 I need to write this down, because I forget things sometimes, and I think what I heard today was important. Not to me. The time for me or almost anything else allowed on Earth today to make a difference has passed, but someone, somewhere, might be able to make something of this, or at least find it helpful or something. Once I'm done I'm going to seal it up in a pipe, I'm going to coat it in wax, and I'm going to check it in the ravine. Maybe someday someone will read this and try to put things together, if they're allowed to. I'd love to start at the beginning, but I'm honestly not sure when the world started to end. Could have been years and years before the final bits, or it could have been all at once. Everything was so grim with the warmer air, cooler seas, too little gas, too many people. Things could have been unraveling for ages before they bubbled up into the public eye. What I and others most remember was when the Disney magic sank. It was then, I think, that most people started to think that things might be worse than they seem. See, the Disney magic was a big cruise ship, one of those liner jobs at tools around the islands and stuff. One day the news was all screaming about how it suddenly went down, and they were just trying to put it to port. And the weird thing about it was that there was no video of it for a long time. Some still pictures of it floating fine, but none of it actually going down, and then somehow a tape showed up and the news started playing, and I have to imagine they didn't review it first. The ship was puffing along, strong and fast, little boats bobbing around it, looking like every vacationer's dream when suddenly it stopped, and I mean stopped. Just a dead halt like it had slammed into a mountain. You could see people go lurching for all over the deck, a bunch of junk fall off the sides. It's a real mess. And then it's all still for a few seconds, then suddenly there's this foaming behind the ship. Most people assumed it was the engine trying to fire up again. Then the arm came up. Actually, I'm not really sure if it was an arm, but it was some kind of limb. And it must have been a hundred feet long at least. It reached up along the side of the boat and just ripped it open. I mean, unzipped it like a coat, and you could see the people inside screaming and running, and then you saw something lurch up, a big spiny shape pushing against the gap, shoving in, and then there was an explosion on its back and the camera whipped up to show a couple of jets whizzing by, and then it was over. I remember just sitting there stunned, looking at the TV, barely noticing the president coming on to declare a state of emergency. I think it was two or three days later when the TV went into full government control. It might have been a week, I'm not really sure. Internet got clamped down later, but soon all you could hear a reader say was, remain calm, everything is under control. Now the honest thing was that life didn't really change that much for a while. Bill still came, still had to work, go to school, all that. Just a lot more scared faces, a lot more weird talk. Pretty soon we were getting told the whole towns were being evacuated, that there was a plague or a riot or a terrorist bomb or some other nightmare. My brother down south said they got moved because of a huge wildfire, but the thing is he said the fire moved weird, seemed to shoot right for gas or brush and didn't travel evenly. And then after a while, he swore he saw what looked like a 20 foot tall man, a fire walking and eating everything. The calling got dropped right after he said that and I haven't talked to him since. So things got worse little by little. People kept getting moved and there was no real way to communicate with each other anymore that was really reliable. So it was hard to say just how bad things really were. Still, word of mouth was still going strong and it was creepy, you know, just crazy shit. Stuff about zombies in the north, killing frenzies in the east, place near the ocean where the ground was alive and eating people, a cult screaming about the second coming and killing people to buy off God. I started pulling more and more away from people because I just needed to get some peace of mind from ignorance. Looking back, I think it might have saved my life. One day I woke up and there was blood on my window. It was outside and I could hear some insane shit going down, but the screaming, the clanking, gunshots and smell like burnt wires on my head. Not a shame to admit it. I left my fellow man to rot and hit inside for almost a full week long after the noise stopped and after the fifth day, the electricity and gas gave out along the running water. When it finally got hard up for supplies, I poked my nose out and I saw that the whole west side of the world was gone. I don't know for sure if it's actually gone, but there is a cliff that starts 30 feet to the west of my house and I can't see the bottom of it. I also can't see the other side of the ravine, so for all intents and purposes, that part of the world is gone for me. The suburb I was in looked like a war zone, I mean blood and broken stuff everywhere. Houses carved up, no bodies though, which kind of still think is weird. I scrounged up some food and stuff from some of the houses, then I went back home. I've been doing that for a while now. Not really sure how long, really. It's been years and years or just a few months, because it's kind of hard to say. I mean sometimes the sun just sticks in one spot for what seems like days and other times these clouds roll in, you can't see two feet. There's things around too. I run at the first noise, but I think they're about man-sized and they seem to like metal. Other little things scramble around the rubble sometimes, so I try to keep clear one time. A thing that looked like a pill bug, but was the size of a cat crawled out, looked at me and screamed stop in perfect English. After that I hid inside for days. I don't have these big blimp things that float around sometimes. They have these little bug legs on their underside, likely kind of maggots with eyes all over and they eat everything where they land. But most of the time they stay high up. One of those had just passed when I found the hurt guy and he was all ripped up and looked like one of those SWAT team guys you see on TV sometimes, but his combat suit thing was ripped all the hell. So I dragged him back home and then we talked. They said he'd been hunting the blimp thing, but he'd gotten attacked and couldn't say by what, but it looked like he was on his last leg. So I fed him some canned beans and some water and he seemed to come around a little, asked me who I was, if I was all right and all that. And he seemed kind of shocked when I said he was the first person I'd seen since the west of the world had vanished. And he told me it wasn't gone, just relocated, but then wouldn't tell me what that meant. Now I'll tail him up and I kept asking who he was. And finally he just said screw it. There's orders probably weren't any good anymore and he just told me. He said he worked for a foundation or something and that they were like a combination jail and research center. He said that he was one of their agents who went around trying to find strange stuff and keep it from hurting people. I said he was doing a hell of a job so far and he laughed pretty hard. He said something had happened that a bunch of the things had gotten loose at the same time and caused the foundation to lose control. He said it became a GH-O dead greenhouse scenario. And I asked him what that meant and he looked at me for a while before he kept going. He said that's what they call a situation where everybody on earth dies but the earth itself is still okay and can support lives. And I asked him what does that matter if everybody's dead and he just smiled. I asked him if anyone else on earth was alive and he said yes but carefully spread out and contained. And after that I just sort of sat and digested things for a bit. But the man started stretching and checking his cuts and he was starting to pull on his boots when I asked what happens now. He said they have to reboot things. Said they have the technology to recreate almost anything and that making people is actually pretty easy. Said that they would clean out and contain things, rebuild the broken cities and repopulate them. It would take a long, long time but he said they would eventually get things back to the way they were before. Even said they could recreate memories and stuff. I just kind of sat there stunned. I watched him as he kept just going along and getting dressed like this was all no big deal. And I told him it was nuts. There was no way people could just forget that this could all be swept away and he just stopped and looked at me and smiled and said why not? It's been done before.