"I have one year left to live, and I want you to understand what happened."
When you've lived through hell, you learn to remember the small details, the little pieces of the world that made it feel alive, the heaven you craved, before it all burned down.
I was born in 2998, right at the edge of humanity's so-called golden age.
Back then, everything ran like clockwork: AI driving cars, cooking meals, running governments.
Everything worked systematically and near a 99% perfection rate.
You could wake up and let a machine decide what you'd wear, eat, and say for the day.
Life was easy, too easy, maybe.
But I wasn't part of the elite who enjoyed that luxury.
I was part of that 1% that wasn't allowing the system to be perfect.
They call us different names, too harsh to mention; even pets received more recognition than us.
My world was the scraps they left behind.
While the rich lived in their floating cities, with their private AI butlers and genetically engineered kids, I grew up in the Dust Zones, what used to be rural farmland before the corporations sucked it dry.
It looked impossible at first, but there is nothing like an infinite resource; with time, all things get exhausted... That's the reason for a lifespan.
My family was one of the few who stayed when the land died.
Everyone else either fled to the megacities or starved.
We managed to survive, though. Barely.
Although my parents did most of the work, I wasn't blind or oblivious to their work.
By the time I was twenty, the world was unrecognizable from the one you might've read about in history books.
Climate change wasn't just some talking point anymore; it was the air you breathed, thick with heat and ash.
The oceans had swallowed entire countries.
The land cracked and bled under endless droughts.
What an irony huh?
To fix it, the corporations got desperate.
They played god.
Scientists and their related field colleagues smiled at their chance to make a name yet again.
They released genetically engineered plants to purify the air, super-bacteria to clean the water, and drones to rebuild the ecosystems.
And for a while, it worked.
The air got cleaner.
The crops grew back.
People called it a miracle.
But miracles have a cost.
Nothing is ever free in this world and everything has a value, be it tangible or intangible.
While the world healed, society crumbled, and humans advanced from hypocrisy to a higher term.
Machines replaced workers.
If you didn't have a tech job or a corporate badge, you didn't matter.
Cities turned into fortresses for the wealthy, while the rest of us were left to rot.
They single-handedly redefined our purpose and methodically enforced them on us as charity.
And when people got desperate, the machines shut them down.
Yes, it's what you'd expect from a cyber society.
Unlike you with one life, the AI either had multiple or none, to begin with.
AI-controlled drones kept the peace with tear gas and electric shocks.
There were riots.
They didn't last long.
I used to wonder what it would've been like to live back in the 21st century, before AI and corporations swallowed everything.
Maybe it wasn't perfect, but at least people had control over their own lives.
In 3025, we were just cogs in a machine, and when the machine broke, so did we.
Maybe that expression exaggerated our use.
The catastrophe came fast, too fast for anyone to prepare.
A virus, they said.
Bio-engineered to fix the planet, they made
Only it mutated and aged.
Spread through the air, the water, even the food we ate.
In a month, nine out of ten people were dead.
Most deaths came from the city in the sky and the megacities as they had more access to resources, which should've enabled them to mitigate most of the effects.
But sadly, they still perished.
We also lost a lot of the Survivors down here, but on a ratio of 55/45, they lost more, or so it seemed.
Considering we are many times more than their population.
Those who survived wished they hadn't.
The virus didn't just kill; it changed things.
Animals grew bigger and meaner.
Plants turned toxic, choking out anything edible.
Some people… changed, too.
I didn't understand it then.
How could I? One day I was just a guy scraping by, trying to figure out where my next meal was coming from.
The next, I was the last of my family, staring at an empty horizon, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next.
Now, as I write this, it's hard to describe what we lost.
The cities are gone, crumbling into ruins.
Between the virus and the natural disasters, the rate of survival keeps dropping day by day.
A perk should be that you no longer have to look for your next meal...
It'll come to you.
The satellites that connected us are just junk floating in orbit.
All those fancy AI systems, the ones that ran everything are useless now.
Without them, we don't even know how to fix the most basic things.
We either have surface knowledge or myths and fantasy knowledge.
The world went from hyper-advanced to medieval overnight.
Humanity went from the top of the food chain to the bottom of the food chain.
But what I miss the most isn't the tech or the cities.
It's the people. The noise.
The feeling that you were part of something bigger than yourself, even if that something was broken.
Civilization is no more, it's like the whole world and its lifeform is out for our lives.
Now it's just me, and maybe a few others out there, struggling to survive in a world that wants us dead.
Just how much must we pay for retribution?
This journal is my story.
My way of remembering what was before everything fell apart.
I don't know if anyone will ever read this.
Hell, I don't even know if I'll make it through the year.
But if I don't write it down, who will?