The Long Winter Trilogy (Book 3): The Lost Colony by Riddle A.G

Author:Riddle, A.G [Riddle, A.G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic
ISBN: 9781940026268
Publisher: Legion Books
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 52

James

In the memories, time marches by in flashes. Before, I was reliving the memories as if watching them. Now I’m experiencing them—this life I didn’t live, but could have. That someone just like me did experience.

At Edgefield, in my spare time, I search the internet for any news on Alex, Abby, Jack, or Sarah. I find only tidbits, and I drink them in like drops offered to a man stranded in the desert.

The lines on my face run deeper.

My hairline retreats.

The world disintegrates. Every major government except for those of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and China defaults on their debt. The global economy plateaus and then starts a long slow decline with no solution—because the problem isn’t the economy, it’s the people. Robots do the manual labor. Cars drive themselves. Homes clean themselves. Roof tiles capture solar energy which powers the cars, the home, and the devices everyone is glued to. Life is comfortable, and as long as it doesn’t get worse, no one tries to make it any better.

In a small town in Cameroon, two hundred people get sick. It’s believed at first to be Ebola. They later name it Melong Fever after the town where it started. The story is in the news one day and forgotten the next. A week later, there are cases of Melong Fever in every nation in the world. Three billion are infected. Four hundred million die.

Then things really fall apart.

No one wants to leave their home. The threat of a second wave of outbreak is ever-present. Virtual reality becomes the largest industry in human history. The hardware market skyrockets and so does the content industry. It explodes when people are able to broadcast and create their own live dramas and sports.

Virtual reality is more transformational than any technology before it. It becomes a drug, a virus, one far more deadly than Melong Fever was.

In a way, I’m in the safest place in the world. No one here in prison contracted Melong Fever. None of us have ever been in a VR rig, never played the games or enjoyed a show or an interactive drama. But I see what it does to the guards. You can tell who’s a heavy user—the bloodshot eyes, weight loss, irritability. Nothing in the real world entertains them. The work is an agony they bear until they can get home and slip back into VR.

It’s like pictures I once saw of drug addicts, illustrating their physical deterioration from the first time they were arrested to the final arrest before they died. People wither away.

Around the world, productivity plummets. Unemployment soars. Before, the world I saw on TV just looked like a run-down version of the one I left. Now it rots—literally. No one wants to keep up the towns and homes where they live when they can escape to the world of their dreams with no effort.

The ban on VR began at midnight Eastern Standard Time on a Tuesday. They shut it down at the routers.

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