05.13.27

It has been almost 30 years since the war ended. But our world is still vanishing, faster than it ever did in its 4.6-ish billion years of existence. Faster than during World War IV, a war which resulted in over 5 billion casualties, and over 700 trillion dollars in damage worldwide.

The government thought the peace talks, the agreements, the treaties, and the new laws would be sufficient for our world to begin anew. It was enough, for a while. Technology progressed faster than ever before. Almost everything in our lives became doable with a mere blink, from shopping to booking a visit to the Moon. Hunger and unemployment were basically nonexistent. It was a good life, in the beginning.

It started around twenty years ago. Scientists found a way to warp, or teleport, or whatever you want to call it. They used æłthœ, which is a type of synthetic metalgas, to create a portal that could bend space. The scientist who found it discovered it by accident when he sprayed some æłthœ into two ring-ish shapes, and light began to travel from one to the other. The technology quickly became a success, as it could be used for quick and safe teleportation of objects and people, making many transportation technologies obsolete, and was pretty affordable to make. There weren't many regulations, so by the time our downfall began, portals were everywhere.

About a year after the warp technology became widespread, people began noticing that random things would vanish, as if they had warped away. But law enforcement, scientists, politicians, and other people of power only took notice when crowds, entire buildings, even a city, vanished into nothingness. And unlike in a normal warp, they never reappeared. 

Within two years, yawning holes which opened up into an abyss of darkness started appearing up around the world. No one went near them, but sometimes you could hear faint screams, and the sound of rending metal. At night, you could see the lights of cities shining through. In the daytime, you could see all the things that had vanished, albeit it looked like you were seeing it through a mirage. But here's the thing: by 15 U.Y., over eighty percent of all land had vanished into the holes.

After our population was decimated in WWIV, there were approximately four billion people living on Earth. In 15 U.Y., there were half that, from all the disappearances. The same scientist who created the warp technology worked frantically with a team of brilliant scientists to figure out why this was happening, and found that because æłthœ was a metalgas, bits of it had drifted off and mixed into the atmosphere, and wherever they lined up in a ring-like shape, they created a portal. But because they had not been connected to another portal, the things that disappeared into the accidental portals got stuck somewhere between.

After "between", a sort of pocket dimension, became filled up, it began to strain at its seams and eventually, it burst, ripping a hole in space-time. Unfortunately, the scientists also found that the holes would keep increasing in size, and that there was currently no known way to stop them. They said there may be a solution, but I personally believe we're all doomed. So I might as well write this before I, too, am sucked into a