The Incident

Written by Jae C. Henderson April 2020

On a basic level, not much about life had changed since 2020. The birds still chirped. The sky was still a dull blue with fantastic displays of pink, orange, and purple hues running across it at dusk and dawn. The mountains were as large and magnificent as ever. Though sea levels rose, the water didn’t rise as far inland as previously projected rechristening neighborhoods as new beachfront properties. People still had fundamental disagreements around religion, government, and race. Cars still didn’t fly. The machines hadn’t turned on their human overlords and taken over.

But there was The Incident that occurred. It arrived abruptly, bringing daily life to a screeching halt and transforming the way people globally experienced life.

It was so widespread that no one was immune from its clutches. Neither social economic class, nor race, age, or religion would render a person safe. It made its way through the mountains of Tibet, the sprawling countryside of Tuscany, the temples of Bali, New York City’s Broadway, and down into the mines of South Africa. It seemed to arrive in waves, making its way from one place to the next, and completely dismantling entire industries, governments, and social norms. Yet, as country after country was hit, it seemed as though the rest of the world stood still, holding on to the naive belief that they wouldn't be affected due to some competitive advantage they had over the others.

So they watched. And they waited. Each person’s government assured its citizens that their lives would not be impacted by The Incident because it was an ocean away. They watched. And they waited as it crept closer to their borders, casting a shadow of doubt, panic, and fear into their international neighbors. And one by one, The Incident would reach their shores, their doors, their kitchen tables, and make itself at home like an unwelcome guest. And one by one, their governments found themselves scurrying to get the needed resources out to patch their wounded economies and government structures.

Some countries tried to reason with The Incident, offering up its homeless population, its minority populations, its elderly, its sickly. They pled with The Incident and tried to study its movements in order to figure out its weakness. Undeterred, it persisted, reaching its hand into their government capitals, their middle class families, their most highly-revered and most prized citizens. And after taking its fair share, the countries would finally quiet down, almost bowing to the sheer pressure it was placing on their systems.

Only then did The Incident take pity on them and reveal the way to make it stop, but it required a substantially different approach than anyone was prepared to take on.

 [JN1]This edit to maintain the parallel structure being used in sentence construction throughout this paragraph