In our present time, a man named Richard Andrews goes on a date with this woman named Stacy. Things appear to be going well: this is their 3rd date, they seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company and in general Richard is fairly certain that they have a future together. After the date, they Richard takes her home and they agree to talk the following day.
In tune with their agreement, Richard calls her, however she does not pick up. He assumes that she was busy and was unable to come to the phone so he sends her a text message to let her know that he called and he was just checking on her. Two days go by and the text message is left unread. Richard calls again, but Stacy does not pick up. Following this he sends her several text messages over the span of the following week, asking if she is okay or if she still wants to see him. He gets no response.
About two weeks after the date with Stacy, Richard tries calling Stacy again and realizes that his calls always go to voicemail, he enlists the help of a friend to call Stacy (the call goes through) and realizes that Stacy had blocked his phone number so that she would not get any of his phone numbers and text messages. This angers and hurts Richard a lot.
In general, Richard knew to expect heartbreak/disappointment when it came to dating, however he did not expect the sheer amount of disrespect in addition to the disappointment that he faced. He had recently just started dating again after coming out from a long relationship, and he was not prepared for any of the disrespect that he faced. He had been stood up on several occasions, Several women had ghosted him and in the process blocked his number and in addition to that, his ex girlfriend had cheated on him several times while they were together and was unremorseful about it.However, the interaction with Stacy was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
He really liked Stacy and hoped that they would keep seeing each other but instead had to endure being ghosted and being disrespected...again, so Richard resolved to stop dating women but instead go on dates with women and kill them, he called these “Kill Dates.”
He would meet a woman and ask her out, kill her during the date, and destroy all evidence of him murdering the woman. He covered his tracks well. He had killed a lot of women and obviously, the media/people began to take notice. He was called the “Date Ripper” and as a result of his actions (He had killed at least a thousand women and nobody knew what he looked like), women started assaulting/killing men during dates whenever they feared for their safety. This is in turn resulted in in men killing/assaulting women on dates because of fear that they would be hurt/killed.
Eventually, Richard was caught and was given the death sentence but this was not enough to stop the mass assaults/killings that had spread throughout society, resulting in massive crime and unrest in society, so the government decided to step in. The government decided that society had descended to an immoral point and that had to be addressed. So the government decided to outlaw every bad thing (Cheating in examinations, Disrespecting people, etc) and make the punishment for doing any bad thing at least 50 years in Prison. To ensure that people still had an outlet for negative energy, “hellhouses” which were social places where people could come together and engage in bad things were established. These hellhouses had virtual reality games that people could play, and organized activities that helped people let go of their negative energy (Disrespect competitions, Non-lethal fighting competitions, etc)...the only rule was that no one was allowed to seriously hurt another person.
The regime of ‘peace’ did ensure that everyone was nice and respectful to each other (Dating was very good during this period) and it lasted for a while but it was shortlived (because of the severity of the laws) and the government was overthrown.
The new government is made of a group of visionaries that think they can restore society to the way it was before the “Richard Andrews Catastrophe”, so they change the 50-year imprisonment law and try to bring back similar laws to the laws that existed before the “Richard Andrews Catastrophe.” The new society is safer than it had been in the past couple of years but the people had seen a lot of things and were not willing to get comfortable with the new society, so they focused on the only thing that had stability, their jobs, and did not do anything else (including having sex or dating).
The new trend of society not dating resulted in the stark decrease of the population because children were not being born. To curb this, the New government teams up with Tinder to create a program that would match people exclusively for procreation and nothing else. To ensure that people signed up for this program, the government gave tax refunds and money to people that signed up and gave them the option to have their children be wards of the state till they turned 18.
This program, known as “The Repopulation Program, ” became insanely popular, with most of the participants opting to have the children they have to be wards of the state. The government seeing the program succeed to the extent that it did decided to change the rules of the program: All children born as a result of this program will be wards of the state regardless of the parents’ choice and people that sign up for the program have to be wards of the state as well. This change of the rules were marketed as “The government trying to provide for everyone accordingly.”
My character fears that this new rule will give the government more power than it needs to have, especially with the recent history of society. He fears that the new change of rules can make the government like the government of North Korea, if nothing happens soon. He decides to try to think of a way to solve this problem and he comes across a website, on the big bad dar deep web, that can send emails to people in the past and decides to send an email to himself of twenty years ago explaining all that happened and telling him how he can, potentially, change the future.