The dream started as it always did, as it had many times over the last few weeks. The sensation of being plucked into the sky, then ever-so-gently placed back onto the ground as if by a giant hand. The sensation of grit underneath bare feet, the slight dampness of the ground. She was on a street, some nameless suburban street, but it was always a different street.
She felt the same sense of dread, sadness and loneliness as always, as she looked around at the abandoned houses.
“They’re all gone” - she thought to herself, as she did every time she had this dream.
She felt it profoundly, this sense that nobody was here, nobody at all. The houses were all empty, everyone was gone. Some of the doors were wide open, some of them were shut but had numbers and letters scrawled on them with spray paint, a legacy of the soldiers that had been through here earlier, clearing houses, checking for dead.
But there was nobody to be seen anywhere, and only the sound of the wind and the chittering of birds, or the occasional banging of a door or window left open.
“All gone” - she thought again. On the heels of this thought, she thought she heard a faint, rhythmic, bell-like sound.
As she walked down the street, she suddenly saw her father burst out of a door at the end of the street. He was, very unusually for him, dressed in a very nice suit. He looked happier and healthier than she’d ever seen him, he was beaming and saying “Oh honey, I’m so glad you could make it, I’m so glad you’re here”.
As she smiled back at him, wishing this dream, this feeling was true, the sound of the bell got louder, until it became a deafening gong, and then its rhythm picked up, unavoidable, inescapable, stirring her back to consciousness.
As she stirred from dreams to reality, it was, again, always the same. She wanted to stay in the dream. It was far better than the reality.
The deaths weren’t the worst part, not by far. By mid-2024, it was obvious to even the most staunch vaccine supporter that something was seriously, seriously wrong. The amount of cardiac arrests suddenly skyrocketed and eventually it became so commonplace that it was uncommon for people not to have known someone to die.
People literally started dropping dead in the middle of doing whatever they were doing. Driving, working, exercising. People started dying at rates never seen before, and at a rate that simply couldn’t be ignored any longer. The bodies started piling up fast.
Further, the horrific rubbery squid-like clots were being found in more and more dead bodies. Real fear started to set in in the minds of the vaccinated, as they contemplated these horrendous growths potentially growing inside their bodies. The demand for screening skyrocketed, but there were limited treatments available, even if the clots were found early.
It seemed at face value that the vaccinated were all doomed. Even worse, the first signs of an even worse disease in large parts of the population began to appear. The vaccinated were not just irritable and angry, but something else.
Thousands, then millions of people died suddenly, faster than services could keep up with. Bodies began to accumulate in houses, and a stench rose over most cities that they’d been mercifully spared for some time. It soon became apparent that the majority of the vaccinated population would either die, or be incredibly disabled.
New crematoria were built at the outskirts of cities, and they worked around the clock burning all the bodies, as they belched out greasy putrid brown smoke that seemed to hang over everything in a dark pall. The stench was at times unbearable, and so thick that after a while, most people became partly immune to it. Some cities were unable to even do this and simply set up massive body pits, which inevitably filled up quickly.
Everyone lost people they loved, their families, their friends, their partners. Many tearful goodbyes were said, the pain inflicted on the community was massive. Many more died alone, in pain, with no-one to say goodbye to. Many started hating those who had done this to them in earnest, for the first time. The grief was unimaginable at a population scale, nothing had ever been seen like this before.
Calls for justice rang on empty ears as governments around the world swept the evidence under the rug and kept insisting everything was fine and that the rate of death was due to anything other than the vaccines. Increasingly implausible explanations were proffered, but the population was increasingly unconvinced as it became glaringly apparent that the only people not suffering terribly were the unvaccinated.
As the election loomed in the United States, on the brink of what looked to be an overwhelming victory for Trump, first the internet, and then power went down. Almost simultaneously all over the world, power infrastructure overloaded and simply stopped working.
The world was thrown into darkness and chaos. Communication cut off, phone lines down. Suddenly people realised how much they had come to rely on all these things, but it was too late. The lights went out, and then the water, and people were simply left to fend for themselves, as governments lost control.
The voices on the radio blamed solar flares, but it was fairly obvious that this was a lie. The way the entire world’s internet and then power was knocked out simultaneously suggested to those of a more suspicious bent that some sort of worldwide sabotage had occurred.
This suspicion deepened into certainty later on, as it was discovered that the infrastructure was not only damaged, but irreparable. So the lights stayed out, and nobody knew, had any idea, of when they might come back on. Even the voices on the radio made no promises.
Still, it was too late for conspiracy theories and speculation now, as societies around the world struggled to restore order in the absence of communication systems. It mostly didn’t really happen in an organised manner, or quickly, so most societies quickly devolved into a semi-lawless state.
People didn’t cope very well with no power or running water. The western population, for so long able to depend on the state for these things, were now left to figure things out. Most did, but many didn’t, and even more people died from starvation, dirty water and poor sanitation.
As for order, it soon broke down. At first it was mostly looting. Understandable really, people cut off from supermarkets and other shops suddenly realised that the need to secure enough to eat could be an existential issue, so the closed shops were soon pried open and picked clean.
There was some sporadic violence as people scrabbled for limited resources, but by and large, people co-operated.
For a while, things settled down. Even in the absence of emergency services, people mostly found ways to just get by, as they waited for things to improve. But as the weeks wore on, it became clear that a new phase in human history had begun, and there was no way to quickly go back to the way things were before.
Around the end of 2024, the first shots in the war that would reverberate around the world were fired. In the end, it wasn’t the superpowers disagreeing that cause the third world war, but hateful people, supported by their governments. At first it looked like random violence, but soon it became apparent that these were targeted killings.
People who had opposed the old systems, the “antivaxers”, tin-foil hatters, cookers and online activists. All the loudest people who stood for truth against the New World Order were targeted for extermination.
This had all been arranged long ago, the same people behind the military operatives online had arranged for the same/similar groups of people to be armed in the wake of these disruptions, and they were given the license to go and “sort out” any dissenters using any means they deemed necessary.
So the raids began. Vans crammed with hate-filled government operatives, with government supplied weaponry, radicalised to kill in the name of their masonic masters, would arrive at the doorsteps of family homes, often in the middle of the night, kick the doors in and drag the occupants out on to their front lawns, where they would be mercilessly tortured and executed in front of their neighbours. The corpses would be left right there with slogans painted nearby explaining the nature of the victims “crimes”.
Of course, they often got it wrong and targeted the wrong individuals, but they didn’t care. What they were doing was for the greater good, and they saw their targets as vermin who needed to be exterminated. A lot of them enjoyed what they were doing, sometimes too much.
Sometimes the citizens fought back, and even won isolated battles, but for the most part, the kill squads had their way and exterminated people ruthlessly over several months.
So screams and death rang out in once peaceful suburbs around the world, and the locals were once again forced to do body removal duties to clean up in their wake. But as they did so, their resolve grew, as did their hatred of the people preying on them.
As the voices on the radio began to promise a return to power and order, it became apparent that this had been yet another staged event. That governments had taken advantage of the collapse of law and order to eliminate their opponents.
The governments denied all knowledge, though it was obvious they had at the very least armed the death squads that had inflicted such a heavy toll on only the portion of the population that was deemed unacceptable.
As the lights started to come back on, and communications gradually began to be restored, governments started to point to China and Russia as being responsible for the now-obvious sabotage. They insisted that these powers needed to be dealt with and started rattling their nuclear sabres. But the truth was, there wasn’t really enough population that wasn’t severely sick to even contemplate a war.
They insisted that to make sure that such a calamity could never happen again, everyone would need to sign up to a new identification system. They set up centres at schools and insisted every citizen in the area report in and sign up. They rounded up whole suburbs of people and conveyed them to these centres where they would be logged, microchipped, and given an identity number and carbon-credit score.
In the end it was that easy to microchip the entire population. Faced with a choice of whether to miss out on essentials such as power, food, and access to fuel, the vast majority of the population simply complied and lined up to have a small chip implanted in their wrist. That, and the armed soldiers insisting that anyone not microchipped would potentially be shot down the track.
Gradually, one by one, services and infrastructure started coming back online. Your digital ID and microchip were now used to verify your online identity. In the name of safety, a number of new rules were devised around the use of internet, strict rules which barred any dissent.
Chip readers were installed everywhere, and scores would constantly be verified to check eligibility. Dissent would be punished with limited access to essentials such as power, food, water, and fuel.
It was argued this was necessary to stop the flow of misinformation emanating from China and Russia, though it was mostly obvious that the governments were simply concerned about losing control of the flow of information again.
As social media sites came back online, people started talking again, and they quickly forgot these new restrictions. They were reminded brutally, as their access to everything would suddenly be cut off. No money, no power, no internet, it would just be arbitrarily cut off at the whim of the government.
People would even be dragged away from their homes by the Police for minor things they’d said online, and their horrified neighbours were reminded of the death squads that had preyed on them mere months earlier.
Within a few months, people realised that a noose had been slipped around their necks, and they were now stuck with this system. A new system of techno-slavery.
The seeds of resistance, planted during the raids, now sprouted into full-blown hatred against the new order. People started quietly talking in groups about what could be done. But with the inability to use the internet to get organised, resistance was only fragmented and mostly futile.
People learned to talk in codes incomprehensible to the AI that was monitoring them everywhere they went.
Perhaps even worse, by now those that were left alive from the MRNA shots were experiencing all kinds of changes. Some were just very, very sick, disabled for life. But some of those that had taken sufficient doses of vaccines began to change, into something other than human. They became gaunt, hollow-eyed with intense stares, and it seemed that for some, their cartilage grew, deforming their faces in all kinds of twisted ways.
A new form of prion disease began to afflict many of the vaccinated, and it drove them insane. Initially it was simply irritability, then later this turned into aggression and rage. Many of those afflicted died horrible, screaming deaths, insane, begging for the end. Many people didn’t realise they’d gone insane and insisted their increasingly delusional view of the world was valid, and would rage and become violent against anyone who disagreed.
Having such numbers of people afflicted by prion disease caused society to start breaking down. Road rage and assaults skyrocketed and eventually the call was made that people affected by prions would need to be removed for everyone’s safety. Former quarantine camps were repurposed and many met their end in these camps and were disposed of in the on-site crematoria. The camp conditions were horrific, to say the least.
Then one day, out of the blue, in the early parts of 2025, a new rumour began doing the rounds.
An unconfirmed letter began to circulate on social media. Any accounts that shared it were swiftly shut down and their owners severely punished, but it was already too late. It had leaked everywhere, and everyone started wondering what this all meant, what the implications could be.
The contents of the letter were brutal and shocking, to say the least, and took everyone by surprise.
Thank you for reading the prologue of my story - “What Winning Looked Like”. This has been a fun project so far and I’m looking forward to where I’m taking this story next. In the next episode I will introduce you to the central protagonist of our plot, a man interned in one of the old quarantine camps for crimes against the new regime.
I used AI to illustrate this, and it was a really interesting experience indeed. AI art creators come up with some very creepy stuff indeed. Interestingly, when I asked AI art generators to make an image of a crowd looting a supermarket, they all populated the picture with only black people. Bizarre, and disgraceful really.
I really hope you enjoyed this story so far, and I’d love your feedback on the poll below.
Looking forward to more! So far, it is not implausible at all!
It's disturbing , it's too near to what I can believe they intend. When do we get to the pitchforks , tar and feathers episode ?