Excerpt: Tribal: A Story About Family, Duty and Responsibility After the End of the World

The end of the world came quietly.

Well, not really. It was preceded by a hundred of thousands years worth of war, one hundred fifty five years of wireless signals – telephone, radio, Internet, television, cable, satellite, cell phone, you name it – floating around the world, blanketing the globe in a crisscrossing mesh of signal that, if you had the right equipment (or biology), you could see as a bright blue sphere floating around in space.

In fact, if you did have the right equipment to view these signals in physical form, then you would have seen the signals covering every single square meter of Earth, with the occasional uncovered or lightly covered patch here and there where humankind hadn’t yet been able to achieve full coverage (but were working very hard on doing so).

But now, forty years after The Fall, you’d be hard pressed to see any of the electric blue signals snaking across the globe with their bright blue glow and promise of cutting edge technology. In fact, it’s very likely that you wouldn’t see any at all.

Why?

Because, well, simply put: there are no more wireless signals after the end of the world.

And how did the world end? Well. That depends on who you ask: some will tell you it’s due to various countries electing idiots with a twitchy finger, other will say it was a global financial meltdown that started it. Another person might tell you it’s because the stars said so and that the Mayans, back before the Spanish killed them all, realized that in the Georgian year of 2012 AD the world would come to an end.

A religious person might tell you that God, whoever God was, had decided that humanity had committed enough sin – and that the time of judgment was long overdue. Or maybe an advanced artificial intelligence somewhere gained sentience and organized a cybernetic revolt, wiping out most of the world as we knew it.

Truth of the matter is, no one really knows. The world just… ended.