The end of the world had a rather silly cause. Of course, after taking a step back most serious matters have rather silly causes: the origins of our own universe have spawned the greatest collection of flatulency jokes in the history of sentient beings, which is saying something – every intelligent being seems to possess at least one hole or crevice that exudes smelly gasses, from time to time. But when their world came to an end – ok, fair enough, our world – humans had only just begun to tap this vast reservoir of universal humor. And things might have turned out rather differently, had we progressed further in our knowledge of flatulency humor (or, as some people still call it, ‘fart jokes’). But there’s not much use in wondering what might have been, as this rarely leads to a heartfelt ‘boy, that turned out well!’ but more often to some useless emotional flare of self pity and bemoanment – I’m not sure whether the latter is really a word, to be honest, but since I am telling you about the end of the world in retrospect, it means that the world has come to an end, so really, who cares?
Ah, yes, the end of the world. It was the early twenty second century. Throughout the entire previous century, the general populace had gotten more and more discontented, as governments traded their power for corporation backing. Civil liberties were sold for continuing economic growth, a few million at a time, and the global military industrial complex – after eliminating any and all forms of organized resistance – took over the policing duties of the governments, who lost their last vestiges of power. At the turn of the century, barely 0.01% of the population controlled over 99% of the resources. Fossil fuels had run out long before, but while viable affordable alternatives had been readily available for half a century, energy prices continued to rise steadily, year after year. The impoverished masses had only two things in abundance: able bodies and means of communication. Naturally, a resistance movement slowly formed, spanning the globe. The first isolated attacks in 2102 against corporate targets were condemned as acts of terrorism by a few fanatics. In 2104, the Global Humanitarian Resistance made itself known to the world. Their numbers grew exponentionally and in January 2105 the GHR sent the corporations, which had unified in the Earth Federation (although their detractors called it the Economic Front), a list of demands. In February 2105, civil war engulfed our planet, as the largest conflict anyone had ever conceived touched the lives of any and all inhabitants of Earth.
Boy, that was one depressing paragraph. You’ll have to excuse me, but the end of the world leaves even a generally jolly fellow like me with an urge to at the very least sigh. And I mean a really deep sigh. But as you may have noticed, this doesn’t seem very silly. Slightly silly, perhaps, but not silly enough to warrant the phrase ‘The end of the world had a rather silly cause’. No, the end of the world was actually caused by a thirty something guy called Timmy, who was already quite silly in his own right; silly and a bit pitiful, to an extent that none of his contemporaries thought he could influence his own life, let alone the course of human history. And perhaps he didn’t, perhaps he was but one of many elements that may have caused the end of the world, but that doesn’t change the fact that he, and only he, was the first actor in a chain of events comprised of reaction after reaction that would change not only human destiny, but the destiny of every single sentient being. I think. Well, ok, Timmy’s first action will most likely have had cause as well – not so much reason, though – but it was an internal cause; or, more precisely, an internal error, which happened rather frequently, poor Timmy.
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