The Great Balkanization

 

 

Everything explodes into its own orbit. The common tongue disappears. The cultural touchstones you find significant are absolutely meaningless to the person standing right next to you. Entire subcultures rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. You take just one little step outside  and find you're slaving over arcane hieroglyphs. It's tiring. It's bewildering. You crawl back to the warm safety of what you know. You spit on the window and rub it in, hoping you might have a clearer view of what's outside. Everyone becomes a foreigner. Everything becomes alien. And any global crisis we thought might unite us only splinters off into more division, suspicion, supposition, superstition. It becomes more and more difficult to trust anything, even yourself. You could be a terrorist cell. You could be a phase-shifting Reptilian. One day your eyes might go funny.