The Final Cloud
“This has been your weather for today, thank you for tuning in and I’ll be back tomorrow, Kenny Dupont signing off”. I grabbed my coat, turned off the lights, and began my walk home. The world was very different than it had ever been, united yet splitting at the seems. Walking through a particularly sketchy part of town, I hear a voice croaking out from the shadows, “care to spare a juul pod”. This was the world we lived in now, where people cared more about getting their nicotine fix than a job or their family.
Many years prior, in the late 2010s, lots of new information had been collected and showed that the effects of vaping had no implications on one’s health. Slowly, people stopped smoking and starting switching over to a new device, the e-cigarette, or “vapes” as all of the cool kids had said. I watched as these vapes destroyed friendships and racked the inner minds of my friends. Eventually, in the mid 2020s, the government started to take notice of this new epidemic. Instead of banning the products like everyone had expected, they simply bought out many of the other companies. In short press interviews, they explained the dangers of the minimally regulated market, and how this was their reason for monopolizing. The change definitely freaked people out at first, but provided people still got their nicotine, they were satisfied.
I couldn’t trust anything the government said. After 9/11, I didn’t understand how anybody could. When I heard about the government taking control of the vape market I knew it went much deeper than regulations.
Working at a news station sure had its benefits. I had access to information that the average citizen could never get their hands on. Valuable data about the climate like CO2 levels in the atmosphere and population data like average income or ethnicity. Usually, we didn’t have a need for this information, other than broadcasting the weather of course, but I got to thinking. There’s no reason the government would do this because of regulations, they must have another, much bigger plan.
I talked to my coworkers about it, and we thought up different reasons this could be happening. Some of them thought this wasn’t strange at all and that the government was actually just regulating the market better. Some thought that they just saw how big the market for nicotine was and realized how much money could be made. All of those ideas were viable, and maybe even partially true, but my friend Richie and I discovered otherwise.
Richie had always been an avid vaper, but when the state bought out the market, he got skeptical. We started researching together, looking through every graph and health report, trying to find anything that could help us. And we finally stumbled upon it. We had been comparing the birth rates of the current year with that of the previous years and we noticed a significant decrease. It went back far. They had been testing this since the mid 2020s, since everything changed. Knowing that our own government had been and was currently implementing population control was world changing news. We had to get this out there. And what better way than a news report.
It was the next day. Today was the day. I put on my coat, walked out the door, and strolled to work, my anticipation building with every step. I met up with Richie and we setup the studio, preparing for the morning news. Thirty seconds. I went through everything in my head, wondering how all of this would pan out. 10 seconds. Well, here we go. Five, four, three, two, one…