Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome

“ADS, that was My Enemy : Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or, Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome, depending on who you were talking to. 

Whatever the label, it killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead. 

No one understood what was happening at first. We’d stabilised the Rockies, we’d sanitised the safe zones, and still we were losing upwards of a hundred or so people a day. 

It wasn’t suicide, we had plenty of those. 

No, this was different. 

Some people had minimal wounds or easily treatable ailments; some were in perfect health. 

They would simply go to sleep one night and not wake up the next morning. 

The problem was psychological, a case of just giving up, not wanting to see tomorrow because you knew it could only bring more suffering. 

Losing Faith, The Will to Endure, it happens in all wars. 

It happens in peacetime, too, just not on this scale. 

It was helplessness, or at least, the perception of helplessness. 

I understood that feeling. I directed movies all my adult life. They called me the boy genius, the wunderkind who couldn’t fail, even though I’d done so often. 

Suddenly I was a nobody, an F-6. The World was going to hell and all my vaunted talents were powerless to stop it. 

When I heard about ADS, The Government was trying to keep it quiet — I had to find out from a contact at Cedars-Sinai. 

When I heard about it, something snapped. Like the time I made my first Super 8 short and screened it for my parents. 

“This I can do”, I realized! 

“This Enemy I can fight!”

And the rest is history. 

[Laughs.] I wish. I went straight to The Government, they turned me down.