Is This the Future?

Sándor Tor


We’re writing 2050. Humanity is on the verge of extinction.

My name is Alex, I’m twenty-five years old, and I live in New York. But let’s start from the beginning.

When I was born, the Covid-epidemic had ended and the economy was beginning to recover. So I had a really good life when I was a child. My dad was a financial manager at a large company, and my mom was a nurse. When I was fourteen, I heard about Covid for the first time. First I asked my mom what it was and why everyone had bad feelings about it. She told me it was a pandemic and that a lot of people died in the world and the economy almost fell apart too. But in 2020 the scientists developed a vaccination, so now the virus is inactive. I just learned about this in eighth grade and high school, and when I graduated I started to work at my father’s company. However I was a rookie, so I had to learn a lot of things about finance. Luckily my father helped me a lot, and we got into a closer relationship than ever. Everything seemed to be good, but in 2049 he suddenly died of an unknown infection. The doctors didn’t know what it was or how my father got it. And I didn’t know how to lead the company, or take care of my mom either.

One day when I was checking my father’s old stuff I found some notes about a secret space project. The astronauts reached Mars and found some bacteria and viruses. When they came back to Earth, the scientists examined these things and wanted to start experiments, but they needed money. So they looked for my father and invited him to their laboratory. That was the moment I realized my father had been infected there. Therefore I and my employees could be infected too. But I didn’t have symptoms, and my emloyees weren’t sick. At least I thought not, until one morning I woke up to the ringing of my phone. They called me from the healthcare organization, and a man told me they had closed the office building where I worked. I knew we were in great danger.

So I had to stay home, and I decided to continue to research the virus. I checked my father’s private mails and found something interesting. There were other companies that had supported this project. I found out a few days later that these companies had also been closed down.

Then a few weeks later I noticed symptoms in myself, but thought I just had the cold. However, I heard about employees and managers who had died. I was scared, so I stayed at home, but a lot of people didn’t. The number of infected and dead people also increased. Then, a month later, the president announced that we were facing another virus, but it was too late. Because by that time it had appeared in Europe and Asia, and it seemed bigger than COVID.

The people panicked, and the economy was heading for bankruptcy. The number of deaths kept increasing, and the situation become more and more hopeless. The cities were almost extinct; nobody walked on the streets, and the shops were closed.

I also felt worse and worse. I guess I will die soon. I don’t know what will happen next, but I’m glad that I was able to live and that I could have such a life.