The End Of The World
and
How it Happened
1.
I sit here in a small garage, once part of an old motor lodge, its frame betraying the antiquity of late-life principle reversal. The walls are too thin, the seams misaligned, yet somehow the structure endures—much like the off-brand tune of democracy that gave birth to its construction. Each year, it passes inspection, at least on paper. After all, “it’s not that bad.” Not so poorly built that leaks or fires from wayward wires threaten its survival.
Just last year, a family of rats or field mice lived in the walls, but they’re gone now—killed off, much like the rest of us soon will be. Here, there is no regard for greatness or excellence. These virtues are viewed as threats. And then, after they’ve torn you down socially and physically, you see them—mimicking your actions, copying your playbook. You were their only exposure to the order and the way, and now they wear it as if it were their own.
But their mimicry reveals the lie. Purity, and the principles born of it, do not flow from their lips. Nor can it be found in the fruits of their walk. Yet somehow, they remain standing, upheld by unseen forces.
The attacks come more frequently now, both from within and without. Time is slipping away. My intuition—betrayed only by my misplaced trust in them—sounds its alarms. Whistles echo in my mind, warning me as my health falters: “There isn’t much time left. Be still. Be calm.”
-
A Breach in Purity’s Cause
Eventually, I saw the process for what it was—sheer madness, but for what aim? I had to piece it all together. We are all links in a genetic chain, forks on an ever-branching path. Yet within us lies a sequence, an echo of the first breach. From that moment onward, and even in the regressive times I’ve only briefly mentioned before, a grand illusion has taken root. It is propped up, orbiting us each day as a scatological reminder—not unlike the shoddy plumbing in this makeshift secondary bathroom.
A nagging notion eats away at me: that I should persist, should continue to live, yet do so devoid of a true center. Meanwhile, others—those who have fully embraced the illusion—seem to thrive under this unholy communion.
The malignant force behind it all—the entity—wants you to look back, to drown in the catharsis of your own wreckage. Worse still, if you wander far enough from the true path, it will begin to assist you. It will guide you deeper into delusion, shaping you into a tool for its purpose—a hollow avatar, a golem, a radio-controlled being wired to defend its dominion and react to any threat, no matter how small.
Once you’ve regressed to this state, there is no turning back. No return to any pure source. The concept of purity becomes a cruel parody. Forever, you are condemned to mimic the motions within the protected glass globe where purity reigns. In that hyperbolic, infinite world, you are but a dark, shadowy forest—a foreboding void the inhabitants of purity avoid at all costs.
2.
...And at this point, everyone is a threat—to themselves, to their families, and to the fragile threads holding this illusion together. The air is charged with reactive tension, each individual sitting pensive, their index fingers trembling wildly, hovering over the big red button of cancel culture.
It's a button no longer symbolic but mechanized, its function amplified by the cloned zombie masses ready to press it at the first signal. Point a finger, and they know instinctively what to do. The frenzy takes over; the hive mind awakens. They don't need logic or understanding—only the satisfaction of action, of destruction.
The alert signals ripple outward, a chain reaction feeding on fear, outrage, and conformity. The button isn't just a tool; it's a weapon of choice in a world where purity and principle have been twisted into objects of scorn. And once it’s pressed, the machinery grinds forward with ruthless efficiency, erasing, silencing, devouring.
The room grows colder, the silence heavier, as the collective waits—twitching, watching—ready for the next command.
3.
But here I sit, ready to buy into the illusion, as if there’s any choice left to me. It’s always a gamble, isn’t it? Am I the rat now, burrowed into the walls of this machine, gnawing at its circuitry in a futile attempt to be the hero that never rose in the mouse utopia? Perhaps my efforts will only clear the way for another shoddy structure to rise, protected under the same sanctuary that allowed its flawed predecessors to thrive.
The cycle continues—cousins, nephews, nieces, rolling across borders, falsely placed into the civic and legislative arms meant to safeguard us, into the protective arms of sheriffs whose lineage stretches back generations. But they aren’t the true culprits, just as those who tore me down were merely enticed—seduced, really—by the malignant whisper of that ever-present force. Suggestive at first, then demanding, it pulls at us, little by little, until we are strung along like marionettes.
Opportunities stripped away—but always surrendered first. Each story, a sad one. Each, a parable. Yet they all share the same banal, predictable plot. Billions now navigate this labyrinth, each through their own distorted scope and filter. The pattern repeats:
Strip away personal power.
Entice away from the pure source, the center.
Offer food at the end of the maze.
And when the rats are hungry enough, they will rely solely on the intuition of survival, blind to the bigger picture. Keep the fires burning in the living room, where food and fare are plentiful. They don’t notice—don’t want to notice—that those left behind, those abandoned, were the tokens of sacrifice required for their entry.
And here I am, about to purchase another coin—a piece of this false world of Pi-based, non-Euclidean, spherical fractals. A digital token that promises to feed me tomorrow while I starve today. Or perhaps it will make me rich, grant me access to that devil’s living room with its blazing fire.
The point is, there’s always a trade-off. Always. And trade we must, in this day and age. I purchase this meme coin, a digital currency of a rat, so fitting for the times, don’t you think? I buy it with a high-interest credit card, robbing Peter to pay Paul. But Paul? He’s just another meme coin in this grand illusion, a reflection of the same cycle.
And so it goes. The fire burns on, fed by the sacrifices we hardly notice anymore.
4.
The Sacrifice
My son has gone mad. Perhaps he always was, though I can’t be sure. There were moments of extraordinary clarity, his words cutting through the noise with an almost divine discernment. He would speak with such profound simplicity, the kind of prose that could make even the most hardened philosopher weep. Doxastic, dialectical, weaving patterns of thought that seemed to belong to another plane entirely. And yet, in the days that followed, he would sit drooling, mumbling to himself, lost in his own haze. Needing another hit of the gas. That gas—the thick, invisible haze—pervaded everything.
The gas, they said, was discovered by accident. Or was it? Perhaps it was just another noose for modern man, another tool of an ancient, lurking force. It began with a leak of fusion plasma during what we now call the collapse, a post-apocalyptic struggle that rewrote the world. Just last year, on August 17th, 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population was obliterated—not by famine or plague, but by three coordinated EMP strikes. One nation, in its hubris, miscalculated and annihilated itself along with the satellites it once controlled.
And yet, the sun still rises each day, mocking all it touches. Its light stretches over this desolate world, teasing safety and normalcy where there is none. The air stinks of bacon grease—an ironic scent, given the scarcity of food—wafting through a world in ruins. There are no leaders anymore. At least people have finally seen the truth: government is unnecessary in the ruins. Survival is the only cause left. Religion, too, was discarded, its downfall brought about by the very technology humanity once worshipped.
It started with the quantum computer. Ignored at first, suppressed and disbelieved, it revealed the unthinkable: maps of people’s lives, their signatures stretching back hundreds, even thousands of years. The machine conclusively debunked the great religious figureheads, showing them to be fabrications. The revelations spread like wildfire, amplified by social media, until Metcalfe’s Law took over. The collective turned against the old myths in a frenzy, and in that chaotic rejection, the world tore itself apart.
Now, the machine, that quantum oracle, remakes itself far above us. Safely harbored in space, left there by the so-called rat king who sealed its fate before his own. Like an algorithmic plague, it carries out the work of a transhuman god, codified into the field, waiting for its inevitable reincarnation—a prophecy borrowed from Vedic scripture.
I’ve heard whispers that a few trillionaires managed to preserve themselves. Their likenesses now float in stasis aboard solar-sailing ships, headed toward some distant paradise. Which world, I wonder? The one whose gaseous layers conceal its lush Eden—a paradise unseen by ratlike eyes such as ours. Some rats survive plagues; others gnaw at the machine’s inner workings, exposing its flaws. The difference is slight but profound.
As for me? I think I’ll buy ten million rat coins today. A fitting choice for these times, don’t you think? The cybermarket opens for just two hours tomorrow, and I wonder if my investment will be enough to buy a loaf of bread or a cup of instant coffee. The meat, you ask? Rats. That’s all there is now.
My son’s image drifts into my mind through the haze. My thoughts are muddled these days. No catharsis can last long—not here. The gas lingers everywhere, a cocktail of sarin, nitrous oxide, industrial ammonium nitrate, and who knows what else. It filters the sunlight, mingling with the remnants of gasoline, water, and nuclear craters. People grift back into feudalistic micro-communities, eking out an existence amid pig farms and busted beer factories.
The smell of burning fat—mocking, pervasive—is the signature of this new world. Portions are divvied out to the “worthy,” their social credit scores scraped from the remnants of a once-thriving digital world. Two months before the EMP strikes, they had perfected the system. Now, it too lies in ruins.
In the crater, a sanctuary of sorts exists for the dejected. They don’t die instantly from the gas. That would be too merciful. Instead, it leads them into madness—a euphoric torment that spirals downward. First, it eats away at their nerves, then their organs, until they gnaw at their own hands in a desperate, toothless agony. And yet, some embrace the madness, chasing the fleeting high. Sacrificing everything for one more breath of poisoned air.
Nuclear facilities litter the valley, their cores exposed and leaking. NORAD missiles, forgotten and untended, tick away like dormant bombs, sinking ever closer to the earth. Above, the archives of mankind orbit in fragile satellites, brushing against covert weaponry—time bombs waiting to detonate.
I wonder: is it better to be mad? To burn the illusion and fade away, smiling, babbling to yourself? Or is it wiser to cling to what’s left, knowing the end is already written?
The days are numbered for us all.
-Stellarmass13
