Part 1: Inevitability
John stared up at the vast sky. It was choked with clouds, filled with vapor, and greyer than stone.
A normal day in Chiquita city. A normal day in Southwest Texas. Some people might even call it beautiful.
But it wasn’t normal or beautiful. It was the beginning of something horrible.
John was relaxing alone on the roof of his apartment building when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard a familiar, friendly, but tired voice.
“Hey John, you there?” The phone asked.
“Yeah, it’s me, Lenny. What are you calling for?”
Lenny was John’s best bud. They’d known each other for years.
“I just… I just had to tell you man. We’re best friends, and I wouldn’t feel right without telling you. There's important stuff I want you to know. Before everyone else does, and everything goes to hell.”
John frowned. This didn’t sound like Lenny. The guy was always happy and upbeat, even back when the two were in college, functioning off of caffeine and less than three hours of sleep.
Now, the man just sounded tired and defeated.
“Tell it to me Lenny. You’re breaking my heart here.” Said John.
“Yeah, sure, sure… so… where do I start?... So John, you know how I’m working with NASA these days?”
“Yeah. Some alphabet agency or other, right? Lending you over to NASA to make rockets or something?”
“You’re kinda on the right track.” Said Lenny. “I wasn’t making rockets though. I was researching Floatstone structures, and how frequently they appeared in the planet’s crust. It was geology, not physics.”
“Oh.” Said John. “So why does this matter?”
“It matters because, well… the world is ending. Literally.”
John just stared at the phone incredulously.
“You’re not pulling my leg, are you? ‘Cause that sounds like a prank to me.”
“I’m not. This is serious. And I’m trying to stay calm.”
Lenny’s tone was flat. Flatter than John had ever heard him.
So this was serious, John accepted.
“So the world is ending.” Said John, not quite accepting it, but willing to consider it. “Why? And how can we stop it?”
“No.” John could almost hear Lenny shaking his head. “There won’t be any stopping it. Not without making it worse. See, the planet’s going through a cooling period. Too much use of ice-magic, see. Corporations, consumers… human activity, y’know?”
“Hold on, this isn’t one of your Global Cooling pitches, is it?”
Lenny laughed. It was a slow, mirthless one.
“No, this isn’t a conservation pitch. The planet’s way past the point where those pitches would matter anyway. Even if all humans came together now and acted in unison to solve the problem, we’d still all… it wouldn’t work.”
John frowned. This wasn’t like Lenny.
“In fact,” continued the other man, “it never did matter. What’s happening now would still happen even if we’d started mass conservation centuries ago. Even if humans didn’t exist, this would still happen. We were screwed the moment the planet was formed.”
“What would still happen, Lenny?”
Lenny sighed.
“Floatstone-Induced Continental Fracturing. FCF for short. That’s what the NASA eggheads have been calling it.”
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A feeling of unease gathered in John’s stomach.
He knew what Floatstone was. It was a strange, naturally occurring material that possessed a weak property known as negative mass. It was basically the opposite of normal mass, and interacted with spacetime oddly, moving away from points of gravity rather than towards them. In large enough quantities, it could be used alongside normal mass to balance out their properties and create levitation technology, though that was rather high-tech stuff.
John had learned this in his engineering courses back in college, right alongside Lenny.
“So what is FCF?” He asked, nervously.
“Well… Floatstone doesn’t gain the property of negative mass when it's in its liquid state. But thanks to the natural and artificial cooling of the planet… more and more of the mantle is becoming solid, and it just so happens that a large portion of it is Floatstone.”
John could see where this was going.
“So more and more of the planet is moving away from the Earth’s center of gravity.” He stated. “That means those Earthquakes the other day were…”
“Yeah.” Confirmed Lenny. “And we only just noticed. We’ve got a week at most, before it comes apart. It’s too late to do anything meaningful now.”
“Damn.” Said John, feeling numb. “There’s really nothing we can do?”
“Nothing. I guess you can grab a shovel and start digging out Floatstone, if you wanna delay it by a few microseconds.”
Neither man laughed at Lenny’s dark joke.
There was silence after that. The call hadn’t ended; the two men were just thinking.
“John, I’ve gotta go.” Said Lenny. “You should hunker down somewhere. I can’t say you’ll make it out, but… well, hopefully it’ll be quick and painless. Same for me…”
“Don’t talk like that, man. Please.”
“Sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Then the call ended.
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Over the next few days, John paid rapt attention to the news, which was covering the increasingly frequent, increasingly violent earthquakes that had been happening all over the world. Europe, China, Australia, North and South America… nowhere was spared.
Everywhere shook, as the planet began tearing itself apart. Lenny had been telling the truth.
During the past week, John had moved all his belongings off of shelves and tables, and into cabinets, boxes, bins, and drawers. He’d put hand-rails in place on his walls, in case things shook too hard and he fell over.
He was always worried about the apartment building coming down on him, folding in under the pressure of the quaking.
On TV, the news loudly played. There was a Federal message to the citizens, telling them to do this or that in order to stay safe from the earthquakes. There were empty promises made to the people, saying that the Government was working with scientists from around the globe to find a solution to the quaking.
John felt depressed each time he heard it. But despite the sadness it caused, he still listened, as he needed to know when things would ‘go to hell’, as Lenny put it.
And that day was today, apparently.
Over the past few days, the news also reported on crime. Murder rates had skyrocketed, as had rape, forceful entry, and theft.
Outside on the streets, John could see rioters. People who had figured out what was happening to the planet were running around like headless chickens, doing whatever they wanted because it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Torches, molotovs, pillaging, gunshots in the street… the city was slowly but surely becoming a no-man’s-land.
He hadn’t gone outside in days. The power had cut off a few hours ago, and so had the water.
The newscasters had also stopped casting.
And at that moment, he heard banging on his door.
“Open up, old man! I wanna see ya!”
The voice was angry and fearful. Through the peephole, John could see a stranger, armed with a crowbar and a sack, looking for all the world like a common robber. The man’s face and knuckles were a conspicuous red, and he was giving a maniacal, toothy grin.
John wouldn’t be opening his door.
But as it turned out, there was no need.
*THWACK*
*THWACK*
“Come on! Come out!” The man outside screamed as he swung his crowbar into John’s door, over and over again. “Open the f*cking door!”
*THWACK*
*CRASH*
Noises of wood splintering and cracking reached John’s ears. He hid behind the couch.
The bloody man stepped into John’s home, through the shattered doorway.
“Where are you? Come out! I won’t hurt you much, if you just give me your food!”
John made no noise as he hid, clutching a vase in his arms.
Booted feet slowly clumped past the couch. John could almost feel the man’s eyes sweeping across his living room.
The boots moved onwards.
Seeing his chance, John jumped out of his spot as the man passed, positioning himself behind the maniac and bringing the vase down as hard as he could.
It shattered against the man’s skull with a crash, and the maniac screamed.
But the man wasn’t dead, or even knocked out. He just turned to face John, blood streaming down his face and a hateful, baleful gleam in his eye.
“You,” he growled. “YOU F*CKING BETTER RUN!”
He shouted, raising his crowbar above his head, and John sprinted for the front door.
He was slow though. At age sixty, mobility was heavily limited.
John only made it to the doorway before he felt an impact over the crown of his head, and blacked out.
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When John woke back up, he felt pain. Dark purple bruises lined his body and a welt had risen on his head, slowly bleeding pus and blood.
“Guh-” He yelped as he got to his feet.
His legs hadn’t been spared the abuse, and they screamed through his nerves at the slightest motion.
He still stood. The maniac was gone.
His home was trashed though.
Countertops were shattered, ripped and torn clothes littered the floor, as did sawdust and pieces of glass. There were gashes in the walls and burn-marks on the stove. The refrigerator was wide open, food haphazardly thrown around, spilled, and stolen.
His mother’s urn was tipped over, ashes had spilled out and spread across the room. Footprints could be seen in the dusk-film it had left behind.
The old, battered man fell to his knees and sobbed.
The earth trembled uncaringly.
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