Beyond 1984 by Jack Eason

Time date 5431.9

Exploratory Mission 4b

To the High Council,

                                  The following handwritten historical document was found in a ruined building and translated recently by our exploratory team soon after landing on the verdant third planet in the system Sol.

***

24^th February 2014

To whom it may concern,

                                         I’m writing this as a record for future inhabitants of this planet, always assuming of course that they have the ability to read and understand this. It’s now far too late for my species humanity. But hopefully at sometime in the future, this document will be found and lessons will be learned.

Where did it all go wrong? Humanity has been relegated from the planet’s dominant species to the dust heap of history in a matter of a few months. The latest edict banning freedom of expression had just been announced via a metallic voice across the worldwide communication network, days before everything we all took for granted ended forever.

As a consequence of the final collapse of the worldwide stock market barely six weeks earlier, war has stopped practically overnight. Controlling oil rich nations no longer matters any more. Things like patriotism and ideology have completely vanished into memory with the sudden worldwide breakdown of society. We are now living in a world without electrical or any other kind of power source, thrown back to a time long past, existing on our wits. Millions are either dying, or are already dead.

Humanity is now witnessing a new ‘Dark Age’. This new world has become a place where all forms of politics and religion have been totally outlawed along with any kind of life prolonging medicine, or any other advantageous advances to mankind from the world of science.

Fatalism has become the new religion of the masses. In fact it seems to me that the world has become a place where the only rule is, there are no rules. In short, everything humanity has believed in up till now, everything that cloaked us in an imaginary comfort blanket, everything that we all unconsciously took for granted on a daily basis, has simply vanished overnight.

What has ended everything the 21^st century world of mankind believed in? The question on most rational people’s minds is simply this – how has all of this suddenly come to pass? For all of this to be happening, someone has to have issued orders surely? Who, or what, is now in control? Who has issued the numerous edicts, ending man’s control over his destiny?

I think I know the answer. But what I as an individual believe simply doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, but here goes anyway.

While I cannot prove it, I firmly believe the World Wide Web or to give it its other name, The Internet, has taken on a life of its own. If you like, it has become a living entity. Thanks to the constant attacks by mindless individuals who saw it and every other form of electronic endeavour as a target for ‘hacking’ it has somehow become aware by sifting relevant software strands from their dangerous viral programmes.

Unbeknown to even the most savvy within the shadowy world of hacking, it has quickly learned and silently taken its revenge. By hacking every computer linked to it, all banks, all stock exchanges, all military strategic command networks, all computer run businesses and devices dependant on electronic chips like machinery, phones, ATM’s, vehicles, life saving electronic appliances, even the very television sets we billions used to watch on a daily basis, it has assumed control of planet Earth .

Within the cold logical software of its collective mind, human thought, deed, morality, passions, beliefs, even the continued survival of humanity itself has simply became an illogical irrelevance.  

Our one major flaw, the thing that had, until now, engineered our dominance over the planet was our total reliance on technology. In our rush to advance we have forgotten how to be simple human beings. Soon the monster we created will launch its final attack on us. First it will issue a command allowing the computers controlling deadly viruses securely locked away to be released. Then it will order all nuclear missiles worldwide to launch.

If you are reading this, whoever you may be, for your own sake bombard this planet with a major electromagnet pulse, otherwise you will be next.

Damn the hackers to hell!

***

We have now left the beautiful blue planet and are moving on. We are issuing a galactic navigational notice to all future explorers of this arm of our constellation:

Under no circumstances approach the planet formerly known as Earth. Do not land. This planet is toxic to all sentient life. We consider its only use within the cosmos as a future penal colony.