Shooting Star

So, I've been working on this, and I think it's ok now. It's not the first end-of-the-world fic I've written, but it seems better than the previous one, so that's good.

Sometime in the Near Now?


Nafli bowed her head and wept silently as another bright line drew itself across the uncomfortably bright night sky. She was almost surprised that she still had tears left to shed. Then again, mourning was the new Thing To Do. Not much else held any meaning. Hope itself was being mourned by a people who had lost everything but hope previously. And, as always, there was no time for it. A shadow fell across her blurred vision. Mehti Sanjuraasvadi, her brother's wife's uncle, was hobbling toward her. She could see he was suffering from overexposure.

She still remembered the proud American president, the Democrat that the world had rejoiced America's choice of in 2008, standing with nervous hands, papers rattling in their trembling grasp, as he read from a prepared statement, made by the amazing NASA scientists. It had been fifteen years ago, almost to the day, but she, like everyone else who'd been a schoolchild that day, and all those who followed them, had learned it and memorized it. Even now, years after America was little but a memory and a few scattered people.

"Brothers and sisters of the human race, I come before you here in the United Nations to speak about something that threatens us all. I do not speak of terror used as a political tool, as my predecessor did. I speak of something far worse, something that cares not for our politics, our race, our differences of religion. Something that will kill us all without mercy, without remorse, and that we cannot ignore.

Scientists at NASA, and others whom they have consulted with around the globe, have proven conclusively that the sun's energy output is increasing, and that if it does not stop or reverse this trend soon, the entire earth will become uninhabitable, and we will all die. Their data is being delivered by couriers to institutes of higher learning around the globe as I speak, so you may verify our findings for yourselves. Our scientists' best estimate for total extermination of human life is thiry-seven years, assuming catastrophic die-outs and mass-migrations.

As of right now, I am issuing a moratorium to all auto manufacturers that forbids the production of any vehicle that cannot meet emission standards set by the Kyoto Treaty. Further, all American energy plants have been instructed to meets these emission standards in one month or shut down until they can. Martial law will be declared anywhere in the United States where civil or other unrest results from this. A new department of the EPA, the Emissions Control Board, has been given police powers, access to National Guard units, and full authority to enforce these standards.

Our entire industry is going to be re-directed to combatting this threat in a two-pronged attack. Firstly, our astronauts will be erecting and expanding a vast Mylar shield between the earth and the sun to reduce the amount of energy reaching earth. This shield will be neccessarily fragile, and therefore can only be considered a temporary solution. The second part of the plan is construction of an 'ark', of sorts, to carry an as-yet-undetermined number of selected colonists to Cygni 66, where the Hubble telescope has detected a moon that may well be habitable orbiting a gas giant there.

While I cannot tell you how many or who will be allowed to go, I can tell you for certain that anyone who interferes with either mission will be considered at war with us, and dealt with as expediently as possible. Since a 'nuclear winter' can only help us in the short-term, which appears to be all we have left, we will begin with nuclear weapons, and then throw in anything else we need to finish the job, should it become neccessary. That is the only warning this government shall issue in the matter.

God save us all."

Any thought of the president's words being a bluff evaporated two day later, along with Riyadh, Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Moscow. The Russian's missiles apparently had fallen into disrepair after so long without maintenance, and of the dozen China sent at America, only the one aimed at Denver, Colorado had gotten through the Americans suprisingly effective missile shield. The American counter-strike reduced China's population to a point where their oil consumption would never again be a thing to worry about. And the world realized that the Americans were not joking. The French carrier group in the Red Sea was vaporized a day later, and the French sabre stopped rattling entirely.

The world was a much darker place now, demographically speaking. It just wasn't a safe planet, in 2028, to be white on anymore, and it was getting worse. Even with petroleum usage at an all-time low, now that supplying it was so difficult and dangerous, the temperature just kept going up. Of course, now that the sun's output was so harsh, only the most deeply pigmented people could withstand it long in the former 'temperate' zones, and even in the sub-polar regions, it wasn't safe to go out with a thick coating of aloe extract.

Her nose wrinkled at the all-too familiar smell, as she brought it to mind. The plants were grown everywhere now, so critical they were to survival, even more important than food, and used as such after the aloe was extracted. Thin, bitter soup, flavored with anything and everything. Crops were grown under roofs now, with panels of anything that would stop the worst of the sun's rays protecting them from scorching death. She missed rice most of all, but it had gone nearly extinct as the conditions needed for it to grown in vanished from nature, and the hydroponically grown stuff was so expensive now that she'd have to work for a year to save the credits for one meal of it just for herself.

It wasn't resentment that made the world an unsafe place for whites, though to be sure there was plenty of that to be had, even though when all was said and done, their profligate waste of oil had ended up not mattering. It was their failure, their vulnerability, worse, the exposed lie of their invulnerability, that rankled. The American wizards of technology, inventors and doers, in all the movies, they saved the world.

Her family had sailed on a cargo vessel to Canada from Kol Kata, along with hundreds of others, to claim lands owned by the dead: dead and dessicated. That was, perhaps, the oddest thing about the whole surreal journey to Baffin Island. She had expected a reek of death when they reached America, but there was only a lingering pall of smoke. Occasionally a body would be found, caked to the bottom of a tub, in a bathroom littered with now dried and dead fungi, but even then, in the best possible conditions, hardly ever even a lingering scent. 'Just a faint mustiness', she remembered Nala telling her, the time her oldest sister had found a body once.

The vast cyclonic storms that earlier in the century had been called hurricanes, and had grown out of scope or imagining, had wrought devastation in waves upon the shores of every continent, and toppled skyscrapers hundreds of miles inland. But then, with the seas nearly choked to impassibility by a new strain of algae that was somehow resisting the sun's stronger rays, and worse, trapping the water beneath it, the moisture that drove those storms dissapeared. In the wake of the storms, deserts began to spread almost overday. Desert encroachments once measures in miles per year were now measured in miles per week. The entire ecosystem was collapsing.

She shook her head to clear her jumbled thoughts, and turned back to her duties. "Perhaps", the new 'American' president had said, "we can build another one in time." She examined Mehti's burns. They were bad enough, without being too bad. She nodded, and he shot her a grateful look, and hobbled to the entrance to the underground warren of hastily-dug rooms that sheltered the 750 people under her care. She frowned at his retreating back. They'd been slightly over subsistence until recently, able to contribute to the Great Plans the Americans had started. Now, with morale devastated, accidents, overexposures, and suicides had reduced them to below subsistence. She had mentioned this to her superiors, and inquired about any forthcoming assistance from Central. Their looks had said enough. Attrition would have to balance their ledgers.

Another line of fire crossed the sky from the terminator, ending almost halfway across the sky. This time, she murmured a short prayer from the Bhodisaatva, as she watched. She wondered from which group came this one. Had he been constructing the solar shield, or the colony/escape ship? Both had been destroyed by the huge flare that had so recently killed hope. Reports were that it had set much of Eurasia ablaze. Those were rather spotty now, as the flare had wiped out most of the satellites as well.