How the World Ended.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

With a murmur? With a sigh? With a muffled gurgle in a dark alley?

None of these. It ended with the ringing clang of a prison door being slammed shut and the deafening roar of the masses demanding MORE, RIGHT NOW GOD DAMN IT! AND FREE, BECAUSE YOU KEPT ME WAITING!! even though there was nothing left. For anyone.

When everything went to shit far enough for even the laziest bastard to notice, people started looking around for answers. For someone bigger and stronger to tell them what to do. For someone to fix it for them. To fix their TVs that didn't work anymore and their computers that wouldn't come on, no matter how many times they hit the 'restart' button and mashed their faces into the keyboard.

But Doktor Howl had already made himself his own personal artificial, automated, orbital planetoid and left the howling monkeys behind for good. TGRR disappeared into the earth, burrowing beneath the surface with the swiftness of a rabid eel. Freeky said he was looking for something that was still pure and untouched by the filthy apes that had ruined everything. Then she went away, too. Disappearing into the bowels of Tucson with a wailing hymn on her lips.

Some sad fools went to the Dark Empress for answers. Which hadn't ever been a good idea even when things weren't fucked beyond repair. They couldn't even make it to her front door. Like the fairy tales, she'd erected herself a mountain of glass. And a fortress on top. No one made the mistake of thinking she was waiting for a knight to rescue her. Not after the first few precisely sliced bits of laser-cooked hero were found at the foot of the mountain.

Khara, Luna, Rictor, Suu . . . their gated community boasted more than enough machine-gun adorned turrets to dissuade the peons and the crazy experiments they conducted behind the tall walls were enough of a threat and a bribe to keep all the other major powers at bay.

It helped that Cain and Pixie, who ruled their respective countries with terrifying deftness, retained some fondness for the mad scientist cultists. It gave them someone to sell their experiments to, for one.

Oh, Charley made an appearance, wandering from one side of American to the other, a migratory bird that never landed for long.

But there was no leadership. No guidance. No reason. It was too late for that. There was nothing left but to wait it out. Wait until the stupid died off to tolerable levels. Wait for balance to come.

No new plastic gizmos. No Taco Bell. No 'like' button. No placating people on every electronic device assuring people with broad Colgate smiles that things were just peachy. Everyone said it was hell and that nothing could be worse than this unendurable tedium.

But it was just beginning.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This is beautiful beautiful!

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Apocalicious 

[Doktor Howl]

I am in favor of this.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

People were still more worried about stupid shit like "Will WoW give me credit for the days covered by this month's subscription that I haven't been able to play WoW because of this silly power outage?" and "How many comments does my latest LiveJournal post about Justin Bieber's lovechild get?" and my favorite . . . "Why isn't Twitter working? If it was we'd know what was going on by now. Why can't I TWEET!?!?!?"

Little questions like "Were am I going to get clean water?" and "What happens when I run out of food that's 100% preservatives?" went unasked.

Children started complaining first but no one pays attention to children more than they have to, so it went unheeded. It was just more proof of how boring things were now. There was nothing for the poor children to do so of course they whined. Until the adults realized they were whining about not having toilet paper or water for Kool-Aid.

With the clever use of sales advertisments, people hadn't even realized they were being rationed. "This week only, five cans of tuna fish for $3, offer valid one time, maximum of five cans."

But as they began realizing that there wasn't anymore gasoline and there wasn't anything left on store shelves . . . well, you can guess what happened.

Things got ugly.

[Juana]

I approve!

[Doktor Howl]

We were kings of creation, as long as the power was on.  Once The Machine stopped, we were slow food for coyotes.  The first people to go, of course, were the WalMart Scooter Kings & Queens.  On first thought, you'd think they'd last the longest, having stored fat for decades...But they were all eaten in the first 2 months, sometimes by their families.

About the only places that still ran were Portland & Tucson (neither of which seemed to be aware that there was a problem), and a small enclave set up by the famous pulp hero, Dr James Semaj.  He had rigged an old submarine reactor up in a National Guard armory, and had enough people working for him that they kept the hordes away.  Dr Semaj's food-scavenging runs were legendary, with running gun battles from one Safeway to the next.  Richter and his crew had joined up, and when the bullets ran out, they started using crossbows and glaives.

Then, one day, the whole pack of them vanished.  Just flat-out disappeared.  The looters finally got into the armory, but everything was gone, except that old reactor, which had all of it's fuel rods fully engaged.  The resulting fire scoured the area, and it's still poisonous to this day (and will be for a thousand years). 

To this day, nobody knows what happened to them.  Some say they "got away", through the bleed to some other Earth, where things had worked out better.  Some say they got to fighting among themselves, but I don't buy that.  Some say they just moved locations and laid low.

But it's been a while, and there's been no sign of them.  Me, I think the lucky bastards got away.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Stories began to appear. Birthed into being by the darker-than-ever night and all the things that went bump in that all consuming darkness. Tales of fires that painted the black and blue sky red, green, and gold. Like Christmas coming with a blaze and leaving a no-man's land.

People went to the site looking for truth and came away with cancer that ate away more than their bodies. It ate away their denial. Some muttered that this was Dr. Semaj's final gift. Clarity. The cancer was punishment for waiting so long to wake up.

Stories grew day by day as some people began traveling from hovel to hovel to town to ragged town. Trading information for Twinkies and cans of Vienna Sausages.

That's how people found out that all the great minds they'd jeered and mocked Before The Machine Went Down had been prepared. And they, the slavering insipid masses, were the only ones suffering. The only ones allowing their children and their parents to suffer in squalor, agony, and without TV.

And riots began as the cancer spread and the stories grew more bloody.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The irony of the survivalists might be the most bitterly funny of all the ironies of this dark time; convinced they'd be prepared, with their food stores and their guns and their fortresses, they were fine for a while. As soft and unprepared as they were, most of them were able to fend off would-be raiders well enough. They were smug for a while, proud of their self-reliance and their isolation; fuck those people out there who didn't plan ahead! They got what they deserved. They should have stockpiled and made a plan if they wanted to survive, after all, you could see this coming if you had half a brain.

But after a while, things stopped going as planned. They had plenty of ammo, plenty of food and basic medicine, but things started happening. A scratch turned into blood poisoning. A bad tin of soup became a terrible case of the trots. A sinus infection, a bad tooth, constipation, hemorrhaging after miscarriage, a fractured ankle from a mis-timed jump... it was the banal things that they died of despite their hoards of antibiotics and their first-aid kits; funny little bacterial infections and fungus and diarrhea, not raiders or even plague. The ones with families fared better, but sometimes they first watched their children die, then their spouse, and then, finally, succumbed themselves. Sometimes the terrible pressure of having a sick child or spouse drove them out to try to find someone, anyone, who could help. A few got lucky and found one of the little bands of people who had among them someone who had the skills to help. Those are the ones who lived.

They thought they had planned ahead. They thought that they would look after their own, and everyone else be damned. And after they died, the scavengers they had guarded so vigilantly against would find their hoard and rejoice, because it meant the children in the band would eat and live for a few more months.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Dok, Nigel; I enjoyed your additions. Thanks for jumping in.

The first two lines of your piece, Dok, are a perfect hook.

I was considering the survivalist angle, Nigel, and you nailed it better than I could.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thanks! You provided an irresistible premise.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

When we ran out of tractors and irrigation systems and immigrant workers to do the hard stuff, what had been paradise became hell. What was already hell became something Satan himself shuddered to see. But it didn't phase certain survivors at all. And at least there was no point in fearing a hell.

. . . .

"The Dark Empress's Kiln" was what the desert spreading from Arizona to the Mississippi river was dubbed. For obvious reasons. The Devout of Tucson became known for suggesting a trek across the sand as penance and sentencing deviants and the unfaithful to hard labor in the sand mine.

Huge metal slabs were laboriously positioned and insulated. Then filled with finely sifted sand. Once filled and the proper blessings and alchemical properties added . . . a beam of light from the sky shot down from the sky and made a perfect pane of glass. Which was then transported to the Dark Empress's mountain.

I served on the transport crew, once. It's mandatory for silk workers and glass smiths and other highly-skilled people to do their stint in hard labor. No one is exempt. Anyone who wants to learn any kind of skill puts equal time into learning it and in doing harder work.

That's one rule they should have had or enforced more rigorously before everything went tits up.

We use layers and layers of silk between the glass and the wooden platform. Silk, wool, burlap, wood. That's how you get glass from the desert kiln to the Dark Empress's tower. And if you're lucky it doesn't shatter. If you're lucky the storms don't ruin everything. You don't get roller-guides covered in Christmas Cancer sores leaving multi-colored pus all over everything.

The path is broad and mostly level until you get to the glass mountain. Tucson's Devout made sure of that, as did the Dark Empress's minions. It frightens me, sometimes, to think of how the truce or treaty those factions came to was brought about. But it makes for safe roads.

I served on the transport crew as a scout and as a back-up roller-guide. It's important to map the roadway every time, just to make sure there aren't downed trees or damage from flash floods or piles of bodies in the path. The giant wooden rollers that move under the platform can take a beating, but if they pick up something it could get lodged between the rollers and the platform, jostling the glass.

And for every pane of glass that gets fucked up on your trip, two in a row have to be transported perfectly safe by your crew before you're allowed to continue your training. People have killed themselves over less since the great wave of Stupid brought about the End Times.

My days as a scout were easy enough. But my days as a roller-guide was back-breaking. Pushing those rolling-pin shaped cylinders along was endless hard work and repetitive motion. No one wanted to stop once we got going so there weren't that many breaks and even fewer paper-pushers around to bitch about ergonomic equipment and worker safety. It needed doing. Even though most people don't know what the glass is for.

The pane arrived safely and in perfect condition. I was released from that particular bondage and allowed to assume the next step in my training. A glutton for punishment, I was learning medicine, glass smithing, and silk work. At least ten years of training interspersed with ten years of labor.

But these goals got me into the Dark Empress's mountain. And I learned the purpose of the panes. And where The Great Reverend Roger ended up. And why Doktor Howl's planetoid had replaced the moon.

Things no one should know.

Things no one should let on they know.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

MY NIPPLES!

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

MY NIPPLES!

Should we rename the Rockies "Paps of Nigel" ?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

MY NIPPLES!

Should we rename the Rockies "Paps of Nigel" ?

Oh lord, please no. 

I really liked the bit about the great wave of Stupid. The whole thing is just magnificent.