Where'd everybody go?

                                                        CHAPTER 1:

              There’s a small fishing town a few miles from the city I live with some very interesting stories, mostly about the huge lake that formed from a dam built thousands of years ago by an unknown civilization that had its home in this parts. Many of these stories are quite interesting, some are even fantastically hard to believe, but a few, mainly the scary ones tend to approach believability and explain a lot about what happened here some thousand years ago.

      You may have begun to wonder what I mean when I say “what happened here”, so let me summarize by describing the world as I know it.
      My parents told me that about thirty years ago, all of mankind lived on a massive ocean vessel, to quote my wise father, “The ship was the size of a small continent. From what I heard , this vessel was once known as ‘Australia’, now don’t ask me what that means, go back to jerkin off, or whatever it is you kids are into nowadays.” As he smacked me on the head with his cane.
      According to what I’ve been told, this large vessel begun to break apart because of something called ‘gravity.’ Apparently the ship was so large that it begun to collapse under its own weight. As different parts drifted off, carried by ocean currents, the inhabitants of these sections settled on whatever land they could find. My family settled on a small island south of the North Pole. I later found out its name from signs I found on the streets, ‘London.’
    Before the ship ‘Australia’ broke up, everyone thought the rest of the world was covered by ocean, since no one who had left the ship looking for land had ever come back. After the discovery of land elsewhere, we all begun to realize that long ago, probably, (According to what the intellectuals deduced,) ten thousand years ago, people lived on continents and ‘Australia’ was one of them. Unfortunately no one knows what catastrophic event could have whipped out such large percentage of the worlds population leaving all but ‘Australia’ empty…
   
    So I did the math, and realized that for billions of people to die or disappear at such a fast rate as to force mass evacuation of entire continents, it was either disease or something people feared called ‘Nuclear war’ or something else unfathomable. Billions of humans dead and a few million huddled up on a small country called ‘Australia’. One word. Damn.