Bleeding Fiction

The trouble with natural disasters is that, to the layman's eye, they all leave the same sort of wreckage behind when they're done. Oh, while they're happening there are certain visual cues that you can use to tell, say, a tornado apart from a volcanic eruption, but once the dust has settled (so to speak), it's really impossible for anyone but an expert to tell a tsunami from an orbital laser strike. It's not really the natural disasters' fault; the things weren't exactly build with subtlety in mind. They can't help but be what they are. (Though there are always those who mutter that maybe, with a bit of better parenting, some stricter rules around the house and so on...) So unless someone were there at the time, unless they'd witnessed it themselves and lived to tell the tale, no one but an expert would ever know what it was that had reduced a city to kindling.

Which leaves us with two types of people: experts and survivors. The experts aren't so bad, so long as you don't mind the sort of stern, serious-minded people who wear white lab-coats as a matter of habit and tend to frown thoughtfully into their morning coffee. They put on faces that smile well enough when they find something salvagable in the wreckage, they joke with each other over beers when the day is through, and when they award points (for thoroughness, for wantonness, for artistic merit), they make sure to sort through all of the evidence first and award their points to the right player in the game. They do their best and if they make mistakes, well, they're only human.

The survivors, though, they're a scary bunch. They've seen natural disasters at work first-hand. They've seen the atomic fires Godzilla breathes out, endured the indignity and pain of the stings of hundreds of thousands of Africanized Killer Bees and seen the earth quake under the weight of buildings. But they've also heard the tight-band microwave transmissions, the ones that direct the carnage. The survivors, the ones that aren't catatonic, they've decided they don't like living on the playing field of a game for billionaires, aliens and gods. They've found enough left in the wreckage of the cities to build from. And they're ready to start playing a game of their own.

(On a purely factual level, concerning the actual detritus of natural disasters, this entry made much more sense while I was half-awake and half-dreaming at three in the morning. On a conceptual level, this is a topic I will revisit elsewhen, for something that doesn't make a lot of sense to begin with.)