TRUMP MASS SIMULATION ENDS

(Former United States of America, Wasteland) Millions of people who had, until just recently, believed themselves to be citizens of the United States of America were awakened from unsettling dreams of a country on the verge of descending into a dystopic nightmare. Conducted by desperate scientists in the year 2342, the test was intended to see what might be done to prevent a domino effect of political, military, and ecological disasters that brought the human race - as well as most multi-cellular life on earth - to the edge of extinction.
"Well," cried lead scientist Siddhartha Abraxas, "We... you see... we thought that if we pushed hard enough on the psyche of the remaining people, we could get them to understand their own personal responsibility - the need for them to act, or else really horrific things can happen. The actual 45th President of the United States was not a good man. He was not a good man at all, but we thought that maybe if we pushed the envelope early, really made people uncomfortable, they'd have rebelled, stopped the future that we live in now - in the simulation at least. It made sense to us that humanity would have its limits, as far as what it would allow in a more enlightened age. These would be people who remembered the moon landing for crying out loud."
Abraxas began weeping uncontrollably at that point and muttering, "We're all doomed... so very, very doomed."
The world of 2342 is an infertile, toxic wasteland, shrouded by sudden and violent electrical storms. Humanity has survived by farming particularly hardy strains of algae and by making peace with a life that will assuredly not be comfortable by the standards that it once held. The Dream Project, designed by the top remaining minds in computer science and anthropology, maintained that if humanity could see more apparently the disaster approaching, the populace would band together and take steps against it.
"We created Trump as an anathema. Yes, the real President Volde - He Who Shall Not Be Named - was a bad man, he made very poor decisions, but with Trump we actually felt that we were stretching credulity," commented Aurora White, head sociologist with the Dream Project. "We actually worried about the ability of the human mind to accept what was happening to it. But then, something amazing happened..." White trailed off and was unable to continue with her comment for some time. Later, a more composed Dr. White continued, "People... they actually started voting for him. Not only were they unable to tell the difference between good and bad decisions. They lost the ability to tell the difference between good and bad at all. What we learned from this experiment... oh my god... what we learned, is that at the level of comfortable apathy in which the majority of the US populace found themselves made it impossible for them to come together intellectually and stop any kind of a threat - no matter how obvious it was. As long as they had smartphones, they felt free to bash each other, blame everything else, and ignore the plight of the immediate future, as long as it was still in the future. Even when it seemed common knowledge that the system was broken, people still couldn't figure out what to do about it. They were more interested in taking potshots at each other."
They decided to end the simulation when they found that the supporters of this nexus of abhorrent characteristics would support him even when he trampled the abstractions that they held most dear.
Upon the conclusion of the project, nearly all of the researchers involved have either died by their own hands or are in a semiconscious state of rocking back and forth, mumbling things akin to, "We are a cancer on this earth," "The disaster will always happen; what point is there in rebuilding?" and "There's just no bottom to this. No bottom at all."



Former US citizens