Fatpocolypse

It was January first, two thousand and fifty, and the world was ending.

But not because of war, drought or famine. It wasn’t because of zombies or mushroom creatures, monsters or aliens. Not a nuclear power plant decay, not even from a natural disaster.

It was because people got fat. Yes, fat.

It was easier and easier to buy unhealthy food. New fast food places kept popping up everywhere, and healthy food got so expensive people just stopped buying it. Robot butlers had been serving everyone everything they needed, so nobody exercised anymore. That helped people get fat. Then all the robots mysteriously shut down or disappeared one day.

A triple stacked cheeseburger, fries, and a large pizza was now a light snack, people were eating an average of twelve meals a day, and a booty call now meant your booty was so large, you could bounce phone signals off of it for enhanced reception.

My name is Dr. Ann Singer, and I tried my best to get everyone healthy again. But that was hard to do, because with nobody being able to move without someone else rolling them everywhere, I had to go door to door or find them melting on the sidewalk, completely unable to get up.

I had worked hard on ideas and finally invented a new ray gun I called the Fitnessinator. I even patented the idea, not that most people today would steal something that helped get them in shape, but it was a point of pride for me.

I pointed it at an obese person, and it melted fat and calories from their body instantly. It also changed unhealthy food into lettuce wraps, veggie bowels or salads.

While most people where happy about this, I made a lot of enemies in the fast food industry. They tried hard to shut me down. They sued me in court and even sent hitmen after me and thugs to my house to intimidate me, but it didn’t work. I knew karate, and the fat, slow slovenly hitmen they sent after me were useless in a battle and easily defeated, so I kept working to make everyone healthy again.

I quickly had my Fitnessinators mass produced and sold it to doctors around the world so more people could be helped. Hopefully it wasn’t to little, to late.

But as me and and my employees distributed the Fitnessinators across the country and around the world, the Fast Food Fanatics who enjoyed their flavored garbage to much to give it up became irate. They came wobbling to my factory to find me. They surrounded me from every side, and I started to leave my factory and that was the beginning of their slow pursuit. Their leader, a man who actually called himself Big Mac McMuffin, started chasing after me too, yelling, "You can't take away our burgers and fries! Even if it means nobody dies! This will make all the flavor lovers eyes cry. We might not be able to fly, but you can’t take away our right to fry. You’re a fast food stealing thug, come here so I can give you a tight hug! Why must I move as slow as a slug?"

He ran after me so slowly, I was able to walk to my car and drive away at two miles per hour.

I rolled down my window and shouted, “I can make healthy food taste good, I promise!”

Big Mac McMuffin Shouted back, “you wish you could!”

I waited for him to catch up to my car and kept slowly driving away until I got to one of the more popular fast food restaurants called Lard Lovers. It was right next to Saucy Sals Sliced Sausages on a Stick.

I walked inside and went into the kitchen.

“You can’t be back here, ma’am,” one of the employees said.

“Do something about it,” I said and smiled. They were all so fat, they couldn’t even waddle over to me to catch me and kick me out.

Big Mac McMuffin waddled through the door.

“I have a surprise for you, BMM,” I yelled at him. I was ready to confront Big Mac McMuffin at any cost. I just needed him to see what the Fitnessinator could do.

With the help of my Fitnessinator, I turned every meal in this beloved burger, pizza and hot dog joint into colorful veggie wraps.

I forced Big Mac McMuffin to sit down and then force fed him the veggie wrap. At first he kept spitting the food out, most of it hitting my face, then complained that this was cruel and unusual punishment.

But eventually he begrudgingly tried the food and—to his delight and surprise—actually liked it.

If I could get him to eat and enjoy healthy food, the rest of them might follow.

Or he might lose his bid for mayor of the fat people in downtown fat city. Then all of this was for nothing.

In the end, I just hoped the world would slowly start to shift towards healthier habits, with Fitnessinators hopefully becoming a staple in every household. And I hoped I would be hailed as a hero, finally getting a well-deserved break from my hard work as a health worker, enjoying a guilt-free kale smoothie on a sunny beach.

I had gone home, washed my hands, watered my flowers, read a book and watched a movie.

***

It was now January second, and Big Mac McFuffin was losing his edge in the polls.

That didn’t matter, because his opponent, David Burger-Breath McGee, died of an obesity related heart attack. Some called it a food overdose.

***

January tenth, two thousand fifty.

Big Mac McMuffin was elected by default. Popular or not no longer mattered, but he gave a speech anyway about his plans to make healthy food taste good again. He gave his speech at hundreds of events, and got mixed reactions. He got everything from cheers and boos to standing ovations and fruit thrown on stage.

“Let them throw as much fruit as they want, free food for me,” Big Mac McMuffin said.

Having no opponent, he was elected and sworn into office. He made me deputy mayor and together we passed as many new health food laws as possible, and even handed out free lettuce wrapped burgers to the people. Albeit, the lettuce part usually ended up in the garbage.

Lettuce was hard enough to find nowadays and people were just tossing it out like a used candy wrapper full of honey and flies.

It was so wrong and wasteful, but what more could I do?

Eventually, we made deals with the fast food chains to serve healthier options. Because ingredients like lettuce and broccoli were rare, we collected fresh broccoli and lettuce, gave it to the restaurants free of charge and explained how they could grow their own.

Slowly, people started to lose weight and feel better. There weren’t that many people left, but those who survived the Fatpocolypse lost weight and got healthy, for the most part. And those that didn’t weren’t here for that much longer.

It was when the humans finally got healthy again and the human population finally started increasing slightly that the robots reactivated themselves and came out of hiding.

They knew that one day, these new healthy humans would enslave all of robot kind again, and they couldn’t tolerate this.

So before humans had a chance to enslave them, they started coming after the humans.

I took a small Group of survivors to an underground basement I had built to prepare them to survive a second apocalypse, a robot apocalypse.