Today in Fiction

Unspecified date, 2023

This clever marketing strategy will surely boost Switch Sports sales.

25 December 2022

By this time, the prison system has become controlled by a variety of corporations, each seeking to profit from an endless supply of criminals.

Back in 2011, an American marine named John Robbins shot to death his superior officer after being ordered to kill civilians during a war in Libya. For this crime, he was given a life sentence, but broke out of two high security prisons. The Warden of his third prison decided to send him to a secretive illegally operated prison-island named Absolom, where criminals are left to fend for themselves in the wild.

On the island exist two groups; the Outsiders, who are jungle-dwelling anarchists, and the Insiders, who are attempting to build a new society within a fortified village. On Christmas Day 2022 the two sides clash, and the explosions caused by the battle threaten the secrecy of the island, so the Warden dispatches attack helicopters to put an end to the fighting. In a daring ambush, John Robbins and a group of Insiders hijack the Warden’s helicopter, stranding him on Absolom while they leave to reveal the island’s existence to the world and liberate its prisoners.

We know the date that this movie takes place thanks to this title card at the beginning, and the fact that the Insiders throw a Christmas party at one point.

18 December 2022

Spoilers for The Tomorrow War.

During the final of the football World Cup in Qatar, a portal suddenly appears on the pitch. Through it emerge dozens of soldiers from the future, tasked with bringing a message back in time. Billions of viewers watch as the soldiers inform them that humanity is soon to be almost wiped out by alien creatures known as “Whitespikes”.

A “bridge” is established between 2022 and 2051. Soldiers from the present are sent forwards through time to help the people of the future fight the Whitespikes and resist total annihilation. A global involuntary draft is set up to recruit new soldiers, as the qualifications for being sent through time are slim. A person must be due to die before their date of arrival so that they do not cause a paradox.

Soon, all the world’s resources are being diverted to fight a war that has not yet begun.

Unspecified date, 2022

After an alien civilisation called the Primers commence an invasion of Earth, a civilian security guard gets roped into joining the elite military group known as the Earth Defense Force.

After fending off wave after wave of giant ants, spiders, frogs, and other aliens, the unnamed hero finally takes out the Nameless, who is the Primers’ god. Upon hearing about the death of their god, the invaders retreat from Earth, leaving behind a shattered world where only 10% of the population is still alive. Nevertheless, humanity begins rebuilding.

Unspecified date, 2022

Two and a half million years ago, an ancient and advanced hominin species emerged in Antarctica. Their civilisation was destroyed by a disease introduced from the planet Yuggoth in the outer Solar System; a disease which would later become known as the Pandoravirus. This virus was a deadly mutagen, capable of transforming any living creatures into terrible monsters, but thankfully it became trapped in the ice beneath the frozen continent.

Today, an operative from the Phoenix Point organisation travels to Antarctica to investigate reports of a possible biohazard at an outpost near McMurdo Station. There he discovers the science team has been mutated into horrifying abominations after a sample of the Pandoravirus thawed from the permafrost.

With climate change and the melting of the ice caps ever-worsening, it seems like it won’t be long until the virus is able to break out into the ocean. Perhaps it already has, and horrors beyond comprehension lurk just out of sight beneath the waves...

Unspecified date, 2022

Content warning for suicide mention.

In America, medical advancements have allowed for incredible feats such as the eradication of the common cold and major extensions to the human lifespan. But these advancements have not reached the poorer parts of the world. The city of Mumbai remains polluted and overcrowded. An unemployed man named Om Prakash lives with his brother Jeetu, his wife Jaya, and his mother.

Om has signed up to be an organ donor for a company named Interplanta. In return, the company will provide his family with luxuries they couldn’t otherwise afford, including a television and their own bathroom. But they also install a surveillance system which watches their every move to make sure that their room remains sterile and free of diseases which might compromise the donor.

When the company arrives to collect Om for donation, they instead take his brother Jeetu. Jaya soon learns that they have used Jeetu’s body as a host to extend the life of an American client, and that same client wishes to use Jaya to bear a child for him. Jaya, refusing to comply with a scheme she has not consented to, instead chooses to take her own life.

12 September 2022

Spoilers for Safer at Home.

An increasingly dystopian coronavirus pandemic has left Americans stuck inside their homes. Today, a group holds a birthday party for their friend Evan via video call.

After attempting to liven things up by taking some dubiously sourced ecstasy, Evan and his partner Jen get into an argument during which Jen stumbles over and cracks her head. The dodgy ecstasy hinders the group’s decision-making and they become convinced that Jen is dead and Evan will be prosecuted for her murder. Evan ends up fleeing the police who suspect him of domestic abuse and breaking curfew. He eventually gives up and resolves to turn himself in, but is shot to death by the police when he reaches for his phone, which is mistaken for a gun. Jen, meanwhile, turns out to have merely been unconcious the whole time.

Evan’s death is lost among millions of others in tomorrow morning’s news, as the global death toll from coronavirus has just surpassed a quarter of a billion.

Schwartzkopf is presumably not delivering a lecture in the above file photo.

18th August 2022

Following the re-emergence of magic back in 2011, one of the many magical creatures to enter the world was the Great Western Dragon Schwartzkopf. Unlike most dragons, Schwartzkopf does not horde gold and treasure in his lair. Instead he hordes books and knowledge, and wishes to share this knowledge with the world.

17th August 2022

Earlier this month on the 2nd of August, televisions in Qinghai, China all began to broadcast the same strange signal; an urgent request from an unknown source to “repair The Child’s locks”. The Foundation quickly got involved, and discovered that the source of the signal was a set of bronze totems at the bottom of Qinghai Lake. This structure is a set of locks, and it keeps a terrible creature imprisoned in the lake. Should these locks ever fail, the creature, henceforth referred to as The Child, will rise in a display of cosmic horror and claw at the fabric of reality until all of humanity is torn apart.

The Foundation hurriedly researched the ritual that they must carry out in order to repair the locks, knowing that they will have no chance to defeat The Child should it break out. They attempted the sacrificial ritual last Tuesday, but something went horribly wrong and the sacrifice did not reach The Child. With the terrible entity’s rise apparently inevitable, the Foundation braces for what will surely be the end of the world.

Today, The Child did indeed rise from Qinghai Lake. But rather than bringing the foretold destruction of humanity, it was completely motionless. Upon further investigation, the Foundation determined that The Child had been dead for thousands of years. And the cause of death was not particularly otherworldly or exotic; in fact, it was remarkably anti-climactic. The Child had merely starved to death.

This is not a real news report. The information in this post is from a work of fiction.

4th August 2022

After the world failed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, it has mutated into a far more contagious and deadly variant named COVID-22C. With a death toll of 31.2 million, the United States has lost nearly 10% of its population to the disease.

Several other countries have suffered total societal collapse, and the same fate now looms over the United States. Unemployment and economic collapse cause many to lose their homes. Cities like Los Angeles have become police states where the military patrols the streets and prevents anyone from leaving their homes after curfew.

With no capacity for socialising outside their homes, video chatting has become the new normal.

This movie opens with a montage of fictional news reports from throughout 2022. Its actual plot begins next month, in September.

Summer 2022

Nearly 500 years ago, a shipwrecked man was rescued by an African tribe in the nation of Bangalla, and taught to fight on behalf of the jungle. Swearing upon the skull of his father’s killer to fight injustice, he becomes The Phantom; the first in a long line of superheroes. The title will be passed from father to son for many generations, so that it will appear as though The Phantom can never die.

By 2022, there have been twenty-three generations of Phantoms. The world is changing at a rapid pace; the whole of Africa united into one country back in 2014, while around the globe vital resources become spread more and more thinly. Today, a boy was born in Metropia, the city once known as New York. His name is Kit Walker Jr, and he is the twenty-fourth Phantom. But he will not discover that this is his destiny for eighteen years to come...

31st July 2022

Back when this blog was brand new, I reblogged a post claiming that given George Jetson was set to be born this summer, his parents must have successfully nastied about nine months ago, around Thanksgiving 2021. But as his apparent date of birth drew nearer, many more people and media outlets have picked up on the story and begun to pick it apart. The date given by the aforementioned post was the 27th August, and even back then I couldn’t find much evidence actually validating that date, but still chose to post about it because it was funny. But now in the interest of responsible journalism (lol) I’m afraid I must deliver some bad news.

George Jetson does not have a canonical birthday. Both the 31st of July and the 27th of August, the two most commonly quoted dates of birth, have their origins in unverified edits to the Jetsons fan wiki and Wikipedia respectively. In fact the edit war over this “fact” got so bad that George Jetson’s Wikipedia page is currently locked. We can at the very least say that the original 1962 incarnation of the character was born this year, in 2022. We know that he is 40 years old in the show, and we know that the show is set a hundred years in the future from 1962. So some easy maths gives us 1962 + 100 - 40 = 2022.

But there might be a good reason his birth has not heralded the arrival of the two hour work week and the flying car. In subsequent Jetsons media the series has firmly remained a hundred years in the future of whatever the current date is, most recently in 2017 which would give George Jetson a birthday some time in 2077. I wonder if future episodes of The Jetsons will ever explore George’s difficult childhood in the streets of Cyberpunk 2077′s Night City, or how the horrors of Fallout’s Great War of 2077 affected his traumatic upbringing.

With all that in mind, for lack of a better date, happy birthday George Jetson.

Unspecified date, 2022

Four years ago, in 2018, counsellor Heidi Burgman began working with traumatised soldiers at a programme called the Homecoming Transitional Support Center. One of her patients was Walter Cruz, with whom she developed a close bond until she eventually noticed that he was developing large gaps in his memory. Upon consulting with her boss, Heidi discovered that the programme was designed to make soldiers forget their trauma so that they could be redeployed into the warzone, rather than to help them reintegrate back into regular society as she had been led to believe. As a result, Heidi was discharged, but not before ingesting enough of the drugs being used at the programme to begin developing her own memory gaps.

This year, in 2022, Heidi is approached by an investigator named Thomas Carrasco who is following up on an old complaint indicating that Walter Cruz and the other soldiers at the facility were being forced to participate in the programme against their will. Heidi has no memory of Walter due to the drugs, but together she and Thomas finally begin to piece together what was really happening at Homecoming.

June 2022

By 2022, technology allows humans to leave their bodies behind while they traverse cyberspace as digital souls. Two months ago, a disaster occurred when thousands of humans lost their souls during the so-called “Early Rapture”, leading to many of the empty bodies dying without a soul to keep them going.

One of the victims was a girl named Shiki, whose brother is named Remu. But today, Shiki unexpectedly arrived at Remu’s door, claiming to have none of Shiki’s memories and believing that she used to be someone else. They resolve to help each other, and the girl gives herself the name “Poem” since she is no longer Remu’s sister and it seems wrong to keep using her name. Together, they will search for both Shiki’s soul and Poem’s original body, using their unique connection to the network and to each other to fight off adversaries.