Year 2070

The future, year 2070

An airborne flu caused by pigs was released on Philippines 20 years ago, which spread all over the globe causing massive deaths for humanity.

Unfortunately, I still survived.

Years before the flu, people started walking with oxygen tank on their backs that provide air through a hose connected from the tank to our nose and mouth to breathe. In a world that has limited supply to everything, even air isn't freely accessible. Nature had given up decades before the flu happened.

The suffocation crisis became apparent when the last forests in Visayas caught on fire. The state declared alarming rates of death caused by asphyxia on south Luzon. The government funded a last minute contingency plan and sought for the last small patch of forest on Luzon last 2049 in hopes of preserving clean source of air. They surrounded it with tight security. No one has ever seen any tree since then.

Then steady progressions of asthma diseases populated the north. So government funded hospitals to provide free oxygen tanks.

Until there were no doctors nor hospitals left when flu came in.

No one from the survivors, the last of humanity, remember anything right after the flu. Even me. All I can remember is I woke up in a hospital bed breathing through an oxygen tank. I was 16. I wish I didn't woke up.

Someone managed to save the last of the oxygen concentrators. They also happen to own electricity. The internet. Which I thought was impossible back then. Turns out they are the rich people and the government officials-- people who survived by hiding on their underground lofts ever since the global warming. Which means they also own the last forest.

They distributed oxygen tanks. Up to where, I have no idea. I haven't seen planes since oils dried up. They transport the fillers using carriages.

The  abandoned stores, schools and police stations became oxygen refilling stations where the portable oxygen concentrators were delivered and changed every end of the week.

Everything else like food, water, clothes... things. You are responsible of finding it. No one owns them anyway.

It's free for all.

Then year 2060 came. The food supplies started running out. Animals are dangerous to be eaten since the flu. Grocery stores are almost looted everywhere, and killing for resources started going rampant.

That's when humanity lost their morals.

The rich people refused to give the oxygen tanks for free. They sold it in exchange of goods to avoid danger outside the forest and make their lives easier as it is.

Breathing became a luxury. People needed to own air. More tanks.

Air became more inaccessible more than ever. Some are even poisoned because someone sold fake air-- selling repainted and reused old tanks.

People became hunters and killers again, like what I read from old newspapers. They robbed each other. Lower class groups seized oxygen refilling stations and forced fellow lower classes to provide them more resoures to hand for the rich.

It's a fucking senseless, endless cycle. I don't understand the wholeness of it. And I definitely will never do.

They bought air for more air.

They killed to live.

And none of us can do anything about it. For we can only aid survival, but there's nothing to cure greed.

Why do they crave for a better life when all they have to do is to fucking inhale and share?

What's so fucking hard about settling for enough so that everyone can live?

I put my mask on again after 5 minutes. I have little left on my own tank, I need to save it. Stale gas filled my lungs. I have to hunt again, but my eyes are now blurry because of hunger.

I felt my dagger on my pocket. And focus my eyes on that pig.