Last time we got a little bit of a history lesson, a background to The Strife which is going to be important to remember later on. Feel free to go and read it again; and if this is your first forray into Story Sunday, do check the prologue out, because we’re continuing this week with a time skip, and a letter from a dying man.

Happy Sunday reading, and see you next week!

Solutions. Interrupted

To You,

It all seemed like a great thing at the time, Internet access as a human right. By 2080 every school, library and community centre in the world had at least one computer with a high-speed Internet connection. It was a triumph of human perseverance! we all told ourselves. Oh, how civilised the world had become!

Then it started. It was simple stuff at first; cyber bullying became a norm, but then, everyone had expected that. Then things got progressively less civilised. Searches about the history of slavery led to multitudes of neo-supremacist chat rooms of every kind; queries about sexual health saw you bombarded with violent and graphic images of degrading acts performed with dubious consent. The grotesque became the mainstream, and soon we really were witnessing the dreaded and oft-mentioned ‘deterioration of the moral fabric of society’.

In all that chaos nobody can really say when the takeover happened, but those of us old enough to remember know that it wasn’t the bloodless affair they claim it to be. The Strife Lords came baying for blood and they got it, rivers of it. The blood of all those who dared to say humanity was decent and good and capable of being righteous.

The rest of us were either too cowed, or too busy drowning in the enormity of it all, to fight back when it would have made a difference.

Perhaps the Strife Lords really are what they say: our old gods. But I am too old now and have seen too much to care if they’re right and they are only monsters because we made them so. I want to see each of them destroyed, but I won’t live long enough for that. You see, I’m writing this because I’m to die soon. But if anyone ever finds this letter, I want you to know it’s worth it to fight. It has to be.

Allan, D.