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Reality is going to start tearing apart in a couple of months. This might be your last New Year’s Eve.
I swear, of all the times I could have gone back to, this couldn’t have possibly been any worse. Everything is FUBAR. Those jerks in the lab couldn’t even send me back enough to have a decent time before things go straight to hell… wonder if I can find them and give them a piece of my damn mind right now.
No, that would just be a waste of time. Right now I need to find him. God knows what could happen when I don’t come back immediately, they’ll probably send someone back here after me. No way am I going back there though, not if I can help it. Forgive any kind of typos or anything I might have here, I’m not really used to this era of tech, and text to speech is a pain in any decade you land in. Hell, even twenty years from now it’s no better, not that the technology gets much better thanks to everything going to crap.
Wish I could enjoy the first taste of freedom I’ve hard in years. Been locked up for years, not of my own volition, mind you. I was just a kid when things started to go to hell, grew up only knowing chaos and isolation. If we’re being totally honest I don’t know a whole lot about how things went down in the early days, but maybe what I do remember can help avoid what’s going to happen. Assuming anyone takes me seriously.
I don’t know what year they sent me back from. Lost all track of time, to be honest. I do know that it’s currently New Year’s Eve 2024 where I’m typing this. That means you have about two months before they start popping up.
They’ll come slow at first. You’ll hear about strange isolated events, horror movie scenarios in a lot of cases. Pretty high death counts that will make no damn sense to anyone based in reality. That’s the problem though, is that we’ve only seen our reality. The assholes that sent me back here, the Collective, they’re supposed to be keeping a lid on these things. The Veil tears, and they show up to stitch it back up. Things slip through when it tears though, and it’s those things that start to grow out of control around March.
First it was isolated, various areas of the world. There were reports of a cruise ship coming back with everyone onboard slaughtered, torn apart and chewed on by something that was never found. Over in Italy a small countryside town went up in flames overnight, talk of the dead rising up to attack the living.
By the middle of 2025, there was a new Tear popping up every week or so in the United States. Rhode Island was one of the first states to fall under Martial Law. Borders got closed down by the government, military sent in to make sure nobody goes in or out. I ended up in a holding cell with a survivor who was there when things began and it sounds like something out of a sci-fi horror.
One day in mid-June, he said a visible tear opened up in the sky, like a theater curtain ripping right down the middle. This… giant thing climbed right out. According to him it looked human enough, though it looked pretty rough. Like the flesh was rotting right off the bone. Eyes were sunken in, hollow pits that just surveyed the land around it, looking for something unknown.
Well, not long after that everyone found out what it was after- food. This thing landed down right in the middle of Providence, tall as a three story building, and started picking up anyone stupid enough to be nearby. It was reaching through windows, grabbing people out and just devouring them. He said it reminded him of this cartoon from before the Tears, giants that would just eat humans endlessly without their hunger ever being satisfied. The bad thing was, this son of a bitch had no way of dying.
Military did a flyby within a couple hours of it appearing, lit the fucker up with enough bombs to take down a small nation, and this thing just started walking off, covered in flame but totally unbothered. Providence was ashes by the end of the day, and that damned thing is still off wandering the countryside somewhere. Hell, it’s probably crossed state lines by this point, considering the military fell for good in 2026.
I can’t give a good run down of everything that happened across the country since I was still a kid at the time. Think I was ten when my little town finally got a Tear in the sky, far above us. God, I can’t forget that day no matter how hard I try to. The year was 2027, the United States had fallen and divided itself into various city-states and no-go zones based on the Tears that had been appearing. To our East was the Georgia coastline, turned red by a Tear that opened somewhere under water off Tybee Island. All the sea life died within days, the smell of rotting fish reaching inland for weeks on end. by the time it faded away, we had become used to it.
Meanwhile off to the North-West there was a Tear that had covered the entire area from Macon onward in a thick darkness. If you went close enough, you could see where it starts, just a thick veil of darkness engulfing everything all the way up to Atlanta with no idea how far on it stretched. Saw some survivors from there getting carted through a Collective facility a couple years back, just empty shells of people. One of them was raving about these centipede creatures and a ‘King of Nightmares’, but there was never any confirmation we could get from them through all their madness.
It was such a clear day when Tear happened. The way the sun was shining, you would think nothing bad could have happened that day. Scary stuff only happens in the dark, that was what I was raised to believe at least. We were in one of the designated “Stable Areas” that the Collective watched over. According to them, our area had a steady grip on reality that kept the Tears from appearing. Bastards.
Maybe it wasn’t much compared to what we all had before, but the little commune that was set up to survive was everything I ever needed. We had friends and neighbors, all of us doing what we could to help each other survive in the terror we were living through. Dad grew crops, our neighbor Dale was a doctor, Mom taught a little preschool for all the kids, making sure they knew to read or write. Even in the midst of unfolding hell, we were making it, surviving.
I was out helping Dad and some of the other neighbors in the garden. We were trying to pick what we could before the sun scorched the crops, leaving them useless to eat. The meager supply of tomatoes, peppers, and sweet onions wouldn’t be much, but the little potato patch we had was booming so far that year, promising some nice consistency in our diets. I know all of us kids were drooling watching the a small patch where we had thrown watermelon seeds down, seeing them bloom into fruits larger than our heads. Ricky, one of the other kids around my age, almost got all of us in trouble by convincing us one was ready and we should just take it off the vine. Idiot wouldn’t listen to any of us that told him it wasn’t ripe yet, cracking it open himself and seeing almost all white and pale green inside instead of the juicy red. We only didn’t get in trouble because of how fast everything went downhill in the next hour or so.
We all looked up when the shadow passed over the field, blocking out the sun we had just been desperately sweating under. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, nothing to give us even slight shade from the heat, yet everything started to look like night time within seconds, right during the middle of the day. Everyone looked to the sky, met with the same terrifying sight.
A Tear was opening above us, right in front of the sun high above, blocking it from view. Wherever it was, it was high enough to cast a shadow over the land as far as the eye could see, and the wildlife of crickets and frogs that had been screaming just moments before finally started to go quiet. There was no sound, just the whisper of a slight breeze, chilling me to the bone in the formerly sun-soaked June heat.
Through the tear I could see… I’m going to sound fucking insane here, but I swear there was an audience. There were thousands of them, maybe millions, all watching through like the Tear ripping our sky in half was a movie screen. Then the threads began to fall.
Millions of them, razor thin threads that could barely be seen in the darkness that now engulfed us. The audience through the tear applauded, rising in fervor as these threads descended on us, falling with the force of a damned plane barreling toward the ground.
Ricky was one of the first to be hit. The thread managed to fall right onto his head, hitting him with so much force it cracked open worse than the watermelon still sitting beside him. The way all the blood spattered on it, you would almost think it ripened up in seconds. The other kids all ran screaming, but I could just fall on the ground, staring in terror at what was happening. All around me, more people were getting hit by the strings, impaled with enough force to punch holes through them.
“Robin!” My name was the last thing I heard my Dad say. He was looking around for me desperately, trying to get me in to safety. Meanwhile strings were hitting the small houses and shelters set up a little ways off, bursting right through the rooftop and doing untold damage to our meager life. I could hear screams coming up from that direction too, no doubt by those that were on the receiving end of the threads. I turned over, desperately trying to crawl on my belly toward anything that I thought might give me shelter, and saw Dad running toward me, still screaming, ‘Robin, run!”
His runs weren’t natural, jerky movements that almost made it look like he was floating above the ground, never quite touching down. If it wasn’t for the blood soaking them, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the threads that were holding him up, making him move around like some fucked up marionette. He was still alive, though there was something causing a bloom of blood on his chest that was making him struggle to breathe. I watched as he was yanked around, those same exaggerated movements pulling him toward me from above.
Someone, one of the other neighbors who was still alive, ran by him desperate to get to safety somewhere. Dad, totally against his will and screaming in agony, was flung right at him, threads breaking his arms to force him to grab onto the man. As soon as he did, some of the loose threads pierced right through the neighbor, picking him up to be a hellish puppet. The entire time, the audience above is roaring with laughter and delight, applause ringing out like thunder as they saw the carnage unfold.
Maybe they thought I was dead, maybe they were just saving me for later, but the puppets paid no mind to me. At this point there were probably five or six of them hanging around the garden area we had set up, some being made to walk around in exaggerated swagger, others forced into doing a stupid dance, and two that had gone off to their own little corner, whoever was puppeteering for them making them slap each other comically like an old cartoon bit. I was just laying there, tears pouring down my cheeks as I prayed they couldn’t find me, watching the audience above get plenty of laughs from the show unfolding all around me.
Before long the meat puppets started to wander off, searching out any that were still hiding in homes nearby. Nobody was safe, it seemed. Women, children… I saw in the distance one of the small kids, probably three years old, being made to walk around, hanging just above the ground as the threads manipulated his small limbs. I can still hear his cries when it gets too quiet, guttural, begging for his mother to help him, but she was strung up right alongside the poor kid, unable to do anything.
Eventually I came to my senses, feeling hunger well up in my stomach that made it growl loud. It had been hours, maybe a whole day, I honestly don’t know. The sun was still invisible behind the giant audience above, still stuck to their seats watching as unseen masters pulled the strings on my former friends around me. At one point I ended up eating a raw sweet onion straight out of the ground, wincing a little as dirt nestled in my teeth, but my stomach was grateful nevertheless.
Looking back, there’s no way a ten year old kid should have gotten out of that alive. Much less been the only survivor, but I made it. Crawled my way over to one of the tool sheds that was unlocked, still awaiting the gardening equipment that we had taken out what felt like just minutes ago, back before our lives were destroyed. The sound of sobs was inescapable, with all those strung up still somehow alive despite their grievous injuries. The audience above was still watching intently, nowhere else to be, I guess. Through the Tear I could see that their eyes were totally black, teeth visible in wide grins that never seemed to leave. Occasionally the puppets would dance or do something that brought a little cheer, keeping the audience hooked.
Finally, agonizingly, I got into the toolshed and picked up a rusty hatchet that was in there. I was running off pure survival instinct now, thinking that I could cut down any strings that got in my way while I army crawled myself out of town. There wasn’t any logic behind it, just the need to escape.
For the sake of keeping my own body intact, I stuck to the ditches and wooded areas where I could. There were still strings hanging down everywhere, nearly invisible to the naked eye, but the trees helped to block them and ensure I had a little more mobility. I clutched that hatchet so tight I thought there would be a small handprint in it by the time I got to the outskirts of town, just hoping that there would be some way out of here.
Of course it wasn’t going to be easy. The audience above wasn’t done using me for entertainment apparently. I emerged from wooded area after pulling myself through a small creek, desperately hoping I was finally at the end of my journey, only for my mother and father to suddenly fall from the sky above, seemingly flung over on their threads to meet me as I clawed for freedom. All I remember is their blank expressions, staring at me without recognizing. Their minds had been broken from the pain, limbs twisted and broken from forced movement, and the audience above wanted them to be the ones to capture me.
All I remember is swinging the hatchet in desperation as they were flung at me, managing to catch a few of the threads holding them up. Both fell to the ground, mangled, as more threads began to fall towards us to try and pick them back up. Before they could get their hands on my parents again, I used the dull hatchet to deliver multiple hits to their necks, putting them out of their pain. Then I kept moving, this time running on two legs as the threads chased me down.
Someone found me passed out near Highway 40, still gripping that hatchet, face down in a ditch. Next thing I know I was loaded up in a truck and driven to a nearby Collective facility, put into a small holding room where two suited agents asked me millions of questions about what happened.
That was years ago now. I’ve been back and forth forever, at first in a Collective-run foster home for survivors of Tears. If you thought the foster system in the good times was bad, let me tell you this was a whole other issue. Plenty of assholes left to reap abuse on those of us with no other alternative. That’s how I eventually ended up in a Collective prison colony, after beating a “Foster father” to death. Not that I was the only one who took part in killing him. The others still had a possibility at living though, so I took the fall.
Through the prison system I’ve met plenty of others with stories equally gruesome. We all end up here one way or another, just trying to survive most of the time, but the Collective is merciless in collecting prisoners to keep their own small efforts to maintain a society moving. Then about three weeks ago I got taken by one of the guards to a ‘special program’.
They found a Tear that was different from the others. One that, with the right measure of electricity channeled through it, apparently let them send people back to unspecified times. They told us that if we go back through the Tear, we would be granted our freedom, but had to find Collective agents in the time we went back to and warn them of what’s to come. Most of us practically jumped at the chance because, hell, we had never seen what a normal world looked like. I don’t know what time period the others ended up in, but scouring the internet in the day since I’ve been back hasn’t afforded any kind of information about if they made it or even how to find the damned Collective. Before everything went to hell they were a shadow organization, least they could’ve done in the future was give us some kind of distress call or something to find them.
Doesn’t matter. I’m pulling up now. I can see her through the window, smiling as she talks. He’s in there too, reading a newspaper, unaware that the happy little life he’s cultivated is about to come crashing down around them. They don’t know that hell is coming to Earth. I’m going to make sure they never do.
Do you know how easy it is to buy a gun in 2024? I was able to walk right into a pawn shop and pick one up with the old money they gave me before sending me through. Not even a hundred dollars and I was the owner of a fancy little revolver. I didn’t need to go all out or anything, just one box of ammo, enough to load the revolver with. Wouldn’t even need every bullet that was in the cylinder. Just one for mom, one for dad, and two for me.
Look, if anyone from the Collective ends up reading this, I’ve done my fucking job. I warned you, you should know what’s going to happen from here. If you’re able to stop it is a whole different situation, but that’s not my problem anymore. Whether the Tears happen in this timeline or not, I’m going to make sure I never have to deal with it. Considering the time, you might be better off following suit instead of ringing in the New Year.
#entertainment
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I swear, of all the times I could have gone back to, this couldn’t have possibly been any worse. Everything is FUBAR. Those jerks in the lab couldn’t even send me back enough to have a decent time before things go straight to hell… wonder if I can find them and give them a piece of my damn mind right now.
No, that would just be a waste of time. Right now I need to find him. God knows what could happen when I don’t come back immediately, they’ll probably send someone back here after me. No way am I going back there though, not if I can help it. Forgive any kind of typos or anything I might have here, I’m not really used to this era of tech, and text to speech is a pain in any decade you land in. Hell, even twenty years from now it’s no better, not that the technology gets much better thanks to everything going to crap.
Wish I could enjoy the first taste of freedom I’ve hard in years. Been locked up for years, not of my own volition, mind you. I was just a kid when things started to go to hell, grew up only knowing chaos and isolation. If we’re being totally honest I don’t know a whole lot about how things went down in the early days, but maybe what I do remember can help avoid what’s going to happen. Assuming anyone takes me seriously.
I don’t know what year they sent me back from. Lost all track of time, to be honest. I do know that it’s currently New Year’s Eve 2024 where I’m typing this. That means you have about two months before they start popping up.
They’ll come slow at first. You’ll hear about strange isolated events, horror movie scenarios in a lot of cases. Pretty high death counts that will make no damn sense to anyone based in reality. That’s the problem though, is that we’ve only seen our reality. The assholes that sent me back here, the Collective, they’re supposed to be keeping a lid on these things. The Veil tears, and they show up to stitch it back up. Things slip through when it tears though, and it’s those things that start to grow out of control around March.
First it was isolated, various areas of the world. There were reports of a cruise ship coming back with everyone onboard slaughtered, torn apart and chewed on by something that was never found. Over in Italy a small countryside town went up in flames overnight, talk of the dead rising up to attack the living.
By the middle of 2025, there was a new Tear popping up every week or so in the United States. Rhode Island was one of the first states to fall under Martial Law. Borders got closed down by the government, military sent in to make sure nobody goes in or out. I ended up in a holding cell with a survivor who was there when things began and it sounds like something out of a sci-fi horror.
One day in mid-June, he said a visible tear opened up in the sky, like a theater curtain ripping right down the middle. This… giant thing climbed right out. According to him it looked human enough, though it looked pretty rough. Like the flesh was rotting right off the bone. Eyes were sunken in, hollow pits that just surveyed the land around it, looking for something unknown.
Well, not long after that everyone found out what it was after- food. This thing landed down right in the middle of Providence, tall as a three story building, and started picking up anyone stupid enough to be nearby. It was reaching through windows, grabbing people out and just devouring them. He said it reminded him of this cartoon from before the Tears, giants that would just eat humans endlessly without their hunger ever being satisfied. The bad thing was, this son of a bitch had no way of dying.
Military did a flyby within a couple hours of it appearing, lit the fucker up with enough bombs to take down a small nation, and this thing just started walking off, covered in flame but totally unbothered. Providence was ashes by the end of the day, and that damned thing is still off wandering the countryside somewhere. Hell, it’s probably crossed state lines by this point, considering the military fell for good in 2026.
I can’t give a good run down of everything that happened across the country since I was still a kid at the time. Think I was ten when my little town finally got a Tear in the sky, far above us. God, I can’t forget that day no matter how hard I try to. The year was 2027, the United States had fallen and divided itself into various city-states and no-go zones based on the Tears that had been appearing. To our East was the Georgia coastline, turned red by a Tear that opened somewhere under water off Tybee Island. All the sea life died within days, the smell of rotting fish reaching inland for weeks on end. by the time it faded away, we had become used to it.
Meanwhile off to the North-West there was a Tear that had covered the entire area from Macon onward in a thick darkness. If you went close enough, you could see where it starts, just a thick veil of darkness engulfing everything all the way up to Atlanta with no idea how far on it stretched. Saw some survivors from there getting carted through a Collective facility a couple years back, just empty shells of people. One of them was raving about these centipede creatures and a ‘King of Nightmares’, but there was never any confirmation we could get from them through all their madness.
It was such a clear day when Tear happened. The way the sun was shining, you would think nothing bad could have happened that day. Scary stuff only happens in the dark, that was what I was raised to believe at least. We were in one of the designated “Stable Areas” that the Collective watched over. According to them, our area had a steady grip on reality that kept the Tears from appearing. Bastards.
Maybe it wasn’t much compared to what we all had before, but the little commune that was set up to survive was everything I ever needed. We had friends and neighbors, all of us doing what we could to help each other survive in the terror we were living through. Dad grew crops, our neighbor Dale was a doctor, Mom taught a little preschool for all the kids, making sure they knew to read or write. Even in the midst of unfolding hell, we were making it, surviving.
I was out helping Dad and some of the other neighbors in the garden. We were trying to pick what we could before the sun scorched the crops, leaving them useless to eat. The meager supply of tomatoes, peppers, and sweet onions wouldn’t be much, but the little potato patch we had was booming so far that year, promising some nice consistency in our diets. I know all of us kids were drooling watching the a small patch where we had thrown watermelon seeds down, seeing them bloom into fruits larger than our heads. Ricky, one of the other kids around my age, almost got all of us in trouble by convincing us one was ready and we should just take it off the vine. Idiot wouldn’t listen to any of us that told him it wasn’t ripe yet, cracking it open himself and seeing almost all white and pale green inside instead of the juicy red. We only didn’t get in trouble because of how fast everything went downhill in the next hour or so.
We all looked up when the shadow passed over the field, blocking out the sun we had just been desperately sweating under. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, nothing to give us even slight shade from the heat, yet everything started to look like night time within seconds, right during the middle of the day. Everyone looked to the sky, met with the same terrifying sight.
A Tear was opening above us, right in front of the sun high above, blocking it from view. Wherever it was, it was high enough to cast a shadow over the land as far as the eye could see, and the wildlife of crickets and frogs that had been screaming just moments before finally started to go quiet. There was no sound, just the whisper of a slight breeze, chilling me to the bone in the formerly sun-soaked June heat.
Through the tear I could see… I’m going to sound fucking insane here, but I swear there was an audience. There were thousands of them, maybe millions, all watching through like the Tear ripping our sky in half was a movie screen. Then the threads began to fall.
Millions of them, razor thin threads that could barely be seen in the darkness that now engulfed us. The audience through the tear applauded, rising in fervor as these threads descended on us, falling with the force of a damned plane barreling toward the ground.
Ricky was one of the first to be hit. The thread managed to fall right onto his head, hitting him with so much force it cracked open worse than the watermelon still sitting beside him. The way all the blood spattered on it, you would almost think it ripened up in seconds. The other kids all ran screaming, but I could just fall on the ground, staring in terror at what was happening. All around me, more people were getting hit by the strings, impaled with enough force to punch holes through them.
“Robin!” My name was the last thing I heard my Dad say. He was looking around for me desperately, trying to get me in to safety. Meanwhile strings were hitting the small houses and shelters set up a little ways off, bursting right through the rooftop and doing untold damage to our meager life. I could hear screams coming up from that direction too, no doubt by those that were on the receiving end of the threads. I turned over, desperately trying to crawl on my belly toward anything that I thought might give me shelter, and saw Dad running toward me, still screaming, ‘Robin, run!”
His runs weren’t natural, jerky movements that almost made it look like he was floating above the ground, never quite touching down. If it wasn’t for the blood soaking them, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the threads that were holding him up, making him move around like some fucked up marionette. He was still alive, though there was something causing a bloom of blood on his chest that was making him struggle to breathe. I watched as he was yanked around, those same exaggerated movements pulling him toward me from above.
Someone, one of the other neighbors who was still alive, ran by him desperate to get to safety somewhere. Dad, totally against his will and screaming in agony, was flung right at him, threads breaking his arms to force him to grab onto the man. As soon as he did, some of the loose threads pierced right through the neighbor, picking him up to be a hellish puppet. The entire time, the audience above is roaring with laughter and delight, applause ringing out like thunder as they saw the carnage unfold.
Maybe they thought I was dead, maybe they were just saving me for later, but the puppets paid no mind to me. At this point there were probably five or six of them hanging around the garden area we had set up, some being made to walk around in exaggerated swagger, others forced into doing a stupid dance, and two that had gone off to their own little corner, whoever was puppeteering for them making them slap each other comically like an old cartoon bit. I was just laying there, tears pouring down my cheeks as I prayed they couldn’t find me, watching the audience above get plenty of laughs from the show unfolding all around me.
Before long the meat puppets started to wander off, searching out any that were still hiding in homes nearby. Nobody was safe, it seemed. Women, children… I saw in the distance one of the small kids, probably three years old, being made to walk around, hanging just above the ground as the threads manipulated his small limbs. I can still hear his cries when it gets too quiet, guttural, begging for his mother to help him, but she was strung up right alongside the poor kid, unable to do anything.
Eventually I came to my senses, feeling hunger well up in my stomach that made it growl loud. It had been hours, maybe a whole day, I honestly don’t know. The sun was still invisible behind the giant audience above, still stuck to their seats watching as unseen masters pulled the strings on my former friends around me. At one point I ended up eating a raw sweet onion straight out of the ground, wincing a little as dirt nestled in my teeth, but my stomach was grateful nevertheless.
Looking back, there’s no way a ten year old kid should have gotten out of that alive. Much less been the only survivor, but I made it. Crawled my way over to one of the tool sheds that was unlocked, still awaiting the gardening equipment that we had taken out what felt like just minutes ago, back before our lives were destroyed. The sound of sobs was inescapable, with all those strung up still somehow alive despite their grievous injuries. The audience above was still watching intently, nowhere else to be, I guess. Through the Tear I could see that their eyes were totally black, teeth visible in wide grins that never seemed to leave. Occasionally the puppets would dance or do something that brought a little cheer, keeping the audience hooked.
Finally, agonizingly, I got into the toolshed and picked up a rusty hatchet that was in there. I was running off pure survival instinct now, thinking that I could cut down any strings that got in my way while I army crawled myself out of town. There wasn’t any logic behind it, just the need to escape.
For the sake of keeping my own body intact, I stuck to the ditches and wooded areas where I could. There were still strings hanging down everywhere, nearly invisible to the naked eye, but the trees helped to block them and ensure I had a little more mobility. I clutched that hatchet so tight I thought there would be a small handprint in it by the time I got to the outskirts of town, just hoping that there would be some way out of here.
Of course it wasn’t going to be easy. The audience above wasn’t done using me for entertainment apparently. I emerged from wooded area after pulling myself through a small creek, desperately hoping I was finally at the end of my journey, only for my mother and father to suddenly fall from the sky above, seemingly flung over on their threads to meet me as I clawed for freedom. All I remember is their blank expressions, staring at me without recognizing. Their minds had been broken from the pain, limbs twisted and broken from forced movement, and the audience above wanted them to be the ones to capture me.
All I remember is swinging the hatchet in desperation as they were flung at me, managing to catch a few of the threads holding them up. Both fell to the ground, mangled, as more threads began to fall towards us to try and pick them back up. Before they could get their hands on my parents again, I used the dull hatchet to deliver multiple hits to their necks, putting them out of their pain. Then I kept moving, this time running on two legs as the threads chased me down.
Someone found me passed out near Highway 40, still gripping that hatchet, face down in a ditch. Next thing I know I was loaded up in a truck and driven to a nearby Collective facility, put into a small holding room where two suited agents asked me millions of questions about what happened.
That was years ago now. I’ve been back and forth forever, at first in a Collective-run foster home for survivors of Tears. If you thought the foster system in the good times was bad, let me tell you this was a whole other issue. Plenty of assholes left to reap abuse on those of us with no other alternative. That’s how I eventually ended up in a Collective prison colony, after beating a “Foster father” to death. Not that I was the only one who took part in killing him. The others still had a possibility at living though, so I took the fall.
Through the prison system I’ve met plenty of others with stories equally gruesome. We all end up here one way or another, just trying to survive most of the time, but the Collective is merciless in collecting prisoners to keep their own small efforts to maintain a society moving. Then about three weeks ago I got taken by one of the guards to a ‘special program’.
They found a Tear that was different from the others. One that, with the right measure of electricity channeled through it, apparently let them send people back to unspecified times. They told us that if we go back through the Tear, we would be granted our freedom, but had to find Collective agents in the time we went back to and warn them of what’s to come. Most of us practically jumped at the chance because, hell, we had never seen what a normal world looked like. I don’t know what time period the others ended up in, but scouring the internet in the day since I’ve been back hasn’t afforded any kind of information about if they made it or even how to find the damned Collective. Before everything went to hell they were a shadow organization, least they could’ve done in the future was give us some kind of distress call or something to find them.
Doesn’t matter. I’m pulling up now. I can see her through the window, smiling as she talks. He’s in there too, reading a newspaper, unaware that the happy little life he’s cultivated is about to come crashing down around them. They don’t know that hell is coming to Earth. I’m going to make sure they never do.
Do you know how easy it is to buy a gun in 2024? I was able to walk right into a pawn shop and pick one up with the old money they gave me before sending me through. Not even a hundred dollars and I was the owner of a fancy little revolver. I didn’t need to go all out or anything, just one box of ammo, enough to load the revolver with. Wouldn’t even need every bullet that was in the cylinder. Just one for mom, one for dad, and two for me.
Look, if anyone from the Collective ends up reading this, I’ve done my fucking job. I warned you, you should know what’s going to happen from here. If you’re able to stop it is a whole different situation, but that’s not my problem anymore. Whether the Tears happen in this timeline or not, I’m going to make sure I never have to deal with it. Considering the time, you might be better off following suit instead of ringing in the New Year.
#entertainment
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| 24,000 mlx | |
| 10 | |
| 6 |