By Reagan Kaelle, TIWP Student

If you look at the earth from above—a bird’s eye view—it is anything but beautiful. There aren’t even any birds left. All of the sparrows, parrots, and eagles of the world drowned on dry land, choked on all of the gross sludge that polluted our stunning orange sky.

My name is Katy, Katy Tolluch. I’m from Province 18—what was formerly known as Washington. We are the sole supporter of New Asia’s hydraulic power industry, a dying industry at that. I awake day in and day out as a slave, a human not yet taken over by AI or some form of technological support. Humans have evolved, evolved to survive in the carbon dioxide—life on little to no water—like a cactus or a camel, blessed with the ability to go for days without food. Of course all of this was aided by computers and brains filled with cords and artificial neurons. The human race as a whole has essentially stopped trying to fix its problems and has just started to outlive them, a strategy that I can vouch for. My twenty-four hour day looks like a horror movie with eighteen hours of darkness and the remainder of the day a dull red glow. (Personally I think that the glow is overrated. All it does is bring light to our massive, planet-sized problems. I, for one, prefer to stay in the dark.) The earth is parched, a no longer hospitable ball of rock. No rain touches the cracked, barren ground. The oceans are pure salt. All that’s left is us alone in our efforts to survive, paying the price of past generations’ mistakes, paying the price for the future they dreamed of.

The physical representation of a plague is forbidden love—not like Romeo and Juliet but like death-sentence forbidden. It’s the perfect solution to our overpopulation struggles. Gen End will be the last one:  our wrath as a species will be over. All babies will be born artificially now (don’t even ask about the details), techno robots and cold, stainless steel claws will replace a mother’s warm hands. Any baby born into this world I immediately feel bad for. We slaves live out our usefulness as workers for one of the various empires or world powers and then fade into blood-streaked oblivion, lost to our peers and our planet, a victim of our own making. So yeah. All of those people who years ago wouldn’t turn off the lights in their kitchen—your actions obviously have had consequences.

Long story short, if you ever get a bird’s eye view of earth, I hope you don’t stop for a closer look. Fly away as fast as possible and don’t let the CO2 and spare debris hit you on the way out.