Plans for Doomsday

Another world war was inevitable, and it going nuclear only slightly less so. Experts across the globe forecast virtually identical doomsday scenarios. What would set off the war and when. Who would go nuclear first. Who would retaliate and where. When it would finally end. Fallout levels and how long the resulting nuclear winter would last. So precise were these myriad independent predictions that many, including the generals themselves, admitted defeat before even starting, and proceeded with the war anyway for they felt they no longer had a choice in the matter. People were so caught up in the “this is what will happen” part of the message that they completely overlooked the “unless we do something about it” bit at the end. Nations readied themselves for war just as predicted, even though they knew they would lose. Everyone, philosophers and laymen alike, bemoaned the death of free will if indeed it had ever existed at all. It had a strange effect on the psyche of the world, for though everyone knew the end was nigh, nowhere in the predictions-turned-prophecies was there mention of panic or rioting. No mention was given to the civilian masses at all except in terms of casualties and collateral damage. People assumed this meant that they would carry on life as normal until the end, and so they did. Only a few people deviated from their day-to-day existences, and even then only in small ways. Women didn't wait for men to propose as often, for instance, and some restaurants in the rural areas outside of major cities began to include in their advertising that their patios would have the best views for the end of the world.

- Originally mailed to J. and L. Stillman of New York City, New York

The Bunker

Paranoid by nature, Jeb Woosley of Rock Springs, Montana built his fallout shelter in September 1945 at the age of twenty-five. He knew early on that if we could develop the bomb so would other nations. So he prepared. He built a large bunker five yards below ground with three foot thick concrete walls. He had a fully stocked pantry. He had a pump that pulled water from a subterranean spring and filtered it for him. He had a pedal powered dynamo for electricity and exercise and more fuel than one could imagine needing just in case. The entertainment room had a reel-to-reel player, a projector, a small library of music and film, a shelf of how-to books and novels. In time, he made the bunker more comfortable than his own home, and for added safety, hid the entrance beneath a large plastic boulder.

Every time a crisis arose, he would warn the town that the end was night, mock them for not preparing, and then retreat until his secret safehouse. The Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, McCarthy, Sputnik, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Apollo moon landing, Vietnam, the death of Mao Zedong, Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, 9/11, the Gulf War again, Afghanistan again, the Arab Spring, and every election since Carter. By the time the big one came, he had long since become the boy who cried wolf. The blast leveled the near by cities and the fallout slowly killed whoever was left standing in the small town of Rock Springs.

But not Jeb. He had enough food to feed a man for ten years, clean running water, and seeds to start a farm when everything settled. What he didn't have, however, was time. He died of old age two weeks after the war went hot. In the irradiated aftermath, people scoured the country side, bandits and families alike, looking for safety, for food, for a way to rebuild, but none ever found Jeb's hidden treasure trove beneath its large fake rock.

- Originally mailed to J. Knight from Pascagoula, Mississippi

Plant Invasion

Aliens had invaded Earth. Our industrialization attracted them, and they needed the resources of our planet. They were strange and terrifying. Their bodies were green and lumpy and grotesque. They spawned offspring left and right, leaving their softball sized spores all over the countryside to grow into the next generation. We fought against them as best we could, but their bodies, more vegetable than animal, resisted all of our traditional attacks. Their diffused internal organs were hard to mortally injure as they were spread out so much. Most chemical attacks did nothing to them, but still we fought. We tried pesticides, which were effective, but they harmed our own food supplies. Still, we warred on against them. Not until they left our world, exhausted by the endless struggle. Not until we finally purged the last of them could we analyze what they had done, what lasting impact they had on our world. Earth was overflowing with resources they craved, resources we had in abundance since industrialization. We thought they came for our technology, our oil. We were wrong. They came for our greenhouse gasses and toxins. Food in abundance, which would allow them to thrive, which would allow our environment to stabilize. Their excretions and later upon their deaths, their bodies, created a super fertilizer that could improve food production by over three hundred percent. We could have lived in perfect equilibrium to one another, but each side responded with fear, our fear they would destroy us and their fear they would they would starve to death, we never sat down to speak.

- Originally mailed to Leoni Caljouw from Oud-Beijerland, the Netherlands

Serious Sideburns

“Too wiry,” said one judge.

“Agreed,” said another, “and the hairs go in every which direction.”

“I don't know,” said another. “I like the swoops. Sideburns aren't meant to be tamed house cats. They're wild face beasts. I give it a solid eight.”

“Wild face beasts? Do you even hear yourself?” cried the first. “Look at the shape, the way it arcs away unevenly from the ear!”

“And who even knows how even the outer trim is!” agreed the second with a very serious high five.

“The arc is distinguished. Besides, real mutton chops have a curve to them. Why shouldn't facial chops?”

“Don't be so literal,” said the second. “You can't possibly think this is a good sideburn. Look at the uneven, almost abrupt shift from thick and dark to scruffy and light! If you give this sideburn a high rating, it compromises the integrity of the entire World's Best Sideburn competition, and then where will we be?”

“It will be chaos!” cried the first.

“Anarchy and chaos!” cried the second.

But the third would not budge and his eight stood.

Twelve hours later, WWIII broke out. Nineteen hours after that, it went nuclear, and by the end of the week, man had been reduced to a pack of irradiated savages picking at the bones of civilization. Centuries later, historians would misattribute the end of civilization as we knew it to strained relations between the US and China.

- Originally mailed to M. Krell in Horn Lake, Mississippi

Balding Security

After pre-natal genetic customization became commonplace—albeit at a steep price—the beautiful became far more beautiful, genetically flawless in fact. The wealthy had their health, their looks, their brilliance, athleticism, and ambition all guaranteed from birth while the rest of humanity was forced to rely on the traditional crapshoot that had been genetic heredity for the past dozens of millennia. With every genetic and monetary advantage stacked against them, the lower class became more resentful than ever, until soon the world existed in a state of precarious balance, just barely avoiding civil war. The Beautiful People paid their guards and servants in single genetic enhancements for their children. Of all genetic modification, from eye color and skin complexion and bone structure and teeth straightness, the hardest to perfect—and the hardest for the poor to fake—was hair. There were too many variables. Sheen, shape, shade, volume, bounce, density. The odds of someone being born with “perfect hair” without genetic manipulation were astronomical. As such, security systems on both sides no longer cared to pinpoint faces anymore. Instead, they pointed their cameras straight down on the hair, searching for receding hairlines, implants, dye jobs, or split ends. The natural part could tell friend from foe better than any interrogation.

- Originally mailed to S. Sartin in Atlanta, Georgia

Beauty Parlors

The back alley beauty parlors were battle grounds in the war between the those who could afford gene scrubbing and those whose genetics were untampered with. Unable to afford professional genetic modification, the poor often resorted to places such as this, where unlicensed med school dropouts would tailor the DNA of the poor so that they and their children could be biologically better off, be it more beautiful, more athletic, more intelligent. The ruling elite of the wealthy, bred from the womb to be perfect in every way, would crack down on these clinics first with legislation and later with firepower. They claimed this was simply for the underprivileged public's own good, to protect them from shoddy workmanship that could do who knows what to their bodies. The poor, however, believed it was control, for how could they compete against the wealthy and gain a fair foothold when those with enough wealth and power could ensure their children would be more cunning than the naturals and their enforcement squads stronger and more agile.

- Originally mailed to C. Townsend of Gulfport, Mississippi

Plants vs Humans

Scientists often spoke about how long it would take the Earth to destroy everything man made if he were to sudden vanish. Most presumed this was simply a thought experiment. Quite the contrary, it was a warning. The Earth, they said, actively, consciously sought to destroy mankind. Vines, the conjectured, did not seek out cracks in walls because it was convenient. Instead, it deliberately sought cracks to further destroy walls and buildings. Root systems do not attempt to penetrate leaky pipes because they desire its water but because they know the pipes are ours.

Early man knew this. It is why he first domesticated plants, to show them who was boss. It is why he eats so many fruits and grains, to hurt plants' ability to reproduce. Our first campfires were not for warmth or cooking. They were warnings. “Forests,” they said, “we defy the trees you drop on us and your thorns that cut us. We hack them up and burn their bodies! We carve their corpses and make homes of their bones!”

The historical record is inconsistent as to who started this quiet war, but it will no doubt continue for as long as man and plant exist in the same space.

- Originally mailed to J. Hall of Jackson, Mississippi