Remus Shepherd (remus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
) writes:
> Wildepad <noreplies> wrote:
>> 1) What are your first thoughts about what happened?
>
> A plague knocked everyone unconscious. Must have hit really quickly.
> Either it's non-fatal and everyone else will be waking up soon, or I'm
> one of the lucky few who generated immunity.
>
>> 2) What is the first thing you'd do? The second?
>
> 1. Get comfortable clothing.
> 2. Look for news broadcasts, an internet connection, newpapers --
> anything that might contain an explanation of the last day or
two.
> 3. Wait a day or two people to wake up. (If they don't wake up,
they
> should be dying off by then, from dehydration if nothing else.)
> 4. If nobody else wakes up, go into 'zombie apocalypse' mode and
> start scavenging for food, weapons, and radio transceivers.
>
>> 3) What precautions might you think about to prevent it from happening
>> again?
>
> None. If it's a plague then I should be immune now. If it's some
> kind of alien weapon then it's out of my league. And besides, I'm not
sure
> I'd want to be the last man on Earth. Going to sleep and not waking up
> might be a mercy.
>
A general comment. Most replies seem to have been trying to identify the
optimum or most sensible course of action. But people often do silly
things
for purely personal reasons (rescuing the cat, taking the oppportunity to
drive down the wrong side of a freeway, painting twenty-metre-high
graffiti
on the side of a building, taking over a radio telescope to communicate
with hypothetical aliens . . .). Sf, particularly hard sf, tends to focus
on the sensible responses, but the quirky ones can also be the basis of a
story. Then the question would be: what would it be
interesting for your character to do?
--John Park
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