“A Global Pandemic” by Choon Chen Rui: July 2024 Runner Up

“Ahhhhhhh…” Noah yawned, waking up from his slumber. 

“Ring! Ring!” his alarm clock shrieked. 

He smacked his alarm clock and turned towards it, shouting, “Be quiet! What is this…” his frustration turned into curiosity. 

Beside his miniature noisy clock was a pair of see-through, glass spectacles. Beneath the spectacles was a sheet of folded paper. Out of his piquing curiosity, Noah took the paper from underneath the spectacles and unfolded it, which only revealed two words in an elegant writing: For Noah. That did not help… Noah then resorted to figuring it out himself. Grabbing the spectacles, he put them on. The lens of the spectacles soon turned electric blue, as the dimension of reality warped into a simulation pixel by pixel…

“What the…” he gasped in awe. He saw cumulus clouds drift across the sapphire sky, and there were many white steel buildings, and there were many humans roaming around the streets, and multiple robots following them. 

“This is so sick!” 

Immediately, he looked around. There were long, stretched roads in the air, as flying cars rode along them. This all felt like a dream!

Noah’s smile kept broadening and broadening wider and wider until that very moment. At that moment, he was already on the streets and the roads. He was admiring the people and their faces and looking at their pet A.I.s. In a split moment, all the people’s faces gradually turned from skin to steel chunk by chunk, and their voices sounded as if Noah had placed a computer chip and motherboard in their throats. 

Their voices were so robotic and monotonous and their arms and legs moved one at a time as if there were gears controlling them. Stupefied and shocked, Noah’s eyes widened and jaw dropped and he stood there, furrowing his eyebrows in confusion.

When he asked a robot-infested person what happened to him, he told him that there was a virus on Earth which took out all the people in the year 2600. The virus was called personia changes de roboxvirria, or the Robot Era Virus. Astonished but sad, Noah decided to remove the spectacles. In a second, the future of 2600 warped back into the present year of 2024. Noah heaved a sigh. “Should I be worrying about this? It’s quite scary! If I tell my friends, they’ll probably not believe it! Oh well, I’ll keep it to myself then…”