[WP] Today, the richest person in the world suddenly and mysteriously drops dead. Tomorrow the same thing happens.

A Reddit Writers Prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1hdhz48/wp_today_the_richest_person_in_the_world_suddenly/


Jerome Brighton was the man born into significant wealth and power. He would grow to use those to amass even more capital through his connections, ruthless and downright predatory business practices.

At the stroke of midnight, he celebrated his net worth hitting that sweet 600 billion mark. Come the next morning, the news announced his death.

It was sudden but not entirely unexpected. Despite the expensive treatments and the lifestyle his wealth could afford, he was still a man in his late eighties who regularly indulged in alcohol and drugs. So his death was easy to dismiss as a heart attack or something similar.

The same couldn’t be said for Mark Trask, the second richest man before Brighton. A tech billionaire may not have been a picture of health but he was generally fit for his age of forty-seven. The fact that his death happened only a day after only fuelled the conspiracies.

And as one billionaire died after another, nobody could deny that someone - or something - was targeting the world’s richest.

The media treated it as the greatest disaster and tragedy since the dawn of mankind.

You couldn’t look up anything without another article or video about how we were all in this together and how we should dedicate ourselves to finding whoever was responsible for these deaths.

But whatever sympathies people might have give. The billionaires before would dwindle once the latter started funding private armies and police forces. Hard to feel bad for dying billionaires when their men broke into your homes and beat you in the streets for the mere suspicion of you being the culprit.

It wasn’t just the presence of private armies and police that soured people even more on billionaires. It was watching these men and women throw away hundreds of millions to hunt down the mysterious killer. And knowing that they could have always used this money for something good.

They used to pretend that we were all the same people. That they understood or sympathised with the plight of those beneath them. But all these deaths and their reaction to them proved otherwise. They threw their masks away, revealing just how little they thought of us all.

Deep down, we always knew that billionaires saw themselves as a separate class of people. Not entirely separated from their fellow men… Just better. Richer. More resourceful. Whatever made them feel like they deserved everything and others nothing.

Our laws are not their laws.

Our limits are not their limits.

Our struggles are not their struggles.

We might live on the same planet but we didn’t live on the same world. We never did. We never could.

By year one, the divide between the rich and the rest was made clear. There were cameras on every corner. A wrong look or motion could have you jailed and interrogated for conspiracy. All social media was controlled and monitored just as much.

Jerome Brighton was the man born into significant wealth and power. He would grow to use those to amass even more capital through his connections, ruthless and downright predatory business practices.

At the stroke of midnight, he celebrated his net worth hitting that sweet 600 billion mark. Come the next morning, the news announced his death.

It was sudden but not entirely unexpected. Despite the expensive treatments and the lifestyle his wealth could afford, he was still a man in his late eighties who regularly indulged in alcohol and drugs. So his death was easy to dismiss as a heart attack or something similar.

The same couldn’t be said for Mark Trask, the second richest man before Brighton. A tech billionaire may not have been a picture of health but he was generally fit for his age of forty-seven. The fact that his death happened only a day after only fuelled the conspiracies.

And as one billionaire died after another, nobody could deny that someone - or something - was targeting the world’s richest.

The media treated it as the greatest disaster and tragedy since the dawn of mankind.

You couldn’t look up anything without another article or video about how we were all in this together and how we should dedicate ourselves to finding whoever was responsible for these deaths.

But whatever sympathies people might have give. The billionaires before would dwindle once the latter started funding private armies and police forces. Hard to feel bad for dying billionaires when their men broke into your homes and beat you in the streets for the mere suspicion of you being the culprit.

It wasn’t just the presence of private armies and police that soured people even more on billionaires. It was watching these men and women throw away hundreds of millions to hunt down the mysterious killer. And knowing that they could have always used this money for something good.

They used to pretend that we were all the same people. That they understood or sympathised with the plight of those beneath them. But all these deaths and their reaction to them proved otherwise. They threw their masks away, revealing just how little they thought of us all.

Deep down, we always knew that billionaires saw themselves as a separate class of people. Not entirely separated from their fellow men… Just better. Richer. More resourceful. Whatever made them feel like they deserved everything and others nothing.

Our laws are not their laws.

Our limits are not their limits.

Our struggles are not their struggles.

We might live on the same planet but we didn’t live on the same world. We never did. We never could.

By year one, the divide between the rich and the rest was made clear. There were cameras on every corner. A wrong look or motion could have you jailed and interrogated for conspiracy. All social media was controlled and monitored just as much.

Our politicians gave up entirely on pretending that they weren’t in the pockets of the billionaires. They passed laws that ate away more and more at the common man’s rights and liberties. And they didn’t care for the outrage and outcries because we were not the people they served.

This hell lasted for four more years before the billionaires gave up and ran.

The surviving elite took their money and assets and left for places unknown. I heard that they built themselves a whole separate country somewhere in the tropics where their best and brightest could figure out how to save them.

There were also those that followed them without having any money of their own. They were the people that still wanted to become billionaires even after everything they saw and suffered at the hands of the richest.

As for the rest of us?

We rebuilt.

When the richest people left for their own little paradise, they took their armies and police as well. And that left our governments and politicians along against the crowds of angry and disillusioned people that demanded change.

And when the corrupt bureaucrats tried to hold onto their power, the people decided to make and be the change on their own.

I am not going to lie to you and pretend that we all became these happy and perfect people overnight. There was too much destruction to fix and too much hurt to heal.

But without the elites constantly pitting us together? We had time and space to fix the world and ourselves.

During the five years of hell under the billionaires’ boots, we have rediscovered the importance of connecting with your fellow men. We formed small communities where we would share whatever little we had to try and survive.

And once the elites ran away, we used these models as the foundation of our new world.

And if you are afraid that we have regressed into some tribal societies, do not worry. We still have the Internet and all the modern comforts. We just don’t kill ourselves or each other in the pursuit of those.

None of us really know what happens to the billionaires and those who left with them. None of us even know where they left exactly. All we know is that they are gone.

Some say that they ended up in a civil war of some sort and destroyed themselves in the process. Others believed that they all died from the same plague now that it had the chance to concentrate in one location. The majority simply doesn’t care.

I could talk to you for days about how much better we are off now than before.

How all basic needs are provided for. How everyone is free to pursue their passions and aspirations without fearing homelessness and starvation.

How we have managed to fix the environmental damage now that sustainability and efficiency take priority over profits and cost reduction.

How everyone has so much more time and reason to look inwards and ask themselves “How can I make myself live a happier and better life today?”

And how we finally discovered the source of this plague.

It was a small rock in the middle of nowhere. A burnt-up husk of a pebble, really. But we could tell that it was special. And after years of research, we finally understood how it worked and who it went after.

You see, it doesn’t just target the richest. It is far more complex than that.

It targets the most destructive forms of greed and gluttony. It goes after those who would put their profits over long-term survival of their species and the planet in general. And it kills them.

We believe that it was sent to us by someone from the stars. Perhaps, they saw our imminent self-destruction and chose to gift us this blessing.

And now we offer you, people of Gamma-4, the same gift as we had once received.

The black button will release the sample of the rock into your atmosphere. The times ahead will be hard just like they were for us. But it will all be worth it, I promise.

The red one will destroy the rock. We will not blame you if you pick it. Death is a heavy thing to process. And the subsequent chaos and destruction are not easy to live through and recover from.

But even if you choose to destroy this rock, I want you to know one thing: We are not going to abandon you or anyone else. We have seen the power that has lied in us all along. And now we will never forget it.

So whatever you do, remember this:

Humanity will reach out to everyone who needs our hand.