Notes from the End of the World

Preface

The world ended fifteen years ago.

We still don't know how many survivors are left across the globe; not many of them, I am sure. The six billion humans were decimated to some few millions. If you walk on any of the metropolises from previous times, like London, Paris or New York, you will barely meet a dozen people on the streets.

There are some sanctuaries, where hundreds of survivors gathered together to rebuild society, but they are flawed, as any human congregation has always been. I have even heard of some wars between some of these communities. A cabal proof that we never learn anything.

That is why I prefer to live alone. In my age, all I need is a good book and a good wine; however, I imposed a mission on myself: to collect as many records of the pandemics years.

In this warehouse that I call home, I have archived more than 30,000 documents, diaries, newspapers, notebooks, memorandums, letters etc. But I also created this huge library of videos, voice recordings, hard drives, and any possible information I can store. It would take me many years to review all this material, but I keep receiving it every week.

It all started through radio communication with other survivors, and the word-of-mouth reached other countries and continents. When the sea routes were restored, people started to send me the documents they had, or that they found scavenging empty houses in empty towns.

The documents may take many months to reach me, but when I see the postman's mule coming up the street, I know that I am receiving hundreds and hundreds of stories from all over the world. Some are written in languages I don't understand, some are even written in language from places where there are no survivors at all, so I will never know what they say. Some of them were already (poorly) translated to English, what makes everything much easier to me, and some I had to translate it myself with the assistance of the dictionaries and grammars that I permanently borrowed from the abandoned library.

That is one of the good things of being alone all this time: I have self-taught myself eight languages, but I have no one to talk to.

I don't have the intention of writing a History book, narrating what happened and how. Actually, we don't know clearly what happened and how it happened. I am not a scholar or a historian, so this is not the work of a scholar. I just put together some of the stories that appalled me most, the saddest ones, the most terrible ones, the funniest ones, and those that show the contradictions and the incertitude of those horrible times. I tried to make a coherent book, but I suppose I lack the methodology for this.

I am sure that someday someone will have access to all the material I had collected and will make a better use of it than I could possible do. Then, you will have a true History of how the world had ended.

For now, all I have to present to you are these sparse, fragmentary notes.

Ibrahim Stein