From Dusk Till Dawn

Chapter 1.

"I'm running late!" I said to myself, as a reminder, whilst I struggled to dress up and make my breakfast at the same time.

The clock was ticking, and by doing both things at the same time, I was just wasting it by overcomplicating everything.

-"Guess I'll eat breakfast tomorrow."

As I jumped out of my building, trying to remember exactly where I parked my car, I noticed something weird: My car keys were in the small plate near the door of the house.

-"I guess it's not my lucky day" I foolishly said to myself.

If only I knew how lucky I would become that very same day, I would be in total disbelief.

Long story short, I went walking, which I wish I did more, as it was only 10 to 15 minutes from my house at the outskirts of the little town I lived in to the office building I worked in.

I may correct myself, it wasn't little by today's standards, but little by 2030's standards.

That town, Wittensburg, had grown a lot, from its mostly residential 15000 habitants to a whopping 365000 in the span of a decade or two in the 1930s, and all because of the discovery of a new and valuable deposit, one of the scarcest, but most concentrated minerals in the world:

Viridium.

In a wave that caught most of the landowner townsfolk, almost all residents became rich from overnight.

That caused a gold rush, and suddenly, people from all parts of the continent were trying to get a hold of the iridium business.

In fact, my job is related to that. I'm responsible for managing the finances and operations of one of the highest-grossing individuals of the world, and all because he bought useless land, incapable of producing anything, and turned it into open mines.

-"What a great story of success!" some might say.

But, without further explaining, I want to just say that he is a petty greedy boss, whom money only made greedier, demanding more to his employees at the cost of labor exploitation.

Five times has he been investigated, and the five "denied" that there were any exploitation attempts, by casually leaving some checks on the table, from which they got new houses, ignoring the illegal work ethics when they don't have to work anymore.

Viridium was used in everything, mainly for technology, as it was a replacement for many of the rare metals used in the fabrication of microchips and also way more productive, making it universally used in everything in technology. There were no electrodomestics, no TVs, no microwaves without it in any shape or form.

And by needing a lot less of it, the world started needing more, with more mines and more workers which put a Fordist system in place, and so, like any and everything that the market wants, it was monopolized by a couple rich families, the same that were one day humble and hard-working farmers, living lives of pure luxe and entertainment, in disregard to the poor or medium-class in the city.

The place had segregated, and badly. The ones that were once like brothers, their grandchilds now enemies, trying to prey on some portion of land to exploit it.

Where was I? Oh yes...

Something terrible happened on my way to work. My phone started to malfunction. I brushed it off as something that shouldn't really concern me, as it happens sometimes. But then, the taximeter went black.

"Guess I won't have to pay!" I said jokingly, before the taxi driver got her manual taximeter out.

Anyway, this was a coincidence I was kind of worried about. And as I passed in taxi through the main street of the financial district, I noticed something.

All the big LCD screens were black, like someone had pulled the plug on all of them. Something terrible was happening, but at the time, I didn't know.