My death
Earth, 2119. It’s the 100th anniversary of my death. It was a simple fall; something that I had been doing all my life and that my friends and family had always joked would be my demise. The face value of my death was so insignificant that you wouldn’t have read about it in the history books or heard about it on the news. When they said, “she died far too young,” and “her death is an unnecessary tragedy,” at my funeral they didn’t know how wrong they were. I actually died at the right time, in the right place for the right events to line up that prevented the pandemic that couldn’t be named. We were saved- at least for a little while.
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If I hadn’t been there that day at that time, a mid-career biochemical engineer would have made it to the conference that they were scheduled to attend. The engineer would have been inspired by the ideas presented at the conference that would change the path of his career. The engineer would have made unprecedented advances in pharmaceuticals that were meant to ease the burden of lifetime ailments. The promise of such advancements would have caused unquellable excitement for those producing the drugs. The excitement would lead to an oversight in disposal safety. The disposal of the byproducts of these drugs would mutate to become the most dynamic and deadly disease that mankind had ever seen. It would move swiftly through the population and no one would be safe from it. The virus would mutate so fast that the defenses produced wouldn’t stand a chance. The time from the day that the virus developed to the day that humankind would end would have been 25 days; it moved so swiftly though the population that it was impossible to establish a name. In the following years, cities would have been overrun with weeds and wildlife. Earth would flourish and by year 2119 it would have almost been as though humans were never here.
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On the day of my death, a young child flipped a coin into the fountain of a hotel. A biotechnologist that was scheduled to speak at a conference saw the child flip the coin into the fountain and was compelled to intervene. The biotechnologist fished the coin out of the fountain while explaining to the child that it was wasteful and that wishing upon things was not a scientifically sound process of making things happen. Water that was on the biotechnologists hand dripped onto the floor as the child looked at the coin in dismay. As the biochemical engineer was on their way to the biotechnologists conference, they witnessed a person slipping in a small puddle of water and falling to hit their head on the corner of the fountain’s ledge. The trajectory of the fall was at such an angle that the hit caused death almost instantly. The biochemical engineer missed the conference out of an obligation to speak to police about the incident that they witnessed. The inspiration did not occur, their career remain constant, the drugs were not created, there was no byproduct to evolve into the most dangerous disease man ever knew. Humanity was safe- or at least it was supposed to be.
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Instead of humans being wiped from Earth, they continued on as they always had. There were too many people using too many resources causing too much strain on Earth. Over the following 100 years, famine, illness, and man to man brutality extinguished most of humanity. There are a few left sporadically around Earth- those who had prepared for this type of thing and have done everything that they could to fight for their little slice of Earth. They won’t last much longer, no one will.
Earth 2119. It’s the 100th anniversary of my death.