Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4 - 7 2018 | Page 253

An Explanation
West Island School, Boerner, Freya – 14
A
very, very long time ago the world was a mess. I wish that there was a way to more eloquently put
it, but I think that that just about sums it up. The death toll was at its peak. People were jumping
off buildings to kill themselves and others were being gunned down in the street. Disease ran
rampant in underdeveloped countries and famine was prevalent all over the world. Terrorism ravaged each
and every nation. Daily terrorist attacks plagued the news yet eventually news ceased to be reported as there
were no longer enough journalists left alive to do so. The biggest trends became murder and kidnapping and
other assortments of crude deeds. With everyone committing such unforgivable acts laws had zero impact or
weight on the actions of most people. The police were no help, they were committing crimes too.
The world was in turmoil.
Everyone thought that the human race was doomed, that we would eventually spiral so far down
that there would be no way for us to climb out of the hell we lead ourselves into. This all changed at 9:03
on the 29th of February, when abruptly there was a massive acceleration in the rate of evolution, so
significant that you could see as people's appearances shifted. Hardly anyone survived, bodies dropped all
around the world, never to move again. It was on this day that the human race was thrown out of one hell
and tossed into another.
The Boom, as it later became known, changed the human race.
Suddenly human beings had skin as tough as titanium, blood hadn’t been seen since the 2070’s.
Immune systems were tougher than ever and disease went extinct. No one drowned because of a new
evolutionary trait in lungs, and no one starved because there was always enough food to go around.
Murderer’s quit trying to murder because you couldn’t kill anyone, kidnappers stopped trying to kidnap
people because… well I’m not really sure why but the point is that they stopped! Terrorists also stopped
terrorising, still not sure why but maybe because everyone else stopped doing bad things? Either way, the
world was a much safer place.
Aging slowed so when you reached 100 you looked 40 and at that point stopped aging.
People stopped dying.
Immortality was born.
In the Days of Mortality people dreamed of being immortal, wrote books about it and even
invented Gods that were. They never imagined the downfalls of living forever. You had to live forever.
Things got boring. Suddenly you had deja vu on a daily basis and nothing surprised you anymore, as you
had seen it all. There was nothing new to experience because you had experienced everything already.
So, people started to attempt suicide, but that didn’t work. If you jumped off the buildings that
remained after the Days of Mortality then you would not splat and become a Jason Pollock painting on the
pavement, you would simply make a significant dent. If you tried to shoot yourself the bullet would ricochet
off your skin. If you injected yourself with a manufactured fatal disease you would recover in a day. After a
pathetically long period of people trying desperately hard to kill themselves, a large percentage of the
population moved from the Western Hemisphere, to the Eastern Hemisphere, living in China, to
experience more. That’s where I am. China. I’m 23 years old and have already experienced all that I could
possibly experience. The word ‘experience’ holds little meaning for me now.
“So, what have you experienced so far?”
“Literally everything.”
“Tell me about your experiences.”
“Well I’ve experienced literally everything you could so I don’t know where to start.”
Many of the conversations I have revolve around experience and life and adventure! It’s like living
in an inspirational quote. I want to die. I’m sick of the inspirational quote. It’s dull. It’s optimistic. I want
pessimistic. I want the possibility of being doomed! But that’s never going to happen, so, I’m going to try to
die. We’ll see if I do, but if I don’t….
What was the saying? If you journey to the west you journey to your death. I always thought it was
strange that the saying was still uttered as we couldn’t die, but I placed my faith in it, maybe poorly. I hoped
that that faith wouldn’t come back to bite me.