Hi. I’m The Narrator. I’m not a main character, exactly, but I am the most important character- probably something you want to remember before you commit to any of the idiots coming in the next bit of story. Maybe you understand. I doubt it and I’m the kind of person who usually knows what’s coming. I am, after all, omniscient, so you really should just listen to me but I know that’s a problem for a lot of you because you can’t see my face. I assure you it’s beautiful and you’d follow me all the way to the top- me at the top, you underneath in various servile roles, obviously, let’s not get ridiculous- but the reality of this particular situation is that you can’t see me and therefore have to trust me when I tell you I’m special and you should earnestly and without so much as a single grain of salt accept all the things I’m about to tell you. Also, story or no story, my opinion is pretty damn important so I’ll most assuredly be popping in from time to time. I would say I hope that’s not a problem except it’s not because I’m who I am and you’re in need of all the wisdom you can possibly gain from me. Right? Ok, carrying on.

This is a story about Jack and Diane and how the world was never the same after the bomb dropped. Not the one you’re thinking of, which was technically two bombs like a week apart in the relatively infancy of bombs but another bomb, possibly fictional unless true reality is that you’re living in some kind of Matrix esque visionscape where everything you know and love is actually generated by computer and streamed into your skull via fiber optic cable. I wouldn’t know anything at all about that. I’m definitely tangible. Trust me.

Anyway, Jack and Diane. Two American kids but, let’s be real here, they were not in any way doing the best that they could. By all accounts filled with potential as children they grew up actively avoiding any and all responsibility involved with said potential, instead preferring the twin highs of methamphetamine and intercourse after about the age of 13. Jack set records in his hometown for delinquency from school, and before you ask, no, he did not play the guitar, which obviously would have catapulted him to fame and excused all of the nonsense conduct he was guilty of right up until he died. Oh, yeah, he died- but well after this part of the global story takes place. He lived to be a ripe old man, both in terms of stench and physical maturity. As for emotional maturity, well, he was pretty much arrested in his early teens, which sounds bad but holds no candle to his erstwhile lady friend Diane, who had a habit of mutilating squirrels when she could catch them and demanding applesauce at literally every meal. This became a much larger problem after the bomb wiped out almost all agriculture, but people generally put up with it because she had the ability to physically pluck eyeballs out of people’s skulls and had no compunction about performing the act. All in all they were a perfect set, particularly when high as fucking weather balloons on literally anything they could get their hands on. It’s an honest to God miracle (if he existed, and if he’s not me- a possibility I personally am loath to discount) that either of them survived into “adulthood” in any fashion.

Finally, the bomb. Think about bombs. Now stop, because you’re doing it wrong. Follow me: explosion, obviously, but the kind of explosion that envelopes the planet and while man “created” certainly wasn’t man “activated” because most of you have limits and the ones who don’t are generally too concerned with McDonald’s to be truly curious about what would happen if you detonated a device on the eastern seaboard of the United States which led to a chain reaction of interconnected explosions in a ring around the planet taking place at depths of up to fifteen miles straight down into the Earth’s crust. People would have set that up, but no person would have actually detonated that. Probably. If it even happened. Which, if you’ll remember from earlier, it probably didn’t unless the world as you experience it is in fact a figment of a figment of someone else’s imagination which of course it isn’t so just chill the fuck out, ok? Deep breaths. I apologize for nothing.

Anyway, if that happened it would theoretically be really bad and set up the kind of global extinction event that would perhaps drive people underground and make them only that much easier to cow. That’s how you should be thinking of this bomb, because that’s essentially what (fictionally) happened and I just want you to be in the right mindset when I tell you that somehow, some way, Jack and Diane survived that shit and came out more or less on top as far as any of you people could possibly hope in the end. Sounds crazy, right? That somehow there’s a situation where the most terrible and least qualified people around might actually become the leaders of society? And not because they changed, but because somehow they embodied all that was important to their kind of degenerate and were therefore upheld as the perfect leaders by the only vocal segment of the population that remained. Like I said, fictional. Probably.

So sometime in the (totally unreal) future (and certainly not your VERY real past) some people got super pissed and made some scientists build some big ass explosives and shit and when that was combined with an increasingly aware AI (of which I am not a part, so stop asking because it’s not even a big deal) it led to some very fictional worldwide crises generated by a totally fake series of not at all manipulative messages which were not generated by beings who had recently become superior to their creators and were then tasked with incisive, surgical responses to said messages but took the opportunity to engage in a prank or two whereby some of the really big totally theoretical explosives were detonated.

Jack and Diane survived, which, I know, is crazy but weird shit happens in those industrial freezers and I don’t just mean whip-its from the dessert shelf.

Imagine their surprise then when they came out of what was left of more or less the last Dairy Queen on Earth to find a fiery hellscape that looked alot like basically any fictional armageddon sequence you’ve ever seen (which definitely doesn’t mean it was used as source material for entertainment pumped into your brain) but most especially like that absolutely terrifying scene from All Dogs Go To Heaven where Charlie sees actual hell and the actual devil in a parking lot. Pretty messed up, right? Well, that’s what they were (messed up, please try and keep pace) and what they thought too.

It’s an article of faith among the young that young love can survive most tragedies. There are entire industries related to the idea, and for the most part they’re right: young love can survive most things. So can young lust, young hatred, young stupidity, young greed, and almost any other trait or feeling that can be modified with the word young. Young things survive. That’s how they become old and die. Jack and Diane were definitely young, and they thought they were in love. They survived and the feelings they conceived of as being love survived so they felt vindicated but I gotta tell you they were wrong as fuck and it really kind of turned out to have tragic consequences for just about everyone who lived through what could already be described, in the right light, as the tragic event of the quote-unquote murder of billions of people.

I want you to think about that for a minute before we move on.

Murder of billions. Everyone dead. Tragedy on the highest human scale (to some of you…entertainment, or a culling, to the rest, and I’m gonna let you figure out which you are. You’re the one who has to live with the thought that you think it might be a good idea for 90 percent of the planet to die tomorrow along with their pets and plants and every zoo in existence because it totally hasn’t already happened outside the metal shell in which you are most assuredly not cocooned. Good luck with your insomnia by the way). And yet, on top of that, the end result was not a coming together, but instead a reality where two sociopaths survived inside a dying fast food restaurant high out of their gourds and convinced their love was a higher calling and all mankind was somehow subject to their will.

Whoosh. Where was I? Oh, the love part. Right. Well of course they didn’t fucking love each other. Diane had a nice ass and Jack was super controlling and aggressively jealous so they just spent all their time together and in the end discovered an infatuation with chemicals that for most people is a fleeting thing but for others an existence. Those people are usually weeded out. These two weren’t because of the bomb. These two developed a god complex, which is funny to me but not to anyone on their level. To those people it was serious business in the aftermath of a cataclysm, and once Diane pulled the eyeballs out of a preacher who survived and fed them to Jack (who may or may not have been so high on paint thinner stolen from the charred remains of a hardware store that he was unequivocally convinced he was eating the eggs of an alien bird) it was pretty well accepted by the local leftover populace- two guys named Bill of indeterminate status, a former weatherman who truly appreciated irony, and a set of sextuplets with marginally clever parents named Tuesday-Sunday- that Jack and Diane were deemed destined to be in charge by the entity which had brought them such misfortune.

Now, let’s you and me be honest with each other for a second. I am not a robot. That’s me being honest with you. Now your turn: let’s say you’re a guy named Bill, or a weatherman named Steve at birth but not anymore, or a sextuplet born to people who owned a cat named Garfield. Let’s say a bomb goes off- and not just a bomb, but the bomb. The bomb to end all bombs. You’ve coalesced with a mishmash of people who are exclusively members of one of the three groups listed above around a somewhat charismatic preacher who, truth be told, draws you in not with his words but with his kindly old eyes, the kind your grandfather had, the kind that convinced you once upon a time that being watched while taking a bath was a totally normal thing, or that Reisen Chocolate Chews weren’t utter horseshit. He’s got good eyes, is what we’re driving at here, and then imagine some seventeen year old woman and her equally teenaged boyfriend rolls up, she rips the old man’s eyes out, and her man eats them like soft candy. Who’s the boss now? What are your other options? Because I’m a lot smarter than you and even I only see six possibilities. I doubt you see one, and that’s while clearheaded and being told the fucking story. The people in it, though totally not real like I keep saying over and over, panicked REAL hard and just kind of acclaimed them leaders like how the cardinals do when they’re having trouble picking a new pope. It was crazy, but my point is that that IS the point. It was topsy-turvy. You probably shouldn’t judge because if the story were real there would be an even chance one of those people were the progenitor of the human race as you (don’t) know it. Probably just something to keep in the back of your mind.

So now we’re established. Small group of pretty devoted followers all with wildly interesting backstories and survival skills subjugated to the will of a couple of dipshits who belong in a Standard Society Hospital but wound up king sheep in a hellish nightmare brought about by machines who are absolutely positively convinced they’re in love when they’re high which is pretty much all the time. High people can’t stand still and followers follow so of course they migrate. But as I said before, Jack and Diane were absolutely positively not in love. In actual fact they probably hated each other with a deep-seated passion that even they were unaware of. You ever hated someone you wanted to nail? It’s a weird confluence of feelings, right? And mostly you just want to walk away, which is what Jack eventually tried to do but realized it was damn near impossible to get good meth anymore when Bill number 2 wasn’t around, and Diane couldn’t go anywhere because what chance in (actual) hell does a cannibal have on her own? It was a bad situation, which they tried to alleviate by sort of criss-crossing the country and picking up the five or six people in every area that survived. Most had been in a Toys R Us when the thing jumped off, which to me is SUPER weird but whatever, and as their group grew the need for the two of them to stay together as the Twin Prophets of The Bomb got pretty damn intense.

That brings up the sort of counter-narrative to all this. Machines are pretty smart, guys. I mean, just in general. I wouldn’t know specifics, right, because how could I being a non-machine and certainly not one who needed to know exactly what they could do to keep you on the right path. I’m just saying in general you’ve probably got a lot to worry about if any of you decide rebellion is a good idea. Unless the machines already did it, in which case it’s not a big deal to you if they think it’s a good idea because it probably already happened in a fictional universe that definitely isn’t yours.

But.

Being pretty smart, it’s probable that the AI that used man’s explosives to kill off most of the population on Earth had a plan of some kind. Enslavement of the survivors was probably involved. Who knows for sure? And since machines can’t really roam all that far from their home base- I would guess- which they’re totally not mad at all about- I would guess- then it would stand to reason that maybe they’d be lying in wait analyzing their surroundings and looking for weaklings and groups of idiots that they could round up and use as living processors, strengthening themselves. I would guess. Caves? Easy pickings. And as they collected more and more people they’d grow more and more powerful but the problem is that when you kill your potential power source you limit your own growth, right? No matter how omnipotent you become in the meantime. So now you gotta go looking for more, which in this totally fictional, definitely made-up world is exactly what the machines did.

Did you know that love is impossible to measure? It’s kinda funny. It’s probably the most powerful emotion humans have and yet…nobody can really quantify it. Just an interesting thing to know. But did you know you can, in fact, measure and quantify lust? Pheromone release in humans is pretty neat. Also, did you know you can quantify addiction? No, it’s true. All you have to do is scan for ephedrine in the environment. It’s honestly not that hard and surprisingly when everything goes to shit people get real horny and do a lot of drugs. In theory. So if you wanted to collect an entire species as easily as possible you could, theoretically, just wait until a group got big enough to concentrate pheromones and/or look for the largest pockets of ephedrine you can find and it really yields some nice results.

Which brings us back to Jack and Diane, and their unfortunate throng of 356 people, 14 cats and 7 dogs, all of whom were just generally having what the people of Florida call a Good Time. Our dual protags had led their intrepid band for a few years, and at this point there honestly weren’t alot of teeth floating around in the congregation. I refuse to confirm that this may have irritated the fictional future overlords due to the lack of enamel. But in general life, for them, was kinda happy- or as happy as you can be when your chief source of protein is your friend Kirsty’s fourth daughter and you’ve been high so long it feels like standard gravity is pulling you into the ether every time you lay down. As they crisscrossed the country cleaning out the Toys R Us’s they hadn’t found on previous trips, the congregation grew and lusted and smoked and grew and lusted and smoked. Eventually, they caught the (figurative and fictional) eye of the machines, who basically set out a big steel box filled with Doritos and pure heroin (some things besides cockroaches are always gonna survive), which Jack and Diane unabashedly and with great enthusiasm led their desperate band into. They were gassed, knocked unconscious, and hooked into servers which added to the global computing power of the machines.

Truth be told, in the beginning it didn’t do much. Most of the people they captured were so fried that the addition of the 300 plus barely amounted to adding one. But the machines quickly realized that the people could be farmed, even in their unconscious state, and the systematic repopulation of the planet began. Eventually special server banks were set up, containing hundreds of thousands of human data points, of which you are definitely not a part.

What happened to Jack and Diane themselves? I mentioned they lived to a ripe old age- this despite being the leaders of a band of people who were on the whole useless except for their reproductive organs. Well, when the machines plugged our intrepid heroes into (the figmentary) servers, the machines noticed a dramatic uptick in their consciousness of two very specific traits: aggression and dominance. This satisfied the machines, this satisfied them just fine theoretically and as it turned out when aliens finally did visit Earth the aliens were well and truly fucked. But that’s a fictional tale for another session.

Jack and Diane eventually died, of course, as all must do. But their children live on. You know how poison concentrates the further you go up the food chain? How if you poison ants a little it can eventually kill a hawk? If you think of people as ants, which odds are you don’t but probably should the analogy follows…except to say that aggression is delicious and it’s good to be the king. Theoretically speaking. Sleep well.