Hello, and welcome to the End of the World Times.

If you are reading this, you are one of the lucky ones who have restored internet connections. Currently, you are in the vast minority, but we are working to restore service to more pockets of survivors as they are discovered. This is no small task, but rest assured, I and what is left of Nordland Telecommunications are working as hard as we can to repair lines, restore power to the main hubs of the internet and reestablish the network links. Oftentimes, our technicians must dig out rubble and dedicate their lives to a location, food and supplies must be airlifted in to maintain them, and the work is slow and tedious, but it must be done. It must be done.

You are probably aware of what has happened locally wherever you are, but as communications networks fell in the catastrophe, news lost the ability to travel. Let me try to give you a brief overview of what has happened in the various places of the Earth.
There were some things that affected us all. When global warming caused the water levels to rise, Tuvala was the first to fall below sea level, but the oceans crept up on every coastal town. Venice, Florida and New Orleans were inundated. The refugees this created moved inland, to other cities, but so many died. We still have Disneyworld, but thanks to the wealth of the corporation, it is Disney Island.

But they were followed by the giant hurricanes of ‘10 and ‘11. Eighteen hurricanes of cat 4 in the first year, and twenty-three the next. We’ll see what 2012 brings, but it looks to be similar.

Then there were the flus. H1N1 met with H5N1, and the strains kept mutating, and people kept dying. The CDC kept up for a while, but the spread was too far too fast, and they soon ran out of resources. The 1918 flu seemed small in comparison.

When the United States Midwest, and Europe’s plains dried out, the food aid to other hungry nations ended. Food and water shortages led to hunger in even the most prosperous nations, and wars in the less prosperous. In the U.S., there was a large migration to the cities, and the overcrowding made life expensive. Many cities had riots for resources and housing.

This instability led to other disasters, mostly due to human actions. When Iran fired it’s nuclear weapons at Israel, and Israel responded in kind, it led to fallout spreading across much of the Middle East. North Korea followed in kind against China. It doesn’t exist anymore, and those that survived the fallout in South Korea spread throughout the world.
After all that we hardly had a chance, but it kept coming. Three large volcanoes went in ‘10. The big one hit in California in ‘11, resulting in a tidal wave that hit Japan hard. And when the asteroid hit Montana, the blast carried for hundreds of miles. The dust has cooled the atmosphere some, but getting plants to grow in some places requires artificial sunlight, and solar power is less efficient than it could be.

This brings us more or less up to date. As far as more details, our reporters will put the rest together through the course of their investigations.

Before I move on to introductions, it’s only fair to mention that our reporters are paid based on donations from you, the reader, so if you have anything to give, we take all currencies.

To start off the journal, we have Lori Kim heading towards Boston to investigate Conrad Blankenship’s community. Conrad took over a complex of buildings that started off as a green building project. Conrad’s project is now seeking self-sufficiency.

We’ll be catching up with more reporters and more locations as we go.

Thank you for reading. Good luck out there.

Editor,
Soren Ragnvald