General Dynamics

There wasn’t much in the way of warning. At 11:41EST an emergency alert became the crawl that ran along the bottom of the CNN feed in Times Square. November. Broadway matinee-ers and business-folk stopping. Reading. A guy said:

Well I guess that shoots the whole afternoon.

An old lady said: What does it mean an “unmonitored body?”

A guy in a turban said: That’s 37 minutes from now

Since everybody dialed their cells at once, none of them worked and 20 odd minutes later the cell-grids collapsed under a weird flood of hot magnetic interference. The last thing that flashed on the CNN feed in Times Square was a 17 second shot of the President looking somewhere off camera and saying “Like a microwave oven?”

Then everything went off for good.

In Times square, two things happened. First, and immediately , people began to yell and scream. It started all at once: a yearning, freaked-out, information-hungry thing getting louder. Murmuring begat curiosity begat realization which turned loud and violent. Argument and fear blossoming everywhere in the valley formed by the intersection of Broadway and 7^th Avenue. (37 minutes). The next and - as it turned out - last thing that happened in Times Square was that everybody in it stared to try to get out of it. They couldn’t of course, there was no time. But some people did make it down to the shore of the East river or the Hudson and those folks were rewarded - in a way - for the trouble.

At 12:16, just as a teeming , stumbling mass of hundreds of thousands hit the shore area of the Hudson, the asteroid - which an astronomer in the early goings of the 14^th century had named “Mord” - Collided with an insignificant yellow star in the central quadrant of the milky way galaxy. This yellow star, though small, held 10 planets and countless smaller bodies in it’s considerable gravitational sway. Three of them had been populated by living things at one time or another and one - a watery, smallish and volatile stone the inhabitants of which had named "Earth" - still did. None of the system, which had been hanging in an astonishingly testy galactic balance for almost 300 trillion years, ever had a chance.

***

When Gi Then first became aware of Mord he was only a boy. He came from a long line of astronomers and the nature and tendencies of the stars and planets was his passion and his birthright. Mord was one thousands of heavenly bodies that his father and grandfather and great grandfather had discovered and cataloged with careful notations and imagery. But - his own father had told him - it was the only one they’d ever come across that had suddenly ceased to be. Somewhere around 400 years BC Mord just disappeared from the night sky without a trace.

Gi Then’s Great Grandfather - who was also named Gi Then - proclaimed in the days and weeks following Mord’s disappearance that he could predict, with great accuracy, the last days of human kind, and of the very earth itself. He summoned the townsfolk saying: “These are secrets known only to me, so it is up to me to keep them or do what good I can with them. I choose to protect our people and our families.”

Unfortunately though, The Emperor at the time didn’t agree with Gi Then or his findings. When Gi arrived to reveal the amazing date and time, he found a crowd gathered for a different reason. He was still loudly cursing the Emperor, the townspeople, and all their unborn kin as the Emperor’s goons sliced off his head and paraded it around the square and the town like Lord Stanley’s Cup. And thus, the secret prediction of Earth’s untimely destruction went undiscovered for many many thousands of years.

***

At around 12:17 the giant rock Mord collided with the sun triggering a series of amazing and awful events. The initial collision was so loud that everybody on earth not wearing protective earplugs was instantly and irrevocably deafened. Following the noise there was a blinding flash of light that seemed to get more intense and hot with each passing moment. If you were on the earth and standing outside, your eyes - even closed - were burned out, rendered useless by the scorching.

So most of the people thronging on the banks of the Hudson at 12:15 were too preoccupied with their burning eyes and blown-up ear drums to appreciate the spectacle. Nevertheless, a spectacle there was. The explosion of Mord and the sun was millions of light-years from earth, but the concussion wave that it spawned moved very quickly. Like a tsunami racing unseen through deep seas, so the burning, roiling heat-wind beamed across the universe. Most space-born objects in the first million light-years of it’s way were simply vaporized. The earth however, seemed to occupy a space in the void where the massive burning wave began to cool. So instead of being vaporized instantly the blue planet was superheated very quickly like a slab of leftover steak in a microwave. This superheating lasted only 7 scant minutes before the poor planet’s infrastructure began to tremble and give way. Also, because the sun was instantly doubled in size and temperature, it’s gravitational pull was also doubled and what wasn’t immediately destroyed began sucking irrevocably toward the conflagration.

***

Miss Rachel Thien, who through an astronomically improbable series of events, was actually Gi Then’s only living descendant, was able - through another set of ridiculous and fortunate improbabilities - to stay alive longer than any other living being in the metropolitan area. Since Rachel had been wrestling with clinical depression for the better part of her 30 years on earth, she’d confined herself to a life lived only for sleep and other bed-related activities. She'd ground her way through most of the 2000’s nestled safely in bed, sleeping or watching movies and gobbling whatever anti-depressed-anti-angst-anti-thinking meds her doctors had seen fit to dose her with. On the day when Mord hit the sun Rachel was bundled under two down comforters and a sheet and wearing a thick black eye-shade that helped her shut out the world and all it‘s mindless jibbering. At 12:17 the sound did not deafen her and the light did not blind her. From buried in the covers she saw the hot white glow filling her hallway and decided to investigate.

She doubled back to get her thick, black, old-lady style sunglasses and then took to the balcony of her apartment facing the Hudson at 23^rd st and the river. The first thing she saw was the George Washington Bridge in the distance coming free of it’s giant concrete housings and slowly drifting up into the air. Under it she saw the entire Hudson river heave itself skyward, breaking up into component parts from the bottom like raindrops which, also, then floated up. She looked to her right and saw New York City folding up like a gigantic carpet. The effect was uneven though and, in some places, appeared to have been reversed. She saw buildings lifting toward the sun (the entire sky seemed to have become the sun) and buildings being sucked down into a black void below the streets. Everywhere she looked she saw flying people screaming. She a terrified mother grabbing at her children as they floated bye. She saw a gaggle of people on a distant roof begin to ride the roof up like an oversized snowboard. She saw each one pop like a red-paintball as the gravitational forces - collapsing and confused -acted their last. Rachel was so amazed by what she was seeing that she didn’t register her own building shaking, coming un-mored, and blasting into the black space that had been the safe blue sky of NYC just a few minutes ago. She saw a couple making love in the air as they spiraled in the gold-white heat. She saw them burst one after the other and she saw the misty remains falling and spinning. She managed to stay in one piece as her building drifted higher and picked up speed. Just before her body imploded and rent itself apart Rachel looked out from her perch and regarded this final, amazing maelstrom and smiled. “Pretty much what I expected” she thought, and popped like a water balloon.

***

In the deep pacific, a man named John Fellows was diving in the Mariana Trench. Fellows had gotten the news but didn’t think much of it. He was already almost a mile underwater when the warnings flashed and he was making for a spot at a depth double that. “If everything’s over” he had radioed his wife “then I might as well try to set a record”. He took a heading for Challenger Deep, a small pocket in the trench that went down another five miles. Fellows hit the two-mile mark at 12:16EST and was racing downward like a bullet. At 12:17, though, his equipment started to flutter. His depth finder was all over the road. First it plummeted to beyond four miles deep, which Fellows knew was incorrect, and then it rocketed up to 2 miles, then one mile, then it was telling him he was back at the surface. By his own measure, he hadn‘t moved at all. He was aware then that his radio wasn’t working. No noise, no signal or interference, nothing. At 12:18 fellows was enveloped in a warm white light emanating from someplace below him, He didn’t have time to properly think it over though because seconds after he took his last reading (the depth gauge read +23meters) he falling downward toward an inky, total blackness. He'd washed out of the water which, plucked from it's ocean bed was now floating toward the heavens. He looked around, and finally up. Just before his body succumbed to newly minted laws of physics, he saw the entire pacific ocean suspended over his head and breaking into a trillion tiny drops. He smiled.

***

Valeri Hickey was just getting back to her pod at the north end of Icicle Works when Mord met sun. Icicle Works was located in “Santa’s Village” as her boss liked to call it from the warmth of his operations center hundreds of miles away. Valeri worked closer to the North Pole than just about anybody on earth ever had or (it turns out) ever would. Her “office” was in an large facility called “the pod” filled with magnetic monitoring devices and food. Valeri’s day to day activities were not complicated (“Two phd’s and a masters for that??” her dad had said when she’d been offered the post two years before). Basically she was there to watch.

“Watch what?” her mother had asked, sort of accusingly.

“Watch whatever happens” she’d replied, knowing the next question.

“What happens?” they both said at once.

At 12:17 Valeri watched the entire 230,000 square miles of the northern polar icecap buckle violently and start falling up. It was very, very cold day as most of her days were. But standing outside on this day in just jeans and a t-shirt she found herself sweating. She was standing on a gigantic sheet of ice which - in seconds - became a freezing sea. She was floating in a roiling icy sea, and she saw the pod hundreds of meters distant pitching and rolling like a sport-fisher. She was boiling in the sea as she felt herself begin to rise and separate into component parts.

***

Nobody got as good a view as Sgt. Major Tad Broach and he knew it. When the word had come he’d been drinking heavily in the hold of the massive Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier Abe Lincoln. Standing orders were that he get topside and fall in for debriefing, but instead, Broach made straight for his flight deck and his F-22 which, as luck would have it, were both at least partially fueled and armed. It hadn’t been post-flight checked and it wouldn’t be pre-flight checked, but Broach wasn't planning on a long flight. None of the other guys in the wing were anywhere around, but the Abe's shooter, a cranky old corporal named Kune materialized from a hatch opposite the flight deck:

“I can’t Tad”.

But as Broach moved past him he didn’t offer any resistance. He actually cleared both ends of the flight deck as Broach powered on and up and allowed his machine to slowly crawl toward the runway. Sgt. Tad was from place called Hope, North Dakota. He’d moved there when he was three years old from a small beach town in Rhode Island. As he and his parents drove through the state and the town that they’d be living in for the rest of forever, Tad Broach couldn’t get over the space. Such pure, constant, flat geological sameness was unheard of in New England and especially Rhode Island, where forest lead to woods lead to beaches and back to forest again. To stretch a gaze out over his back yard in North D and be able to let his eyes range for hundreds of miles before coming to rest on a staggered, Rocky Mountain horizon, was nothing less than perfection for a young Broach. He’d spent his life entire seeking vistas that could even come close to comparing and today he found one.

A Navy pilot is as close in theory to a robot as human tissue can afford to be. When in flight, the pilot is subject - at all times - to the commands of his wing commander. He cannot so much as slow down without clearance from command and witness by many more random radio operators. His life as a pilot was very much one spent in service of others.

Today though all that was gone. The instruments, awash in cosmic debris, proved almost completely useless and there wasn’t any voice on the radio. The shooter waived him into position and Broach powered up, engaging 29,000 foot-pounds of thrust under his aircraft and giving it as much throttle as he ever had before. After two minutes clear of the Abe, Sgt. Tad Broach was running 4 times the speed of sound and gradually gaining altitude. This is what he saw:

What appeared to be 4 suns had taken the place of the one usual sun in the sky. Broach was just singing the outside edge of South America heading northward toward Alaska at mach three. He was at 1500 feet when Mord struck. The four suns he had seen were suddenly mushed together and the light - even through several layers of Army tint and sunglasses - was blinding. To counter this effect, Broach began a long slow turn back out over the pacific and towards Japan. The explosion happened just as he settled into that heading and powered back up. As Mord dissolved into gas and kinetic energy, Broach had the aircraft pinned with every bit of horsepower she could muster running wide fucking open. When he heard the noise he pulled back on the stick and stared heading up up and away. Below him the earth could stand no more of gravity’s fickle games and finally came apart. Broach was straight backward and looking down over his shoulder as the sphere below him ripped itself into sections. He saw a sizable chunk of the north Americas, and the north pole itself, break away from a larger piece of the earth. He saw a weird brown light inside the middle of the bigger piece and he saw landmass drifting and spiraling in the void below him. He felt the aircraft losing traction in the sky like a car driving over a rickety bridge, collapsing more and more with every inch of advancement. He heard and saw another huge concussion. Then he was back home. It was the summer of 1972 in Hope North D. He was ten years old.

And so that’s it?

That’s it.

That’s all there is to it?

Cyclic on your left, throttle on top. Stick between your legs and pedals to move the nose.

Who taught you that?

The Army

I can’t believe it. It’s that simple.

Well maybe not that simple, but I sure could teach you. Maybe some day I will.

I hope so.

Yeah me too. So now lesee: that’s Fenway for a game, and learn how to fly. We’ve got ourselves a to-do list there.

Yeah but that’s what mom calls it, so lets call it something else.

Ok. But what?

How about just a list of things that we’re gonna do together?

Works for me dude. Maybe we can learn you how to fly and then have you fly us to Boston.

Really!!? That’s awesome…

And he remembered thinking long and hard about it. And laughing.