A storm on the horizon.
Both forks lead you into the storm, but the destinations are not the same.
You take the right fork, below the sign labelled FEAR.
The road ahead is cracked and cruel. But you trust the people who coaxed you this way, because you are scared and you are biddable, and those leaders seem like clowns not monsters so how bad can the future be?
Soon, external circumstances begin to bite. The prophesies of environmental chaos that you chose to ignore become real. The country’s access to resources dwindles. Scarcity — both real and perceived — turns the country’s heart to stone.
New, more callous opportunists step into the breach vacated by the last. The dark money industries and plutocrats that bankrolled their rise to power cash their chips. You acquiesce, because at first the only people suffering are the people you have been taught to blame, people you don’t know. But the quest for scapegoats grows.
They build a wall.
They build a camp.
It’s twenty years later, and you are growing old in a world of war, government surveillance, fascism.
Your children are militiamen, camp-guards, engineers of apocalyptic weaponry. They are emphysemic miners quarrying the last minerals from the toxic…
