Every story of the apocalypse starts with something that goes wrong.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one . . . After the weapon or energy source went off, everything was left a desert with hardly a tree in sight. The internet no longer exists and telephones don’t work for some reason except for the ones that are hardwired, such as the one pay phone still in existence. Computers are now about as high tech as typewriters with screens and you will never play any video game ever again, not even something as simple as Tetris or Minesweeper.
Most of them have a lot in common. Sure the details might be a little different than that, but a lot of them are very like that. Something is radioactive. Grass doesn’t seem to exist any more or maybe they just decided to all go live in the Badlands for some reason. Look I get it, the Badlands are gorgeous. I definitely would visit them, but living in them seems like an extreme decision.
I guess I should make it clear I am not talking about the zombie apocalypse. That has it’s own set of rules, but technology still does seem to take a dive for that, too. And yes, I have seen really good reasons behind the lack of technology including in Revolution where something stopping technology from working literally was the apocalypse and it was bad and I very much enjoyed the show.
In this case we don’t know what happened. What we do know if there is a high probability that meat will poison him. Is this because something changed the DNA of animals so that most are now poisonous? Maybe the animals tend to live in areas where they are more likely to get affected by poison and pass it on to anyone who might eat their meat later on.
While the poison meat thing tends to attract my attention first, we can’t forget the other detail we know about this character. He carries a communicator. That means no phones. Of course he could be from another world where phones never existed in the first place. Maybe these communicators are their version of phones. Or maybe they are higher tech. Maybe this is like Star Trek communicators. Not so much in shape, but in range. Maybe they can easily reach someone in orbit of the planet. Maybe with a little boosting they can communicate with people in other galaxies. Probably not, but this doesn’t have to actually be low tech. Maybe they can fix the poison animals, but have a reason they don’t.
Or maybe this is a space ship. Maybe they were traveling between galaxies, a multi-generational thing and something poisoned the animals and they can’t fix it, but the poison isn’t deadly, so they mostly put up with it while they try to reach their destination faster and maybe their plant food supply is existent, but hard to grow while animals are easy to take care of for some reason. Maybe the communicator is just standard issue or at least common. Lots of options here and I’m sure there was many I haven’t come up with. Do you know how you would treat this prompt?
