Fifteen

The world ended pretty quickly all things considered. This ending of things was fundamentally tied to technology, but it really had to do with exponential growth in a couple of ways. Humans are clever, and they have always been very good at making new technology. Pretty quickly after the advent of opposable thumbs, humans started grabbing things other than branches and trying to make their lives easier.
As with any case of exponential growth, things started out rather slowly. The age in which they exclusively used stone tools lasted three million years or so. From a modern perspective, this was a shockingly long time to be mucking about with obsidian and the like. It’s easy to judge the average paleolithic stone crafter as dim witted, but nothing could be further from the truth. Stone crafting is an art that can take a lifetime to perfect. It requires dexterity, skill, intelligence, intuition, and a healthy dose of cleverness.
Homo sapiens sapiens used the materials that they had at hand to transform themselves from a species that acted as prey to the ultimate apex predator that looked down from the lofty heights at the top of the food chain. They were rock stars with a hit that took them straight to the top of the charts.
Technology and information are intrinsically linked. When humans started this whole journey, they lacked both of those things. When a new technology was invented, information as to its use would have to be disseminated. This was done orally at first, while they were presumably neck deep in the business of inventing language, so taking a few million years to get it right was kind of understandable.
After the invention of the written word things got a little bit easier. The ability to transform a concept from something carried about in one person’s mind into a physical object that could be passed around and shared and understood by anyone that could read, totally changed the game. From this novelty, the concept of civilization was born. Ideas could be shared and expressed relatively easily, and they no longer had to rely on mere word of mouth to make a stone ax or whatever. Finally, if a human had a question, they could just look it up.
Early writing was tedious and vague, but the technological advances that it precipitated caused us to rocket through both the Bronze and Iron Ages at a breakneck pace compared to the Paleolithic. Along the way were advances in mathematics and material sciences that eventually culminated in the invention of the printing press. This is where things truly started picking up speed.
Technology had been held back by the simple fact that if you had an idea, you had to write it down. Once written down, there would be exactly one copy of it. The printing press changed this. All of a sudden, if there was a good idea, or a bad one, anyone with a printing press could blast off as many copies as they wanted and everybody would get the memo.
This was where the curve of exponential growth for technology started trending towards the vertical in a substantial way. In the three hundred years that followed the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, humans went from trotting around in horse drawn carriages to walking on the moon.
The last hundred years of this innovation were truly astounding. In a single lifetime, starting around 1898, somebody could be born in a farming village in central Europe, take a steamship to the New World only to find that by the time they got there airplanes had been invented, have a couple of kids, lose a couple in a world war or two, find out about the death said children over the radio, ride in cars, fly in dirigibles, watch people walk on the moon live on television from the comfort of your living room, ride out the threat of a global nuclear war, watch a space shuttle blow up from the same living room and then cap the whole thing off by checking your email on your cell phone.
This technological explosion in the last age of humans was dependent on a couple of things. Firstly, information, we’ve covered that. Secondly, access to cheap abundant energy. There was only one thing to fit this bill and that was petrochemicals. Pound for pound, it is the cheapest, most energetic stuff that you can find. Sure, plutonium has it beat in terms of energy density, but that stuff is very expensive and a nightmare to deal with.
With the widespread adoption of petrochemicals fueling the technological engine of humanity, life got easier. The human population was able to flourish and establish itself as the dominant species on the planet. The fever dream of capitalism took hold and everybody hung back and started letting the market make all the big decisions. One of those big decisions was to make almost everything out of plastic. Plastic, being a by-product of the petrochemical industry, was cheap, durable and eventually, ubiquitous.
With the concept of the market in charge of everything, the march of technology continued forward unhindered by ethics or responsibility. Plastic was bought, sold, used, and consumed with frighteningly little regard for the consequences. Things made from plastic were viewed as both desirable and disposable. Because of this, the environment, landfills, and ultimately the very flesh and blood of every creature on the planet became saturated with the stuff.
The big problem with plastic is its staunch refusal to participate in the food chain. Humans had been littering for eons with very little consequence. Historically, most of their detritus was organic in nature, so the problem pretty much took care of itself. Something would just come along and eat their garbage. The Stone Age was no real problem, that was just kind of moving rocks around. The Bronze and Iron Ages were rather similar as well. Melting and combining rocks was pretty inconsequential. Sure, there were some pretty nasty byproducts in the mining and refinement of these ores, but in the grand scheme of things it was no big deal. Once petroleum was discovered, the environment began to fill up with single use disposable everythings by the metric gigaton.
While this pathological littering was going on, technology got smaller and faster. Computers, Once hulking things that were typically the size of whatever building you chose to build them in, became small things that you could carry around discreetly in your pocket. This increased the rate at which information could be exchanged, and in turn affected technology in a positive feedback loop.
Eventually, technology got so small and fast that things could be manufactured out of single atoms. This was nanotechnology. Small simple machines could be employed to make smaller even more simple machines. Things like superconductive nano batteries and post space age whiz bang metamaterials became widely available, boring, everyday things. It became the new plastic, but there remained the problem of the old plastic.
There were major market readjustments and financial collapses as the manufacturing sector imploded due to mass adoption of nanoscale 3D printing. When you could 3D print a car out of rocks and dirt lying around in your yard, there was hardly any reason for a big messy factory somewhere employing thousands of people just to make one type of car. This sort of thinking knocked the bottom out of the world economy for a while, but due to a plucky can-do attitude, the human race marched on. Financial collapses due to disruptive technology are kind of the name of the game when humans get involved in something.
Utopian societies began to spring up around places like college campuses and rural farms. With most jobs being replaced with things like AI and nanotechnology, humans could focus their efforts on being human. A number of wars resulted from this.
During one of these pan global wars somebody, somewhere, for it was lost to time quite where and who, got the bright idea to clean up the environment and take care of the old plastic problem. Somebody, in a misguided attempt at redemption created a small machine that went around and ate plastic. When its little belly was full from eating plastic, it would turn that raw material into a clone of itself. Then, they would both go around looking for more plastic to eat, and tell each other about how it was going over the radio.
Doing some quick back of the envelope math could give you insight into how problematic this could be if it continued unchecked. After about 100 generations the combined weight of these little rascals would be about equal to the weight of all of the oceans on Earth. Of course, there is nowhere near that much plastic in the world, but you get the idea. With microplastics saturating the flesh and blood of pretty much every creature on the planet the unintended consequences were catastrophic. Or perhaps that was the intention after all, there is really no way to tell.
Almost everyone died of starvation, or were eaten from the inside because of the microplastics that suffused their bodies. Life went on though. There were small pockets of humanity dotted all around the world. Each convinced that they were the last humans on earth.
All their high technology had crumbled to dust and they were relegated to whatever technological level that they could remember. Some were solidly stone age hunter gatherers, others were lucky enough to have known how to work metal. All of these people were relegated to the level of technology that they carried in their heads before everything collapsed.
The Daemon Sword Fyndraxis was sadly ignorant to these facts.