The Program

It did not happen in a flash, there was no thunderclap to rouse the world and hurl it into chaos in a single instant. No, the end was slow, slick, insinuating, like a venom slipping through the veins unnoticed until it was too late. There was no single day when history turned the page: there was an entire age that creaked and splintered, piece by piece, beneath our own weight. And we, blind and arrogant, did not see the crack widen into an abyss.

I had not been born then, yet the stories always kept me awake at night. The elders told them, my mother whispered them with a voice frayed by fear and longing. And the more I listened, the more I understood that the Collapse had not been a divine punishment nor some science-fiction apocalypse: it was the inevitable consequence of everything we were.

At first it was only numbers. Global markets collapsed like houses of cards in a sudden gust. People stared at glowing screens, watching graphs plunge, headlines bleed red, banks evaporate into nothing, billionaires vanish along with their digital empires. Then came panic: nations sealing their borders, governments declaring states of emergency, cities under military rule. But money was not the only fragile thing. The entire scaffolding of our world was rotten.

When food began to run short, the veneer of civilization dissolved in days, not months. Cities became crowded traps. Supermarkets were stormed within hours, shelves overturned, floors slick with blood and torn plastic. Mothers fought like rabid animals over a moldy loaf. Fathers sold their children’s future for a bottle of water. In some streets, the strong raised barricades, weapons in hand, and became kings of ghost districts. Those who had nothing dwindled into shadow, into beast, into desperate predator.

Then the water truly vanished. Not only clean water. Water itself. Rivers withdrew like wounds that no longer wished to bleed. Lakes became cracked craters, the rains ceased to fall. The earth groaned, people screamed at the sky, begging for a sign. They prayed, sacrificed, dug wells until they died of exhaustion. But the sky remained barren, as though it had ceased to care for us.

And when we believed we had reached the bottom, the darkness came.

Not a temporary blackout. Not a network failure to be repaired. A global fall. All the light of the world went out in the same breath. Airplanes fell like burned moths, hospitals halted in the middle of an open heart, cities became bottomless pits. Communications ceased, satellites turned to dead stars, the seas filled with wrecks without coordinates. And in that total darkness, humanity ceased to be human.

From then on it was only survival, naked and merciless. Old and new epidemics spread without barrier, cutting down anyone who breathed. Those who did not die of hunger died of thirst. Those who did not die of thirst died of cold, or heat, or another’s hand. The seasons went mad: winters sharp enough to shatter bone, summers that roasted bodies in the open. Without electricity, without medicine, without laws, life became brief and brutal. Death no longer knocked at the door: it was a traveling companion, always beside you, ready to take anyone who faltered even for a moment.

It was not war. It was not natural disaster. It was us.

And the world called it the Collapse.

They called it the Collapse.

And when the silence was complete, when the screams of hunger and madness were fading among the charred buildings, they arrived.

They did not descend among us like prophets or saviors. They did not drag themselves through the mud like the other survivors. No, the Founders emerged from the darkness as if the Collapse had been only a storm watched from behind thick glass. They were those who had foreseen the end, who had observed it from afar without lifting a finger to stop it. I imagine them behind the transparent walls of crystal towers, in steel bunkers lit by lights that never went out, in secret citadels where the real world could not enter. They had let the rest of humanity bleed, scream, devour itself… and when the ashes settled, when the old order was nothing but a smoking corpse, they stepped out.

They came wrapped in perfect suits, measured smiles, calm voices. They seemed untouched by pain, immune to the despair still drifting in the air. They called themselves the Preservers, a new caste of “visionaries,” an alliance of surviving generals, elite scientists, architects of artificial intelligence, and strategists with frozen hearts. They said they had a plan, the only way to prevent history from repeating itself. They carried salvation in their hands… but salvation, we soon learned, was a gilded chain.

The price of the future was the past.

They burned everything: books, flags, languages, prayers. They destroyed history piece by piece, claiming it was precisely our differences that had killed us the first time. Borders erased, cultures declared a threat to unity, religions banned, identities made a capital crime. Even the name you were born with became a death sentence if it did not fit the codes they had written.

“To save humanity,” they said, “one must first erase it.”

And so the Global Union was born.

One government, a single law carved in fear: conform or disappear.

The world, once deafening with revolts and hopes, fell into an unnatural silence. Squares emptied, voices smothered behind walls and cameras. Children forced to swear loyalty before they even knew what love or freedom meant. One language, one thought, a single monotonous heartbeat, controlled by electronic eyes hanging everywhere like faceless gods.

They called it peace.

We learned early to call it obedience.

Then came the Division.

The Preservers declared that, to avoid new conflicts, there must be balance. Structure. Absolute order. So they organized the lottery. Only once, never repeated. All the survivors were gathered before the last functioning screens. The drawings were broadcast worldwide. No birthright, no merit, only pure chance.

Two destinies. Two worlds.

Those selected became Privileged. They were taken away, into dome-cities with filtered air, synthetic food, artificial light, power and control. There, in sterile illuminated towers, they learned to command.

The others… remained in the mud. Marked forever, destined for forced labor in the fields, the mines, the factories that kept that new order alive. Mechanical eyes followed them everywhere, silence the only permitted language.

A hundred years have passed.

We all wear the same gray, eat the same protein paste that tastes like cardboard, speak a language without music, move like shadows. We obey. We survive. Those who do not… vanish without sound, without grave, without memory.

And yet the cracks always return. Always.

The elders still remember the color of the sky. The taste of real sugar. The forbidden names that once passed between lovers. My mother sang a song she should never have known, and every note was an act of resistance.

Because memory is the only weapon we have left.

And in a world that wants us identical, memory is dangerous.

Because memory is hope.

And hope… is rebellion.