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Picture this:
You're in a busy shopping centre. Suddenly people start screaming. You
don't know why... and then you feel dizzy, fall to the ground, and pass out.
When you awake, you find yourself surrounded by dead people. Everybody
in the place is stone-dead. You are apparently the only person left alive.
You call the emergency services, but nobody answers. You run out to the
car park. You drive home. Everywhere you see wrecked cars full of dead
people. Paths and sidewalks littered with corpses. Their horrified faces
and vacant expressions haunt you.
You drive to your home. Your entire family is dead. You grab your phone
and try to call every single person you can think of. Nobody answers.
You drive to see your relatives. Every major road is like a train wreck.
Mangled vehicles everywhere. And dead people. Lots of dead people. Every
person you go to visit is dead, or their house is simply empty.
You get on the Internet. You check every website you can think of. There
is no mention of the inexplicable catastrophe which has befallen the
region. You send emails, you leave messages on forums; nobody replies.
You call some folks you know who live in another country, but still no
answer.
Slowly it begins to dawn on you that you are, apparently, the very last
human alive on this Earth. And now you feel scared. Really scared.
Society as you know it no longer exists. Your world is over. Everything
you ever cared about, gone. Forever. Every person you ever met, everyone
who ever mattered to you. They're all dead. And you never even got to
say goodbye.
Yesterday you were worried about some stupid computer problem. Today,
pushing 1s and 0s around inside a computer suddenly seems... irrelevant.
Pointless. Obsolete. Trivial.
Suddenly you find yourself in dire circumstances, and there is
absolutely no-one you can turn to. Everybody is dead. And you don't even
know /why/. Does it even matter? You'll surely be joining them soon. The
phones and the water and the electricity still seem to be working right
/now/. But for how much longer? They won't run themselves forever. And
you won't last long without drinking water, or heating for the winter
months. With no people around, you can walk into the nearest shop and
take whatever food you like. But how many months before all that becomes
inedible?
You always wanted a nicer car. Now you can take any god-damned car you
like. Go to a warehouse and cart off stackloads of computer gear. Hell,
you can have your own personal datacenter. Who's going to stop you? And
you don't even have to /take/ it anywhere. You can live wherever you
want. It doesn't even have to be a /house/. It can be anything you want.
In any city, anywhere. You can literally own anything you want.
But what's the point? You're going to be dead very shortly. Sure, you
can drive over to Google and use their entire datacenter as a giant
render farm. But why bother? What /use/ is it? You're still going to be
alone /forever/. And you're still going to die a slow, lingering death
by starvation, terrified and alone...
Worst.
Dream.
EVER.
>_<
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