It still amazes me that the human race once believed that our actions could not affect the planet on a global scale. Sure, there were a lot of eggheads and white-coats running around at the turn of the century squawking about global warming and climate change, but it was easy to ignore those Chicken Littles. We were at the height of our game, transforming and shaping our environment to suit our purposes and stroke our hubris. Unfortunately, a rude awakening was looming on the horizon, and our actions would come back to haunt us in ways no one could ever have expected. A plague on a scale not seen since the days of Moses was about to land on us out of the clear blue sky?literally.

Doctor Salinger was the first scientist to stumble across the unsettling findings. A paleornithologist by trade and avid Boggle player by night, Dr. Salinger was excavating a site in the south of Germany back in spring 2017. Though hunting for the elusive remains of an archaeopteryx, he and his team of bone hunters made a far greater and damning discovery. They observed a peculiar behavior by the local finches, crows and robins: they were eating and defecating at an alarming rate. No fewer than 103 bird bombs rained down on the heads of the hapless scientists each day, and the added costs of shampoo and detergent effectively bankrupted the endeavor. Before returning back to his lab at Cornell, Dr. Salinger captured a few of the dyspeptic birds for examination. After the autopsy, a chill ran down the spine of the usually level-headed doctor, for he had unearthed troubling news: the birds? digestive tracks had mutated and expanded to gargantuan sizes, resulting in an unholy level of offal generation and uncontrollable bowel movements. Further chemical analyses proved that this evolutionary quirk stemmed from an incredible build-up of methane gasses inside the birds, ironically enough.

The good doctor tried to warn the world by publishing journal articles, writing a book, and making an appearance on The Tyra Banks Show. No one wanted to listen to him, though. Even after the fowl disorder began spreading beyond the boundaries of Bavaria, mankind just buried its head in the sand?literally. To avoid the soupy deluges of bird squeeze, human beings started moving underground. Elaborate city-states and replicas of major metropolises were erected inside of mountains, abandoned mine shafts, and any other earthy orifice that a Bobcat could fit into. A new New York sprung up, followed by Neo-Tokyo, and also Branson II, which came complete with a Yakov Smirnoff Theatre. Within thirty years of the initial discovery, nearly all of the world's population that hadn't drowned in the Great Fecal Flood of 2036 had taken up permanent residence under our white planet's crust.