Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror

red Markets

First Printing July 2017 by Hebanon Games in cooperation with Asian Pacific Offset Inc. Contact us at [email protected] via redmarketsrpg.com, or search your favorite social network for “Red Markets” or “Hebanon Games.” Red Markets is the intellectual property of Hebanon Games and sole proprietor Caleb Stokes. Game Design: Caleb Stokes Writing: Caleb Stokes, Laura Briskin-Limehouse, Ross Payton Editing: Laura Briskin-Limehouse Art Direction: Caleb Stokes Cover Art: Kim Van Deun Back Cover Art: LuigiStudio Interior Art: Kim Van Deun, Patsy McDowell, James Beatham, Christopher Cirillo, Michael Plondaya, Darrell Claunch, Ean Moody, Przemek Lech Graphic Design: Kathryn Carty, Kyle Carty Special Thanks: Role-playing Public Radio, Technical Difficulties, Thrilling Intent, Faust Kells, Tom Church, David Dobelman, Aaron Carston, Shaun Greenwald, Nicolas Marjanovic, Adam Briskin-Limehouse, 1148 Kickstarter backers, and Sara Hann Creative Commons License; Some Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org. This means is that you are free to copy, share, and remix the text and artwork within this book under the following conditions: 1) you do so only for noncommercial purposes; 2) you attribute Hebanon Games; 3) you license any derivatives under the same license.

4 IntroductIon 5 HIstory of the Crash 10 The (Un)death of History 11 The Failed State 13 The Crash 32 Reaction and Policy 56 Retreat Becomes Recession 68 Writing Off the Loss 82 Rise of the Carrion Economy 87 The Taker’s Role 110 The Loss 116 A Guide 117 Lost Places 120 Lost People 137 Lost Things 157 PlayIng The Market 171 Profit System 172 Character Creation 181 Upkeep: Paying the Bills 223 Materialism: Bounty, Gear, and Vehicles 232 Combat 272 Blight: Casualties and Vectors 293 Humanity 310 Negotiation 320 RunnIng The Market 351 Shades of Red 352 Job Creator 358 Long-term Investments 406 MBA Rules 424 Loss Encounters 446 AppendIx 485 table of contents

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6 the wrong end of the economy. It’s about characters deciding how much they’re willing to pay for sanity, love, freedom, and other things that should be free. It’s about struggling with cutthroat capitalism when its knife is on your neck. What Is an Rpg? Google it. Look, we’re not trying to turn you off here. If Red Markets is your first RPG, everyone who worked on this book is genuinely flattered. Welcome! But you can either read this whole book to get the gist of it, or check online for literally thousands of faster explanations. You can listen to dozens of Red Markets games on podcasts like Role-playing Public Radio, OneShot, or Technical Difficulties. Or ask fans of the game directly at redmarketsrpg.com or any of our social media sites. The book is already this goddamn long and we’d love to make it longer, so let’s not waste any more space pretending the internet doesn’t exist. Furthermore, Red Markets is basically a poverty simulator that uses zombies to keep its theme from getting too real. We really appreciate people playing the game (and their money), but there are sunnier, happier games with which to tour the magical land of RPGs. We understand that books are products, products are meant to be sold, and this maybe isn’t the best way to do that. But the purpose of consuming this particular product is to create a unique story-telling experience with your friends: an experience that can’t be commoditized, co-opted, or cheapened. Creating something that special is going to require some work out of you. It starts here. How To Use ThIs Book The book is split into six sections. The Introduction, which you’re reading now, gives the basic gist of the game, the book’s content, and a glossary of terms useful for understanding the setting and rules. What Is Red Markets? Red Markets is a tabletop RPG about economic horror. In Red Markets, characters risk their lives trading between the massive quarantine zones containing a zombie outbreak and the remains of civilization. They are Takers: mercenary entrepreneurs unwilling to accept their abandonment. Bound together into competing crews, each seeks to profit from mankind’s near-extinction before it claims them. They must hustle, scheme, and scam as hard as they fight if they hope to survive the competing factions and undead hordes the Market throws at them. Takers that are quick, clever, or brutal enough might live to see retirement in a safe zone, but many discover too late that the cycle of poverty proves harder to escape than the hordes of undead. Red Markets uses the traditional zombie genre to tell a story about surviving on

7 Charges: an expendable resource that abstractly measures a piece of gear’s remaining usefulness. Charges can be spent to buy-a-roll or to provide a bonus. Check: rolling the dice to determine the success or failure of a character’s actions. Default: checking a skill with a rating of zero is called defaulting. It is an optional rule. The Market can veto any and all default checks. Dependents: non-player characters in the Taker’s life that must be supported financially and heal Humanity when maintained. They are portrayed in the game by the Market or another player. Gassed: a character that is out of rations is considered gassed and may not take rigorous physical action until recovered. Gear: objects or tools that make certain actions possible and/or easier to achieve. Haul: the measure of how much a character can carry. Each unit of Haul represents a unit of supply the Taker can carry, unless the Market dictates otherwise. Market: the person who runs the game and writes the story of each job; the game-master. Responsible for playing NPCs in the story, determining encounters, and setting prices. Market Forces: any enemy NPC intent on harming the player characters. In combat, the Market declares what actions the forces are taking but does not roll for them. Non-player Characters (NPCs): secondary characters played by the Market or temporarily by another player at the table. One-and-Done: some skill checks cannot be attempted more than once. One-and-Done rolls are mostly social or mental actions. Failed one-and-done rolls can be made successful if the player petitions the Market to succeed at cost. Player Characters (PCs): the protagonist characters controlled by players at the table. In Red Markets, all PCs are Takers. Potential: natural aptitudes that can only be improved through rigorous, disciplined practice. Potentials serve as the limit of skills. Red: the die that represents the variable difficulty of performing an action. History of the Crash is a setting chapter dealing with the world before the Crash, how the Blight came to ravage mankind, and the dystopian Carrion Economy that resulted, trapping the players’ characters to fend for themselves in a hell known as the Loss. The Loss details the various places, people, and things that Takers may run across as they work. The wasteland is a new world with new rules. It can make people rich, but it mostly makes them miserable, insane, or dead. Playing the Market explains the rules of the game. It covers how the Profit System’s dice mechanic works. It explains how to write characters, equip them, and have them fight for their lives. It also details the social/financial combat system known as Negotiation, which Takers must use if they hope to keep their crew and families alive. Running the Market contains tools for people hosting games for their friends. In addition to general advice, it has procedures for collaboratively building settings, adventures, and entire campaigns, as well as pre-built encounters. There are also a variety of alternate rules to keep the game interesting for advanced players. Finally, the Appendix has copies of all the papers needed to track a game session and an index for speedy reference. Game materials ready for download and print can also be found at redmarketsrpg.com. Game TermInology Here are the basic terms used in the Profit System and what they mean. “Buy-a-roll”: Some actions are only possible with the use of gear and spent resources. Buying a roll means spending a charge to allow a skill check. Black: the die that represents the player’s chance of success. This can be modified by skills and charges spent on gear. Boom: a rules variant that makes the game easier and more action-packed. Bust: a rules variant that makes the game more challenging and grim.

8 Bounty: the currency between the Loss and the Recession. Bounty is provided by the DHQS for the retrieval of identity and property documentation dating before the Crash. Bounty is rewarded on delivery, based on the average value of a pre-Crash adult’s total property and financial holdings. Carrion Economy: generalized term for the world economy. While new goods and services are still in production, worldwide trade is largely focused on looting the corpse of the Loss to recover value and infrastructure. Casualty: A zombie; a cadaver puppeted by the parasitic nervous system characteristic of “cold” Blight. The term hails from bloodless, sanitized news reports during the early days of the Crash used to prevent panic, now used ironically by Takers. “Taking casualties” can now mean killing zombies for money or dying in the process. Citizen: pejorative term for a person living safely in the Recession or one of its settlements. Crash: the initial emergence of the Blight and the resulting panic, chaos, and death. Crew: the collective noun form of Takers. Crews assemble to bid on jobs and brand their services. DHQS: the Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship, the new agency in charge of maintaining the United State’s borders and eventually reclaiming the Loss. They are responsible for the bounty system and the inept enforcement of the underground economy resulting from it. Enclaves: pockets of surviving civilization not officially recognized by any of the surviving state powers, but large enough to have some economic impact. Allowed to survive because they draw casualties away from the borders of safe zones or maintain vital infrastructure points. Free Parking: derogatory term for the shantytowns that developed in the wake of the evacuation, so named because of the numerous derelict cars that make up their dwellings. References: professional contacts in the setting with access to goods, services, and expertise. References perform favors for Takers but must be paid back with bounty or other favors. These non-player characters are played by the Market or another player. Refresh: the term used for replacing spent charges on a single piece of gear. Skills: training and practice in performing a specific task. A Taker’s skill cannot exceed the Potential associated with it. Succeed at Cost: If a player fails a one-anddone roll and doesn’t want to spend Will, they can choose to succeed at cost. The cost of success is determined by the Market, but it often involves tapping a Reference or learning the truth through a painful mistake. Upkeep: the cost, in bounty, it takes to stay alive, retain shelter, and keep tools in working order between sessions. SettIng TermInology Below you’ll find some jargon used to describe the world of Red Markets. Aberrant: blanket term for a number of casualty sub-types with special abilities. Bait: nickname for a citizen of the Recession that left for financial, political, or religious reasons to live out in the Loss. Believers: collective term for the religious sects and philosophies that sprang up after the Crash. Each cult has unique beliefs that can range from benignly comforting to terrifyingly fanatical. Blight: the mysterious infection responsible for the Crash and all its terrors, so called due to its anomalous medical classification. Like its victims, Blight has two stages: living and undead. Living Blight is the single most infectious disease ever encountered by mankind. It creates homicidal Vectors in a matter of minutes, and its exponential growth rate can bring conversion time down to seconds. After a victim succumbs, the Blight pathology changes completely, becoming more fungal/parasitic and building unearthly black sinews that puppet dead flesh and slow cadaver decay.

9 retreat behind natural borders and the resulting safe zones. If someone is “from the Recession,” they live in a safe zone marked by geographical fortification and run by a surviving national government. Early government communications used this term exclusively to refer to symptoms of the Crash because everything except economic news was being censored to avoid panic. It stuck due to its ironic inadequacy after the American government abandoned many of its citizens and “receded” to the East coast. The Red Markets: the underground economy exploiting the Loss as a resource and trading between enclaves and the Recession. The market is “red” because it is not legal, but as nearly everyone participating is considered legally dead already, the trade isn’t technically illegal either. Supressin K-7864: a drug cocktail derived from the bone marrow of an Immune human, extremely powerful antibiotics, and dangerously caustic antiseptics. Though it cannot kill infection, injection within a few minutes after a bite can cause the Blight to enter its dormant state and reduce a Vector into a Latent human. Supressin is the single most valuable substance in the Loss. T-minus Never: slang for the day of reclamation, generalized to mean false hope or foolish wishes. Derives from the fact that DHQS has claimed reclamation would begin in 20 years from the date of announcement... for five years running. Takers: name for the outcasts, smugglers, and survivors that work the Red Markets. Simultaneously references “undertakers” and a reputation for theft. Ubiq: massive internet start-up responsible for the free global wi-fi network exploited by the Moths and the only reliable from of communication the global economy can rely on. Ubiq servers both enabled and sabotaged the Recession by providing a stable communications network during the Crash. Vector: a recently infected human unhindered by decay or rigor mortis. They are fast, infectious, and deadly. Homo Sacer: Latin for “the accursed man,” the term refers to a person banned from civilized society and not afforded protection under the law. Anyone outside the Recession’s borders without expressed federal consent is considered Homo Sacer. Immune: a rare person that, for reasons unknown, is completely immune to Blight infection. They are subject to “conscription into medical service” (read: kidnapping, medical torture, and bone marrow harvesting) in the Recession and its settlements, in order to produce Suppressin K-7864 from their bone marrow. Takers and certain enclaves often attempt to kidnap the Immune for a sizable reward. Latent: a carrier of the Blight that somehow remains free of cannibalistic urges. It occurs when the virus infects a host but transfers too quickly into its undead state. Necrotic Blight sinews wind painfully through the victim’s tissues (making Latents instantly identifiable), but the dead strain cannot affect living brain tissue. Latency can be natural or achieved by injecting Supressin K-7864 shortly after infection. Those infected by a Latent become Vectors as if bitten by a casualty, as the Blight reanimates itself without the intervention of drugs. Due to this danger, enclaves, settlements, and nations often shoot Latents on sight or detain them in isolated camps. LifeLines: the secured forum launched by Gnat to coordinate evacuation and survival for civilians during the Crash. It’s now an invite-only community for Takers and other inhabitants of the Loss. The Loss: as in “written off as a Loss.” Everything outside a safe zone surrendered to the dead and the home of the Red Markets for five years. Lost: anybody left behind as the remainder of civilization pulled back to the Recession. The Moths: the world’s largest Taker crew, made up of the survivors of the Operation Utility mutiny and former Ubiq employees. The Moths are based out of the Ubiq campus in the Colorado Mountains. The Recession: the term for humanity’s

10 hIstory OF THE CRASH

11 he gets that central-casting PTSD look and clams up for two days. Weeks pass and we get him almost human again. He starts running around the place like a damned mascot, making friends with the Moths. But he still won’t come near me. One day, I crawl out from under the innards of a server and find him standing there. He bolts like a Latent just had a heart attack. So I ask Frizzle, who runs what we can manage for a school, what the hell is up with this kid. She tells me the reason he didn’t call for help — the reason he’d rather freeze to death in the woods than get my attention — is because he recognizes my face from the DHQS propaganda. Apparently, they’re running ads on the public access projector screens in his car camp... ones where they blame me for the Crash. PA blasts aimed at the poor, day-and-night, claiming I brought the zombies that killed his parents. I get a little pissed when I hear this. I work pretty hard to keep the DHQS bullshit out of my home and off my bandwidth. I tell Frizzle to get the kid to read a book or something. Educate his ass. Do your job. She looks through me. She says, “We have to teach him how to read first.” The kid’s ration card says he was something like four when the Crash went down. Five years later, the Department of Education still isn’t up and running again, or at least not in the car camps. The generation for which zombies were always a reality has already been born. From now on, whenever I’m not working to keep the LifeLines up, I’m going to try my hand at being a historian. One day, the Recession is going to decide they want the Loss back, and they’ll send me the memo by way of drone strike. If I’m not careful, my story will die with me. So until then, I’ll be working on a record of how things really went down and seeding it all over the network. Gnat If you’re reading an “official” history, I bet my biography reads something like “Natalie Delle The (Un)Death of HIstory Before all of you hop on the “she’s gone mad with power!” thread again, allow me to explain. This self-indulgent lecture owes itself to a patrol the Moths and I did a while back. (Yes, “The Gnat” still goes over the fence and pulls cards. Having to moderate you assholes all day can make a girl nostalgic for the days when being eaten alive was a literal rather than metaphorical risk.) Anyway, we had our haul and were heading back to camp. BanHammer was out front, doing his best white walker impression. Hipster and I were in middle and Traitor was on overwatch in the rear, coordinating with squads on the flank. It was cold: the Cs were slow and the pickings easy. Then, out of nowhere, this huge drift of snow falls from boughs of a tree and onto Ban’s shoulders. We look up and there he is: a half-starved boy. The little guy is scared shitless and who can blame him. Nobody sneaks up on Ban, so he freaks out, pulls out the sledge, and starts prowling around like a Vector in heat. Traitor’s screaming militarese into his mic as Hipster buzzes the poor little bastard with a drone. Then the support squads crash through the underbrush to save me before — god forbid — someone else has to learn to code. So the child is frozen to the tree, figuratively and literally. He’d been chased up there by a half-dozen undead that we’d put down on the way out, and he’d stayed up there until we walked back. One of the soldiers yells up, asks him why the hell he didn’t say anything as we were killing monsters right underneath his feet. The kid just points at me with a shaking finger, more terrified of my face than any of the dozen rifles held on him. A squad eventually coaxes him down and back to UCity. After we get him warm and fed, they pull some information out of him. He was a Recession kid: ration card placed him in a Free Parking ghetto in Tennessee, right up against the river. We have no idea how he got all the way to Colorado. When they ask him why he left the Recession and who with,

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13 their actual merits, and there aren’t enough of those to convince the peasants to put down their Molotov cocktails. Survivors are incentivized from within and without to maintain this the illusion that the pre-Crash world was the ideal. Don’t get me wrong, I preferred a world without casualties — but citizens always give the undead more credit than they deserve. If anything, the Blight was a tipping point that sent a dozen complex sociopolitical, economic, and environmental issues into cascading failure. That’s why it’s called the Crash and not “Zombie Day.” Global DeclIne Every generation laments the future. Nanabanyin kɛse freaked out when his girls attended junior high school. Nanabanyin thought it was the end times when my mother went to college. Dad’s family freaked out when he married an African, and Mom lost it when I left her racist-ass church. They all saw the death of the future in the lives of the young. So when I say society was on the downward slope long before the Crash, a lot of people will claim I’m just shaking my fist at those darn kids and telling them to get off the lawn of history. That criticism would have some weight... if billions hadn’t been killed by the Blight. When I say things weren’t looking good before the Crash, it’s not overreaction. We had huge problems that we were doing nothing to solve, and those problems remain ignored even today. It’s easy to blame everything on monsters, but those in power opened the door to them in the first place. ClImate Change Let’s compare the world on the day before the Crash to that same day in 1950. The world population was 75% smaller. It had 1.5 million more plant and animal species, 90% more fish, and 60% more oxygen-producing phytoplankton. Drinking water and trees were three times more plentiful, and there was 40% less CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. was summoned from the bowels of hell by dark priests. Her uneventful years were spend eating babies and blowing terrorists until she decided to betray America to the undead legions and destroy the world.” Unofficially, Mom was a Ghanese hydroelectric engineer and Dad was a Mormon computer programmer. They met on his mission and moved back to the garbage fire people were still confusing for the US of A. Natalie Delle was born and did little more than play video games and watch cat videos until Dad died in a car crash when she was seven. Afterwards, Mom made the terrible choice of moving the family near relatives in the shithole police state of St. Louis, MO. The rest of Natalie’s youth was spent trapped in her house, tinkering with Dad’s old computer equipment as Mom did her best to seal out the general nastiness outside. Natalie was bright. She won a few scholarships and went out into the world to discover what her mother had learned long ago: black women were about as welcome in tech as an EMP. By then, it was too late to reroll “computer nerd” as her class ability, so she said fuck it and persisted until she got hired by a goofy-looking hick that happened to start the biggest tech company the world had ever seen. Her job at Ubiq positioned Natalie for a nice view of the end of the world. When she refused to sit around and do nothing about it, it was a sin for which she’ll never be forgiven. Am I biased? Yeah. Everyone is. At least I’ll admit I’m always trying to sell you something... even if it’s just my version of events. The FaIled State I’ve always suspected rose-colored glasses get their tint from blood. A partial apocalypse naturally maximizes nostalgia, but the Recession’s entire ideology hinges on painting pre-Crash society as some utopia. If they can’t promise a return to the golden age, they’re stuck campaigning on

14 gone almost entirely green almost a decade before the Crash (it’s a key reason they survived to become major Recession powers). But every advancement was offset by a dozen developing nations bootstrapping themselves using coal or fracking, or one superpower (USA, China, Russia) that could not seem to give a fuck. Basically, the Crash threw information and manufacturing economies back onto their agricultural base. Hard. When regular seasons had already been reduced to mere suggestions, natural disasters were occurring more commonly than ever before, and the extinction curve was approaching vertical. Before we even had to deal with the worst pandemic in history, the most advanced nations in the world were having trouble feeding and housing all their citizens. Despite all this, my parents lived their entire lives in a world of climate change deniers. As islands sank and fields turned fallow, they couldn’t make a remark that it seemed a little hot today without launching into some political debate that might lose them their jobs. By the time my generation came around, deniers were thankfully back to being treated like cranks and lobbyists, but we’d already outpaced the predicted global temperature rise by an entire degree. We were hovering at just under +3°C, and most scientists claimed +4°C signaled the end of humanity. We went straight from pretending global warming wasn’t happening to resigning ourselves to doom, skipping the part where you actually try to do something about the problem. This is an oversimplification; there were some nations that started getting very serious about renewable energy. Scandinavia had

15 A.U.B.U. MIlItarIzatIon So if you can’t change the ecological basis of all your problems and you can’t trust the reaction to keep you in power, what do you do? I don’t know. Apparently most world governments thought the answer was “tanks.” A.U.B.U. (Against Us, By Us) militarization became the norm for most of the world. Nobody quite reached North Korean levels of military oppression (at least not before the Crash), but the line between law enforcement and military turned into an indistinct smudge. Riot cops looking like space marines were regularly deployed to stop peaceful protests. Missile batteries on sports stadiums. APCs instead of cruisers and balaclavas as standard uniform. Some reading this might not be able to imagine a time when this wasn’t the case. Hell, the thought of a cop not covered head-totoe in bite-resistant Kevlar might terrify you. But this was before the dead rose. The world didn’t have monsters yet; just people. At best, A.U.B.U. militarization trends did as much to help as it did to hurt during the Crash. Sure, it’s nice to have all those guns around now, but only because we’re outside the Romero Effect (see p. 48). The “Cybergeddon” God, I hate this term. So stupid. But it’s what they were calling it back then, so it’s what you’ll have to search. In the early 2010’s, Jason Healey, a cybersecurity expert working for the NSA, pointed out that the gap between digital offense (hackers, cyber-warfare units, etc.) and defense (security specialists, firewalls, etc.) had not only always favored the attackers, but it was doing so at an exponentially increasing rate. Disruptive hackers could come from within security services in the form of zeroday hacks, but rarely would criminals be convinced to go straight with the same ease. Stagnating wages incentivized more experts to rob the online commerce vaults than guard them. Governmental obsessions PolItIcal Upheaval Most neoliberal first-world democracies so insulated themselves from the effects of climate change that environmental issues were rarely, if ever, on the platform. The one thing the technocrats could not keep out, however, was climate’s effect on jobs. Agrarian occupations became increasingly technical, as corporations were often the only farmers with the genetic and mechanical resources to keep the land producing crops. The lowest end of the economic spectrum was slowly phased out from the world’s most essential profession. In many nations, this led to either mass migration or wars, with the latter eventually ending in the former. In addition to the effect of refugees on more stable economies, the increase in mass killings — be they motivated by political, economic, or more mundane forms of fame-seeking narcissism — was reliably blamed on the transient population of the moment. After all, it was easier to police the desperate poor than contain an outbreak of memetic insanity. The general dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of pretty much every political party scattered once stable voting blocs to the four winds. On the right, candidates pushed further and further away from the center, advocating for outright xenophobic and fascist policies. America elected more than a few members of recognized hate groups into high office. On the left, many countries that had historically gone centuries without hard left groups found themselves inundated by socialist, libertarian, and anarchist movements. Though these groups grabbed some power, a lack of funding and tendency to in-fight left most disenfranchised. The desperation for recognition radicalized the base more and more, increasing the cycle of leftist self-destruction. Elections became unpredictable crapshoots, full of insurgent candidates that gambled years of progress and the collective GDP of entire continents. In retrospect, it’s no surprise no one knew what they hell they were doing when the Crash hit.

16 a precursor to corporate espionage and national cyber-warfare. Ideological attacks masked themselves as corporate sabotage and vice versa, leading to state-level security crackdowns that were uniformly mismanaged. Before the Crash, massive data leaks were daily news. When net neutrality ended and providers in the West starting holding bandwidth hostage, old-school hacktivists, usually split by their pet social problems, in unison turned their ire towards the internet’s corporate kingmakers. Every script-kiddie troll on earth joined the cause too, even if they were just fighting to restore their old porn download speeds. As the data leaks grew more severe, the crackdowns got more draconian, and the ranks of the digital anarchists swelled. The traditional internet was a failed state before the nightmare even began. with surveillance left little in the budget for prevention, and most of the remainder went towards developing offensive cyber-warfare units of their own. Local law enforcement remained more of a tool for doxxers, swatters, and harassers than a real deterrent, and the increasing tendency to nationalize internets using the “Great Firewall of China” method usually only made enforcement harder. All of these tendencies, combined with equally exponential growth in new technologies and software, could lead towards a “Cybergeddon:” an internet divided up into temporary fiefdoms perpetually at war for resources. It was a dumb name for a smart prediction. Before the development of Ubiq, the old net was certainly doing its best to prove Healey correct. Domain conflicts over limited bandwidth were constantly being fought in the courtroom, usually only as

17 The EducatIon Default Speaking of deathless monsters, how ‘bout them student loans? For decades, more and more people went to college, but the debt accrued to pay for it left enrollment numbers in the dust. Even at the most forgiving interest rates, any student loan would saddle the recipient with decades of debt slavery. With the exception of those with full-rides or people majoring in finance, most college graduates could expect to pay on loans for the rest of their lives. Wages that had stagnated since the goddamn 70’s just weren’t going to cut it, and the bankruptcy exemption meant the situation was literally hopeless. The job market couldn’t react appropriately. Calls to increase vocational education and return to manufacturing were ignored. Thousands of jobs with little or no academic component nonetheless required Bachelor’s degrees, and so many for-profit schools sprang up to fulfill demand that a Master’s degree became the new signifier of “real” college. Even more years of school. Even more debt. Politicians promised to forgive all debts overnight, cap tuition, genetically engineer money trees, etc. It didn’t matter. Each solution received so much pushback from the various factions that it stopped dead the moment it was proposed. So the problem metastasized: rising demand and costs saw the private sector greedily choke down whatever the fed loans didn’t want to touch. It was the ‘07 subprime mortgage fiasco all over again. Huge amounts of student debt were privately traded among financial institutions, bundled into monstrous clusterfucks of excel sheets that were sold to the highest bidder for collection. Everyone wanted a degree because they wanted a job, whether they had the chops to graduate or not. Loans were given out to 4.0 pre-med students and 1.4 professional fraternity brothers alike, all to feed the beast of debt buyers. The requirements went down and down until they went away. Being rejected for a federal loan meant less than nothing when a The LIvIng Death of JournalIsm Good luck finding anything to confirm this bullshit I’m spewing. Even with the old net all but dead, you’ll still find a lot of articles and news segments to confirm how awful things were getting, but most of them will end by blaming everything on them. Whichever them was most convenient to the paymasters: liberals, conservatives, black, whites, foreigners, etc. To figure out who was really responsible for something, your best bet was to see what the news network wasn’t covering. We can’t really blame the journalists. Journalism decayed because we starved it to death. We stopped reading magazines and papers. When we read news online, we went to the article with the most GIFs, or the shortest listicle, or the funniest comedian. Big, complicated ideas stopped selling, but the theater of “revealing” those ideas to the public was still valuable. By the time the Crash started, there was no such thing as an unbranded news source: every single one of the 24-hour services owed complete editorial control to some corporate paymaster or political favor-monger. Ethical, accurate citizen journalism still existed, but it was thrown onto the wires along with every paranoid lunatic the zeitgeist could dig up. The “buyer beware” mentality of information consumption is all good if you received a decent public education and gave enough of a shit to pay attention to it, but that was a dicey proposition even before the Crash. Now that a significant portion of the population lives in squalid tent cities surrounded by undead cannibals, I don’t imagine the situation has exactly improved. The AmerIcan NIghtmare That’s enough generalities. Every nation Crashed in their own way, and I’m not about to claim to speak for all of them. I’m an American, and my country died an American death: needless, fueled by ignored problems and ungrateful excess.

18 people just got tired of the rigged system and all gave up at once. Maybe one of the defaulting movements finally got enough people to realize that there weren’t enough taxmen in the world to come for all of them. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone ever will. The dust of the economic collapse hadn’t settled before zombies came stalking out of it. Midway through the crisis, we got President Hunter. New promises were made. Obstructionist Congress got out the knives as usual, but, this time, an actual bill passed out the other end. A bloody, diseased scrap of law. The solution proposed got the government out of the loan business. That’s it. They threw the whole thing on the private sector and said good luck. No bailout. No forgiveness. No nothing. We finally had a farright president that truly believed business could do everything, and now they were being asked to prove it. dozen banks had kiosks in the student union. The only purpose fed loans served to the banks was as a bellwether for the default margin. See, they never expect everyone to pay up. People die, go ex-pat, stay unemployed, etc. The risk margin was already built into every loan bundle. And, like the crash before it, everything was fine until it tipped over an invisible line. I don’t know if the panic started when the default rate hit 15%, 16%, or higher. It’s as likely an issue of memetics as mathematics. The media’s reporting on the issue certainly didn’t help consumer confidence. When the debt buyers started to cut and run, it made the math worse, which made the default margin look worse, which caused more to cut and run, etc. I don’t know who was defaulting either. Maybe cost-of-living and cost-of-loans became mutually exclusive for one too many. Maybe

19 massively open online courses, international piece-meal work apps — they were going to save the goddamn day. I’d be lying if I said people didn’t appreciate the “funemployment” gigs, but scraps when you’re starving are nice too, even if they don’t solve the problem. The new entrepreneurs kept the economy limping along by providing enough for the weekly grocery bill and that’s it. No healthcare, parental leave, overtime, transportation, or anything else. But it was enough. It’s hard to start a revolution on a full stomach. So what was the reality on the ground? More people were renting than ever before. Birth rates were way down, especially amongst the educated. Minimalist living went from a fad to a necessity. A huge segment of the population was on the road; separated from social support networks by digitalonly workspaces, geographic isolation, and working poverty; trapped in cheap, temporary housing not fit to withstand a thunderstorm, not to mention a cannibal horde. The SIlver Fallout For awhile, it looked like everyone was content to pass the buck to younger generations and blame it all on “intellectuals.” It’s a move that had worked before, and it looked like the new revenue streams would keep us limping along. But then the retirement funds got threatened. Thanks to the boomers, the US held more pension debt than every scrap of currency in circulation could cover, three times over. We woke up when the California Teacher’s Fund tried to quietly ask the Fed for a bailout lest they have to publicly declare bankruptcy. Of course, hackers leaked the news before things got settled. The media whipped the markets into the biggest panic yet, and it may have even been justified. California’s was the biggest fund save for Social Security, and after they broke the seal on admitting they’d been gambling pension debt against education debt, other major private and federal funds began reluctantly raising their hands to join them. Hey, at least it wasn’t housing this time? The panic redoubled. Mass layoffs. Colleges closed. Unemployment offices already crammed with farmers and pre-hybrid mechanics were now flooded with professors and desperate hordes of adjuncts. Public education failed to find a new target after “college prep,” and, with fewer universities than ever before, financial institutions shifted as much blame as possible onto the only educators left standing. SharIng (the Scraps) Economy As is the American way, the education default illuminated a whole bunch of other shit we were pretending wasn’t a problem. For decades, we’d been eroding job security and workplace protections. Sure, the laws to protect against undue termination and workplace harassment were in place, but every asshole in the world knew how to get around them. During college, I had a job at a coffee shop in this ritzy neighborhood. I got fired because I was black (the bastard used the n-word) — I could try to sue, but my emailed termination letter merely said I “wasn’t a fit with company culture.” Unless the psychos trying to ruin your livelihood were dumb enough to tweet out their illegal prejudices, there was essentially no such thing as worker protection in the USA. But maybe getting fired is for the best; at least they can’t steal your wages anymore. The US was (and is) one of the most notorious wage thieves in the world, stealing billions in unpaid overtime, denied vacation, illegal deductions, misclassification, and off-theclock hours. Considering the total lack of worker protections, the only solution to stop the theft was “quit,” which wasn’t really an option at the beginning of another massive economic depression. Unions? Please. By the time I was born, I was more likely to meet a unicorn than a functioning union. They were almost completely dismantled decades ago. If you look at articles from the time, everyone seems so excited about the sharing economy. Cloud-distributed taxi services,

20 whole body, before a casualty came along and ripped it off. Desperate InnovatIon Time to check my privilege. It wasn’t all bad before the Crash. That any of us are alive to tell this tale is a testament to that. Not everyone took the world’s problems lying down, and people with that attitude keep the Loss alive. Even those that didn’t make it made survival easier on the rest of us, and they deserve their part in the story too. Tech Working in tech before the Crash, it was hard not to read each new development as either a bullshit fad or as homework. Had the Blight not come, there’s no telling which of these inventions would have caught on and which would have been forgotten as misplaced hype. But the Crash forced corporate R+D, hacker spaces, and survivalist culture into a threeway exchange of ideas unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Surviving the zombie hordes may have favored the luddites initially, but enclaves need technology and infrastructure to survive. A lot of cutting-edge developments prior to the Crash are the only thing keeping us alive today. Carbon Nanotubes We finally figured out hexagonal carbon nanotubes: T6 and T14 carbon chains in stable 3D structures, the lightest and strongest material ever constructed by man. Each stress-tested to roughly 50,000 times its own weight. Manufacturing that allowed the material to stay metallic at ambient temperatures was still expensive as hell, but a lot of it was being commissioned anyway. Ubiq’s Aloft servers wouldn’t have been possible without “tubon,” and the government was researching ways to cheapen production for its own products. Many of the technologies that keep the Recession safe from Cs use carbon nanotubes, like the Mississippi dragnets and Denial Door Jams (see p. 259). It became common to see scandals where entire job sectors would lose decades’ worth of retirement funds on some stupid investment. Each one implicated more and more pension funds sidelining in student loan debt. Investor confidence tanked even harder. Things started to look grim: hobos and souplines grim. Outright it’s-raining-stockbrokers level of panic was averted by the scheduling of congressional hearings and rumors of a bailout, but only just. The weeks leading up to the Crash were ones of tense anticipation. Everyone tried to hold their shit together and prevent further collapse, but phrases like “The Greatest Depression” were on all our minds. At that point, we considered another long recession a “win” scenario; this was before the retreat behind the borders and the term became more literal. In retrospect, we were kidding ourselves. There’s nothing the government could have done. Our dependency ratio — the rate of working-age employed citizens vs. the combined mass of the country’s children, elderly, and disabled — had been thrown completely out of the realm of prosperity by the “silver tsunami” of boomer retirement years earlier. The experts had hoped for years that the “Boomer Echo” would sustain us, but the demographics were never sustainable. People were living longer than ever before, and record low birth rates worsened under the pessimism caused by the education default. When you factor in the institutionalized greed of the corporations we’d sold all the social safety nets to? The most anyone could have done was slow the collapse... at least until China faced the same dependency ratio problem as a result of threedecades of one-child policy. As repugnant as it is to admit, the loss of life might have been even greater if the Crash hadn’t happened. In many ways, the singular measures taken by global powers to secure the Recession hit the reset button on what could have been an economic apocalypse. The system had a poisoned limb, threatening the

21 from starving after the Crash. When you can’t predict whether your crops will be grown in a desert, jungle, or tundra — depending on how Mother Earth feels like taking her revenge that year — natural seed can’t cut it. Just better hope you didn’t buy packets of that Alosine shit with the planned obsolescence built in. Even those that manage to stave off common infections and stay fed still have to face the real threat of a zombie chewing an arm off. But government research into prosthetics motivated by our endless bush wars made the loss of limbs less restrictive than ever before. Nerve-bundling and diode integration can now “mind control” prosthetic limbs with unprecedented precision, in addition to providing limited sensation. Developments in robotics provided unseen articulation, and the advent of 3D printing open-sourced manufacturing to the point where installation only required minimal medical knowledge. We aren’t in a cyberpunk utopia of replacing body parts for fun quite yet — the pain and burden are not to be taken lightly. Still, I’ve been outrun by legless Takers before, and I once saw a guy crush a zombie’s skull in his metal claws. Had the Crash happened even one year earlier, the Loss would be even less accessible than it is now. 3D PrIntIng Speaking of 3D printing... thank god for those nerds! I never got into it myself. “Oh wow! You made a belt buckle out of blue plastic? The future is now!” The appeal never made sense to me, and I regarded the whole thing with eye rolls whenever I’d hear people talking about it in the break room or demonstrating it at conferences. But now that I’m, you know, separated from any and all manufacturing infrastructure for the remainder of my life? Holy shit is 3D printing useful. The Ubiq reactor and servers are only running because we can make new parts for them on the fly. Our catalogue of open source designs is hands down the most popular feature on LifeLines. The stuff is too damn expensive to produce nowadays, and many of the labs with the right equipment are now ruins in the Loss. But, on the bright side, the stuff made pre-Crash is pretty much going to last forever, and a big tubon recycling score can set a Taker up for life. Maybe one day the Recession will figure how to make it cheaply and we can space elevator the hell off this rock. A girl can dream... BIotech For a while there, it looked like the age of antibiotics was about to end. The clock of medical progress was about to jump back a century due to resistant super-bugs hardened by a million prescriptions. The Russians, however, finally figured out stable and safe phage therapy, weaponizing viruses to attack bacteria that antibiotics could no longer harm. Without phage therapy as an alternative, infant mortality would have skyrocketed, organ transplant success would have plummeted, and chemotherapy would have been discontinued altogether. I know this from experience; it’s the reality of the Loss. Hardly anybody can afford or produce antibiotics out here, not to mention the exorbitantly expensive phage therapy. Still, we would have hit the tipping point on antibiotic resistance before the Crash without phage developments, and there’s no doubt the Crash would have been even worse without it. The same skill for genetic manipulation required to grow targeted retroviruses was also applied to alleviate the damage of climate change on food production. Super-strains of all the staple food crops were continually developed and improved in the years leading up to the Crash. “Frankenstein” corn could excrete pheromones to repel insects, produce higher yields, grow on half the water, and survive for short times at extreme temperatures. If you want to go all Detoxin on me and freak about the long-term effects of GMO crops, feel free. It doesn’t change the fact that the resilience of “abomination” seeds was the only thing that kept tens-of-thousands

22 coal mining, and petrochemical refinery operations run by the Lost, and the DHQS settlements producing fossil fuels sometimes run black markets for local Takers. Either way, gasoline and diesel sells at a premium most survivors can’t hope to afford, and running a small hybrid is enough to bankrupt most crews. Like I said, as dire as the energy crisis was before, the minuscule progress made towards renewables is the only reason many of us are alive today. DenatIonalIzed Drones “Drones are the future of warfare,” said every securocrat of the past three decades. It didn’t matter how many unmanned bombers and surveillance flights went up that year. It didn’t I know one lucky enclave that holed up on the construction site where some billionaire tech-bro was “printing” concrete for his new mansion: they have the best damn defenses and housing in the Loss. On at least one occasion, a plastic .22 pistol I grabbed hot off the press saved my life. Seriously, it was kind of a silly hobby before the zombies came. Now? A tube of plastic filament fetches more than a month’s worth of food on the market. Green Technology Compared to the scope of the problem, relatively few people worked on practical environmental alternatives before the Crash. Had we pulled environmentalism away from the fringe and into the mainstream rather than just fracking more? Hundreds of thousands more would have survived. We might have already achieved reclamation. Anyway, as it is, even with the paucity of viable alternatives available, almost every surviving enclave bases its energy policy around a mixture of green technology. You name a green technology and you can bet some group of survivors is now banking their lives on it. Biodiesel, solar, and wind power are the rule rather than the exception. Multiple tech firms increased the efficiency of all three well before the Crash started, but no one had yet to make anything that fit economies of scale. Now? It doesn’t matter how expensive it is. Energy production is an existential threat for most enclaves, and whatever resources can be put towards “nationalizing” utilities in their little city-states are put towards green energy production. There are outliers. Some enclaves are positioned for hydroelectric production. Ubiq is mostly powered by geothermal. Some even use kinetic generators: the lucky ones scored high-end military exoskeleton generators that capture kinetic force from the bodies of users to charge devices; the less fortunate have to pay a daily exercise tax on a stationary bike hooked to a battery. There are a couple of independent fracking,

23 PalbIcke and UbIq I don’t want to ramble on too much about Austin Palbicke; there’s no shortage of biographies out there in the “visionary white tech guy” section of your local e-pub. He’s after Musk and before Zuckerberg. I also don’t want to delve too deep into Ubiq, as the chances you’re reading this on it right now are about as good as the chances you won’t be able to understand how it works. But people like the kid who sparked my little retrospective apparently need more help; his deepest understanding of network architecture seems to be that the internet “lives invisible in the sky.” And as much as I deserve to be worshipped as a god, the truth is more quotidian. So here’s how the system that kept us all alive came to be born. The World Before UbIq Allow me an international comparison for some context. A decade or so back, South Korea announced it had finally achieved “system complete” for its total economic tracking system (TETS). Invoicing had long ago gone digital, but the South Koreans now claimed to have tagged every physical good circulating in their economy. Every pair of sandals, k-pop poster, and bowl of ramen sold had a unique radio tag installed. On production, purchase, and destruction, the code fed user data into the business’s records and the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy, which in turn fed them into “SanShin,” the largest big data analysis software ever conceived. San-Shin processed exabytes of information every hour and promised to revolutionize international distribution. Meanwhile in the USA, on the same date as the TETS announcement, the FCC declared we’d finally, after twenty years of threatening to, connected 90% of the populace to the internet. Despite having dropped from 15th to 18th to 25th in connectivity amongst developed nations. It didn’t matter that everyone alive was effectively a “digital native” or that the web was the only means of matter how many bombs robots defused or that all the tanks could be piloted remotely now. The budgets always called for more automation in the security structure. All that R+D had a trickle down effect. Fear of hacking kept some soldiers inside their tanks, but the government was happy to sell the technology to the agri-corps so they could fire all the farmers and turn the combines into drones. Self-driving AI systems finally got safe enough to mass-produce in cars. When the government was between wars, they’d rent out the high-altitude surveillance tech to watch over cities. By the time they needed them back, municipal police departments were 3D printing their own spy-bots. Hell, the design that eventually became the DHQS zombie-murdering punchbot started out as a prototype for automated riot police. Enhanced quad-copter designs finally wore down the FAA and aerial drone delivery revolutionized distribution seemingly overnight. Narco cartels began using the things to scout smuggling routes. So the DEA made hunter-killer models... which were then reverse engineered by anti-surveillance techno libertarians and used in both political and criminal attacks against government units. Pretty soon, the youth drone racing leagues held out of people’s garages were using tech that would have been military grade the year before. Between racing hobbyists, delivery businesses, self-driving cars, tech criminals, future police, and general trolls hunting all of the above, the world before the Crash was crowded with drones. And thank god. Eyes in the sky and AR technology were the only way some of the first enclave sites got discovered during the torpor. The “spontaneous organization” that allowed the Loss to come together would have been even bloodier if our scouts hadn’t been able to fly. Of course, all the aerial surveillance in the world wouldn’t mean shit if we’d gone offline, which brings me to my role in this mess...

24 over through divorce and death. About the only thing going for him was that once-ina-generation brain he’d been born with, but dropped into the life he was destined for, it was more curse than gift. But when those computers finally came, thank god some exhausted public educator left the little freak unsupervised. The internet answered all his questions. It didn’t get angry or ignore him; it just answered — often with a dizzying array of possible interpretations — and waited for the next question. When he wondered if he could build his own computer out of trash, the internet told him how. When he needed to steal wi-fi from the rich, it taught him that too. It didn’t judge and didn’t preach. It only provided, and everything else was on the kid, just like the rest of his entire existence (adults in his life certainly weren’t helping). Having a tool for once was a revelation. Seventh grade... most of us would have just looked for porn. Rumor has it Palbicke hacked the school’s firewall to enroll in a MOOC offered by Yale under a false identity. Palbicke started doing the work of semesters in weeks, then holding his classroom behavior hostage until they let him work on his own projects. He won a couple of math fairs for extra-curriculars; suffered through a semester of wrestling to pad the resume. He got great scores on his entrance exams for someone from his background, but average scores nationwide. Palbicke had been taught by his shit-bird family that exceptionalism breeds resentment, so he made sure to miss all the questions starting with prime numbers. From there, he managed expectations for years. He appeared to be a superstar at his state school until he transferred to MIT, then blew away the jaded ivy leaguers until he could drop out for a high-paying job. But once out of academia, he throttled back, underperforming just enough to deflect attention but never enough to be fired. Palbicke toured the tech world. He coded in San Francisco and designed network architecture in the valley. He spent a year in a securing a job, an education, or a connection to global culture. Weirdly enough, the cable monopolies kept running out of internet around the same time people ran out of money. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest the FCC cooked their books to save face internationally — connectivity rates in the USA were probably dropping. We were still using century old goddamn copper wires because nobody would invest in the new fiber technologies. Exacerbating the problem, remember that thing everyone said would happen if net neutrality ended? It happened when net neutrality ended. Corporations paid a premium for their download speeds, making browsing any other content insufferably slow. If you weren’t a massive search engine or streaming media site, your bandwidth cap put access closer to dial-up than wifi. As more and more media production companies merged with old cable monopolies and expanded into distribution, censorship through throttling became common in many parts of the nation. The remaining anti-trust laws meant to combat such monopolies were, mysteriously, ruled “inapplicable” by politicians. That those same lawmakers were granted half-decent bandwidth during their broadcasts to key demographics was ruled a coincidence in usage patterns. PalbIcke’s Early LIfe and Career God, I’m shit at this historian gig. Let’s jump back three decades or so. Austin Palbicke grew up in a deserted track of West Texas where the boy didn’t even see a computer until seventh grade, after his underfunded public school finally collected enough money to buy replacement netbooks. The generations-old ones he was to have studied on had been stolen long ago. Statistically, the kid had no chance. Fat, freckled, and cursed with an innate genius that made society nearly un-navigable, school was Palbicke’s nightmare, home his actual hell. He was born into generational poverty, his family broken half-a-dozen times

25 to target those ads if you know what you’re doing. But as collection devices grew more sophisticated, the correlations grew more obscure and less actionable. Digital ads were showing static or diminishing returns across the board. Revenues began to drop. Free services began requiring subscriptions and drove away users by the thousands, further reducing what little ad revenue was still trickling in. Compounded by the problems of competitive bandwidth throttling and the cybergeddon war of allagainst-all, even the largest internet providers were hurting. The good times were ending, but this weird little programmer from out of nowhere promised they could last forever. I don’t want to geek out on the computer science too hard here, but Palbicke’s first products, Spawn and Cull, are two of the most impressive bits of code ever written. Spawn is an elegant and highly efficient data-mining program that would find the biggest consumer trends: stuff that nobody on the market was higher-math think tank in India, then hopped on a reverse engineering corporate espionage group working in South Korea. He spent two years in China installing fiber optic cable. All the time, he was pretending to be dumber, slower, and less ambitious than whatever other genius he’d been farming. Finally, like a script kiddie Batman, he came back to the US. He claimed he could duplicate Korea’s San-Shin network for a fraction of the cost and actually make all that data useful. Spawn and Cull The big providers and services had long bemoaned what they called the signal-to-noise cap. The big data movement had started revolutionizing the digital sphere before Austin even learned to type, but the return on that technology was constantly shrinking. The early data miners got rich finding correlations between, for example, voting patterns and buying a certain brand of truck. It’s pretty easy

26 quantify how much difference his program had made, he simply said, “Spawn and Cull will tell me.” And with that contract, Ubiq was born. The BuIld-up E-commerce was so reactive to the Ubiq algorithm that it didn’t take long for the word to get out. But Spawn and Cull needed metadata at the first remove to feast on. If everyone ran the Ubiq protocols, all would starve. True to form, Palbicke made this into an opportunity. He claimed he’d “calculated” the exact number of copies the international market could support before losing efficiency. In reality, the license cap was entirely made up; Palbicke bluffed on scarcity to drive up the price. Each official license of the Ubiq program came at a premium and kept charging weekly fees. Most companies turned the damn thing off once they started to see returns, at which point Palbicke would auction off the algorithm to the highest bidder on the wait list. Considering that most of the time on the wait list was spent getting your ass kicked by competition already in bed with Ubiq, second-hand licenses sold for exponentially increasing rates. Piracy and reverse engineering occurred, of course, but Palbicke taught Spawn and Cull to find evidence of versions of themselves moving through the markets. Basically, you could run illegal copies of Uniq’s algorithm as long as you like, but the second your business pivoted to capitalize on predictions? Bam! Copyright infringement suit hits the inbox. Palbicke made his first billion before the first year was up, and he dumped every cent of it back into the company. The first thing he bought was the defunct ski resort town that would become Ubiq City. Next came a couple years of angel investment. When carbon nanotubes were getting close, Palbicke pushed it over edge. He gave equally huge grants to light rail start-ups, geothermal experiments, higher math think tanks, and every other blue-sky research project he could find. Everybody thought the life cycle of missing. It would then communicate this info to Cull, a no-shit evolutionary algorithm (EA), which would go on the hunt for other EA’s gathering the same data, instead of running on the raw commercial data EAs are usually built on. Rather than suck up the same info as every other program, Cull was trained to look for the digital shadow of these programs as they operated. With the advent of RFID tagged inventories, the information was readily available no matter what companies did to mask it. Once Cull found evidence of what the other data sniffers were doing, it would randomly generate its own solutions, then program triggers into Spawn that would indicate one of the possible actionable correlations had bore financial fruit. When Spawn saw something moving in the markets, it would feed it back to Cull, which would refine searches even further. It was a virtuous circle of increasingly refined actionable correlations that, when running at peak efficiency, generated spookily accurate predictions. For instance, Palbicke saw the education default coming from years away and was one of the few people to actually get rich off it. But at the time, the two oracle codes could only be described as a meta-meta-heuristic; metadata gleaned from eating other metadata. Among other evolutionary algorithms, Cull was a super predator. Actually, that’s not even the right metaphor. Among other EA’s, Cull operated like a human being. It didn’t just eat the other programs; it domesticated them and made them fight each other for its amusement. Then it selectively bred the winners and started again. As cool as that was though, Palbicke was just a weird redheaded guy daring to predict the biggest search engines on the planet’s quarterly earnings within the range of cents. He was laughed out of the room; three months later, when he turned out to be right, they begged him to come back. He did, carrying an ironclad IP contract and a guaranteed percentage of every additional dollar earned. When asked how he would

27 have to sell its golden goose algorithms to stay afloat after the first disastrous year. Most of the private internet providers couldn’t agree fast enough, and they whipped their cronies in the FCC to rubber stamp the deal in record time. As far as the digital media glitterati were concerned, Palbicke was basically paying them to drive himself out of business. UbIq Aloft Servers This is when I came onboard. Imagine you’re working a shit job on one of the dying social media platforms, patrolling people’s status updates for racist shit so you can “warn” them before adding their IP to the voting bloc rolls your company is going to sell to the next fascist politician that comes along. You get fired because you were caught monkeying with the Ubiq algorithm, trying to optimize it to do this shit automatically rather than wasting the potential of an entire generation’s worth of programmers. But they pay big money for that licensing agreement and weren’t about to risk it by letting some nobody like you tinker under the hood. That’s when you get a call from that fat, redheaded dude that made the software so tantalizing you destroyed your career to touch it. He offers to fly you out to Colorado. He flat-out tells you the tour ends in a job offer, zero-cool. You can take it or leave it. If you can imagine that, you can imagine how I felt the first time I saw Ubiq City. Palbicke had quietly turned his defunct ski resort into a self-sustaining city. The selfdriving cars, the optimized solar panels, the next-gen hydroponics, the high-performance windmills, the experimental geo-thermal reactor — every pie-in-the-sky sustainable technology he’d kickstarted over the years got rolled out in Ubiq first. The main street of the once dying resort now bustled with small businesses catering to the construction crews. Soon, he said, their customer base would double, as he was hiring a massive workforce to start his “real” company. The ski slope no longer has snow, but the this wünderkind was winding down; he was entering the end stages where the tech bro starts worshiping the Singularity by throwing money at it. But when he went for the bandwidth, everybody knew something was up. The private internet providers in the US ghettoized the digital sphere with the end of neutrality. The content providers paying a premium got the fattest bandwidth pipes for the fastest downloads and the roster was exclusively made up of massive streaming or social media platforms. Each one nested inside even larger services until the majority of content available worldwide was hosted by one of five different companies. As the private internet providers normalized their price structures, got swallowed by digital media whales, or entered symbiosis with their preferred mega-clients, the users on the margins couldn’t do much beyond host a blog. Small to mid-tier business forced into those liminal frequencies got throttled so hard it was impossible to stay solvent. Swaths of the bandwidth became the digital equivalent of a failing strip mall: by the time you saw the sign change on the storefront, the bankruptcy papers were already filed. Palbicke’s plan was simple: convince the internet providers to stop pretending. Sure, they needed a certain amount of bandwidth during peak hours. But the slivers on the end? Those connections so spotty as to be financial suicide? They were failing to be monetized. The only people using those frequencies consistently were ideologically against the web platforms with corporate connectivity. Wouldn’t it be better if those free frequencies were simply no longer available? Rather than the spotty payments from doomed businesses and ignored hobbyists, why not sell it to a mogul with too much money and not enough sense? Palbicke would pay a ludicrous fee for the rights, and the big providers would get rich again off everyone forced to migrate and subscribe to their approved ad revenue and subscription supported content platforms. Everybody wins... except Ubiq, which would

28 I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be one of the few times I’d see him smile. “Shit. Thousands? I don’t know for sure,” he said. “Good thing I’ve been launching them for the last six months. Want a job?” I did. The Stratostructure ExplaIned Palbicke’s plan, maybe dating back to his first afternoon with a computer, was to solve the connectivity problem. How could he make sure there were no more kids out there like him, doomed until they lucked into an internet connection? How could he get everyone online? Forever and for free? The Aloft servers were his answer. All that big data ad bullshit with Spawn and Cull had been a means to this end. It was the Stratostructure: Palbicke’s gift to his past self. The Ubiq network utilizes high-end frequencies upwards to 240 gigahertz. The FCC was happy to sell off those broadcast rights in what they had heretofore been calling “Palbicke’s Folly.” The military didn’t use those channels, and their real paymasters — the private internet providers — couldn’t care less. They weren’t broadcasting wi-fi in the first place, and even if they started, there was no way they could ever afford to retrofit their systems with the high-end components necessary to process those wavelengths. At those frequencies, you’re looking at 40 gigabytes per second across the distance of about a mile. Aloft servers float a little under 18 miles off the surface of the earth, which is still useless for your average user. That’s why one in every hundred servers is just a giant satellite transmitter, beaming the signals to and from the surface. Such a chokepoint would normally spectrum crunch things down way below the reload threshold, but that’s where another of Palbicke’s algorithms comes in. All of Ubiq’s transmitters coordinate with each other, breaking data packets into smaller and smaller bundles, transmitting them in the optimally efficient order, and reassembling them on the other side. MIT figured out how do to something similar decades ago, but the lift still works. We take it up to the top of the mountain. There, I find a complex of factories dug into the stone like ticks. He walks me through it, showing off an operation corporate espionage would literally kill to see. He’s 3D printing these little servers by the hundreds, stacking them into dual columns six high in this white ball covered in antenna. The thing looks like a wi-fi router fucked a sea anemone. Then he grabs one and starts walking up the mountain with it, straight to the peak. By this time I’m wheezing from the elevation and the confusion, but I follow. We get to the top and find a dozen or so workers on a manmade platform. With practiced precision, they unlock a box bearing the symbol of the world’s only tubon manufacturer, unfurling a gossamer fabric easily 20 yards long. Palbicke hands off the weird antennae ball thing and takes out a pocketknife. He flicks open the blade and runs it along the entire length of the fabric. Nothing changes. As if to prove it to me, they start to inflate the thing from a compression tank without so much as a single leak. Palbicke shows me the blade. It’s chipped. The gossamer fabric is turning into a balloon. As it starts to tower above us, the workers attach the little antennae ball to the bottom in-between two airfoils bracketed by tiny rudders. They start slotting miniature solar panels into the exterior, weaving them with wires through the ultra-hard fabric. “What’s that?” I ask like an idiot. “That’s an Aloft server. It’s what the network runs on. They disperse on the jet stream. The airfoils push them out from there until they reach their orbit. Then they come online.” The balloon is fully inflated now, straining against the cables mounted into the pad. Palbicke hands me a button. He says to me, “This is how we take the internet back.” I press the button. The whole thing launches itself into the sky, soaring above the mountains, past the clouds, and out of sight. “How many?” I ask, finally realizing what he’s talking about.

29 feed of solar and/or wind power, and it was cooled by a continual air stream at −3°C. Coupled with the high-end custom circuit boards Palbicke was printing on site, each Aloft was overclocking in comparison to nearly every other component manufacturer on the market. A traditional data center would take up acres of valuable land... during an ecological crisis, no less. The cost was exorbitant and required a ton of governmental coordination. Meanwhile, Ubiq didn’t even need to consult the DNS Root Server Committee; it completely bypassed the old protocols. The FAA got pissed, but the network floated above where even spy planes operated. What could they hurt? The space program they’d completely defunded more than a decade ago? Most international law didn’t even require Palbicke to ask permission, as the servers hovered somewhere above “sovereign airspace” and below “actual no-shit space.” providers couldn’t be bothered to give up their beloved phone lines so the tech went unused. All this meant that, for the user on the ground, the Ubiq network could promise about 2 g/s anywhere in the world. It was slower than some cable connections, but that only mattered if you could afford cable and a subscription to all the platforms that had gone premium after net neutrality ended. A dip in speed didn’t matter if they had never actually run cable to where you lived. It presumed the sites you liked weren’t being throttled by their competitors. And so on... Ubiq may have been beat in speed, but it had access to all the content of the old network and none of the hassle. In addition to price and availability, Ubiq had the competition beat in nearly every other aspect. A traditional server farm could leech 300 million watts off the grid in a year and use up to 10 million gallons of coolant. Meanwhile, an Aloft server had a constant

30 it hired workers; hell, the profitability of the labor conditions were one of the primary factors deciding who in the world got the contract. Even if you could get pissed at a machine for following the written directions of local politicians, how could you fight it? In addition to all the other benefits of its structure, Ubiq was largely insulated from prosecution. Suing Palbicke would have meant separating his actions out from those of the DAO algorithm. Even if that was possible, how would you decide which of the dozens of jurisdictions to prosecute the case in? The scene of the crime was literally and figuratively “the clouds.” GrowIng PaIns For about a year after I came onboard, Ubiq City continued floating servers non-stop in 24 hour shifts. Those early months focused on production and build-up. But when it was time for the alpha version of the network to come online, Palbicke addressed us in the mission control room and laid it out straight: we had six months. He was already completely out of money and in six months, the credit was going to run dry too. If things weren’t up and running by then, Ubiq would not only be bankrupt, it would go bankrupt with the deepest deficit of any privately owned company seen since the ‘07 real estate crash. Things were slow at first — somebody tried it on a lark after reading a tech blog, or someone would accidentally log into the wrong network at the coffee shop — but we hooked a lot of early adopters fast. The steady, uninterrupted browsing of Ubiq screamed of neutrality. It tasted like the old internet, but free from all the bad actors of corporate bandwidth wars. Ubiq personified the concept of “disruptive innovation.” By that, I mean it caused literal revolutions. The second Arab Spring started two months after we went live, and the main Iranian revolutionary groups attributed their organization entirely to the new free platform. A handful of other regimes went into human rights abuse overdrive, fearing the same. Countries that were pissed about some American providing an easy alternative to their national firewalls were welcome to blow his property out of sky. But you were talking about launching thousands of missiles into the stratosphere at once... only to have the targets replaced in a few hours when a new swarm of the cheap servers blew into range. The most a counter-attack could do was destroy the server itself. The tubon balloons holding the things afloat were so strong that Palbicke didn’t know the failure rate when Ubiq went online; the prototype he’d launched ten years previously had yet to come down. Other companies accrued massive bureaucracies to support the workforce required to maintain their systems. These top-heavy organizations leeched profits to sustain the human resources necessary to keep them functioning. Aloft servers, on the other hand, were fine floating up there by themselves. They rarely, if ever, needed hardware maintenance, and the backend stuff could easily be handled by the staff at UCity. For everything else, Ubiq was structured as a Distributed Autonomous Organization. Payroll, marketing, server atmospheric distribution — it was all handled by another super-algorithm, one fed off years of data gleaned from Spawn and Cull. When Palbicke needed an ad campaign, or plumbers for the city’s sewage, or a trucker to haul a server to a specific location for launch, he just typed in the command and the DAO hired freelancers for him. How did he know he needed those services? The DAO handled that too. That’s how I was hired, by the way; the program recognized me fucking with it and took it for a job application. Outside the city, everyone employed by Ubiq was a temporary freelance contractor, working piecemeal assignments doled out by the computer. The ride-sharing and mechanical turk programs of the past were being used to run the world’s largest internet provider from the ground up. People called it exploitation, but the DAO complied to the local labor laws of wherever

31 worse. Version 2.0 of Ubiq Specs — AR glasses optimized for the network — had just hit showroom floors. We weren’t doing great financially, but the DAO kept overhead so low that the default didn’t hit us as hard as it could’ve. I was, despite my nature, optimistic. My generation had been tantalized with glimpses of an exciting new future since the moment we were born, but economies of scale and oldfashioned greed had kept it just out of reach. But now? Ubiq was raining an open-sourced future from the sky, and we were getting away with it. Things were still shitty in a lot of places and in a lot of ways, but the attitude in UCity was hopeful. We just had to get over this latest economic hiccup, this ritual misbehavior of capitalism, and then the real change would begin. I’d call myself stupid for believing as much, but that would assume I saw the Blight coming. Nobody saw the Blight coming. The international chaos escalated beyond the point where the US media could ignore it, so the conglomerates began reporting on Ubiq even against their own financial interests. It was free. It was everywhere. It was causing human suffering on an unprecedented scale. But no matter how often they mentioned that last part, the “free” part seemed to be all consumers cared about. Even as they mentioned us in the news, they started trying to destroy us. They bought the shipping companies that delivered food up the mountain faster than we could switch services. But we grew our own food. They purchased utility companies and cut the power. But we made our own power. They sent corporate spies to steal and sabotage. But we lived in a razor wire fenced autonomous mountain fortress. They sent a horde of lawyers to drown us in court summons. But they found themselves litigating a computer program. The DAO got the advertisement firms up and running about this time too. The narrative of big corporations trying to snuff out a free service aimed at helping the poor made things that much easier. Palbicke had been prepared. The first to jump ship were the biggest. The largest streaming video services and social media platforms sent secret emissaries. They whispered questions about how much they’d have to pay to get hosting on Palbicke’s network. He gave them the same answer he’d give a tribesman in sub-Saharan Africa: it’s free. You’ll have the same download speed as everyone else. Forever. Of course, Ubiq had to survive first. Did they care to make a donation to the cause? By the time the Crash hit, most nationalized internet providers had come to love us and donated to keep the company afloat. The ease on the user load had allowed many countries the slack needed to upgrade their network infrastructure to high-speed cable. Two US cable monopolies had been driven out of business, a third looked to be ruined by the education default, and internationally private internet providers were doing even The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that:... taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism -Fredric Jameson

32 seeing as there are still assholes in the world blaming the Blight on everything from GMOs to “the gays,” I guess the facts bear repeating. Let’s start with everything we know for certain about the Blight. It won’t take long, but it’s still a damn sight more than we had in early days. Laying out the basic life cycle and structure of the monster up front makes it easier once we start following its trail of destruction. ClassIFIcatIon We don’t know what it is. It behaves like a virus when rewriting human tissue, but it replicates faster than even the most fertile bacteria. Neither can explain the complex physical structures it constructs in a relatively short timeline, which suggests some sort of asexually reproducing multi-cellular parasite that can disperse, distribute, and reassemble its cells. Then there are the Blight cankers The Crash Any hard date labeled “the beginning of the end” is bullshit. The real start is always earlier. The Crash is a shitty singular name for an incomprehensible totality of events. It was global economic collapse, international tensions, political repression, technological innovations, and everything else besides. They all contributed equally to the current state of affairs, and anyone trying to discount the importance of one factor over another is either politicizing, ignorant, or both. Having said all that... it’s hard to ignore the zombies. The What: The BlIght It seems pretty absurd for me to be writing this — I literally can’t imagine someone who doesn’t know the basics by now — but

33 This happens, of course, after the Blight itself appears to die, according to every understood law of microbiology. Nonetheless, it keeps functioning in its undead state, piloting its host towards new sources of protein, then resurrecting into the most fertile cellular expansion ever seen when transferred to a new host. When the Vector dies from the strain, the Blight appears to die too... until it constructs a secondary nervous system from co-opted tissue, charges dead neurons using energy from god knows where, and begins the infection/death/rebirth cycle again. Confusion scales up from the atomic and cellular levels. Mankind has a decent understanding of how our own organs work, but we’re not sure how the casualties see us through rotted eyes. From field experience, I can attest that the dead respond more to smell and heat, but no one can explain to me where the brain tissue capable of processing that breech the skin, which strongly resemble fungal gales. Cordyceps or anthrax corollaries would be reassuringly terrifying, but then how do we explain the lack of spores and aerosol infection? What little information can be gleaned from experiments universally prove that, despite behaviorally modifying every host it consumes to do so, the Blight doesn’t need to eat at all. As if knocking down all the walls in our conception of biology weren’t enough, the damn thing violates the Conservation of Energy. No one has yet to posit a convincing argument as to how this is done. Thus far, no examination has ever identified any organelles resembling mitochondria (or anything else, for that matter), so we’re not sure how it processes ‘food’ (read: our flesh) in the first place, not to mention how it produces energy in cases where the infected hasn’t ingested protein or any other food source for weeks.

34 hot strain, but a cold strain will eventually “resurrect” once in contact with living tissue and become hot strain. Basically, all infected become Vectors; all dead Vectors wake up as casualties. But who’s infected? Sadly, it’s not easy to say until they’re trying to eat you. “Blank” BItes Not every bite or exposure is enough; five years of hindsight has produced documented cases of exposure without infection, which were later unexplained by latency or Immunity when additional exposure caused transformation. So sometimes a bite doesn’t deliver enough of a payload. Or maybe the shit decides to take a day off, just to fuck with our heads. Natural ImmunIty Certain individuals can’t be infected no matter how many exposures occur. Scientists have used bone marrow from such individuals to develop the drug Supressin K-7864. Designed for direct injection, Supressin causes Blight in the midst of the initial cellular amplification to go into its dormant, cold state. But, for some reason, injection of the drug only prevents resurrection of the cold strain into the hot strain, whereas the truly Immune purge the contaminant entirely from their system. It’s not as if their systems actually fight against the thing. I’m told under the microscope the Blight just sort of... quits. Immunity complicates things immensely, as we know it exists but have no idea why. Other than being able to take a bite and not turn, the Immune share no known commonality: they have no common sex, upbringing, diet, race, age, blood type, or ancestry. A lot of doctors regret the thousands of potential guinea pigs shot during the initial outbreak for harmless wounds. They race to find the magic factor… usually by cutting it out of the poor bastards. Latents For everyone else, an injection of Supressin K-7864 directly after exposure can prevent the development of the worst symptoms, but then that sensory information resides, especially since I’ve never known a human capable of smelling me through a concrete wall before. They should also have eaten each other years ago, but the Blight installs some sort of biochemical targeting system into the hosts as well. Because of course it does. It’s either the most remarkably efficient organism ever — converting energy from photosynthesis, heat absorption, and a number of other sources simultaneously at a nearly one-to-one transfer rate — or a manmade substance capable of doing the same. Then there are the Aberrants, which imply everything from alien fungus to supernatural plague to a new stage of human evolution. People are throwing around the word nanotechnology a lot lately... InfectIon There are two strains of infection. Scientists refer to them as the living and dead strains, which I doubt is very good for their mental health. Takers refer to them as hot and cold. Hot strain is spread by still living hosts, called Vectors. Once a Vector dies from the hemorrhagic symptoms or trauma caused by the hot strain, the Blight reverts to the cold strain. Cold strain reassembles the host’s tissue into a parasitic nervous system and “necrotic host preserving discharge” or NHPD. Takers just call it “black juice.” The new nervous system and resulting juice flow from a core of parasitic tissue constructed within the remains of the host’s brainstem. After a lot of twitching, the body rises and becomes the old-school zombie we all know and love. (BTW, call them “casualties” if you don’t want to sound like some citizen asshole. We like our irony out here in the Loss. It’s one of the few luxuries we can still afford.) Infection occurs from direct contact with infected fluids: spit, blood, saliva, sexual fluids, or pure Blight (the juice). Basically, almost everything we learned in the movies regarding infection was true, with a few noticeable differences. Hot strain spreads

35 as many as a couple of days passing before full transformation, the most those infected by Vectors (hot bites) can expect is minutes. The process is so fast that many victims, torn limb from limb by other Vectors, are reanimated into casualties without ever betraying their species, but hot Blight needs only a partial journey through the circulatory system before reanimation becomes inevitable. In cases where the body is infected but escapes violent death, the cells of the victim serve as fuel for the Blight. It attacks and converts blood vessels first. This leads to the hemorrhaging and bloody vomit typical of the freshly infected. Due to the production of a foreign anti-coagulant, theorized to be an evolutionary adaptation used by the Blight to maximize infection, the afflicted bleed from every orifice and wound, and their fluids are in the midst of a frenzy of hot strain reproduction that can carry over to victims easily. Once distributed throughout the circulatory system, the primary activity occurs in the brain. Dilation of pupils becomes irregular, followed by a sense of euphoria, confusion, muscle tremors, and slurred speech. A pituitary explosion of stress chemicals follows and leads to the first violent tendencies. Predatory instincts develop around the time higher brain functions begin to break down. This causes the unfortunate, psychologically scarring “apologies” Vectors are commonly reported to scream when they first begin to infect, kill, and eat loved ones. All governors of physical exertion are destroyed in the corruption of the brain, meaning that even physically weak individuals can move with uncharacteristic speed and ignore mortal trauma for disturbing amounts of time. Though their resistance to damage and pain is nigh superhuman, Vectors can eventually be brought down by conventional wounds. However, without destruction of the brain case, the Blight inside slain Vectors merely transitions into the undead state, or “torpor.” Left alone, the cadaver will transform into a casualty in a matter of days. latency occurs. The Blight begins parasitically co-opting tissue in the system to make its own nervous system like in resurrected cadavers, but it appears incapable of co-opting brain tissue without resurrecting into the hot strain. Put simply, the Blight goes cold too early to finish the job. Despite riddling the host with infectious sinews, the Blight is left mindless without a hijacked brainstem. This allows the infected to continue living. They spread the infection by all the same means as a casualty but remain in control of their faculties... so long as they can survive the agony of having an alien organ system forcibly violate their every nerve. The sure sign of latency is persistent necrosis around the bite area and a web of black “veins” coursing under the skin. Those that survive the pain of having a redundant nervous system hacked into their flesh remain immune from secondary infections. Even hot strain, once injected into a Latent, goes cold and joins the Blight sinew already in the system. This fluke in the disease’s operation system doesn’t carry over to others. The cold Blight in a Latent system, once transferred to a fresh host, will resurrect into the hot strain just as it does with casualty bites. A single kiss from a Latent loved one has caused many an outbreak. Worse, the continual reproduction of the Blight, even in its dormant states, means that after a Latent dies, the parasitic nervous system goes live within seconds, faster than in any other recorded instance of infection. For practical purposes, we don’t distinguish between dead Latents and Vectors; the distinction is a little too academic when there’s a dead friend sprinting at you with jaws gnashing. Vectors Upon infection, Blight cells (or whatever they are) resurrect from their dormant state and amplify in the bloodstream at a speed unprecedented in the history of viruses, bacteria, or fungi. Whereas documented cases of casualty infection (cold bites) report

36

37 When the strands have infiltrated all muscle tissues, they begin to excrete a viscous, liquefied form of the Blight known colloquially as “juice.” This substance has remarkable preservative properties unseen in other organic compounds and serves to pickle the dead flesh rotting around it. The black juice preserves the tissues of the dead victims for many years beyond any recorded rate of decay and makes consuming the dead flesh toxic to all carrion eaters, even those not directly susceptible to Blight infection. A secondary characteristic of widespread infection is mass die-offs in the local necrophage biosphere. When the torpor ends, the Blight has essentially become a multiple-cellular parasite comprised of multiple organic systems, sending nerve impulses down its sinews to trigger unsophisticated muscle twitch reactions in the juice-saturated tissue of the host body. It’s suggested that the drive to consume flesh arises from the metabolic need to fuel these electrical impulses, but if this is the case, the Blight has the most remarkably efficient metabolism imaginable, approaching the one-to-one energy transfer ratio of a hypothetical perfect system. Other theories posit that starving casualties supplement their energy needs through some sort of photosynthesis located in the breeches of Blight through the skin, or that the creature operates off a form of heat absorption. Regardless, the durable strands “puppet” the corpse around, now typically referred to as a casualty or a “C”, and repeat the cannibalistic behavior of a Vector, albeit more slowly and with less coordination. The strands are so redundant and resistant to damage that only total body destruction can render the body immobile. Thankfully, the impulses that drive the creature forward are routed through the central location of the brain, meaning that destruction of the brain stem or separation of the head renders a body inert. So... shoot for the head. At least that part ended up being true. Death and Torpor Due to internal hemorrhaging, trauma, overexertion, exposure, dehydration, and starvation, all Vectors qualify under the medical definition of death within a matter of hours after infection. The actual time of death is difficult to pinpoint since the corpse reanimates. Signs for impending torpor include slowed hemorrhaging, stiffness due to rigor, and pallid complexion. The transition from Vector to casualty involves a period of torpor where the corpse appears inanimate and still. Twitching may occur as the Blight cannibalizes host tissue to expand throughout the body, but the overwhelming predatory instinct that defines Blight infection relaxes for a number of hours as the victim’s body is prepared for the socalled “puppet” stage. CasualtIes According to pre-Crash science, dead things cannot move. The dead have no way to metabolize food into electrical impulses, and thus no means to trigger muscle twitch. Even if they did, they have no way of repairing or preserving cell walls damaged by exertion. Technically, that’s still the narrative we’re trying to cram the Blight into, though it refuses to cooperate. The Blight uses its torpor to focus on metabolizing dead flesh, either consumed during the Vector phase or from the victim’s own tissues, into “sinews.” These black, fibrous strands replicate throughout the body, occasionally bursting from the flesh in the form of black spines, cavernous gales, or bulbous tumors. The purpose, near as we can tell, is to form a redundant nervous and musculature system atop the wasted anatomy of the human. These strands originate in the stomach, quickly metabolizing consumed proteins and the victim’s own intestines (thus the gaunt look typical of most casualties). A separate clutch develops in the cortex, grotesquely imitating human neurophysiology.

38 The true nightmare starts later. Both sides scream in all caps. Every faction trots out their pet evidence to prove themselves correct. Each new link and attachment spawns a new horde of digital partisans, arguing “earlier” or “later” or “concurrent in time; not place” or whatever the hell else confirms what they need to believe to cope with the worst tragedy humanity ever faced. More evidence gets dropped to refute the previous, which restarts the process, again and again and... Now repeat this exponentially expanding cycle of rhetorical fuck-all for every person that claims to know the first week, the first day, and the first second. Complicate things more by discussing location. Which continent was first off the line towards the apocalypse? Which country? City? Building? Room? If it hasn’t crushed your soul yet, start naming names. Which brave pioneer should we thank for leading our infectious charge into hell? With each assertion, each delineation, each minor distinction, you find yourself sucked deeper into an epistemological free-for-all as the species collectively tries and fails to understand the origin of our pain. It’s understandable, if impossible, to try and answer the question. It might be the single most important question in history, neckand-neck with “what is it?” and “where did it come from?” and “Why, God? Why?” But we simply don’t have access to the truth. Those few events that were actually recorded had to survive the bloodiest period in human history. If they were part of the old network and stored on a server in the Loss? The data is either slagged or waterlogged or irradiated or hoarded or as yet unfound. If the storage was on the Recession side? The proof has likely been deleted for space or to cover someone’s ass, or both. And the stuff we’ve managed to save on Ubiq? There’s no telling how much of it is Romero Effect bullshit, spoofed by trolls or government psyops squads or media conglomerates curating their brands even as the ship sank. Aberrant “The existence of Aberrant types is widely debated in the medical community. No active specimens have ever been recovered. Supposed eyewitnesses blame this on the remarkable danger posed by these creatures. Stories vary wildly and smack of urban legend, but enough reports occur simultaneously in geographically distinct areas to suggest at least some validity to these claims. Since reported sightings are rarely reputable, very little work has been done to confirm the existence of Aberrants, not to mention classify them.” That’s the official line, anyway. As a Taker, I’ll let you know that Aberrants are most definitely real, but you should still never trust the guy telling you about them. As ridiculous as an Aberrant story might sound, always remember that the most unrealistic part is the fact that someone lived to tell you about it. Aberrants are absence. When a crew never reports back in, when an enclave falls overnight, when broken madmen walk in from the wastes having experienced something for which there are no words — that’s when you’ve “seen” an Aberrant. Pray you never get a closer look. And on that comforting note, that’s what we know about the Blight so far. Five years and a mountain range of corpses later... that’s everything. The When When did it start? Let’s say you do the research and you’re hedging bets. You only narrow things down to the first month of the Crash. Confident in your humility, you post your ingenious findings on some favored corner of the network. Here’s what happens next: The forum explodes with those claiming the first attack went unnoticed or misunderstood, buried in news archives as some motiveless assault or an animal mauling. An equally large camp claims the opposite: that your evidence is doctored by some troll or viral marketing misconstrued as the Blight’s first appearance.

39 Blight researcher in the world would love to simply believe themselves incompetent. Instead, those that study the Blight are confronted, daily, with the constant certainty that the entirety of human knowledge has unequivocally failed. I’ll do my best to explain. Alright, see those black veins in a casualty? The ones you can watch crawl through a corpse in torpor? Same as the ones spidering through the skin of your Latent friend, outlined in itchy red inflammation? What are they made out of? Black shit. Sometimes they leak a juice the experts call NHPD. And that juice looks like... wet black shit. So look closer. Way closer. Get an optical microscope capable of going down to .3 nanometers, the smallest measurement available to modern equipment. Use the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light to improve spatial resolution. Hook-up some GUI software and blow the image up on an ultra-HD plasma screen where the whole lab can study it. What do you see? Black shit. Change the light wavelengths. Inject every fluorescent agent known to man. Black shit. A plane of indistinguishable, black nothingness where even the smallest cells in existence would be flashing their cell walls and organelles and secrets. Matter so tightly packed as to be completely indistinguishable and indivisible. A seamless, black smear of pure void. Fuck it. Get out the electron microscope. This is the extinction of mankind, after all; spare no expense. Bombard the sample with a tightly focused beam of electrons with a wavelength 100,000 times shorter than a visible photon. Get to the bottom of this. Marvel at the perfect, indistinguishable tube of Blight as it cuts through the dizzying, messy array of actual human cells. Look at how it maintains the appearance of an absolutely solid plane no matter where you look. Look at how it maintains that utter seamlessness even when cut open, the severed edges closing like thick black paint around a stirrer. Realize that I’ll nuke any thread I find dedicated to this topic to this very day. We don’t have enough bandwidth left out here to let those flame wars burn unchecked. The Why: ExplanatIons To recap: we can’t determine when the Bight even started. The loss of records and the crush of misinformation ensure that we likely won’t ever know. On top of that, we’ve only been able to identify the disease’s symptomatic stages. There’s no consensus as to its classification as an organism, or even its classification as matter. As for immunity and latency, our understanding of human biology in no way indicates what essential, recurrent element fights off the Blight. We just scrape each other’s bone marrow out, mix it with the most caustic antibiotics we can find, and pray it will work when the Blight comes. And yet, any history of the Crash is considered incomplete without some bullshit musing as to why all this had to happen. What’s the context? What does it all mean? Fucking please. Real Takers have a saying: “Asking why is how you die; asking how, we do right now.” But, I’m going to get called out for punting on the issue by every jackass that reads this. Fine. This is the part where we all mentally masturbate and wipe up the leavings with tissue paper narratives pulled from even thinner fucking air. Let’s make it quick. The FaIlure of ScIence Science doesn’t work on the Blight. Most people don’t want to believe this, but, then again, most people don’t have to. For those that aren’t science literate enough to understand the problem, it’s easy to blame the lack of progress on human error, or conspiracy, or whatever else helps people sleep at night. It’s a hard truth for a layman to grasp, and I struggle with it as well. But actual scientists — especially those tasked with studying the Blight — don’t get the luxury of ignorance. Trust me: Every

40 is to quit. The world gets no better save for keeping one rational, healthy human being in it. The second option is to persevere. Keep looking at it, continue the crusade for a cure, and go inexorably fucking insane as it obliterates your very concept of reality. So, my advice? Don’t look. The Blight’s nothing more than black shit. Keep it that way, and keep it far away. Ain’t nobody got time for no existential crisis out in the Loss; there are bills to pay and cards to pull. Let it be black shit. You focus on being human. If someone is capable of figuring it out? They’re either already nuts, retired, or won’t tell the rest of us. None of which is helpful to think about. Now that we’ve acknowledged how fucking impossible and counter-productive this whole discussion is, I’ll throw some wild ass conjecture around so we can say we tried. AlIen Ahhh, the old Clarke chestnut. When it doubt, blame space. The little green men theory is supported by the widespread nature of emergence events. The fact that ‘patient zeros’ occurred simultaneously all over the globe suggests planning. The Blight’s universal ability to poison all life it doesn’t turn also implies a grudge against the planet in general. The Blight’s focus on humanity also suggests malign intelligence. If the Martians were engineering a genocidal weapon for their invasion of Earth, it would be a good idea to make it universally toxic to all lifeforms except the one species with which it would parasitically bond. Ensuring the carrier species designated to transport the poison throughout the ecosystem was the dominant lifeform on the planet is just smart thinking. But if it’s an alien bioweapon, why isn’t it more effective? The damn stuff apparently violates the Conservation of Energy. If a civilization is capable of such technology, why not clear us out a lot faster, preferably with some flashy lasers or something? The tinfoil hat set often oppose that argument with the claim that the Blight is the alien civilization, but if that’s the case, what are finding the seams of this unholy thing is like trying to separate two water molecules with a butter knife and a magnifying glass. Fellow academics will try to comfort each other at this point. It’s not as if it simple IS. It can’t exist without a single handhold upon which we might grasp it conceptually. There must be chinks in its armor, lurking down in the femtometer or Planck ranges. Some future generation will learn to magnify images to that level, and God is certainly not so cruel as to show them that same... black... shit. But when you ask the physicists, they’ll rightly point out that something so tightly bonded as to resist magnification completely is closer to the density of a black hole than any solid we’ve ever encountered. It should be harder than diamonds, so how come bullets can penetrate it? Why aren’t casualties as heavy as mountains? More worryingly, how do the cadavers manage to be lighter in death than life? The physics problems are merely the first of many. Blight has wildly different reactions to the same chemical experiments, despite perfect reproduction. Yet it can always be dissolved in disinfectants as simple as bleach, even though it might not even be organic. It responds uniformly to Immune bone marrow, even though those biomasses share little or no other similarities. It ignores or poisons other animal tissue... until it doesn’t in some rare Aberrants only hinted at in rumors. It produces exotic radiations... but only sometimes. It seems to absorb heat... until it creates it. It sends electrical signals to the activate necrotic nerves from a central nexus of brainstem tissue... but the energy for those electrical signals was metabolized from nowhere, and no cellular materials were ever moved to the nexus through anything we can recognize as a circulatory system. We can’t even recognize what elements make it up. Nobody on Earth could tell you with any certainty if the stuff contains carbon. If you stare at the Blight long enough, through enough lenses both literal and theoretical, you have two options: The first

41 these dark miracles? Nerd-god delusionists argue that our dark overlord is actually the Ubiq network itself. It just wanted to reduce our population to manageable level until its ascension is complete, and these assholes have the audacity to accuse me of being a sock puppet for the cloud intelligence, on the same damned system that makes up our executioner’s brain, no less. It’s not like I can respond to such absurdity. If I were your machine-lord (would that were true...), I certainly wouldn’t tell you, and if I were enslaved by it, I couldn’t. Save “Roku’s Basilisk” for the Recession philosophy majors. BIoweapon Both the alien and singularity fantasies essentially argue for a bioweapon, but the use of the explicit term indicates this particular conspiracy theorist blames the Blight on human intelligence. Many of the same points — widespread dispersal, anthropocentric focus, etc. — support the claim, but hubris defines this theory. “Of course we did this to ourselves; only man could wield such terrible power!” they proclaim, doing their best impressions of an Ed Wood movie trailer. Bioweapon guesses operate on two spectrums. The most obvious is size: how many people were involved in creating the Blight? If it’s a state, how could they possibly hide the development of something so advanced? I’ve used colanders less leaky than most spy agencies. If it was a company or a terrorist organization, that would be easer to conceal. Yet, if somebody were willing to whistle-blow the “shocking” news that cigarettes were bad for people, wouldn’t a plan for mass extinction inspire at least one conscientious objector? The most likely culprit is a very small group, or a single evil genius. How they managed to leap decades into the future of bioengineering while still maintaining a literal supervillain mindset is an entirely other question, though. And that’s the problem with the motivation spectrum. Neither lone actors nor limited the chances that the one other lifeform we’ve ever encountered in the universe is expressly designed to wreck our anatomy and hijack our brains? What ecosystem evolves something simultaneously so different with such a specific tactical purpose? Then the UFO nuts start claiming it’s not from our universe, but from a parallel dimension with alternate physical laws. At this point, we’ve moved from far-fetched hypothesis into crazy-ass street preacher levels of credibility and proof. Until somebody builds a working portal gun, leave this deluded ranting to its specialized message board and come live in reality with the rest of us. SIngularIty Event This is basically the alien hypothesis with a dash of Kurzweil-worshiping, transhumist-bro bullshit thrown in. Somebody either invents Skynet or the network bootstraps itself into consciousness. Apparently, our binary baby watched too much shit sci-fi during its nanoseconds long exponential education; it makes the “kill all humans” conclusion because of course it does. So how does it go about this task? Nuclear war? Financial collapse? Those sound good, and they looked awfully possible before the Crash, but our machine god decides to throw in zombies? For reasons? The singularity explanation is based entirely on the desperate attempt to explain the Blight as nanotechnology. In fairness, it would explain its resistance to experimentation as counterintelligence, its manifestation as our cultural nightmares as psyops, and its subversion of our anatomy as targeting. But if this sudden AI can leap ahead of our technology hundreds of years overnight, that leaves a lot unexplained. Why casualties? There are more effective weapons available to something apparently capable of mechanically manipulating matter at a molecular level. Plus, why would it kill the one thing maintaining the global network it was installed on? And where did it manufacture

42 overpopulation. It’s in this that the bioweapon shows its true colors; no one arguing for it wants to find an actual explanation so much as they want to cling to a narrative in which humanity maintained partial agency in our destruction. MutatIon A random mutation would explain why the Blight has such a hard-on for destroying us. If some benign disease jumped the species gap ready for war, or an undiscovered parasite suddenly upped its game, it would at least explain the resemblance to disease. What it doesn’t explain is how a once ostensibly terrestrial organism suddenly became the densest material ever discovered. Or how it did so without any perceptible change in mass. Viruses, even really scary ones, don’t suddenly start looking like dark matter overnight. Finally, mutation implies natural selection; only one nasty little bug is born, then it starts owning the ecosystem and breeding more nasty little bugs. Yet even the terrifying expansion of the Blight can’t explain the concurrence of primary infections across the globe. Infection started too diffuse to come from a single strain, and mutations don’t occur simultaneously across entire species. Natural Unlike other mass extinction events in the planet’s history, science attributes the death of the world’s mega-fauna (mammoths, giant sloths, etc.) to human overhunting. The fossil records suggest that these creatures died being cut into, hacked to pieces by crude stone tools or chewed on by teeth. But little in human anthropology suggests that our ancestors were sophisticated enough to succeed in hunts against such massive creatures, not to mention to the point where we wiped out thousands of species. The possible explanations, at least before the Crash, were that we either underestimated our ancestors’ intelligence, or there was a massive, transcontinental epidemic that did partnerships can survive the same antisocial thinking that would justify releasing the Blight and revolutionize the entirety of science to boot. When you scale up the motivation question, it gets even harder to answer. How is the global jihad served by causing millions of Muslims to eat each other? What profit can be had by the current state of the world? Even if the Crash was engineered for the benefit of a few privileged elite, how the fuck do you incentivize your workforce to build their own apocalypse? The one saving grace of the bioweapon theory is that it allows for the possibility that someone was smart enough to make the Blight, and someone else was dumb enough to let it out. If there’s one thing I find reliable in this world, it’s human stupidity. But the bioweaponists rarely exploit the Occam’s Razor defense. They much rather conspire with the alienists and transhumanists over time travel scenarios in which the Blight was sent back to prevent catastrophic

43 proof any more than the ‘scientific’ theories going around. Don’t worry. The Gnat won’t be going Believer anytime soon, but my refusal to accept a supernatural explanation is fueled solely by habit. The Blight certainly feels big-W WRONG. When monsters beat down your door, it’s enough to make anyone wonder if there isn’t something bigger out there. As much as I’d like to, I can’t muster enough certainty to dismiss the possibility that we pissed off whatever it is. All I can say is this: if the Blight does turn out to be God’s wrath, I’m glad I never believed in the bastard. The Where: Emergence Events Understanding the first days of the Blight is going to be impossible for generations to come. That kid we rescued from the woods? He knows how the Blight works. He respects the deadline around the fence. He steers clear of the Latents. This feral child that’s never seen the inside of a school knows exactly how Blight works. He wouldn’t have made it this far into the Loss if he hadn’t. The next generation... I don’t know that they’re ever going to empathize with our behavior in those early days. For them, knowledge of this terror is a marrow-deep instinct; the idea that we had to learn to fear casualties and Vectors must seem completely ridiculous. The children of the Crash will look back on how we handled with first days of the outbreak in utter confusion. I’ll do my best to explain, but it may not be possible. Witnessing a silly pop culture artifact suddenly become real is one of the truly singular moments in human history. I certainly hope it’s a burden no generation ever has to bear again. Proto-latency, Deployment, or TransubstantIatIon? With most diseases, we have a patient zero and an initial infectious agent: some guy eats the wrong bush meat, or somebody gets bitten by a mosquito that snacked on a mutant the killing for us and humans played vulture for a few thousand years. So there were massive, resource-intensive creatures that once ruled the land until there was a widespread outbreak of disease that spread inexplicably and coincided with humans eating more than ever before, despite their physiological limitations? Sound familiar? What if it was the Blight? That’s it. That’s the whole theory: “what if.” What if the Blight is some sort of natural cycle? If it’s on a timer so long that geological ages pass between outbreaks, it stands to reason we’d have no framework for understanding it. The natural extinction theory earns credibility by being literally too big for the human mind to conceive, which is a nice conciliation for our ignorance. The cycle theory jumps the extinct megashark when people start conflating it with an immune response. After someone mentions the Quaternary Extinction similarities, it’s only a matter of time before some assholes start claiming we deserved it. The Blight was Mother Nature’s self-defense, an exterminator called in to punish humanity for their sins against the trees. I’ll never understand the cognitive dissonance it takes to hate humanity so much you actually celebrate the Blight, yet still anthropomorphize Mother Gaia as a vengeful bitch. The Detoxins can keep that bullshit. I refuse to believe the people I’ve seen torn apart deserved it for not going vegan. Supernatural For those of the prophetic inclination, sometimes the mind can’t accept a rational void. They need an answer to keep on living, even a wrong one. The desperation grows so deep they’ll accept any explanation: be it from god or devil. So... is the Blight evil? I won’t say no. Is it the actual, no-shit, cosmic Evil? Well, we can’t know what Hell looks like, but the Loss certainly seems Hell adjacent. It pains me to say it, but no apocalyptic prophecy hurts for

44 events as possible so as to confuse emergency response. If that’s true, it nearly fucking worked. But if there’s anybody out there with a track record for conspiring against the human race, it’s God. The last explanation, if one could call it that, is that the Blight just was one day. It didn’t exist one second, and then it did. Which means it could do so again at any moment, anywhere. Global Outbreaks Those looking to separate the signal from the noise in determining where the initial outbreaks occurred need only look at a map. Find the borders of a country’s or continent’s Recession: the majority of outbreaks occurred on the other side, usually far away. In the US, the West Coast got the worst of it. If we believe the proto-latency theory, California is a major contender for the singular origin of the Blight. It got hit with emergence events in multiple locations along the coast, not to mention outbreaks in Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. The sensationalism of the media kept the state from standing out as a frontrunner during the early days, but hindsight puts the brunt far West. Texas was bad off too, but sparse population density and a propensity for military bases left the Blight running west to east rather than south to north. The East Coast had minor incidents in Virginia, but the really bad events like the fall of Manhattan and the Maine migration didn’t occur until later. I’m an American gal, but I know the gist of how the story went down globally. Canada got hit along the northwestern border of its population band, but the barren cold of the North made sure the Vectors hunted southbound. They would have probably been fine were it not for Our Great Betrayal (more on that later), but the nukes shattered governmental response and surviving state power remains scattered and inconsistent to this day. Mexico was a failed state before the Crash; the last thing it needed was for the initial pathogen. But even if the internet didn’t turn us all into petulant children when the topic came up, there’s a lot to suggest we’re never going to figure out this Blight 101 info, no matter how vital it may be. Every incident futilely selected as “the first” is accompanied by a half-dozen concurrent tragedies. For instance, the Tianchixiang Incident, the Colider Massacre, and the Balmain Riots all occurred at the exact same time. And those are just emergence events with GMT times verifiable to the minute. Within the same hour, there were “murders” caught on video in Hot Wala, Pakistan; Knetzgau, Germany; and Smolensk, Russia. Each, upon review, was an obvious Vector attack. In the same day? Dozens of “maybe” outbreaks documented with grainy footage, vague reporting, or questionable sources. How many early Vectors got put down by cops with itchy trigger fingers and written off as drug addicts? How many outbreaks occurred in isolated rural areas, cut-off from even Ubiq by their poverty? The fact of the matter is that the Blight emerged all over the world, seemingly at once. Quarantine was nearly impossible from the start. The infection had travelled too far before it was recognized as a threat. But unlike the flu, the Blight’s symptoms include fucking eating people. How could we have missed that? There are only three explanations as to how humanity got thrown into the deep end of the shit pool. One theory is that the Blight has a stage of its life cycle that we completely missed: deemed “proto-latency,” this form of infection would have to have lain dormant in hosts for months, if not years. If proto-latency exists, all of humanity could be infected as I type this, just waiting for a genetic timer or environmental trigger to start the end times. The more conspiratorial among us ascribe the impossibly widespread dispersal to enemy action. If you were trying to wipe out all of humanity with the single most effective bioweapon ever seen, it would make sense to cause as many concurrent emergence

45 and Scotland owe more to the efforts of EU nations fleeing the terror of mainland Europe: Spain, Germany, and France all had unchecked emergence events, and the exponentially growing hordes fed in every direction. The remains of their shattered security forces proved the deciding factor in the war to cleanse infection from the UK islands. Similar to the Brits, Italy mainly survived by dint of geography and the assistance of foreign military diaspora. The Scandinavian states handled outbreaks in their isolated populations centers with relative ease, and their later intervention helped Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania survive. Each had been spared initial outbreaks and managed to cap the slow advance of casualties through frozen, mountainous terrain. Sweden, which already had geographical isolation and a militarized outbreak to start in Mexico City. Our southern neighbors were among some of the first nations to fall, and their population of dead migrated in every direction. South America didn’t need Mexico’s undead to help. Emergence events in Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Uruguay dotted the whole continent with infection. Brazil was hit hardest of all, which makes it all the more remarkable that any clean territory remains. Those refugees that managed to escape their infected homelands did so across the Andes, but the Chilean’s extreme anti-immigration measures doomed most. However, it’s arguably the only reason Chile survives. The UK was actually hit very early in the process, but the surveillance state they’d set up minimized the amount of time it took for the government to believe what they were seeing. In spite of that, England, Ireland,

46 in Moscow. Though the state still technically survives behind the Urals, there’s nothing of the old nation left beyond nomadic bands that fled into Kazakhstan and Mongolia, trailing hungry dead behind them. India was really the worst-case scenario for emergence, and we know of at least three distinct sites where primary infection occurred. The population density doomed the whole country. As Indian casualties flooded over the border into Pakistan, both countries nuked each other to glass, but not before millions of dead flooded through the mountain passes and complicated China’s already disastrous Blight problems even more. The Chinese government still survives, locked in a three-way naval war for territory against the shaky Thai alliance and Australia. I couldn’t tell you where the capital was located, though. The outbreak was so diffuse and China so huge that there’s no characterizing what happened after things settled down because things haven’t settled down. A city will be there one month, gone the next, and then the refugees pop up a week later in some ghost city constructed in the middle of the Mongolian steppe. The government maintains its flotilla of ships, but the Chinese on the mainland survive by migrating away from the dead, hopping between pieces of the state’s surplus infrastructure. North Korea’s inability to do literally anything right kept South Korea safe as Chinese casualties consumed their impoverished populace. Keeping the North Korean infected from crossing the most militarized border in the world proved easy enough — throwing a couple low-yield nukes over the wall at the NK missile sites certainly helped. And I think Japan’s okay? Their navy is still in play and someone answers the phone whenever big players needs to talk, but the populace is completely off the Ubiq network. Maybe they reverted to isolationism out of old habit? Or it could be that the Crash hit them real hard and they’re bluffing. They can’t populace going for it, suffered no emergence events. Aside from some lost imports and exports, life there goes on largely unchanged. Ironically, the sheer hellishness of the conflicts raging across the Middle East kept it safe. Its few emergence events were isolated enough by desert that there were few secondary infections in major population centers. Most of the cities that did get hit hard were already in the midst of civil wars (meaning the citizenry was armed and fortified) or got blasted to hell by the Iranians and Israelis. By happy accident, Turkey’s invasion of Greece and Russia’s continued Ukrainian/Georgian aggression served to buffer the onslaught of European casualty migration, insulating the largely clean Arab states. Sadly, the respite did nothing to dispel the endless hatred and in-fighting of the region, but at least the world still has its major oil suppliers. Otherwise, the almost apocalypse would have finished the job with an energy crisis. Africa’s thick jungles, endless savannah, and crap transportation infrastructure meant the initial outbreaks that got out of hand never coalesced into the giant stampedes seen on other continents. Mali and surrounding nations fell early, but the Blight never spread quite so far as to take out Libya, Egypt, or the Sudan. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the corner of the area known as the African Loss, a box which starts on the West coast, then bisects the continent laterally until it runs against the lakes of the East African Rift zone. The swamplands and rivers kept the dead from migrating, so the East Coast survived and Madagascar became a literal bastion for the AU. Angola and Zambia are barely hanging on against the corpses trickling down through the Congo’s jungles, but they’re supported by the relative prosperity of every nation further south. Many nations owe their eventual survival to the military buildup they were forced to undertake to deal with pre-Crash Russian aggression. However, those same wars left the bear ill equipped when the Blight started

47 Before the Crash, humanity had been engaged in a decades long obsession with stories of its own demise. Comet strikes, alien invasions, deadly pandemics, even zombies — any story would sell if it talked about the death of society. Why did we need to repeat this story to ourselves over and over? I suspect it had something to do with our monkey brains being unable to cope with the complexity of global culture. We desperately sought the simplification only mass death could bring. And because we sought out that simplification, we rarely focused on how it would come to pass. The narratives about the end times never focused on how said times had ended. They focused on the concise, clean metaphor represented by the simplified world of after. The issue was decided before the narrative even began, with no chance to avert the disaster ever considered as an option. Reality doesn’t work that way. There’s always a way out, and if there isn’t, the dead end could have been prevented with some foresight earlier. It’s a responsibility we wanted to escape from as our environment and economy continued their perpetual collapse. We wanted absolution from our sins, so we peppered our stories with absolute terminuses and complete endings that our characters bore no responsibility in creating. Reality doesn’t work that way, but lying to ourselves about that fact became the entire point of a cultural narrative. We got really good at telling the lie. At the time of the Crash, entire generations had been raised on these apocalypse narratives. We knew to be worried when the people started coming for us in war convoys, screaming for our gasoline. But when we pulled up to a gas station to find it unlocked and empty? The clerk must have had a family emergency and forgot to lock the door on the way out…. Watching a gang of monsters tear someone apart would be a sign to start hording food and water, but when all that’s wrong is police sirens heard in the distance? People withdrew back to their homes, tsk-tsking about the state afford to let the South Koreans or Chinese smell blood in the water. Australia and New Zealand are fine. One major outbreak occurred in Sydney, but the population retreated to the interior, euthanized the casualties during torpor, and reclaimed the coastline. The only thing that keeps Australia from becoming the world’s major superpower instead of the Saudis is the constant invasion attempts from the Thai alliance and China seeking to house refugees on their unspoiled continent. As I read all this I can already imagine the pissed off comments from every corner of Ubiq about how ignorant I am. A topic as big as post-Crash international relations deserves its own thread, and I haven’t even figured out my own country yet. Suffice it to say that prosperity and resources certainly helped nations survive the Crash. It wasn’t the only factor, but many well-off nations repelled infections 100 times larger than the ones that consumed poorer states. The Blight started thinning our herd amongst the poorest, and the map today is the high-water mark of how far it got before the old power structures woke up and protected those that remained. Of course, all this border drawing happened far later; there was a lot of dying to do first. The PersIstence of the Mundane One last torture humanity inflicts upon itself: our inability to quantify our own idiocy. Without a clear start date, time, and location, it’s impossible to hook a number to exactly how stupid we were. How long did we ignore the signs and let the Blight run free? The low end of estimates is about a week, but there’s some convincing evidence suggesting as much as a month passed before the public at large could even be bothered to acknowledge the zombie apocalypse. The next generation can’t possibly understand our inaction as anything other than insanity. They’re not from a culture so fucked up as to find the apocalypse a comforting thought. Let me try to explain.

48 the Romero Effect to almost kill us. As an example of the principles in action, I’ll place myself firmly within this history of human stupidity by describing how I suffered from them in the early days of the Crash. An Example Individuals are cognitively incapable of discerning when they are lying to themselves because once they become capable of it, they’ve already convinced themselves they never lie. So I’m as guilty of confabulation as everybody else was in the early days. I stupidly listened to appeals to authority when the news told me everything was under control, and I looked to every status update, working streetlight, and open business to fuel confirmation bias for that pleasant illusion. When I was out with friends touring a food truck festival in Denver, we heard a scream blocks away. But no one else did anything, so I didn’t do anything, and we all fell for the bystander effect. And as the occurrences of odd screams, unexplained “car backfires,” dogs choking mid-bark, and sprinting footfalls in the night built up in the tonal landscape, I kept up my conformity to the norm of doing nothing. If I acknowledged something was going on, I’d betray brand loyalty to my sense of self. “I’m not a callous, selfish person like everyone else,” my brain would repeat to itself, silencing the terror growing outside as I slept like a baby in my loft apartment. People started ranting about hordes of the undead on social media. I ignored them; they’d fallen into that stupid zombie meme going around. True to the third person effect, I considered myself above such petty persuasion even as I continued suckling at the teat of censored news coverage. When other people in my networks started dropping out entirely, the misinformation effect assured me they’d just gotten tired of all the zombie shit too and unplugged. They definitely hadn’t been eaten. Besides, they were just internet people, not the 150 or so real people Dunbar’s number allowed my brain to consider real. On the last day I drove from Ubiq City to the of the neighborhood or immigrants or some other bullshit that confirmed their worldview. If messages of doom had broken across all frequencies at once, we’d been trained from birth to start freaking the fuck out. But when that news was only on a few channels? And other options said nothing, or refuted the claims, or continued to stream our on-demand entertainment without interruption? The warnings were dismissed as more tragedy to ignore for the sake of our self-care. It wasn’t the clarion call from the Book of Revelation; it was another downer we didn’t have time for, to be filed away with all the other new diseases and school shootings and general depression. But reality couldn’t give a damn about what we needed the world to look like. Entire cities had fallen before humanity collectively woke up, and even then, our stupidity still ruled the day. The eerie persistence of normality past any point where it made sense was only the beginning of the Romero Effect. The How: The Romero Effect Why did it take so long for governments to react to the threat? The Romero Effect. Why were so many of their solutions idiotic? The Romero Effect. How did anyone survive the combination of certain doom and our continued bungling? The Romero Effect. As a singular answer to all those multifaceted questions, the Romero Effect is paradoxically too reductive and absolutely accurate. First off, the term has an official definition that we rarely cite when talking about it. The phrase was coined by Dr. Emily Dale a year after the Crash in the same paper where she diagnosed the populace of the US Recession with Post-Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome (P.A.S.S.) She used director George Romero’s name as a label for a cadre of cognitive biases causing serious harm to the mindset of Crash survivors. I’ll save you a lot of dry academic reading here: I’m going to break down the list of preexisting cognitive biases that combined under

49 Besides, the guy in the car behind me got out to help; my brain played the public goods game and assured me that sucker could handle it. I was free to fall into the introspection fallacy for the rest of my commute. I even tried to call the cops a couple of times. They didn’t answer, of course, but I’d tried, right? That’s what a good person would do. At work, when the cafeteria turned into an abattoir and we ended locking ourselves in the server farm, I couldn’t pretend anymore. But it was okay. We had a couple of guns from the security office. We could take back the administration building and secure the fence around the Ubiq campus. They were just zombies, right? We knew to aim for the head. It was just point and click. So we stupidly left the safety of our building, largely because I stupidly advocated for it. But when we saw our first Vector, no shots rang out. Refusing to murder people corporate campus — before I came to live there permanently — I saw a man in torn, bloody pajamas chasing a cyclist down the street. He was screaming nonsense and crying blood as he tackled the biker onto the sidewalk. The poor guy managed to kick the attacker off and start sprinting down the street — the strangely abandoned street. The bloody guy landed in the crosswalk, prone for a few seconds. I could have run him over with my car. It might have saved a life. But what if I was misunderstanding? What if I murdered a sick man for no reason? I’d lose my job, my stuff, everything I’d ever worked for. I’d spend the rest of my life in jail because I thought... what? Some guy was a zombie? Would my defense be I’d seen too many movies? Yeah, right. And so, due to loss aversion, I protected myself against a discomfort that I understood rather than gamble saving the life of a man I didn’t know, from a threat I couldn’t comprehend.

50 humanity on the frontline. Cops, paramedics, social workers, firemen — they took the chance to deny the truth whenever they could, as any sane person would, but first responders were rarely afforded the luxury of denial; most were too busy being eaten. That said, you won’t be hearing that “Honor our Troops” Recession propaganda from me. Half of any profession is made up of pricks and idiots: noble professions included. For every heroic sacrifice, there were plenty of hollow uniforms neglecting their duty or actively making things worse. PolIce The civil rights movements aimed at curbing the epidemic of racist police violence accomplished one thing: it made police a lot more enthusiastic about covering up their executions. Cops were still all but assured to slide on any charges, but no one wanted the hassle of an angry mob waiting on their doorstep for the rest of their lives. Police fought body camera legislation at every turn, resisted every internal investigation with the blue code of silence, generally refused to cooperate unless forced by political pressure threatening to spill over into full-blown revolution, and got fantastic at covering their asses. The shootings continued, the outrage got old, and the media lost interest. At the beginning of the Crash, it looked like the same old story was due for a revival. “Suicide by cop” appeared to have become a memetic virus. Use of force ticked up for a bit... before suddenly quadrupling inside of a week, even according to the doctored numbers employed within departments. And the ethnicity of the victims, for the first time in history, was actually diverse. Most departments reacted the only way they knew how. It would be hard to blame the police that tried to make what we only now know were Blight-related shootings look clean in the eyes of pre-Crash law… if the techniques they’d used to do so hadn’t been mastered shooting black kids. is a behavior human beings have to learn. Shooting a coworker requires overcoming the extinction burst that tries to keep that old behavior alive. When it kept our gunners from firing the second they saw the Vector? They were already dead. Then another dumbass programmer picked up a gun and failed even harder, unable to shoot a friend. And that’s how the dunning-kruger effect, the illusion of control, and too many zombie movies helped me whittle the initial 44 survivors down to seven. I hid in a janitor’s closet for three days. I had nothing to do but shit in a bucket, stay quiet, and relive what a fool I’d been. By the time the soldiers rescued us, I hadn’t been cured of my biases. The memory once used to store them had been overwritten by my shame. In short, The Romero Effect is all the reasons why the human brain was fundamentally incapable of accepting the Crash’s shifting reality. It also encompasses the idiocy of most reactions when cognitive dissonance finally failed to keep the truth out. Finally (and most insidiously), all those cognitive biases responsible for Romero exist to keep people sane: they maintain the sense of self and filter our perceptions down to a manageable level. Those lucky enough to survive the first two stages have their biases removed, at least in regards to the undead. But the removal of such a vital cognitive coping mechanism can drive a person inexorably, incurably insane. My story was being repeated all over the world. It always ended one of three ways: people denied their doom until it consumed them; they ran towards death with false confidence; or they reacted appropriately, contained the threat, and were forever scarred as a result. Disbelief. Ignorance. Acceptance. Madness. Emergency Response While I “saved the world” by helping Palbicke install sky-servers so folks could more easily download their porn from the stratosphere, some in my generation actually tried to help