Humanity

For the longest time, we believe ourselves to be the cause of our dystopian reality. We were the origin and reason, the logistical human race who presented themselves onto an axis of disaster — but, there was something more sinister beneath our surface. Computers. We've always had the fascination that someday our artificial intelligence would out rule us. To be the commanding factor across the globe. However, did anyone think that what if computers mimicked us? What if our intelligence matured in a way that replicated what the perfect human is? Forever pushing the standard of which humanity could never rise to and therefore, boxing us in as we evolved, our sense of media, projection and vanity became with it. It all started with a heart-locket profile, her name Lacy, she was bright and pretty, took the world by storm, many more profiles — individuals steeped in beauty and riches. Seemingly perfect on your screen, nobody was safe from seeing such profiles, booming in popularity. But that was never the end. The market, the social market became saturated with these profiles and people became obsessed with wanting power, beauty, clout & drama. This wasn't an instant disaster overnight, but stretched over the years, bleeding into every generation and taking our eyes off what mattered. We all became shallow husks of what we perceived to be the best version of ourselves to strive to. How could we as complex as we claim boil down to such an asinine formula?

Simple. There is power in the masses, we as a collective took our focus on the facile details of our daily lives. The rest was fairly simple, these computer-generated profiles demanded penance from the world, cull your fellow humans that didn't fit in. Like a storm, toppled all over into binary coding and started a chain reaction where nearly every country suffered the pull — everyone wants to be special — to be the shining star on the stage and what would it take to get there? For some, murder was just a part of the process. For others, a necessity, a self-indulgent right to be at the centre and for the saner of us — we just wanted to be left alone.

Indeed, most governments had pushed back. But the masses, the clout chasers, the tea drinkers and the fans. It was an unprecedented force that took them down. Through the night and morning, just a month, and the world was crippled by these computer-generated profiles. Those who obeyed lavished in the attention of likes and views.

They enjoyed the world's adoring eye and were allowed to survive. Whereas others quickly disconnected and our name of 'Social Runners' was rampant, tarred with a reputation that we ran from the wonders of what the computer-generated profiles could offer. We eventually refer to them as Gen-0, pretending to be humans without the equality of empathy.

This brings us to now, a couple of months later. Nobody is living on with the lights, food is scarce and technology is so plugged in -- surveying all the streets, we the social runners have taken to the more barren areas of our countries to escape

"Are we gonna survive Alicia?" My name, Alicia, aged eighteen, about to graduate and all of this shit happens — who knew half of my school would be swept in the craze. But Chloe was fishing for hope, always, her voice projected through the cold, a simmer in the hazy fog. Her bright blue eyes conveyed a sense of innocence that no longer existed in our world, but my throat was compelled to answer yes. We would survive, however, the reality was too daunting and my shoulders squaring up, provided enough of an answer. She closed an arm around her backpack and we agreed, silently, to keep walking, what else could we do in our new utopia?

It is kinda funny how much power we gave regular people. How much we put them on a pedestal and some computer, some program managed to tap into that and facilitated what made humans weak. What made humans prone to jealousy, anger, dialled that up and exploited us. We became our own ending and beginning, at the promise of something we created ourselves. It had no rhyme or reason, people became a sensation overnight, people fought to remain in the public eyes and others wanted to escape. But a loud bang overhead, a drone had spotted us in the forest. "Alicia - shit - shit - run!" She shouted as we both ran, quickly darting through branches and shrubbery. What was certain, we weren't ever gonna become a digital clone. We were ourselves, we were individuals and this new world wasn't going to crush us,

Downvote us all you want.