The Ceasings

"What plagues us?" asked the acolyte, his Eurasian features wilted and laden with perspiration. He wrought the hem of his wool cloak's sleeve, letting the coarse fibers scrape his knuckles like a cleansing burn. Looking up, he met the gaze of He who was looking down, and felt those wooden eyes water to life. Jesus must be crying. Yet the acolyte could find no reason to reprimand the son of God. All who once walked in the light of truth were crying in their own way. All the world was crying.

Able, for that was the young acolyte's given Christian name, feared for the world of man. He sat, as he had sat for days, praying to understand the mysterious will of God. The world at 2043 was leaking something, but no one could determine exactly what. Religion failed to spread as it had spread for millennia, as the Gods of Science and Reason were taken into the hearts and minds of the masses. Able wanted to believe that this faithlessness was to blame for the current state of things, but he knew in his secret heart that this was not true. It was but the symptom of an even greater disease.

The first of the Ceasings were hardly noticed, at least no more than regular suicide cases. Scientists initially mistook the sudden upsurge in suicide rates as a natural sociological trend; a result of the increased pressures of a down economy. The United States, one of the first countries hit, didn't address the problem until the yearly ratio rose from 1 in 600 to 1 in 25. Even then, they had not yet grasped the magnitude of the situation.

It was a German psychologist by the name of Dr. Hanz Burwitz that discovered the peculiar nature of the Ceasings. He noted that in the past, suicide had always been a messy and emotional ordeal, more often used as a tool to grab attention or attempt to hurt others than a means of self-destruction. The Ceasings were entirely different. There were no notes, no warning signs, no last phone calls or text messages to friends containing the secret hope of being saved. Sometimes it would happen to people who seemed perfectly fine. Hanz remarked on one such case; a young man in Madrid named Antonio Deverez. On Thursday, July 26th, 2024, Antonio was a strait A college student who had just finished a game of soccer with his friends before heading back to his dorm. One of these friends told CNP investigators that Antonio was happy and carefree as always, joking with him and swearing about a particularly good goal he made. On Friday the 27th, Antonio was found dead in his bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in one hand.

If this was just a single case, it would have been considered odd, but not exceptionally so. However, it was the frequency of similar stories that marked this phenomena as truly and terribly unprecedented. (still in progress)