.
Run.
crazyabe:
Your name is – well, no call to be spreading that around. Nobody calls you that here anyway. There are a few things you answer to, here, none of them too flattering, but that's prison for you. At least it's a nice prison, because you were smart enough not to tell them everything you've done. So you're minding your own business in the yard, playing a relaxing game of Safety Checkers (guaranteed suicide-proof!) with your buddies the insurance fraud and the corporate embezzler, all pretty nonplussed about these strange events that all the guards are worrying about. And then there's a crack.
It's a good thing you never did lend Little Ted, the insurance guy, that extra commissary money he asked for, you reflect, watching the approximately half of his skull and torso remaining slowly drop to the ground. Behind him... you're pretty sure that pleasant suburban forest wasn't there yesterday, or even a few minutes ago. You hear screaming, and the general sound of guards not paying any attention to you at all.
I guess you might as well escape.
darkwarlock3:
Your name is Rakasas. You have a splitting headache and no tea. The last thing you remember, you were at home in the forest where you hid from the local lord's knights, with whom your peculiar appetites made you terribly unpopular. You vaguely recall seeing some humans in unusual clothes who seemed to appear from nowhere, then did something strange that knocked you over before you managed to eat them even a little bit. When you picked yourself up, they were gone, but so was everything else. Now everything that was familiar to you is gone, the sky looks wrong, and there's an ominous feeling in the air. You hear a deep, disturbing roar drawing closer to you, sounding like an angry monster you might see in a dream, and you crouch down in the bushes to hide.
And watch.
OceanSoul:
Your name is Lucas Clarke. You are a very serious doctor and would-be academic, which is why it is not in the least surprising that you are clinging to the roof of a car, careening away from something which your expert medical opinion would identify as "zombies". A lot of zombies, in fact. In the distance you can also see something that looks an awful lot like a dragon making an unfortunate mess of your erstwhile city. Meanwhile, the driver of your mount, whom you did not consult in your escape, has just noticed you and appears to be trying to shake you off, which is just incredibly rude. Now that you're outside city limits and seem to be relatively safe, you're growing concerned that she might stop to take care of the problem more directly. But there's a nice grassy slope to the right that you could probably survive landing on at this speed.
Is this where you get off?
Blood_Librarian:
Your name is Tolodor Wick, but everybody calls you "Breader". Last you knew, you were in South Korea, in an ordinary apartment building in an ordinary city, and the world was ending. Now you've walked out the front door to find yourself standing in the middle of a grassy plain like no place you've ever seen before, except on television. Reflexively, you check your phone to find out where you are, but the global positioning system is down, in some cases literally. As you look around, the ground thunders, then swells, then splits like an overripe tomato right in front of you, exposing a vertiginous jagged chasm. And it's still growing.
You may want to get out of here.
And as for me?
I was in my home office, prototyping a new deep-learning AI design for a data mining company you've probably never heard of (and we like it that way). It's a funny thing, you know, when you tell people you're an AI programmer, people instantly think Skynet and act like you're going to destroy the world. But I'm at least 86% certain none of this was my fault. Not that we don't all dream of creating Skynet one day, but this was just a boring pile of totally mundane databases and algorithms about as likely to achieve self-awareness as your average calculus textbook, or slightly more likely than the average voter. Which is why I was more than a little uneasy about the sudden and indescribable sensation I had, of some unseen behemoth waking up.
Well, no, that's not what made me uneasy.
What made me uneasy was the screaming.
Unmistakable, pouring forth from the speakers, from a program that had no code for making sound; and not the tinny screeching of overloaded electronics, but anguished, organic, the cry of a living soul in abject unthinkable agony.
Calmly, I turned off the computer, ending (I assumed) its suffering. After disconnecting the power, just to be sure, I walked out of my house in search of a safer place. In my case, safety wasn't hard to find: a gap in the swirling, ominously off-colour clouds, less than a block away, centred over the suburban home of one Chantar Drake. I didn't bother to stand around wondering why at that point. I just walked over, and walked in.
The rest of you will be arriving soon, right?
Author
Topic: Cataclysm (Read 9311 times)