《Computerman》The Tale of a Changing Time

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Couple of days went by and I of course got some half star reviews for my ‘expert’ plan of dealing with that man child. I didn’t mind because the next locators were well behaved and actually read terms of service and their contract and the rules and did abide by them pretty well. So when they threw a party some day to celebrate something I only mentioned that they should’ve told me beforehand instead of just doing it with no warning beforehand. But I didn’t ask for any reimbursement because of their docile behavior.

Also they even bought me groceries even though they didn’t have to do that. This allowed me to enter the state of safe game marathon which is basically playing to the point of starving and bladder bursting and stopping playing just before anything bad happens. Unsafe game marathon would be just shitting myself while playing and allowing myself to starve just to play. I knew that my ‘safe’ ways were unhealthy but If you want to be a number one or just really enjoy something your focus can reach levels where you barely notice passage of time and normal physiological needs are disregarded altogether.

But then the disaster happened, the sun eclipse started and then never ended. Naturally without special glasses it's kinda hard to see the actual sun eclipse, so the people didn’t freak out, they probably assumed that this event would be slightly longer. No one bothered to check the implications of long sun eclipse. As for me? I didn’t care I never really enjoyed any sort of eclipse because there always was something better to do than to stare at the moon or at the sun and damage my vision.

After another couple of relatively peaceful days the sky began dimming and the moon or whatever else was blocking the sun grew to the point where only the outline of our local star was visible. It looked almost apocalyptic and it happened in the span of an hour naturally people freak out not everyone though. Children, teens and laborers reacted first because most of them were outside doing whatever the rest either didn’t believe saying it's some government test gone wrong.

Others were speculating about aliens and other bullshit. Frankly I was quite surprised that people or rather mindless mobs didn’t start looting and killing each other, instead the police and military came and they have beaten sense and logic back into citizens with batons and water canons. The riots were over before they even started. I wasn't panicking because I saw politicians going about their daily lives just a day before this one. Since they weren’t freaking out then, that meant the eclipse wasn’t harmfull in the short term.

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Short term means that whatever is causing such an event won’t cause cancer or isn’t outright harmful to the humans and the rest of the planet. Of course in the long run we were still fucked because by the inverse square law aka light get more dim when it more farther away. Which means that there will be sweeping crop failures across the planet or the crops won’t be as plentiful as before, leading to widespread famine. The future was sadly far worse than we expected.

The eclipse was now a permanent feature on the sky no matter where you were on the planet no matter what time clocks showed the dark circle with fiery ring was still there on the sky. The climate was worsening a lot. The constant exposure to the sun from all sides was heating up the planet a lot. To combat this the plastic from oceans was repurposed to make a giant and thin snow white sheet to cover any flat surface outside that wasn’t essential for survival.

The government's first covered buildings and then anything near the cities, after that we put these sheets on the deserts and small mountains. After covering all cities and nearly all deserts the climate finally stopped heating up. But this wasn’t ideal for all of the factories around the globe and some of the power plants would need to stop working as well as any fuel inefficient car, to effectively stop the climate change.

Some countries from the Middle East proposed the idea of covering more surfaces with white plastic sheets, others proposed optimizing the industry, others had other less stelar ideas such as going to space and destroying whatever is causing this. The last idea was quite popular among the general masses. Sadly those mindless cretins didn’t see that ejecting a shit ton of chem fuel to the atmosphere would only speed up the warming and that we couldn’t be certain that whatever is causing this can be destroyed by our level of tech.

First year was harsh not only for our climate. 90% of fauna has died, mainly birds due to perpetual day making them unable to navigate as well as most of the ground animals due to surface area being converted into curved smooth and hard shapes meant to reflect the light back up.

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Since the surface was made out of plastic which is a man made material plants had a quite hard time growing on it with the lack of plants the population of herbivores receded along with the population of carnivores. But not only land animals got screwed over in the process of saving the planet or rather extending the amount of time in which the surface is hospitable. A lot of farms that were deemed unnecessary were dismantled and covered in white sheets, most of the pastures were also destroyed due to them being not essential.

Most of the farmers who lost their jobs ended up on the streets although the statistics said that over half of them died to various factors such as but not limited to terrorist attacks and suicide after couple of months. Also quite a lot of people that were considered as fanatics thought that the end times are coming and also started terrorist groups and offing themselfes. Regular citizens were also affected, because our bodies function on a 24 hour clock and without any indicator for sleep time the internal clocks of our bodies became more and more faulty stretching out our work time sometimes even to 30 hours.

Cases of suicides and deaths from overworking also skyrocketed because of this. Some countries tried to counteract this with special laws and computer programs that indicated the time when citizens should go to bed and special curtains that completely stopped any light from passing through them. Crime rates also went up for all the wrong reasons. The bandits and criminals started working on their papers to look like a skilled and government approved psychologist, to ‘help’ people and make them go to a good ‘psychiatrist’ which would prescribe them with a good ‘medicine’ at some point there was a hundred criminal groups working more or less like that in a single city.

Other common crimes were organising groups of people thinking about suicide and then leading them to do it only for them to either give their wordly possesions to the organisers or for the organisers to steal the participants stuff even during their life to force them to kill themselfes, to feed the mass of panic and sadness so that the gang could gather more participants next time.

I didn’t really care as I didn’t work and just played games, speaking of a lot of good games came out free this was goverment plan to at least curb rising suicides among young people. The gov also tried giving people money or tax breaks. Nothing really worked, so eventually the communist levels of propaganda were authorized and people instead of working together started hating those from other countries. Of course it didn’t happen at once, no, the media started showing pieces of ‘evidence’ from which all of this shit was caused by whoever or whatever country the majority of citizens didn’t like.

With tax breaks for whoever was a productive member of society (I barely qualified) and rich people buying out entire cities I was living quite comfortably. Of course I was pitying the poor people who were too dumb to live and use this situation to dirastically improve their lives, like for example studying or going through diffrent courses to become psychologist or someone else who talked to people to calm them and whatever.

I sent a couple of letters to corporations owning land listing all of my exploits and contracts simply asking to become a partner or affiliate to the corporation in making other contracts for whoever rents their land. Some replied some didn't. I had some offers from smaller start ups which I accepted stating I wanted good hourly pay and no fees for getting fired or me leaving myself. Most didn’t reply after I wrote that I want 150 bucks per hour which was almost as much as the psychologist wanted when the suicde rates spiked.

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