A. Wood The Stinky Pandemic The Stinky Pandemic remains the most lethal event in recorded human history. The disease is believed to have first entered the population in Kazakhstan in late 2005, a former soviet socialist republic which was at the heart of the USSR’s biological weapons program, raising never-answered questions about the origins of the organism. Due to its extremely contagious nature and delayed appearance of symptoms, it had successfully spread to all six populated continents before it was even recognized as a public health threat. By February of the next year, the severity of the situation was fully realized, though quarantine programs were so unsuccessful as to be barely worth mentioning. Within a year of the first confirmed case, four billion people fell victim to the pandemic, a number roughly constituting 60% of the global population. The next decade lacked the catastrophic losses of the first year, but yearly losses remained in the hundreds of millions until a cure was finally developed in 2017. Despite recriminations cast about over issues of abuse of otherwise functional antibiotics, lack of disease-based crisis planning, and irresponsible Cold War science and genetic engineering, it has been recognized that the rise of common international travel, a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries, were essentially responsible for what otherwise could have been a local tragedy turning into a global catastrophe. Ironically, the Stinky Pandemic became a positive turning point in the course of human progress. Human civilization, previous to the pandemic, was carrying a population load larger than planet Earth could support without either dramatic reductions or unequal distribution of resources. Society had yet to catch up with scientific advances, chief among them penicillin, creating a dangerous intersection of high pregnancy rates, low infant mortality, and longer life-spans. By the time of the Stinky Pandemic, cultural attitudes in the industrialized world had adjusted to accept these realities, but by then global population had already exploded and continued to grow in under-developed regions. With more than 80% of the global population gone, solutions to the world’s problems in the nature of egalitarian globalism were suddenly a possibility. Many of these trends were already present in those same industrialized nations, so with the problem of insufficient resources to meet all needs solved, a new era of international cooperation and bountiful personal goodies was set to begin.