A Heart-Shaped Locket Changed the World

Locket, the latest cryptocurrency, promised a means for investors to get away from central banking and invest in something new. The heart-shaped locket representing the altcoin had a broad appeal.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all the rest couldn’t hold a candle to Locket. They were projected to have the greatest impact on the decentralization of currency.

What they didn’t anticipate was how it would crash the world economy. In a mad two-week dash of market fluctuation, nobody would have believed it possible that the dollar, yen, Euro, yuan, rupee, and every other major currency would be devalued so instantaneously.

Essential services ended across the globe. Military forces walked away or began settling long-held grievances in blood. In less than a year, the borders of the nations of the world were ruptured, erased, or forgotten - and the people of the world shifted to only the haves and the have-nots.

For a decade, some of the more progressive, liberal cities across the planet held it together. Life went on, and although broadcast news and the internet showed numerous horrors, those cities’ residents felt little direct impact.

Until the food shortages began. And several cities had their water supplies contaminated by those who’d been abandoned by nearly everyone else.

Fifteen years after the heart-shaped Locket, the world had become a desolate shell of what it had been.

As those major city infrastructures collapsed, many became centers of death and disease. Some of those once glorious cities became horror zones of the sick and dying.

Twenty years after Locket devalued the central bank currencies of the world, the population was halved, and a pale shadow of its former self.

Pockets of power, functioning infrastructure and technology, were scattered across the globe. Groups of people scavenged and struggled to survive. Farm communities started to spring up - but had to defend against all others. Many people merely struggle to survive however they could.

I was born five years before Locket came into being. Initially, I was fortunate to live in one of those big cities that squeezed a decade of life within the ruins of society.

When the city began to collapse, I ran with a crowd of clever kids. We’d go out beyond the city, but all too quickly learned we lacked many necessary skills to survive. More than half of us didn’t.

I managed to survive into young adulthood. But life was nothing but struggle, avoiding the scavengers and well-armed crazies by keeping constantly on the move.

Most of the time, I was alone. Occasionally, I’d come across an enclave of like-minded people. I never stayed with them for long. The time or two when I did, they were always attacked one moonless night by the aforementioned scavengers or well-armed crazies.

For a decade, this was my life. In time, I had made my way from one coast to the next. To my surprise, I had a quartet of companions who had joined me after a few stops at enclaves along the way.

We had heard the rumors more and more. It wasn’t another enclave, nor a surviving city pretending to hold relevance in its previous identity, No, it was something new.

What the place was before the heart-shaped locket didn’t matter. Rumor held that it was a new fortress city-state, a bastion of society that would take in anyone who arrived and was willing to work.

We made our way there, the first sign of hope after most of a lifetime of struggle for survival. Could it be what they said it was? Was it a sanctuary, where we might find a chance to live without constant vigilance?

Creating Opportunity from Crisis

We lost one of our companions on that fateful journey – but at last, we reached the place.

Just as the rumors said. A fortress, walled. Within, a compound of buildings old, new, and cobbled together. We knew there was a farm in there, too.

After a few days of observation - and seeing that it was not some militaristic hold-out sending parties into the wild - we ventured to the sanctuary. They welcomed and admitted all of us.

At first, it was everything we believed it would be. They gave us food and shelter, asking only that we do labor either in the fields, maintaining the structures, or doing random tasks as assigned by our benefactors.

Something was not right. I couldn’t put my finger on it – at first. But then, one of my traveling companions – having become skilled with technology, its upkeep, and repair - shared what work they had been given one day.

Underground, there was a bunker. We all knew about it – that was where our benefactors kept to themselves. But my companion shared it was more. She’d thought it was nothing when they assigned her to repair surviving tech within – until she saw the heart-shaped Locket.

The sanctuary was Locket headquarters. This was a property Locket’s creators had acquired and expanded, either before or immediately after the global economic collapse.

As we worked to learn more, we discovered they were still connected via satellite to similar sanctuaries across the world. They had a plan. Wait out the destruction of the rest of humanity – then start it all over. Those in the sanctuaries would one day emerge to the world that had scoured itself clean and create a new world in their image.

And maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad. If it wasn’t for the fact, we learned, that they were encouraging and supporting any number of the scavenger groups and well-armed crazies to accelerate the world’s full collapse and the deaths of numerous innocents.

The sanctuaries had the resources and means to heal the world now. But the leaders had other ideas. They would use the apocalypse they’d created to depopulate the world so that they could start a new one in their own, twisted image. Anyone outside of that vision – if they didn’t die out during these dystopian times – would be disregarded and left in the cold to die.

Faced with this crisis, we made plans. It took months because coordination with the other sanctuaries without alerting our benefactors was a challenge. When we were ready, one morning, answering the call of our benefactors, we turned on them.

It was bloody, and I lost two of my former traveling companions. Like everyone who fought that day – I did not leave it unscathed.

We gained control of the sanctuary. Now, we had the opportunity to turn the destruction caused by Locket into opportunity. We would do all we could to work with the other sanctuaries and try our damnedest to turn this crazy world around.

The heart-shaped locket that had wrought such destruction might now be our ultimate beacon of hope. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late.