Lazaretto Planet

I remember when the world died. That's kind of what it felt like, at least. It felt almost like a dream. Maybe. My whole life's felt like a dream, so maybe I can't say for certain what the difference really is but I think that was the most dreamlike anything ever was. The least real an already unreal seeming life ever felt. I was alone in a city I'd never been to or had any real connection to. Or, almost alone. I was rooming with a friend I'd known over the internet since childhood. A good friend; we're still good friends. But we're not children anymore, we haven't been for a long time now. Work, school for those of us who choose to keep taking it, attempts at relationships- carnal or romantic, what's the difference anymore?- it meant I still was, as always, alone most of the time. I treasured those brief moments of existing even if only in the periphery of someone else's life. A strange side character in an otherwise normal tale. I recall when it began, though, I don't really. My soul was glued to the aether, as it always is, wired directly into video and text feeds, a gluttonous maw with which I hungrily consume all information in the hopes I can fill something in me with it. I had been tracking it for some months by the time the panic set in, something strange crawling its way out of the depths of the orient. A horrifying mistake of nature, I was told. I did not believe it. This was nature, twisted; debased, but I could never say that. We're always being watched to make sure we slip up. I tread the webway careful. It was strange in those early days. No one believed that we'd only be shuttered indoors for a mere two weeks, not really. As that realization set in I think it drove countless mad. How strange to see so many driven to despair and madness by living for a fraction of a fraction as long as I have the way I've been for most of my life now. What, if anything, does that say about me? I shan't think it.

I am nothing if not a child of the 21st century, and we ignore our problems here.

I was curious, as I always am. Even before, and long after, the death of the world the only time I ever left the comfort of my serene box was to venture out into the world around me. They were and are lonesome adventures; explorations of a world teeming with life but full of secrets no one takes the time to slow down and spot. A hole in the wall bookstore tucked in-between a furniture store and an abandoned building that sells VHS copies of TRON and Robocop alongside the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Upanashids, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A record store hidden in the basement floor of an old rented out two story flat by the shore of a great lake as big as a sea that sells rare vinyls, CDs of my favorite 2000s metal bands, and cassette tape recordings of the local underground punk scene. A permanently parked out old Lincoln covered in schizophrenic scrawl owned by a middle aged conspiracy theorist handing out pamphlets entailing the end of days. A troupe of homeless people living in underground tunnels designed to drain the local river out into the lake before the water levels dropped. A socialist revolutionary activist group organizing, or failing to, in the back of a tabletop game tavern. Was it much? I don't know. But I think it's more than most people find in their lives, just driving to and from work everyday, maybe stopping by some fast food joint if they can afford it. Ironically, for someone so stuck in the digital bread and circuses, I've felt for a while now that I'm also one of the few who still treads out into the real, and actually leaves- if only briefly- from the desert of it.

I can't help it, with or without the Wired I think I was born to be a shadowrunner. To seek out the hidden and arcane, the mysterious and meaningful, even if I never really find it. Another errant knight doomed to wander the earth in search of a grail that never shows. So when the world began to die, when it began to be killed, and the masses that had always ignored and never so much as uttered a word to me in my daily and nightly quests began to hide away as I always did- still I was compelled to search, to see, to make sense of the world with my very own eyes. I'd never seen a city so desolate before. So dead. It really did feel like the end of the world, or maybe more like... The world had long ended, and these were just the remains, the wind howling through the empty streets; a pained requiem more for the world killed by the world now dead than the world now dead. A haunting reminder from a dreadful future now present that the world has been dead for longer than most could hope to imagine. Longer even than I've been alive. I was free out here though now. I needn't watch my step for fear of bumping into someone, especially some hormonal ape itching for a brawl where one need not occur. The magnetic push of other people's eyes that oft kept mine to the ground was missing and I could finally gaze, wide-eyed and amazed, at the world around me. It almost made me wish that world would stay that dead. I think the constantly overcast sky and ever-present fog though were a way for the world to remind me that the challenges of the soul would not be so easily overcome. I was only allowed a brief respite while the world suffered.

Everything was dead and only I was left alive to witness the demise. A ghost of a man haunting voided streets that it seemed were never going to come back to life. Windows, portals to other worlds and other lives, now only reflected my own hollowness back at me. Even the once bustling back alleys full of vagrants and scoundrels lay as vacant as my veins have long often felt. I had long prided myself in being able to see what few others could, that made it worth the vacancy in my heart, gave me reason to hold myself above the skittering masses. Now I could see everything, and nothing, and no one, at all. The world reflected back into my eyes was the world I'd always been living in, I'd just refused to see it.