#burningchrome

"Inclusion" Hello, I present to you a fanart illustration of William Gibson's Winter Market. I really love this story!

The Lost People Nov 05, 2018

© Scott Fraser. All rights reserved

It didn’t happen like so many had once predicted. There hadn’t been an Antichrist born who brought the world to flames. There hadn’t been a nuclear confrontation between two super-powers. It had been just like the sci-fi novels of the twentieth century had written. The last great war had been fought around the globe but not with soldiers, but with accountants. Corporations with more money and power than countries had been the Weapons of Mass Destruction that would bring the world into the new era. Wealthy elite people had scorched the planet in the name of profits for themselves and their shareholders. Asia had invaded the Americas, but it wasn’t with kamikaze pilots that they had achieved this goal - no, it had been with “legal immigration” and corrupt officials and greedy people in business in Canada, then the US. What was once a middle class, hadn’t existed in over fifty years, instead there were those who had, and those who had not. Most of the people on the planet, fell into the Had Not category.

Global warming, mad-men dictators, the fall of the USA as a world super-power and everyday greed had done in humanity. For the price of cheap disposable products (from Asia), western society had fallen. The addiction western society had to fossil fuels that was sold to the public by their elected and bought leaders, had kept them using oil, coal and natural gas all the while, knowing without a shadow of a doubt, that the planet was doomed. For dollars and cents, western society had sold their land, their businesses, their education, their natural resources to Asia, and then seemed stunned when it dawned on them, China and Asia had won the war without a single shot fired. Their leaders kept them sucking on the gas, coal and oil pipes like a corner street dealer selling meth or crack.

In the first half of the 21st century man-kind had achieved incredible advances in science and technology. At times in the first couple of decades the species of man thrived. But it was during this crucial time, that the would finally stumble. And that stumble, would be the last mis-step our species was given. Ten percent of the world population died off in the first five years of the new heat. The people in poor and developing countries felt it first and felt it hardest - but then, those people always do. The great migrations would begin, not because of war, not because of an ideology or a religion - no they started out of necessity. Man-kind could longer survive in some regions of the planet - the damage was that bad. Coast lines and coastal cities were swallowed up by the rising sea levels.

The wealthy, the powerful, they had seen it coming. In the late 1980’s, the wealthy started buying up remote ranch land around the globe. Farmers and ranchers in Canada were offered great sums of money by Asia billionaires for the homes their families had once homesteaded. By the 2015, industrial farmers and the wealthy controlled or owned most of the “good land” left. Rednecks in British Columbia, Washington State, and Montana laughed at the wealthy buying up farms and ranches. But when the West fell, those same rednecks weren’t laughing any more. Those same rednecks would be slow to realize they had been played by politicians bought and owned by the wealthy. The only thing Make America Great Again ever did, was help to speed up the process. Did they really believe that the oil companies, the big box stores that sold cheaply made goods made in Asia, that these companies actually cared about them?

No, the geeks and nerds had called this one. The scientists, the activists, the nerdy environmental ones, the artists, they had nailed it. The data and math supported their position, but like some bad play, the wealthy used money and fear to discredit them. And we all paid the price for that. A beautiful once blue orb in the milky way paid the price for it. 89 percent of wildlife had paid the price for it. Eventually 35% of mankind paid the price for it, because you see, it took that first ten percent to die in front of everyone’s faces on screens before society woke up and demanded change. But that change was too late for another 25% of the women, children and men on the planet Earth. It was the same with the New War. Fear and greed had enabled Asia to brilliantly take land, businesses, jobs, and homes away from those living in the west. When Canada and the US should have been welcoming refugees and poor immigrates to a new life, they instead created a panic among their citizens that “these people will take away your safety and livelihood”. And while society was swallowing that fear down their throats, the politicians, the wealthy and elite had been making profits selling their countries out to Asia and the middle east.

Like something out of Shadowrun gaming session, corporations ran the world into the ground. The elite bought up the fresh water. The elite lived in safe and habitable regions on the planet. The elite ate real food, and rumour had it that includes things like beef, pork and chicken - actual meat from an animal. The elite had access to the miracles of modern tech-medicine and all the benefits that came with that. The elite lived.