A person is watching some old, archived, videos of humans Pre-Shattering. Some videos showing a place called Amerikka and an event called "Black Friday". Where hundreds of humans end up trampling some others, injuring and killing some, just to get into a store to buy cheap, disposable, items. -- Anon Guest
The theatre marquee declared it to be Archival Footage Viewing and Classification: Pre-Shattering Terra. Which should be enough warning for anyone. Curiosity, an almost fatal Human flaw, drew Kam in like a moth to a flame.
There were lots of Archivaas in there, furiously taking notes. Some were SPOEns[1], also furiously taking notes. The ones not taking notes were either Havenworlders there for some epigenetic improvement, or other fascinated Humans who could not look away.
Kam found an empty seat, staring at the ancient images of people centuries dead. It wasn't war. Not exactly. All these people were unarmed. At least when they went in.
They were a horde ravening for bargains. Willing to cause harm to their fellow humans for the sake of a thing. Some were willing to kill, or at minimum cause near-lethal injury.
Some were news articles about the event. Which meant that there was a clear Deregger accent to the people speaking about such things. Seemingly bragging about the number of injuries and what all those people were fighting over.
Blenders. Televisions. This year's Must-Have toy. Some random piece of plastic deemed "cool enough" by the advertising.
No wonder so many archival horror films equated the zombie hordes with consumerism.
Kam purchased some snacks from the in-theatre vendor and murmured, "Powers. Humans really are insane."
[1] The Society for the Preservation of Original English is one of those factions that are viewed with the same eye-rolling as Flat-Earthers. Willfully ignorant, true, but mostly harmless. Unless they get into other areas of anti-science philosophy.
[Image by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash]
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