All Our Wrong Todays(89)
I’m simultaneously trying to get my scrambled mind back on an even keel, keep John locked away, and take over my earlier consciousness before the disaster I’m here to prevent plays out in its original sequence.
The bad news is it’s not working.
The good news is I spent five decades trapped in my own mind, so I’ve developed an array of cognitive tools with which to maneuver my consciousness to the forefront.
I see Lionel pull up the lever and activate the Engine. In a few seconds those glittering plumes of energy will spike out across the room, dazzling the witnesses and disrupting my invisibility field. My best chance, probably my only chance, to grab hold of this mind and get us out of here is while Tom is distracted by the experiment. The timing will have to be perfect, but I think I can do it . . .
Which is when the whole back wall of the room—it’s a metaphor, sure, but it’s also how it feels when it happens—explodes in a frenzy of brick and plaster, and something thick and black gushes in, threatening to drown all of us in dank, oily memories that I’ve never known before but which stick to everything they touch and burrow in roots of alarming solidity.
They’re a stranger’s memories, but this mind is their home too. These memories belong here just as mine do. Memories of a timeline where things go much, much worse.
129
This is how the apocalypse starts.
On July 11, 1965, Lionel Goettreider tests an experimental power source for a group of colleagues at a research laboratory in San Francisco, California. But while the device is gearing up to full operation, he is startled by the inexplicable appearance of a ghostly observer and abruptly switches off the machine, causing it to malfunction. Destructive energy erupts in fiery plumes. The lab is wrecked. Goettreider and his sixteen colleagues are incinerated. The observer—sorry, I don’t know why I’m describing the events as if I’m not part of them, but the memories flood into my mind with such velocity that it’s easier to be detached and reportorial about them than it is to absorb their sheer propulsion—the observer, me, I’m flung into a brand-new future as the time-travel apparatus overloads.
But the meltdown continues. A crater 2,000 miles across is carved into the Earth. It burns so hot the bottom is crystalline glass a mile thick. Since San Francisco is on the coast, half of the crater gets punched into the Pacific Ocean, causing tsunamis and earthquakes that decimate vast tranches of the eastern coasts of Asia and Australia. California is gone. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, South Dakota, most of North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and about half of Texas, three-quarters of British Columbia and the lower halves of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, and Coahuila de Zaragoza are seared into a rough arc of emptiness that quickly fills with seawater. Hawaii is obviously gone. Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands, gone. Japan is gone. Taiwan is gone. Papua New Guinea is gone. The Philippines are gone. Indonesia is gone. Malaysia is reduced to a quarter of its landmass. The North Island of New Zealand disappears but the South Island survives. Costa Rica and Panama more or less disintegrate. Earthquakes destabilize countless cities as tectonic spasms rend the planet’s surface.
The massive redistribution of global ocean levels, plus some warping effect on the Earth’s magnetic fields thanks to the unprecedented energy release from the meltdown, causes a polar shift—basically, a radical repositioning of the magnetic poles. The magnetic South Pole shifts a little under 1,000 miles to the middle of the Indian Ocean. The magnetic North Pole ends up in Hudson Bay. What’s left of Canada and the northern United States is sealed in a tomb of ice half a mile thick. The land under Antarctica is suddenly livable, virgin territory, desolate but untouched. So of course everyone invades it to claim it as their own.
That is, everyone who isn’t lobbing volleys of nuclear missiles at one another. The United States descends into a second civil war following a military coup that seizes the country’s nuclear arsenal and fires on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under the belief, despite contrary evidence, that the San Francisco explosion was the first strike of World War III. The Soviets claim innocence, but with a third of the United States vaporized and another third encased in ice, no one’s thinking clearly. Both the United States and the USSR are rendered uninhabitable for generations.
With the global weather system in chaos due to the polar shift, entire ecosystems collapse. Desperate survivors mass-migrate, trying to escape the undulating hurricane clouds of radioactive ash spreading across the planet. China seizes what’s left of Asia, insisting they’re uniquely poised to manage the cataclysm. Europe and Africa collapse into dozens of civil wars within individual countries. Australia tries to sit the whole thing out but that just makes them an easy target when China comes for them. South America declares an emergency political unification and ends up as the closest thing to a haven of stability, although nobody’s safe from the rancid clouds wafting down toxic ash.
But I still show up in 2016 with a crazy story about time travel.
Temporal drag is in full effect—my existence in 1965 demands that I’m born in 1983 to receive my consciousness in 2016. My mom’s parents were from northern England and survived World War III. My father’s parents never moved from Austria to Canada, so he grew up in the ruins of Vienna. They met in a hospital in Geneva. My father had lost both legs trying to stop a suicide bomber at the Voltaire Museum and my mother had gone blind after irradiated ash dusted her eyelashes while she hid out in an Alps ski resort that had been crushed by an avalanche and abandoned. She was halfway through Great Expectations when her sight winked out. A clerical error assigned them to the same room and they got to talking. My father offered to read my mother the rest of the novel out loud. It took three days to finish it. Afterward, they made love.