“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

- William Goldman

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Chapter 0

I might as well start with the important bit:

The world is ending.

Or... at least, it was the last time I was there. But, I'll get to that part later.

In olden times, people probably would have pointed their fingers towards the legends that fit the bill. Ragnarök, or maybe “Divine Judgement.” But these are modern times. And modern times require modern perspectives.

I’ve heard some scientific experts on the news call it a “Great Filter.” At least, back when there still was real news. People discussed the subject on TV, and all sorts of talking heads were going on and on about it. They kept parroting one another until the label stuck. TV show hosts were using the term as a buzzword to get views, advertising money, or whatever. All while acting completely oblivious to just how insane the subject they were reporting on really was.

If the world's ending, and you're reporting about it wearing a suit and a smile, I can only assume there's something fundamentally wrong with you.

But that's just my opinion.

For those not in the know: The Great Filter is a hypothetical concept. It describes an event which can cut the path that leads to intelligent life off at the bud. Presumably, mankind already survived a few of these. We made our way from organic components floating in puddles near volcanic vents, to launching spaceships. And that doesn't just happen without billions of years, specific conditions, and quite a bit of luck involved.

In essence: to become a space-traveling civilization, theory holds there are a few “Filters” in the way. And with each filter, the assumptions is that things become more and more difficult for life to truly succeed. When all of these filters are put together, the combination presents a possible reason why the universe seems to be mostly without visible signs of life.

To have life, you need all sorts of conditions. To have truly intelligent life? You need even more conditions. Simple enough, but considering how the human race has never had the pleasure to discover alien life, it’s also been assumed there are events that make it very difficult for life to be successful in the universe.

Long winded, you’re right. I’ll just cut to the chase and say that, so far as anyone knows: this was sort of what happened.

Our “Great Filter.”

Religions were preaching it as our long awaited and predicted reckoning. Governments literally went on the air and called it the end times. Some cults are probably still out there saying it’s our chance for greatness and the coming of a new age. Yada, yada… Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. Not my place to say.

All I can tell you, is that it was called the [Trial]

Feel free to interpret that as you will, because everyone else did.

What it meant, why it happened? Theories abound, of course: wild and outlandish as you could ever hope to imagine. It's amazing how many reports got published while the world was crumbling. Hundreds of papers and studies: presenting reasonable or extremely unreasonable answers to the obvious questions.

My favorites seem to suggest that the arrival of the [Trial] and the progression of events directly following it, lined-up within a few milliseconds to a successful test involving the Hadron Collider. Timed almost exactly, in fact, as it was being run in the hopes of discovering a yet-unnamed particle.

I haven’t found anything else that can really provide a more realistic explanation, and there’s something of a poetic justice to such a trigger event. Because if it's true, then the [Trial] was our reward. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun: our foolish species reached a bit too far into the unknown. Bravely, boldly, and ignorantly, we went grasping at forces we didn’t understand and it was just our luck that we found something.

Following that line of thought, it's been theorized that this [Trial] was always there. Just waiting patiently, the [Trial] is a silent trap for any species like ours. Any life intelligent and daring enough to advance. That we stumbled into it with blissful ignorance, finally meeting the conditions to attract its attention, may have already happened to many, many, many, others.

That the universe seemed to be so devoid of life, perhaps, might have a lot to do with exactly that.

So, it was.

January fifteenth, 2024.

The day when glowing letters in the sky lit like beacons above every major city in the world. Announcing the horrible future yet to come:

[Your Species Has Been Selected: The Trial Has Begun]

What does someone say in response to that? What is the correct choice of action to take, when faced with giant words in the sky. Words, which when perceived by anyone- Be they blind, or illiterate: would be legible. Words that could be easily understood by anyone, regardless of nationality, language, race, or religion? All were equal to that statement.

How did it work?

How did it know?

On and on and on, people tried to come up with answers: but to say floating and mysterious words in the sky were just the tip of the iceberg to our problem, would have been a tremendous understatement.

This was not exactly a fun time-period. The US was throwing its weight around. China was too. Russia, the EU, Japan… It’s not all that difficult to recognize the geo-political saber-rattling that was ramping up even before glowing letters in the sky appeared. Battles through economic policies, trade-wars, growing concern over climate changes, overfishing, air pollution... In essence: the world was already a mess, and suddenly it was a mess that was on fire.

Giant words in the sky that were calling attention to the fact that our species was about to undergo some sort of tribulation, was hardly welcome. But, at least it had the common decency to warn us. You know, before the real problems started spilling out of interdimensional rifts across the globe.

In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned that first.

Monsters.

They arrived mostly in time with the words floating in the sky.

Big, small, scary, hungry, dangerous… you probably get the idea. Use your imagination, and you'll be close. Some were easily recognizable, some were not. Myth and folklore were appearing in physical form: bursting out of the unknown through odd "rifts" that formed across the world. Places that looked like empty space, cut into the air, or the ground. There was always a little bit of swirling colors, but mostly these were just devoid of light. No matter how you might circle around them, they would always look the same. And if you stared at one long enough, there was a good chance you were going to get a terrible migraine when something inevitably came out.

I don’t recommend doing that, by the way.

In fact, I don’t even recommend getting close enough to one to even look at it in the first place, because that is a stupid way to die.

Dragons were spotted, ripping out of rifts in the sky above mainland China. Ogres were reported in Russia. Massive wolves were spotted, roaming freely in Alaska. Gryphons were seen on thousands of shaky cell-phone cameras, as they devoured entire towns in Europe. Strange serpent-like things completely consumed the Congo. And these were just the ones that I heard about. These were the ones that made headlines before the headlines stopped.

Rapidly, there were creatures of all shapes and sizes. All appearing seemingly from nowhere, and all intend on hunting down human life.

You could be in a city, in a rural town, in a scientific installation at the South pole: Nowhere was safe. Everywhere was equally threatened. And, suffice to say, entirely at once the world was in chaos, as millions upon millions died. Massive global supply-chains were repurposed. But, by the time that started, the global markets were already messy. Shipping routes were disrupted by literal leviathans with a habit of making vessels the size of multiple football fields “disappear.” Companies were closing, as they lost all their workers, and people fled for areas they hoped would be safe. Normal life quickly fell apart, and even in the most advanced nations, the confusion was almost enough to throw things into a tail-spin of disarray. People hording resources, buying up guns and food. Military units dispatching, tanks rolling down highways. Civilian militias fighting in the streets, rebuffing attacks, or utterly failing to rebuff attacks.

Under-developed countries lacking more advanced militaries to reinforce their population centers, were in flames almost immediately. Any nation that was unable to push back against the sudden swarms of creatures roaming their towns and cities, lost everything. This, in turn, began prompting a new-age crisis of refugees. No longer fleeing dictatorships or poor economic environments, but simply fleeing for their very lives as their countries were devoured from the inside out.

With battles being fought everywhere, cities were lost, towns were wiped from the map. Entire countries ceased to exist. Borders could have been redrawn, if anyone really had the time for it.

And out of all of this, came just one positive.

Humanity was not entirely defenseless. For better or worse, we had been in the habit of fighting amongst ourselves since pre-historic times. And, it turned out that if we directed such efforts at a shared threat, we could accomplish great things. And with massive casualties, and costly efforts, it was determined that the rifts that monsters were coming out of could be closed.

Leaked reports suggested that there were entirely different ecological environments on the other side of those rifts. Strange and alien places that seemed completely separate from Earth, and were all extremely hostile. But, there was always a “core” beyond the rift. A power-source, or conduit, it wasn't clear. Yet, by destroying these cores the resulting effects would cause whatever rift they were linked with, to close.

Apparently, these cores were not always easy to reach.

Nuclear options were eventually elected to be sent though and detonated, and those attempts were met with mixed success. Low levels of radiation in the surrounding areas upon the rifts closing, was a large downside. The United Nations quickly ruled this method to be a last resort, but that didn’t stop many countries from using it anyways.

There were other options, too. Extreme encapsulation was popular before supply chains started failing. Simplistic as it could get, this was done by use of barricades and ungodly amounts of concrete. Just burying the problem, until it wasn’t a problem. While this seemed to be nowhere near as reliable as actually closing the gates, the method seemed to keep the smaller rifts plugged. Though, this was at a high price of materials and labor. And it wasn’t long until this method became more and more unreasonable. But it helped to establish "Safe-zones" where some order could be maintained...

I’m probably boring you with the details.

My guess is that by now, you probably get the picture.

This was how the world crumbled.

These “rifts” were continuing to appear. Apart from specific zones where mankind maintained a foothold: as a species, we simply couldn't keep up. This was happening in every country, on every continent. Nowhere on the planet was truly safe.

Which, I suppose brings us full circle.

Back to me.

My own town, located in bumfuck-nowhere-USA, was no exception to any of this. When a rift opened up in the local gas station, everything quickly started to spiral.

Luckily, there was a military outpost which had been arbitrarily been set up a few streets over to protect a critical supply-line running towards a nearby city that had even bigger problems. The end result was that they just expanded to deal with it. Top brass probably signed a page, and by association, my town got to survive.

Somewhat.

Shut in my home, only a few hundred meters away from a growing military force attempting to quarantine what was turning out to be a major rift, I soon found that I had nothing to do but wait.

My windows were boarded up, not that doing so would help with anything but my own mental well-being. My supplies were rationed out. What I had, what I might be able to get. Several risky supply runs quickly convinced me the risks were not worth the rewards. I made spreadsheets, notes, documented everything and broke down caloric needs, water intake, etc…

And then?

Well, there was nothing more I could do. I waited, in the timeless quote, “For all this to blow over.” And then I kept on waiting, because it most certainly was not going to blow over.

Trapped inside, information became my life. My power and internet were being kept on, almost entirely by luck. Bolstered by the tiny hand crank radio, and the presence of a shoddy solar panel and battery I’d bought a few years prior during the pandemic that preceded this mess, I was able able power a spotty mobile hotspot I used to rely on for work.

Every day was more bad news.

Going outside wasn’t much of an option after the first few months. Monsters were spotted roaming around, often reported only after they had killed people- and people themselves were just as scary. Law and order weren’t much of a thing as the stores were cleaned out and whoever was left alive started going hungry. The few times I risked supply runs in the early days, I saw a lot of things I couldn’t unsee.

They say that society is only three meals away from anarchy, and that's potentially true.

Not long after my choice to bunker down, commercial news really began to falter. Remote broadcasts continued, as did infrequent radio broadcasts to some degree, but much in the manner that war-time coverage and personal uploads might. Updates were rare, or simply repeated over and over, providing nothing of real value.

And then it got worse.

The electrical grid was dead. Bombed out, if I had to guess.

My area had a military focus, but anything they didn't need was left to burn. The water tap ran dry at some point. I’d kept to topping off all the empty bottles I had lying around, as well as filling the tub and sink, but leaving pans out to catch rain water was hardly sufficient. While I’d never truly identified as the sort of person who would turn to prepping, but I learned quickly.

Still, I started to truly ration things, the writing was on the walls.

It was a strange and terrible feeling, waking up and knowing things were about as bad as they could hope to get. And yet, I did have the rare privilege of counting down the days. The nearby military base was a strange buffer, keeping me somewhat protected, and away from the worst of it.

There I sat: escaping the outside chaos as best I could by refreshing pages on my phone and laptop, while struggling with my lack of power and spotty internet. It was only by reading about the information as it filtered in on message-boards, that kept me halfway-sane.

I broke out old journals, and took notes. I scribbled my theories and plans, ever-meticulous as I tried to reason out some manner by which I might come out of the mess alive. For the first time in my life, the old shotgun my grandfather had passed on to me sat loaded, ready under the shelf in my bedroom. The pistol I’d bought at the start of the pandemic, what felt like an impossibly long time before, waited in a holster on my belt. I knew that guns were almost useless. It was only with tanks and missiles, that monsters were being brought down consistently, but the thought I could do something, anything at all, was a small comfort.

And that was how I spent my last days on Earth.

Quietly waiting, knowing that there would be no help coming. Watching society and all the many facets of it, as it all began to go dark.

Servers were going offline. The “cloud” wasn’t so immortal as most had hoped, and how could it be? The physical locations those machines were stored, were probably being wiped off the face of the earth. But resourceful internet-addicts could still rely on a trickle of personal videos and witness accounts. Personal uploads of all sorts, which held for some time until perhaps the lack of reliable connections and power grids became too detrimental.

With nothing better to do, I kept my strict routine of distractions: reading, learning, reaching for any glimmer of hope there might be a way out of this. I kept this up until all that was left was a barely a drip of news that came in on the few resilient pages, tucked and squirreled away with whatever servers were somehow still operational.

There, I read all of the strange and obscure stories.

I saw footage that I assumed had to be fake, were it not so convincing. I read all of the wild tales, the lunatic-like ravings, and the conspiracy theories. Each and every bizarre tale, no matter how farfetched.

It didn’t matter what it was, like a sponge: I soaked the knowledge in.

Which meant, perhaps, that I was probably one of the few people alive who entered the [Trial] with a halfway-decent understanding of what it was.