As a home owner, I can attest that when the roof of your house is a wreck, it tends to take precedence over every other problem. It's just hard to care about scuffed paint or an ant infestation when your living under a series of tarps surrounded by drip collecting buckets.
When you fall asleep wondering if your roof is going to crush you in your bed during the night, you tend to get tunnel vision for the issue.
Then one day, you hit the lotto, or you make it onto some house renovation TV show, and next thing you know, you've got a whole new roof, a new lease on life, an albatross off your shoulders. And suddenly you realize how out of control the other problems in your house have become.
January 1st 2100 marked the 20th anniversary of the final human on human violent death. The last murder was by a man in Papua New Guinea, who hit another man in the back of the head with a shovel. The murderer argued it was an accident, but his implant said otherwise, clearly displaying the hormonal spike of rage that drove him to the act.
Since then, no human being - not a single one on the entire planet - had killed another human being by volitional force. It was a miracle of social and scientific engineering.
But even as the world celebrated the 20th Global Peace Day, a new darkness rose in the south, one which was hardly noticed when we all thought the roof was going to collapse on top of us, but which now presented a growing, I dare say existential problem.
Emus.
You know the Emu, wily cousin of the mighty and mightily stupid ostrich, half bird and three quarters blood thirsty dinosaur. While humanity toiled away - first at killing each other wholesale, and then at not kiling eachother wholsesale, the Emu procreated and grew in number.
Australia had been mostly abandoned for fifty years. Global warming made it completely inhospitable to large scale human habitation and all that now remained of humanity on the dessicated land mass were stubborn stragglers and aboriginals happy to have their native lands to themselves again.
At least at first. Reports began coming in over twenty years ago of emus running amok, but the rest of us didn't really care, and so we did nothing. The implants did not address humanity's penchant for dangerous inactivity or shortsidedness. While the rest of the world looked away, aboriginals and lingering Australian nationals were fighting, and then losing, a battle for survival against a force we could never have imagined.
Until they came for us.
The invasion began on January 2nd, 2100. It was as if the Emus knew we had just destroyed what few ceremonial weapons mankind still had left, as if they had an intelligence their tiny, bizarre monster heads could not possibly contain. Today, that intelligence is without dispute.
They came in boats, thousands of thousands of boats, through the island nations of the South Pacific, sweeping in like a Mongol horde, their giant feathery torsos and freakish long legs storming the beaches and taking over in force.
An emu is a terrifying creature to begin with - but now imagine one with armor and an automated machine gun strapped to its ball shaped midsection, barking commands through its awful pointed beak inna bastardized croak of english. It was the thing of nightmares, and the people of the South Pacific had nothing at their disposal to fight.
Millions died within the first few weeks as the global human government began to mobilize the creation of new, Emu armor penetrating weapons. But the Emus moved quickly, and humanity's disarming had been thorough.
Over the next year the Emus swept across asia, wreaking avian havoc. Startling at the slightest movement, the Emus turned out to be trigger happy in the extreme, killing anything that moved too quickly or reminded them of a Dingo.
I am writing this from London, where we are taking constant stock of their advance. They have made it as far as Russia and unified Korea has fallen completely. The Japanese have armed their population, men, women and children alike, with wooden spears, bows and arrows and so far they've been able to hold their craggy shores.
However Turkey fell two days ago and the emus continue to press toward the boundaries of Europe. At this rate the first human gun should be available within a month, but to be honest, I'm not sure we'll still be here by then. Two centuries ago, we might have turned to American for help, but there isn't much a pile of radioactive cinders is going to be able to do.
So we wait and watch, helpless to resist.
Fucking Emus.
The posts on this blog are mostly the results of my r/writingprompts responses. To view my other stories check out @Dberstories or my subreddit r/LFTM