POSTHUMAN

The world as it is now

They called it The Flash, Marcus does not know who they were and why they lacked any imagination, but that was the name given to the instantaneous apocalypse. A plague had been carried by it, the Ragnarok Virus: half of the Earth's population died at the exact moment the light touched them. The survivors came in three varieties but for some, death would have been easier. Transhumans were made stronger by their exposure to Ragnarok, a once dormant gene flicked into activity.

        Ferals also had the dormant gene necessary for survival but other ancillary genes became active. Thus the ferals regressed to a stage where they would only interact with others of their kind, and showed extreme hostility to ordinary transhumans. They fled wildly from civilisation and came together in tribes; these tribes antagonise one another, attacked transhumans and harboured a murderous hatred of the necrotic. Half of the surviving, non-necrotic population were feral.

        Then there were those who had seemed to die at the hands of Ragnarok. Days, weeks, sometimes months after mass burials they emerged from the earth. Necrophids, colloquially referred to as necroes, operated on a level even more basic than ferals. They moved and killed, incapable of speech. Their bodies had been ravaged by The Flash; their flesh succumbed instantly to necrosis and their minds to decay. The condition was not transmutable as it was a catastrophic change at the chromosomal level. 60% of those humans who did not die as a result of The Flash became necrophids.

        Marcus had wandered in a stupor from his house, surveying the rapidly rotting bodies in the streets that would become necroes. It took two years to make Belle Fourche habitable again, by which time Marcus wanted nothing to do with the town. He said his goodbyes to Jamie, Milo was a feral and Denny had died in The Flash, before setting off across the country – not really sure where he wanted to be. He had decided that anywhere which didn't remind him of his family would be a good start so he left South Dakota. Marcus had joined up with a group headed for New York City, where the population had burned the dead. However, the outskirts of the city had been a veritable orgy of violence; ferals and necroes locked in combat, each trying to exterminate the other. Transhuman groups had gone relatively unnoticed into the city proper because their enemies were too busy killing each other.

        He cleared out the rats from an apartment block and took up residence there. Nine years passed and New York State swelled to 40 million people, New York City to an absurd 15 million: it actually crossed state borders to encompass most of what used to be the New York metropolitan area. People had flocked from all over the country to be in those states where trade with Canada was easier, no need to traverse the necrophid rich interior: the American Great Plains had become a hellish vision. California and Texas effectively existed as nations unto themselves at this point, around the same time as global communication collapsed which was followed soon afterwards by nearly all communication that could connect the American continent. Everything went dark, communities were isolated and it was left to individual states to organise themselves. As far as the government was concerned the United States of America were effectively thirteen colonies again.

        In those nine years, Marcus was never short of work or people to help him but there was something bizarre about working in a world where outside the city limits the walking dead battled psychotic, murderous tribes. Occasionally, his National Guard unit would be called up to needle an intrepid tribe or scare off a necro pack.

        Nothing seemed real: Marcus would wake some nights thinking he was still dreaming, stuck in some horrific night terror. Then he would open his curtains to see the heaving, monumental skyscrapers of New York City and remember his waking world was more terrifying than anything his imagination could summon up.

        This is the world of 2111 AD.