For twenty years, I was one of the one million. One of the founders who agreed to that vital pact: $100 a month from each man, creating a collective treasury of $100 million every 30 days. We purchased 10,000 acres of remote heartland and built not just a refuge, but a new genesis. For two decades, that river of capital erected the advanced society, a perimeter thrumming with anti-personnel weapons designed to disintegrate the zombies that had overrun the world. Inside, we spun a tapestry of towering arcologies, alternative power, healthcare, and every conceivable luxury. It was perfection, engineered by a million minds and a $24 Billion dollars.
And I chose to leave it.
My Family, The Men insided, They Understood. My exosuit, the Aegis Mark X, was our military’s pinnacle—a plated titan that made the user near invincible to zombie attacks. Its servos could outmuscle a hundred of them; its shell turned their frantic teeth and claws into harmless scratches. But within our paradise, it was more of a museum piece to me although i greatly appreciated what it provided, it was a symbol of a threat we’d already neutralized. I needed to know if we could still survive in the world we’d walled out. I needed to harden not just the suit, but the soul inside it.
The gate sealed behind me with assurance that if i should ever return, i'd be welcomed back with open arms from my brothers. The silence of Arcadia was instantly replaced by the wind-whipped moan of the dead. A pack of zombies sighted me, their bodies coiled springs, and they surged forward at that terrifying 15 mph sprint. The Aegis handled them with ease. I didn’t even fire my weapons. I simply let them come, their assaults bouncing off me like hail, before shoving through, leaving them stumbling in my wake.
My invincibility, however, was only in regards to their threats. The suit’s power cell was eternal, its armor impregnable. But it couldn’t synthesize water or food. The $100 million a month paradise had solved scarcity forever. Out here, it was the only law. I found a single, rusted can of beans on my third day. Water was a daily gamble of risky filtration and long treks to possibly contaminated sources.
To remember the cost of comfort. To feel the raw edge of existence that our perfect calculus had eliminated. I move through the desolation, a kingdom of rot, forever orbiting the citadel of 10,000 acres that we built. The zombies cannot harm me. But the hunger, the thirst, the isolation, these are the whetstones on which I would deliberately sharpen myself, proving that humanity isn’t just something you preserve behind a wall. It’s something you fight for, breath by ragged breath, in the ruins.