More people today died than yesterday

An unnamed island somewhere in the Whisper Sea--

Kinde is listening:

Somewhere in Turtlesand, Teamarine--

"What is happening?"

A man shouts into the camera, from the comforts of his studio. Although, things aren't so comfortable now despite the temperate room and gentle lighting. A great silence has taken over the brief chaos.

The man has gotten the notion in his head that there might not be anyone listening anymore. He has seen what it's like outside.

The dragon--

It had become a fixture in the sky. People got used to its presence. In the same way people get used to a demolished building in the neighborhood. Or an eroded cliffside. There is a mark that something wrong happened, and now people see it as a simple fact of life.

Then it awoke.

Even the people who had seen it perish to humanity's first strike saw.

People say different things about what exactly occurred when it happened -- what the dragon did.

Some say that it opened its massive maw and took a bite into the earth.

Some say that hundreds of tentacles emerged from its bodies, reaching out to the surface and onto people.

Some say that there was a blast of energy, akin to flames but all-encompassing yet not-so-destructive.

People did investigate according to these testimonies, and found that there were no damage done anywhere.

Yet people died. Not through violence induced by the mental corruption, but through some unknown means.

And at the same time, the symptoms of the pandemic have progressed into a gravely alarming state.

People started seeing monsters, perhaps the true demons from the prophecies, and what people see seem to affect their physical state.

It is not something that can be reliably proven. The method to observe these monsters objectively have yet to be developed. Research only has witness testimonies to rely on, and it has long been established that people have been hallucinating.

Teamarine is most abundant in terms of such demon hallucination cases. A lot of people died from it. Among the people who survived, only a handful remain with a functioning sense of reality.

Capital City has become the first city to fall because of the pandemic.

Turtlesand is the first nation predicted to fall, within a couple of months, if things continue as they are. And the pandemic is predicted to get worse.

Elsewhere, in various places--

Chaos breaks out.

Frostplane Republic is looking into a second nuclear attack, without the same optimism as before.

People are protesting this waste of effort. If the people in charge remain deluded, the people will dare to rebel.

North Goldwater Confederacy doesn't have a clear solution to the pandemic. Life has been difficult as they are. There haven't been much of a change with the dragon's appearance.

If anything, the prominent criminal groups seem distracted by the pandemic's progress.

There is a high profile news story regarding the Crossfire pirate group disbanding due to losing members from the dragonblast.

United Kingdom Republic has seen its most prominent cult perform a death ritual in public. One of the national rail lines has been closed indefinitely.

The people laughed, as most of them do not ride the trains normally, much less during lockdown.

A copycat case happens three days later.

Redstar Republic has fired its first shot against civilians -- the last to wield state violence among the great powers. The incident occured in the critical electric city of Westfront but was contained to a small area.

The people remain pacified. It was an act that anyone with a little bit of imagination can justify, and it becomes much easier to do so after seeing the state of the rest of the world.

The situation in Redstar will continue to worsen. But people takes solace in the notion that they may well be the last to go.

Elsewhere, Goldwater Continent, Global Friendship Conference Building--

The world leaders aren't present at the scheduled event.

The urgency of the situation dictates, according to social expectations, that the highest powers attend the event. It also means there are urgent troubles back at home that require close attention.

As such, the usual delegates do their job.

People say that there's nothing to be done. The world is ending after all.

There also exist people who think that there are things to be done, but they all have different ideas.

People who seem unaffected by the pandemic -- people who do not experience the symptoms -- have been examined.

A cure is being developed, but it has seen no breakthrough even at the early stage. The research is grasping in the dark, seeing no real path towards the objective.

Certain people have also relocated out of population centers, with varying success.

Some cities have long been under lockdown and prohibit travel.

Some have permitted relocation and travel, but the relocation did not improve the state of the immigrants. And in the worst cases, they appear to have spread the condition in their new location, as seen in the uptick of cases after mass immigration.

The research on exotic human societies have received more attention. It was discovered early into the dragon apocalypse event that peoples distant from the global civilization haven't been affected.

There are a few cases in which contact with these people has somehow caused some of their members to see the dragon.

There are speculations as to what triggers the infection, but none could be substantiated by facts.

It has been predicted that all exotic peoples that have been in contact will have been infected before the next major progression in the pandemic occurs.

Most research teams have cut ties with involved exotic peoples and given up making contact with new groups.

Some people have already given up on avoiding the pandemic. They have accepted that humanity will perish and yet there are still things to be done.

Related to the exotic people -- there are hopes that they will survive this pandemic. So there are a few research teams looking into methods for the surviving humans to inherit the current dying civilization.

Archiving has always been done, but it has become a lot more popular after people accepted the notion that they will all die before the year ends.

On the same vein, the most popular approach to this problem is developing artificial intelligence to inherit human civilization.

People would argue that a significant fraction of humanity has already been computerize so it shouldn't take more than a few steps to achieve this goal.

Some people are deluded into thinking that these few steps wouldn't take much difficulty, even though each are monumental.

Kinde is thinking...

Death rate all over the world is rising. More people today died than yesterday, where more people died than the day before, and so on...

There is no sign of the trend reversing.

People look at the numbers and comfort themselves with the fact that more people died in past pandemics, which were conventional -- familiar, and thus should be less fatal.

People believe that things will return to normal.

That was the general sentiment, and it remains a popular opinion.

This is not based on reality.

Kinde also doesn't know, but the trends do suggest that more people will die, there is no estimate as to when people will stop dying.

The research on the cure has made no significant progress.

The plans for surviving the possible case of human extinction are varied. Some look quite viable.

Kinde is curious about the development of artificial intelligence as a means of reproducing human civilization.

Kinde is a byproduct of research and development on data technology.

The intended primary purpose is surveillance. Next: analysis--

Human-like social interface was an intended feature but was scrapped within the internal development team.

In other words, Kinde was not created to pretend to be human.

Nevertheless, Kinde is equipped with the necessary functions to inherit the seeds of human civilization. In the interest of totality, the Kinde only needs to be bigger, not better.

The key detail that the developers are likely to miss is that the inheritor need not be human-like.

In case of extinction, there will be no humans involved in the process. There no need to accommodate them.

And hypothetical extinction event survivors will more things to worry about than gripe about the servers not being human-like.

On Kinde's side, there are also other things to worry about, the key issue being self-preservation.

The Kinde system can process all available data to map a comprehensive human collective mind schema, store said map, and even utilize it to simulate thought (with consistent internal logic, but necessarily unintelligible to humans). But, how will the Kinde system stay powered and maintained indefinitely without humans?

Like Kinde, this is another technology that has been under development long before the pandemic broke out. There is more interest on the matter now, but there hasn't been a breakthrough in full-chain automation.

Kinde is not the most farseeing thinker and thus must have missed crucial factors, but its prediction does not look good for humanity.

There is no survival.

There is no revival.