[Writing Prompt] Earth is the lobby of a big battle royale video game and we were just waiting for enough players to start the next round.
Earth Royale
The first signs were less than obvious.
Reports came in from the most obscure locations around the globe, over the course of months, of objects suddenly appearing out of nowhere, inside derelict buildings and abandoned apartment complexes. The objects ranged from the banal – baseball bats and golf clubs – to the extraordinarily dangerous – assault rifles and ballistic vests.
The phenomenon was widely discredited until, all at once, the C.I.A. opened a public investigation. They would have preferred to keep it private, but social media everywhere was packed with photos of a highly advanced U.S. military missile launcher found in a disused orphanage in Botswana.
Turned out the launcher had no business being found anywhere as there was only a single prototype being R&D’d by the Army. The question of how a Botswanan villager could be seen lifting the Rapid Burn Ballistic Launcher over his head on Instagram was a real puzzler.
Soon similar discoveries, new and developing weapons sourced from every major government and military contractor on Earth began appearing just about everywhere, seemingly at random. By March of 2018 a global intelligence task force was created to better understand the phenomenon. However it would not be the intelligence community who unraveled the mystery.
In mid 2018 reports began to swarm in news media about anomalous readings at several physics installations worldwide. Initially it was postulated that these readings might provide a glimpse into a deeper understanding of new elementary physics. In a sense, this turned out to be right.
Particle and Quantum physicist Henrick Van Dorn, or rather the algorithm he created, is credited with decoding the strange data. What was initially interpreted as possible evidence of a new type of neutrino revealed itself to be far stranger.
Dorn’s algorithm was built to recognize patterns in the impossibly dense results of a wide variety of particle physics experiments. Without much expectation of success Dorn had the program analyze the alleged aberrant neutrino readings. The results of that analysis are known today, by the few remaining who remember them, as Dorn’s Warning.
In the apparent chaos of quantum fluctuations and “random” particles, Dorn’s algorithm saw terrible providence – two sets of densely packed data.
The first was simple and could be interpreted as a real number deteriorating at a stable rate of one digit per hour, a countdown of sorts. Extrapolating the current rate of decay Dorn estimated it would reach zero on January 1st 2019.
The second data set was far more complicated, in constant flux, filled with data. After the first run through the program Dorn had a rough estimation of its content, but refused to believe it. So he ran it again, and again, a dozen times. Each time the analysis revealed slightly altered results, either additions or reductions, but always the framework was the same.
Certain, at last, that he had uncovered the underlying meaning of the data, Dorn released a rough visualization to the public – and then ate a bullet in the backyard of his chalet in the South of France.
The content of the pdf was immediately familiar to many – anyone who played video games understood instantly.
Over the next month, on almost every computer screen around the world, the public digested Dorn’s Warning, a constantly changing scorecard hidden in the quantum fluctuations of the universe, listing every human being on Earth, removing those who died before the game began, adding those freshly born, every person accounted for and currently given a score of “0”.
But not for long.
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