The most important day of humanity's brief existence on Planet Earth began at exactly five o'clock in the morning Eastern Standard Time, on December 31st, 1999.
Unlike the commencement of most of the important things that happened in the life of humanity--things like the birth of inventors or dictators or prophets, or strains of bacilli gently mutating to infect and murder a significant percentage of people on a continent--this important beginning was televised.
It wasn't viewed by a huge number of people in the city where this story takes place, but it came as quite a surprise to the residents of Kiritimati, also known as Christmas Island (named, not surprisingly, because intrepid but unimaginative explorers discovered it on a certain holiday). It is located at 1° 52′ 0″ N, 157° 24′ 0″ W, is famous for its coral and nature sanctuaries, and is an excellent place to do some birdwatching, surfing and/or bone fishing.
It will now go down in history (what history is left to go down anyway) as the place where its roughly 5,600 inhabitants were the surprised first witnesses to the terrible, awful thing that would end their lives, and eventually the lives of every human being on the planet. There were also cameras there, uplinked to satellites, and so the news traveled quickly to those who were up and connected enough to hear about it.
Australia was gearing up for the night's festivities, Asia was finishing dinner, most of Europe was going about its daily routine, so the news spread like a gently mutated bacilli in those places. Pretty much any sensible person in the Americas was still asleep, perhaps dreaming sweet dreams that could only serve to stave off the harsh reality of this terrible, awful thing that would greet them upon waking.
In essence, it took no one long to figure out it was like this: As each country and people celebrated the new year, it was wiped off the face of the planet. It was devastation on an unprecedented scale. It was unrelenting, unstoppable, an end to all things.
Humanity, to its credit, was not completely unprepared for this eventuality. There has always been a wide, fundamental streak of fatalism in human beings as a species, an idea that an ending is inevitable, and that one should be prepared. Most of this is a result of the finite length of individual existence, and that in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except for death and possibly some other thing.
This knowledge, that there will eventually come a full stop to the physical world, manifested itself on an individual level in one of several ways: either the person got severely depressed, or he learned not to think about it, or he latched on to a way to prepare for the end that made it seem not like the actual end, but just a moving on to another (usually better, but not always) existence.
Religions popped up early and often in the stretch of human history, with the idea that once the end came, if you were prepared enough, you could continue on in some manner. Initially this idea presented itself as a sort of bargain: If I don't steal or molest my neighbor's wife or oxen, then the giant crocodile will not chew me up and spit me into the pit of knives and I will get to eat honeyed fruit and sit on palm leaves forever. Or something similar.
Most cultures celebrated this idea of death and rebirth in the form of a new year's celebration, a time to let the past year go and prepare for the next one. If there were a lot of unmolested oxen then the next year would be bountiful. If there were a lot of inexplicably pregnant wives then the crops would fail. But the idea that the end was also a beginning has always been very firmly fixed in the mind of most human beings.
Usually this celebration took place on one of the equinoxes, which meant that stars were in a certain place and the sun was up for a longer or shorter time than what seemed usual. For the most part time was measured in sunrises and sunsets, in cold seasons and warm seasons, and nobody looked much beyond that. At leasy no one worth speaking of.
Eventually, however, humans started putting numbers and things into columns and checking boxes on forms and this higgledy-piggledy way of operating was tossed out in favor of something called a calendar with real numbers and actual dates that were measured in a scientific manner.
One group of humans, the Romans, were specifically good at that sort of thing. They were a people who adored putting things in their proper place, celebrating holidays, and the mass murder of other cultures. And so they created a calendar that put history in its proper place, took inventory of when and where holidays should happen, and allowed them to murder in an organized manner.
But despite their love of organization--or perhaps because of their distraction by all the murder--the Julian calendar, as it was called, was eventually discovered to be off by a full eleven minutes a year. So having none of that, another organization called the Catholic Church (known for some of the same things as the Romans, actually) came up with the Gregorian Calendar (named for someone named Gregory, probably), and that's what was adopted and used by most of the world ever since.
The thing is, calendars are all about numbers, and since human beings tend to put significance on certain of these, such as multiples of 10, 100, and 1000, they celebrate the passing of these dates as somehow important. Decades happen fairly often, centuries less so.
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Since the invention of the Gregorian calendar, only one millennium has passed, that being the year 1000, and the significance of this completely man-made date was not lost on the populace of the time.
In the decade leading the end of the first 1000 years since the birth of a prophet (or son of a deity, if you prefer), people began to get more and more convinced that something wonderful or terrible was going to happen. Or something wonderfully terrible. Or something terribly wonderful. But definitely something.
Dark Age peasants streamed into churches and begged forgiveness for real and imaginary slights against God, people began either giving away or hoarding possessions, and many slewed up or down the scale of piousness and riotousness. As the millennium grew nearer, some people drank themselves to death, ate themselves to death, or simply killed themselves to death. It was a tumultuous period.
Or at least we think it was. Historians are, as historians are wont to be, divided.
But then, 1000 came and went without a blip, and those who were left went back to wallowing in uneducated filth and worriedly wiggling their black teeth in infected gums. And so humanity survived to the second millennium.
After a thousand years, what does the human race have to say for itself?
Have they come this far technologically, philosophically, and spiritually just to start wringing their hands in fear of an imaginary judgment that could occur simply because a church official set the birthday of a prophet (or son of a deity, if you prefer) as 1? And by all accounts did it incorrectly?
Ridiculous! Unthinkable! It is to laugh.
And so, with that peculiar human trait of seeing a boogeyman in a dark closet that was obviously empty when the lights were on, a lot of people began seriously wringing their hands in fear. There were three prevalent reasons for this that became apparent in the late 1990s:
Y2K - This is the idea that computers, which have become so prevalent and basically run human society, were built with an inherent flaw: their date counters were created and set to be used in the 20th century.
The companies that made them, being the forward thinking entities that companies generally are, did not account for the fact that at some point the century would change from 19XX to 20XX, and neglected to program that into the computers. So, some alarmed people theorized, when the new year occurs, all the date counters will roll over to 1900 again, and the computers will realize that computers had not been invented yet in 1900 and cease working on the basis that they have a good 40 years before they would be needed for anything.
The upshot of this, the alarmed people speculated, is that the entire world running on computers, from the defense industry, to the stock exchange, to cars and video game systems, would seize up and refuse to work, or at least start outputting turn-of-the-century slang: "ERROR 231: The program is about half a bubble off a plumb."
Airplanes will fall out of the sky. The economy will collapse as digital money becomes even more non-existent. Humanity will go back to nomadic subsistence living and have only the toilet paper they thought to pack beforehand.
The Rapture - This one is rather complex and has been covered in detail in other volumes, but suffice it to say that a 19th century theologian took it upon himself to translate the Christian Bible in such a way as to put very specific meaning to very vague lines of scripture.
The basic idea is that when the prophet (or son of a deity if you prefer, and in this instance it would only make sense) returns to judge the righteous and the unrighteous, he will do so only after magically whisking the True Believers into paradise and leaving the rest to muddle through famine, wars, meteorites, dragons and the like until he found time to teleport down again and send everyone to eternal torment.
There was no particular reason to think this would happen on the millennium, but the True Believers were hoping.
Terrorism - People had been unhappy in a lot of places for a long time on Earth, and a lot of those people looked around and saw a great number of people to blame for their unhappiness.
In fairness, these unhappy people often had real and valid justification for all their grief. A lot of bad things had been done to a lot of groups of people in the name of a country, or a religion, or just because. Oppression happens during the end of the 20th century much the same way it happened in every subsequent century, and the people who were oppressed often got sick of it and fought back.
One group in the late 18th century got so sick of being oppressed by a bigger country that they waged a terror campaign to get the oppressors off their backs. They didn't have much except for resentment and a fair amount of pluck, but they put their terrorist plans into action and eventually exasperated the controlling country so much that the King gave up and went to have some tea and concentrate on India. No one knows whatever happened to that group of terrorists. Their struggle has been lost to time.
Unfortunately, where muskets and tar and feathers were the weapons of terror in the 18th century, the collapse of a country called the Soviet Union and the disorganized dismantling of its nuclear programs meant that there were all sorts of dangerous things unaccounted for and floating around where oppressed freedom fighters might get their hands on them.
And so the anger might manifest in a nuclear device, or a dozen or a hundred, going off in major cities across the globe.
Another country called the United States had seen its share of terror, both foreign and domestic. Earlier in the decade someone had set off a van full of explosions at a government building, and even the center of economic power had been hit by a (fortunately minor) act of terrorism. So by 1999 the US had a real understanding of how bad things could get.
But even with these three worries lurking around the bend of the millennium, the majority of the world's population just gave it some thought and let it go. The chances against anything really terrible happening were terrifically small, and anyway, even if something bad did happen, humanity would press on, would rebuild, would prosper again, so there was no reason to get worked up about it.
Unfortunately, as was made plain at 5 am Eastern Standard Time in the Christmas Islands, there was reason to get worked up about it. And though no one understood at the time, that little coral atoll, stripped of humanity and some of the most endangered species on earth, was the beginning of the end of everything.
And one man, six and a half hours later, was about to find that out.