GROUND ZERO : EARTH
GROUND ZERO : EARTH
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. A sigh. And a small shudder on the ground. At 5.14am GMT on December 14th, as most of the world slept - Australia basked in sunshine, and Europe in darkness, a small pulse slowly enveloped the world.
All life was extinguished. Wherever life was, whatever it was doing, it ceased.
A boiling beach next to a cool sea in a place distant from where man had ever been felt mans touch for the first time. As clouds passed above, a water crab scuttled across the sand. It stumbled and collapsed. In the sky above birds dropped out of the sky as the beat of their wings were suddenly cut short. In the depths of the ocean creatures beyond human imagination went limp. All animal life had suddenly been cut short, their lives smothered by an unseen hand.
Mankind suffered equally. People were walking across the street and stumbled, fell over into the path of oncoming vehicles. Drivers slumped in front of their wheels. The natural order of things continued, at least for a few moments. And then life became disordered. Things fell apart.
Everything remained where it fell. Tube trains ran past their stops, past the end of the line, past the concrete barriers, past the metal, the glass, the flesh, to where they accelerated to an abrupt halt and left the rails - plunging into black concrete, leaving imprints in the concrete where velocity�s fingerprint pushed an unstoppable force into an immovable object. And tonnes of steel and pounds of flesh crumpled like screwed up paper in a trashcan.
In public places and crowded buses bodies fell onto each other, wrapped in suits and clutching bags in cold fingers. Bodies decomposed where they fell, but there was nothing to eat them. At least two billion human beings were asleep at the moment they breathed their last. And slowly, without human intervention, everything just carried on as normal, as best it could.
Trains failed to stop at red lights. They ploughed through the end of the line at high speeds, catapulting debris into the abandoned cities. Planes slowly dipped from the sky. Those on autopilot continued numbly on, then as the fuel slipped away, sunk to ground level. Cars veered across the road before making contact with whatever was in the way, be that flesh, metal, concrete, whatever. A mass of thousands upon thousands of pile ups of twisted metal and memories.
Cookers remained on, pressure slowly cooking, until random explosions occurred over the spectral, enormous wasteland. Until the power stations fall into disrepair, fail, and cease.
Televisions blared continuously and burglar alarms remain primed. Alarm clocks went off all morning, every morning, shattering the silence for one hour every morning. Radio stations broadcast until the end of the song, and after ten seconds of silence, filled the airwaves with a continuous ringing, warning those in the studio that the air was empty, but they could not hear. CD players continued for a few minutes, until the end of the CD, and then fell silent. Within hours, there was no sound on the globe bar that of the tides.
The sun still rises and sets. The tides still move in and out. The moon still orbits. Buildings remain stoic, immemorial, artefacts of a civilisation past. Eventually, in time, with storms and floods, some will fall to the ground. The sea encroaches a few feet at a time, with each and ever year, slowly eating the land. All human history will become just that - history, with a sudden, unexpected ending, as if the power cable was severed and the work left undone.
Memory is all that is left. Whatever caused the genocide of life on this planet would have been irrelevant in a few weeks or months time, even if anyone was left to evaluate it. The thing that trips the switch, the trigger that pushes the button, the madness that will kill us all, will ultimately be meaningless. Not because it has no meaning, but because whatever it is, it won�t be won if there�s no-one left to win it. Pride is the sin that will destroy us. There are those that would rather destroy the world through their intolerance than leave anyone left alive on this rock called a planet. This is not the end. It is the beginning.
� copyright Mark Reed, 1991-2002 except where indicated