Monsters
Authors: Peter Cawdron
Monsters
Peter Cawdron
Copyright © Peter Cawdron 2012
All rights reserved
The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published as an eBook by Peter Cawdron using Smashwords
ISBN: 9781301424689
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental
Dedicated to
National Year of Reading
Monsters explores the importance of reading against the backdrop of dystopia.
The fallout from a passing comet contains a biological pathogen, not a virus or a living organism, just a collection of amino acids, but these cause animals to revert to the age of the megafauna, when monsters roamed Earth.
Bruce Dobson is a reader. With the fall of civilization, reading has become outlawed. Superstitions prevail, and readers are persecuted like the witches and wizards of old. Bruce and his son James seek to overturn the prejudices of their day and restore the scientific knowledge central to their survival, but monsters lurk in the dark.
Prologue : Comet Holt
For those that could still read, for those that dared, newspapers were the best source of information about the collapse of the Old World. It had only been a couple of centuries since Comet Holt first appeared, but Nature was quick to reclaim her jewel given half a chance, undoing tens of thousands of years of human progress in what seemed like the blink of an eye.
Nature was vengeful. After billions of years of evolutionary pressure, she was not one to stand idly by while man re-created the world in his own image. She had taken her licks, she had endured earth-shattering asteroid impacts, the eruption of super-volcanoes that spanned hundreds of miles, and severe glaciation that had threatened to engulf the entire planet, transforming Earth into little more than a snowball, yet somehow life always endured.
Homo sapiens
were just another emergent species with a fragile hold on a span of a few million years at best, a few thousand if civilization was any measure. Life had flourished on Earth for billions of years, and would continue for billions more, regardless of mankind, regardless of Comet Holt.
Newspapers were a surprising link to the past. They had been intended as a disposable medium and were out-of-vogue when the comet arrived. The broadsheets, or tabloids as some of the more salacious papers were called, were a passing snapshot into the affairs of any given day, hurriedly printed on cheap, low-grade paper. Far from their heyday, when the daily print-run toppled presidents and spoke
Vox populi, vox Dei
, with the voice of the people echoing the sentiments of their God, newspapers had faded to little more than pulp-status in most countries, yet it was the daily periodicals that captured the fall of civilization in a roughly chronological sequence.
Newspapers provided a glimpse into the consumer desires from a bygone age, the distractions and hype that once seemed so important, and they cataloged news from far flung corners of a planet most would never venture to cross. Buried deep within their black on white print, scattered across days, weeks, months and years, lay the fragmented story of how the reign of mankind ground to a halt following the appearance of the comet. Among their petty advertisements for skin cream and new cars, among the frivolous reviews for local wine shows and the jaundiced opinion pieces on federal politics, lay the fragments of what happened as society collapsed under its own weight.
Comet Holt was billed as the celestial show of the millennium. Fifteen times larger than Halley's comet, its twin V-shaped tail lit up the night sky for months as it approached the sun from the outer reaches of the solar system. At first it was little more than a smudge, but its long, blue and white tail spread out more and more as it approached the sun. Space telescopes measured the tail as reaching over six hundred million kilometers in length, a staggering four times the distance from Earth to the sun.
The distinct V-shape drew considerable attention from media commentators, although professional astronomers pointed out that all comets had twin tails. NASA explained that the dust and gas streaming away from the glowing nucleus of the comet projected outward on slightly different angles. The dust tail, they said, was brighter and curved, revealing the orbital path of the comet, while the ionized gas was fainter, streaming directly away from the sun in a straight line. The public was entranced.
At its height, the comet's tail stretched across forty degrees of the night sky and was breathtaking to behold. Holt was a splash of white paint daubed on a starry sky. Van Gogh, it seemed, had been brought back to life.
Although it had never been seen before, scientists said Holt was a short-period comet, but one that originally orbited within the Oort cloud for billions of years before being unseated. At some point, the comet's cosmic ballet became perturbed and Holt drifted out of the Oort cloud, starting its long, slow fall toward the sun with a highly elliptic orbit that for hundreds of millions of years barely crossed the path of Neptune.
Scientists said Holt's initial planetary orbit was measured in tens of thousands of years. From there, it was just a matter of time before the gravitational attraction of Neptune either threw Holt out of the solar system or sent it plunging toward the sun. NASA calculated the stability of this orbit and the newspapers spoke of an age that saw the rise of mammals, the fall of dinosaurs, and the advent of bipedal apes before Comet Holt crossed in front of the oncoming Neptune and found itself flung toward the inner planets.
Comet Holt grew in intensity as it approached the sun. Each night it appeared earlier in the evening sky, lower, longer and brighter, until it looked like Holt would collide with the radiant reds and yellows of the setting sun. Holt rounded the sun, breaking up as it passed too close. The comet lost over half its mass in the process, with the majority of the comet breaking up and falling back into the sun. The flare of volatile materials unleashed during the comet's disintegration was visible only to orbiting astronomical observatories.
Although the comet's fiery death throes never competed with the brightness of the sun, the heavily-filtered photographs looked sensational in the newspapers. The science editor for the New York Times called the fragments that escaped the sun's fiery grip a 'necklace of pearls.' At first, they were barely visible in the dusk, soft specks of light moving away from the sun along the ecliptic. As the days passed, the fragments appeared later in the evening sky; a string of pearls, each with its own tail, each tail blurred as it stretched away from the horizon.
After a month, in the dark of a moonless night, the pearls shone with a radiance never before seen by the races of man. It was as though seven separate comets had been painted on the backdrop of the heavens, and the comparisons with Van Gogh were replaced with those of Michelangelo and Rembrandt.
The public fell in love with the pearls. Cities across the world would dim their lights on Sunday and Monday evenings so residents could enjoy their stunning beauty at its height. Like diamonds on black velvet, the comet fragments were mesmerizing, putting mankind's petty troubles and earthly contrivances in perspective for a while. Crime rates fell, as did acts of suicide. An age of romanticism swept the globe, transcending cultures, with the awe and wonder of nature being given a place of prominence and prestige, if only for a few short months.
Although comets had long been seen as the harbingers of doom, few saw any danger looming. Those that did were labelled crackpots and were ignored. The newspapers belittled them, calling them superstitious, paranoid, but even the naysayers couldn't have foreseen what was to come.
The pearls were no threat to mankind, at least that's what the newspapers said. NASA calculated their orbit and determined they would pass harmlessly into the outer solar system, with a periodic cycle of over a hundred years. The next time the family of Holt appeared, they would have spread apart, forming distinctly separate comets, each with a slightly different periodic cycle, returning up to three years apart.
NASA said Holt would never appear the same again, that this generation was privileged to witness an astronomical spectacle like no other. They told the world the pearls were continuing to break up, leaving tiny fragments in their wake.
NASA predicted Earth would pass through this fine cloud once a year, giving the public an annual meteor shower thousands of times more sensational than the Leonids. Although meteor was too strong a word, they said, as the shower would glisten high in the atmosphere like sparkles on the Fourth of July. Being micro-meteorites the fragments were millimeters in size, just dust particles and flecks of snow and ice. None of them would ever reach the ground, so there was no danger, at least that's what the papers said.
The Sparkles, as they came to be known, were every bit as magnificent as NASA had predicted. Flashes of light rippled across the sky, appearing first in the constellation of Virgo, but slowly stretching out to span two other constellations as the month progressed. At their height, thousands of streaks of light were visible every few seconds. For a couple of weeks, it was as though the planet were under the constant gaze of a full moon. Some claimed it was bright enough to read a newspaper beneath the stars, at least that's what the media reported. For almost two months, the Sparkles continued. Then, as quickly as they had come, they were gone.
The aerosol-like remains of the Sparkles soared high in the jet stream, interrupting international air traffic for nine months. Several transatlantic flights were crippled by the fine ash, each of them hobbling in to London on a single engine. After two passenger jets crashed near Sydney, Australia, killing over eight hundred people, flights across the Pacific were suspended. The military continued to fly, but the loss of several fighter jets curtailed their activities to critical missions. Turbo-prop airplanes were more resilient, and so a fleet of military heavy-lifting aircraft was re-tasked to provide the government with transport, but the wear on engine parts due to the fine grit limited their effectiveness. Within weeks they were spending most of their time on the ground undergoing re-fits. Global travel had ground to a halt.
At first, the majority of people weren't too bothered by the interruption to air travel, and there was even some talk about the good this naturally imposed moratorium would do for the environment. Greenpeace noted that if modern man could live without airplanes for the best part of a year, then perhaps they weren't as necessary as everyone assumed. With romantic sunsets dominating the early evening, and each dawn being announced by sweeping vistas of orange, pink, yellow and purple, Comet Holt could be forgiven for interrupting holiday plans, at least that was the initial sentiment.
Opinions changed as the global economy faltered. Investors got nervous and companies struggled to adjust to life without air travel. The newspapers downplayed the impact, but the reality was air travel had become a form of commute as common as a taxi ride. Without it, companies turned to a virtual presence in remote locations, but it wasn't as effective. Business slowed, efficiency dropped, and inflation raced ahead, dampening economic confidence even further.
Later that year came the first of the drifts, followed by the floods. Eight million people died in North America alone that winter. The snow drifts were abnormal, that much everyone agreed upon, but what had caused them took time to unravel. In New York, the drifts reached heights of eighty feet, paralyzing the city for months on end. With over sixty major US cities affected by the drifts, the United States was helpless to prevent the loss of life on a scale never before seen outside of a world war.
Snow compacted into ice under the weight of the drifts, causing buildings to collapse. The ice was impossible to tunnel through, with demolition experts likening it to granite. Wall St moved to Queens, while the bulk of New Yorkers vowed not to be displaced by nature, but as the years passed it became increasingly obvious they were fighting against an incoming tide.
In Chicago, civil engineers compared the compact of ice to mountains arising suddenly out of the ground. Roads shifted, bridges fell. Interstate ground transport came to a halt. On the northern side of a number of apartment blocks in Boston, large packs of ice persisted through to the following summer, being hidden in the shade for most of the day.
NASA said that dust fines in the stratosphere, the charred remnants of the Sparkles, had led to the formation of these devastating snow storms. The fines, as they were called in the newspapers, were apparently as vaporous as cigarette smoke, but their dominance in the stratosphere upset global weather patterns. NASA predicted subsequent years wouldn't be as bad as the Sparkles reduced in intensity. They were wrong. The newspapers told them so.