levoydpage posted:

Also, so so sad that so many "gen z" (a made up name which is totally ominous itself and has a faint odor of propaganda) are 2nd gen silicon valley spoiled brats that have been to every Maker Faire and been reading how cool predator drones are since they were in a NUNA Leaf or something on a soylent green iv. STEM education in the states is highly patriotic and not exactly strong in the areas of critical thinking and ethics... Of course they need a new name, "Gen Z" the FINAL GENERATION before the BENEVOLENT SINGULARITY OF TRANS-HUMANISM!

It might just be because it's 2 generations after Gen X

White heat and light annihilate the store. Shoppers become ghosts in an instant, inundated and incinerated by that light. Their forms swell with it before they vanish. Shelves of books and food and toys and jeans fall over. One Talkie Sally doll crawls feebly across the floor with its vocal circuit and both legs crushed; it mumbles and crumbles as it crawls, the sound of it “clerp. Clerp. Clerp.”

The power dies.

Susan is there. She seizes an armful of boxes from the shelves before she begins to run. She does not want them destroyed.

That is her impulse in the apocalypse: to save what she can.

Broken glass scores her face. She isn’t sure from where. There is a red and soft white glow off to the east so she heads in that direction, dodging around a crumbled ceiling. She scrapes out through a crack in the wall when she reaches the building’s edge. Most of the boxes tumble from her arms as she squeezes through.

She is on the second floor.

“Ah—” she says, looking back for a moment, as she falls.

The building shimmers, swells, and shatters.

Susan hits the grass hard and her vision goes black.

On the first morning after the apocalypse, she opens her eyes. The world is desolately empty. There are no sounds of cars or people or even birds. There is only the rushing wind.

“Oh,” she says.

Her arms are clenched around the last few treasures that she has saved. Painfully she releases her grip. She sits up. She sets them down. She dusts herself off.

They are a Fisher-Price carpentry playset and a talking learn-the-alphabet game.

“You saved us,” says the talking learn-the-alphabet game.

Susan smiles tiredly.

What a strange toy, she thinks.

“Because you saved us,” says the talking learn-the-alphabet game, “we will help you survive this grim post-apocalyptic world.”

Ah, Susan thinks. I have gone insane.

“It is not necessary,” she says, politely. “I have already learned the alphabet.”

“There are more than twenty-six letters,” says the talking learn-the-alphabet game. “There is also soph.”

“Soph,” says Susan.

“Now you know your A-B-Cs!” declares the talking learn-the-alphabet game. “Next time won’t you sing with me?”

“I will,” Susan says.

So they sing the alphabet together, including soph, in an empty world.