Chapter 17: An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim

By the time Continental Express 188 had arrived at New Haven, it was almost time for Aaron to get logged out by the RRS hastily, Aaron stepped off the train, waved goodbye to Virgil, and then disappeared. A few minutes later, the train departed from the station and a minute after than, Riley and Lucius re-appeared in the New Haven Train Station.

“Oh good. You’re here,” Lucius remarked upon seeing Riley.

“Yeah I’m here,” said Riley. “So where to first?”

“Well I figure we should probably hit District 4 first. That way we can restock on heals, ammo, and sell off some drops,” Lucius suggested. “We’re also going to need DIY and upgrade kits but we can check out the Auction House while we’re walking.”

“Okay. Let’s go,” Riley said with an approving nod.

District 4 didn’t look that much different in the morning than it did in the evening but it sure looked and felt different without the presence of a crowd. Nobody in the right mind has ever wished that a busy street be busier but at the same time, a busy street that’s empty is almost always a bad sign. It’s just not a natural state. With few exceptions, personal places are almost always meant to be quiet and public places are almost always meant to be loud – it’s a boundary that everyone feels and understands on some instinctive level. Any subversion to that just doesn’t feel right.

After walking around the market for a while, Lucius and Riley were able to stealthily offload their Bunker Turtle crafting materials across a variety of merchants to both maximize the sale value of those individual components and to hide the question of how someone could have acquired so many Bunker Turtle materials from inquisitive minds. With the proceeds of the sales, the pair were able to easily secure a full compliment of heals and ammo, the price of which had more or less remained at par with normal market prices. They were also able to secure 1 more DIY kit from the Auction House and enough upgrade kits to fully upgrade their equipment.

In the day that they’d been gone, the social and economic structure of New Haven had changed drastically. As a result of all equipment repair services being suspended from 3 days prior, all hunting or grinding activities have more or less come to a complete standstill server wide as the market supply and personal stockpiles of both weapons and DIY kits finally became exhausted. It was necessary for the Crafting Guild to suspend all repair services server wide in order to corner the market because otherwise, people would just repair their weapons and avoid buying new weapons. It was also necessary to suspend all repair services and not limit repair services to exclude the C-ranked because otherwise, repair-based arbitrage, where someone from another class repairs C-ranked equipment on another person’s behalf, would occur. If the repairs were only denied based on the C-ranked level range, individual equipment demand would simply fall to the D-level supply and if everything in the C-level and below were denied, then paying for EXP boosting from B-ranked and above will become the dominant meta.

After all the available C-ranked equipment supplies were effectively priced out, C-rankers and other profit-driven scalping merchants began to purchase D-ranked weapons en masse. This then raised the price of D-ranked weapons and when those supplies ran out, C-rankers and scalpers then targeted E-ranked equipment and so forth until eventually, everything affordable was purchased, consumed, and gone. C-rankers also paid for B-ranked or higher boosting but without repairs, that form of EXP arbitrage also dried up as well.

As a result, the C-ranked were almost entirely exhausted of all their money and capital as they lost all their wealth to trade for marginal gains on EXP. Hunting had also crawled to a standstill server wide as no one could acquire new equipment without paying for the insane markups due to weapon durability to EXP conversion rates. However, every cohort besides the C-ranked were fine because they could simply suspend their activities until after the culling and wait out the storm. And so, the vast majority of players simply stopped grinding and stayed home to watch movies, play video games, and eat junk food instead. Eventually, scalpers began offloading their supplies but no one else could afford to buy them except for a few people, like the trio, who had managed to keep their equipment operable due to a) having secured a sizable number of DIY kits and b) having a very cost-effective method of converting money into EXP and salable crafting materials. In the end, only 30% or so of the C-ranked cohort possessed any ability to move forward from their current positions at all.

This meant that in New Haven, about 70% of the C-ranked diaspora now had a lot of free time on their hands and they, along with their friends, decided to spend that free time by protesting. Eventually, they were also joined by unfamiliar people from other cohorts who wanted to resume hunting and together, they mainly petitioned outside of a) City Hall in District 1, b) the Crafting Guild headquarters in District 4, and c) near the gates of New Haven. They petitioned for the injunctive relief from the Crafting Guild and an immediate resumption of repair services but to date, with no success. There were 2 main reasons why: the first was because the overwhelming majority of players were apathetic to the cause and the second was because that violence was not an option.

The reason for apathy was easy – after all, everyone knew that these measures were temporary which meant that all they needed to do was rest for a few days. The vast majority of people were also not in danger of being culled. Thus, it was much, much easier to simply do nothing than it was to petition for something which wouldn’t affect them anyway. As for the second reason, there’s no need for any authority to respect a protest that has no consequences. It’s the threat of violence which makes protests meaningful. If a protest is known to be non-violent then what danger is there? Just wait until the protesters get tired.

And this kind of thinking is exactly why the Earth suffered through cataclysmic climate change in the first place.

Since ancient times, people have often wondered what the apocalypse would entail and how humanity would react in the face of it and the answer to that question is that life would continue just as it always has, right up until the moment where it doesn’t. After all, what is an apocalypse but another name for death? Don’t be fooled by semantics – any one or any group that is facing their demise is facing their own version of the apocalypse. So how does humanity, as a whole, act when faced with that? How else but with casual indifference?

Take a look at America in the 21st century. School shootings? Thoughts and prayers. Bridge collapses? Pull out your cellphone. Pandemics? Buy toilet paper. Genocide? Who cares? Warnings, knowledge, and certainty means nothing in the face of fear, ignorance, and apathy. Science and reason can’t beat emotion – if it could, Q-anon and the anti-vaccine movement would’ve never happened and fascism would’ve never made a resurgence. The human mind is not designed to solve all these great problems plaguing humanity – it’s designed to crave sugar, salt, and sex. Yes, the future’s going to be shit but that’s still in the future and until then, people still need to buy slacks and eat hoagies.

And that’s how humanity faces the apocalypse. Humanity has always been facing its extinction – this has never stopped. From the first day the first human was born, every single moment has been spent fighting against the inevitable end because the danger to humanity is always omnipresent. Every single act is just buying a little bit more time. And unfortunately for mankind, most people simply don’t care about a problem until it starts affecting them personally. People are just so fucking stupid.

It is the great failing of the human race for without a natural predator, stupidity always wins.