Happenings/2043
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Somebody call fuckin' Soyberg! The following page or section was written during a schizo episode. You WILL remind the author to take his meds. |
Ok, here it is ( but this happens in an alternate universe where Gerald Ford won the 1976 US presidential election tho, not our universe, because that would be pretty brimmy ngl dawg ☠️💀💀💀. It’s brimstone fanfiction to fill up this empty page with some filler slop anyways so who cares about this info tho) :
The end has come, but it is not a swift one, for mankind seems to be stubborn to disappear once and for all. Something happened. The Third World War. Tens of thousands of cobalt bombs amassed in the arsenal of the great powers for many years were deployed all across the global battleground, its deadly product spreading across the entire earth to bring silent death in the form of radiation to every single corner of the planet. Any organism which didn’t retreat beneath the earth itself perished in the lifeless moonscape that had once been the most fertile planet of our solar system. What man had started, man had finished.
In the depths of a cold concrete shelter beneath the Pyrenees mountain range, an old man is sleeping. The man is pale, balding, and wears glasses, with a large grey beard formed in his chin. The old man is alone, has been for what seems a lifetime. He was once much younger, and worked in the coal mines tirelessly to earn a living. It didn’t matter in the end, as he realises, not because his job had failed, because it hadn’t, but because the gamblers of all of human civilisation had now rendered all jobs worthless. He still has his memories tho, and it’s what keeps him going.
But there is one memory in particular which the old man cherishes most. It was near the end of that summer, so many years ago, a different eternity in his mind, when he created it. Something he came to both love and hate, but which he ended up abandoning for greener pastures. But he still hasn’t forgotten. So when he stumbles out of his bed and into the shelter’s mainframe, he decides to go back.
As the mainframe goes online, he examines the status of other shelters of the network and their present state. He sees that there are only three other shelters of the network still online in the entire European continent: One in Spain, one in Portugal and one in Switzerland. There is still a blinking dot in central Italy, but its status is “unknown”. Anything north of Gimmewald, east of the Pyrenees, and west of the Urals, or, well, Magadan, is dead, of that there seems to be no question. The man looks for his creation inside the web, expecting to see it offline just like every other website on the planet, but to his surprise, it is still online. Not only that, but it is still active.
It seems that the site’s last administrator, a man by the alias of “Taliaferro”, had ensured that there would be an entire nation’s worth of AI chatbots which would continue to converse between each other and maintain the site “alive”, crudely as it were, so even if mankind was destroyed, there would still be a website. There would still be a Sharty. As the old man watches the chatbots converse between each other, he remembers. He remembers everything, the gems and the coal, the gemeralds and the brimstone, the iron and the recently created “ore”, and no matter how gemmy or brimmy they were, he cherishes those memories. Just how it was, before The Network and the threats and the leaks and the feds and the degenerate spamming forced him out. As he continues to stare at the screen, a single tear rolls down his cheek. He doesn’t know if it’s of sadness, of happiness or of pride, but the man certainly doesn’t seem to care.
He is taken out of his trance by a single message which appears on screen. It seems Taliaferro knew the old man still survived, and left him one last message for when he would return to the Party. The message has a simple choice. It asks him whether or not he wants to shut down the Sharty, once and for all. Just as the man reads the message, he hears a single knock on the door. Rapidly, he readies his firearm, and enters his bulky CBRN suit. He asks who it could be outside, unsure even of if it is a human being. But he gets his answer. A thick accent, he is unsure of if Russian or Turkish, or perhaps from Florida or Tennessee, greets him. Soot knows who it is. His apathy and confusion has turned into anger and hatred, and he raises his pistol ready to open the door and strike the man dead. But the voice simply asks for one last concession, this time not the right to a website, but the right to help him choose its future.
Soot opens the door, his firearm raised, but as he sees the man in front of him, battered and wounded and clearly suffering from radiation sickness, he lowers it. Not like he’d be much of a threat, he thinks. The man stumbled into the shelter, frail and coughing. As their eyes meet, they realise that maybe just now they can put their differences aside and make one final choice together.
They both walk towards the mainframe, silently, seemingly reluctant to speak with each other, but cordial enough to not dissolve into squabble. Soot places his aged hand on the screen, contemplating. The other man finally speaks once again. He says they must put it to rest, once and for all. Better for it to disappear silently now than to continue broadcasting into a lifeless world as a mere shell of what it once was.
The old man wonders. If the Sharty dies, then a part of himself dies along with it, but then again, the old man knows he is, for all intents and purposes, a living corpse. Maybe now, if the website rests, he can finally rest too. The old man chooses.
After having made his choice, he walks through the corridor into the shelter’s entrance and opens the door once more, this time without his protective clothing, and breathes fresh air for the first time since the end of the world, irradiated and ash-filled as it may be. The other man too walks down the hall and joins him. They wander outside silently, and sit by a small rock as they contemplate their fate. But, at least now, the old man can truly rest. He no longer has to worry about his legacy or his survival because none of it matters now. It’s over. His fate, both of theirs, just like the Sharty’s, is sealed now, and the old man is happy. What man had started, man had finished.
