The World as We Know It Read Online Free

presence in the room until I sat down right in front of him.
    “How’s it going, Art.”
    “Oh, you know, just livin’ the dream.”
    I love when a courteous greeting is met with a morbidly sarcastic response like “just livin’ the dream.” Perhaps I should have felt guilty finding comedy in such complacent hopelessness. I smiled slightly.
    “What can I do for you? Got another fund you want to pitch?”
    “Funny, Joe. You know, we’re all treading water here.”
    “I know, I know. It doesn’t matter anyway. Everything is headed south now.”
    “Even so, I came here to apologize. Sometimes I’m too willing to give into pressure from above and not willing enough to listen to my people on the front lines.”
    War analogies. Who was the enemy?
    “Well, it’s a new week. Let’s see if things turn around.”
    They didn’t. That Monday was as bad as the previous, if not worse. Markets around the world continued the trend that had begun the week before, and there was no indication that it would let up any time soon. A decline of that magnitude was unprecedented. It was more rapid and more widespread than any in modern history had been. Economic peaks and troughs are expected, and in hindsight, they’re usually explainable, but this was baffling. It was as if the entire school of economics had ignored some unseen and all-important variable that had finally decided to show its hideous face. Nobody understood it. The world’s top economists gathered to try to reverse the trend, but even they didn’t know where to start. It was far more than a natural adjustment to overinflated stock prices. The lines on the charts crashed right through their futile attempts to slow the momentum.
    It lasted for about a month before the protests began. Mobs formed outside of corporate offices around the world to point fingers and demand revolution. They began picketing mostly in relative peace, but unrest grew quickly, and within a week, riot police and tear gas were necessary to maintain order. I remember watching the news one nightas it broadcasted footage of law enforcement unloading rubber bullets into a crowd in Boston, and then it switched over to a journalist in Houston who seemed to be covering the same event under slightly different lighting. That reporter was the first person I heard put a name to what was happening. She called it “The Great Collapse,” a headline that would be permanently etched into history books.
    The fact that it all progressed so quickly reflected the lack of faith that the citizens of the world held in the system. When I say “system,” I mean the entire machine and each of its components that made up the modern world, which determined how society operated in every country large or small, first world to third. The economic system, monetary exchange, corporate conglomerates, government in every form and at every level, social hierarchies—all of it. Wherever you lived, you were a part of it in one way or another. In the eyes of the working and middle classes, they had followed the rules, gone to work, provided for their families, and invested in their futures, but that hadn’t been enough. They were losing everything they had worked for their entire lives, day after day, watching it happen on the television, despite having taken every possible step to ensure the security of their lifestyles. They were finally coming to the realization that even after thousands of years of what had always been deemed “progress,” nothing man-made could be taken for granted. They were sick of the roller coaster, distrusting of the system, and the collapse was the final straw.
    Although she pretended to be satisfied with my reassurances, Maria was no fool. She knew as well as anyone that things were changing, and she knew that my line of work put us in a particularly vulnerable position during that time. She would smile and nod and hold my hand, but her eyes always gave away her true feelings. They seemed