Extinction

by Ray Hammond

  ‘Hold it,’ said Emilia, racing her observation chair around the perimeter of the holo-pit to position herself directly over the point where the beam of red light had struck the Earth.

  ‘That’s the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755,’ she announced. ‘Almost Magnitude Nine. The tsunami that followed killed over sixty thousand people. Run it back.’

  The globe reversed so that Michael could see the red line connecting to a huge black weather swirl over the Indian Ocean.

  ‘This is the crucial part of Bob Fivetrees’s work,’ explained Emilia, swivelling in her motorized chair to face Michael. ‘He compared historical climate records with the Jesuit observations, and then related both of them to the seismic logs. Looks like that storm occurred three weeks before the Lisbon quake – his software makes a direct connection.’

  After ninety more minutes of simulations of historic data, the researchers had finally caught up to the present day. Each of the main seismic events that had been modelled and matched to weather patterns was now posted on a transparent laser-display board beside the holo-pit, and Emilia finally declared herself ready for a coffee break.

  ‘We’re just about to run the magnetic force-fields model with the latest data on climate-management output,’ she explained as they stood in the visitor’s gallery, sipping sweet Turkish coffee from small china cups.

  ‘Are you going to allow for the new solar output due from the moon?’ asked Zaoskoufis. ‘I know the resource is not officially open yet, but they’re already applying some of its energy.’

  Emilia nodded. ‘I’ve modelled it as if the moon is already fully on-line. We’ve got the published data on their projected output.’

  It was just after 4.20 a.m. Athens time when Emilia Knight and her fellow scientists resumed their positions around the Simulation Theater, Michael once more took his seat in the viewing gallery.

  Again, he watched with fascination as the bright mauve rings of light representing the planet’s magnetic heartbeat spun, skipped and bowed around the globe. Sometimes they flared out into space for three or four times the Earth’s own diameter, sometimes they flattened down to creep closely over the surface of the planet itself.

  ‘Let’s have it all,’ ordered Emilia.

  It seemed as if the planet and its force field of magnetic rings had suddenly been hit by a hundred bolts of lightning. Red laser lines shot down from the encompassing flux, connecting to the surface to indicate where the Earth’s crust itself was being broken and cracked, as the inner core-dynamo bulged and pushed under the churning magnetic compulsion.

  ‘Stop. Stop!’ shouted Emilia. Then she extended her own laser-control display and brought the simulation to rest.

  There were now too many red lines criss-crossing the planet to count.

  ‘It’s started a whole chain reaction of eruptions and earthquakes,’ Emilia observed quietly as she gazed at the frozen image. She raised her hands to the side of her face to block out her peripheral sight, to help her think better. ‘One global-scale seismic event triggering another, hopping along the same fault line.’

  There was a long silence as they all gazed at the model of the Earth. It seemed as if the crust had torn along its seams.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Michael.

  Emilia shrugged and projected a data panel onto the simulation overlay. ‘We’ve just witnessed the start of magnetic pole reversal,’ she explained, swinging round in her chair. ‘The charged particles reflected back towards the Earth by the climate-management mirrors managed to weaken the polarity of the magnetosphere so much that it started to oscillate, north flipping to south, south to north, then back again. Of course, that causes massive disruption to the magnetic currents in the Earth’s mantle – which triggers seismic chaos all around the planet.’

  Michael had no idea what to say. Eventually he asked, ‘How long would it go on for?’

  Emilia shook her head. ‘We don’t really know. Most previous pole reversals on Earth have taken about five thousand years – which is almost instant by geological timescales. But one or two of them seemed to have occurred much faster – there’s palaeomagnetic evidence from Steen’s Mountain in Oregon that one reversal occurred in just a few weeks. The magnetostratiographic data is very convincing.’

  Michael realized that, just like lawyers faced with confusing legalities, Emilia and her scientific colleagues were falling back on the arcane jargon of their discipline to try and impose a structure onto the seemingly chaotic issues now under consideration.

  ‘But what it really means is that many thousands of people will die from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, right?’ he said, deliberately reductionist.

  ‘Well, that might be true, but only if Professor Fivetrees was right about this,’ agreed Steve Bardini.

  Emilia nodded. ‘Yes – if he was right.’

  A high trilling sound filled the Simulation Theater. Giorgio Zaoskoufis reached forward quickly and touched an icon on his workstation to silence it.

  ‘That’s a warning coming in from Geohazard Labs in Tokyo,’ he said. ‘Shall I project it here or go next door to the Risk Monitoring Centre?’

  Emilia stepped down from her mobile viewing chair. ‘We’re done with this, Giorgio. At least for tonight. Let’s see what Tokyo wants to tell us.’

  The Greek geophysicist killed the display in the holo-pit and patched the Japanese feed onto the large wall-screens. They saw a map of Indonesia appear and the myriad islands of the Java Sea.

  ‘Holy shit,’ exclaimed Steve Bardini. ‘They’ve got a Level Five warning out on Papandayan. Zoom in.’

  Zaoskoufis obliged and they saw a chain of islands, sixty miles south of Jakarta, one of which was highlighted by a red circle. Inset into this screen display were real-time windows showing seismic sensor readings, magma-flow projections and ash-dispersal zones. Across the bottom of the screen a caption running from right to left estimated the level of strength of anticipated tsunamis.

  ‘Papandayan’s a stratovolcano,’ Steve explained for Michael’s benefit, ‘a near neighbour of Krakatoa, in the hottest volcanic belt in the world. It’s been dormant since 1942.’

  ‘Not for very much longer, though,’ said Zaoskoufis. ‘It looks like she’s going to blow sky-high in the next forty-eight hours.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The great Javanese volcano Papandayan, situated on the southern coast of Java at 7.32S – 107.73E, began its latest (and final) venting early on the morning of 26 September 2055.

  The first explosion took place at 7.51 a.m. local time, when the lava dome split asunder and ash and boiling water vapour were thrown up into the atmosphere to a height of over eighteen kilometres.

  At 11.19 a.m., a second and far larger double explosion occurred when Papandayan’s volcanic chimney itself was shot upwards like a plug from a barrel, thrusting an estimated four billion tons of rock, ash and debris over twenty kilometres into the air. The explosion was heard on all 13,000 islands of the Nusantara chain, across all of Indonesia, and as far away as Singapore, Australia, the Philippines and Japan. The total force of the energy released was estimated to be between 500 and 1,000 times greater than the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested.

  The previous largest-ever volcanic explosion had been recorded in 1883 when neighbouring Krakatoa erupted, killing more than 36,000 people. Over ninety per cent of those deaths were caused by the mega-tsunamis that swept the coastlines of the Indonesian islands as Krakatoa imploded, causing two-thirds of its underlying volcanic island to fall into the sea.

  If volcanoes could ever be thought to be competitive, Papandayan effortlessly topped Krakatoa’s paltry efforts. In its great final explosion, Papandayan too ceased to exist, as if making an insensible effort to mimic its former neighbour.

  First Papandayan’s long-parturient 8,700-foot-high crater was levelled as its superheated pressure-cauldron of magma exploded. The heat and velocity were so great that the spewing lava emerged looking like a pink foam.

&nb
sp; Then, as its roaring chimney became more of an obstruction than a vent for the molten rocks below, the mountain itself blew out sideways, like a giant car-bomb stuffed with Semtex. Superheated rocks and gas were ejected over a ninety-mile radius at supersonic speed.

  Then the underwater base of the mountain itself imploded.

  For the people living on nearby islands day turned to night as the boiling rocks mixed with air in the stratosphere, before cooling and solidifying to descend as light pumice – a debris-fall that lasted for over sixteen hours, forming an obsidian deposit ten metres thick. Unfortunately for animals and for the many humans caught without shelter, this precipitation also included huge quantities of solid rocks falling back towards the ground at a speed of 200 kilometres per hour.

  The gloomy, roaring twilight that enveloped all of the south Javanese islands was constantly split by jagged forks of volcanic lightning – an electrical discharge caused by the mid-air collision of volcanic ash and magma.

  As Papandayan’s abyssal lava chamber emptied, hotter and denser rocks from deep within the mantle rushed up to join the pumice and ash that were now spewing upwards at a rate of 100,000 tons per second.

  Even when they had found shelter in time, the humans caught within the ninety-kilometre volcanic fallout zone had little chance of survival. Like all stratovolcanos, Papandayan produced a gas that was a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide, a combination ruinous to mucous membrane and animal tissue. The first inhalation of this gas stripped the linings from human lungs, causing them to fill with fluid. The second breath caused inhaled ash to mix with this fluid to form a cement. The third breath thickened and set that cement. Over 250,000 people suffocated in this horrendous manner.

  Other victims nearer to the pyroclastic flow as it burst from the sides of the volcano died instantly of thermal shock – their tissue vaporized, their brains boiled, their bones and teeth crystallizing before being shattered.

  Successive waves of mega-tsunamis shot outwards in concentric circles, sweeping over the entire southern coasts of Java and Sumatra, overwhelming the cities of Bengkulu, Padong, Yogya-harta and Kupang.

  Of the thousands of separate islands that made up the Indonesian nation, 5,311 were completely stripped of all life forms by successive waves measured by Geohazard’s satellites at over fifty metres high.

  These multiple mega-tsunamis also radiated north-west for 1,500 miles, completely submerging the Maldives and drowning 800 square miles of southern Sri Lanka.

  Just over 600 miles to the south of Papandayan itself Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands also disappeared beneath the waves, and to the east the successive embankments of water submerged the north-eastern Australian coastline and up to seven miles inland. All the low-lying areas of Darwin were flooded for three days.

  Despite the advance warning provided by Geohazard Laboratories in Tokyo, over three million people died in the twenty-four hours following the world’s first recorded global-scale geophysical event – mostly those who were unable to escape to high ground.

  The skies went dark over all of South-East Asia, and the ash canopy drifted as far east as the Central Pacific. All of the climate-management companies were immediately tasked with the job of directing winds to disperse the ash safely over the remote Southern Oceans.

  WORLD’S WORST-EVER VOLCANIC ERUPTION, trumpeted the Hong Kong Star. But how did they know? Human beings had a very limited perspective from which to judge the typical geophysical behaviour of their host planet. As a species, Homo sapiens had been around for only 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s lifetime to date.

  *

  ‘Welcome to the BBC,’ said Perdita Curtis cheerily, as she ushered Michael Fairfax, Emilia Knight and Steve Bardini into a meeting room on the eleventh floor of the Corporation’s new West London headquarters. ‘My executive producer will try to join us later, but he’s frantically busy preparing for our moon broadcast – as we all are. Only ten days to go!’

  The three American visitors sat down around a large smart-table. Automatically, they ran their fingers in rough squares over the glass surface immediately in front of them to set up their own computing, note-taking and communications spaces.

  Michael Fairfax now felt both fully rested and back in synch with European circadian rhythms. While Emilia and Steve had remained for two days at Geohazard’s European HQ in Piraeus, helping Giorgio Zaoskoufis and other scientific colleagues around the world to cope with the Indonesian disaster, Michael himself had caught up with his sleep in a small Athens hotel before picking up the reins of his case with his Brussels colleagues and discussing what their next move should be.

  On the insistence of his new legal partners in Belgium, the firm of Beauchamp, Seifert and Co had formally applied to the International Court of Civil Justice in The Hague for writs of witness protection for both Dr Emilia Knight and Counsellor Michael Fairfax. The lawyer had provided live testimony to the court about the threats received from American security agents via a secure video link from Athens. News of the writs’ subsequent granting was then supplied to both the California Bar Association and the US State Department.

  ‘If they’re still after you, it should at least give them pause for thought,’ explained human rights lawyer Anatole Karmin, one of Michael’s new associates in Brussels. ‘It was only last year that President Underwood went out on a limb to secure US ratification of the new international court. The American security services won’t want to be seen to be interfering with witnesses in the first case to involve major American corporations.’

  And, with the approval of his new legal colleagues, Michael also made the decision to approach Perdita Curtis and the BBC in London with the latest theories developed by his geophysicist friends.

  He himself was unqualified to judge whether there was any validity in the assertion that climate management was triggering worldwide seismic unrest. But he was sure that the claim that it might cause a chain reaction of global-scale geophysical events would not only get the media’s attention, it might also bring Nick Negromonte and other such oligarchs of the energy industry rapidly to the negotiating table.

  Like his Brussels associates, Michael had little doubt that in the long run the courts would find in favour of the victims of global warming. But he preferred to go for a quick interim settlement, something he could pass on to the hulk people now, to bolster their ongoing belief in what was certain to be a long and very drawn-out process of litigation.

  And while he had been waiting in the Athens sunshine, Michael had also found the courage to discard his air-porous latex gloves. After wearing them for over eight weeks, his scarred hands and regrowing nails no longer looked quite so revolting.

  ‘You are still available to take part in our debate from Luna City?’ Perdy asked him as she pulled her guest list up onto the tabletop. ‘I’m relying on you to help make it hard-hitting.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ agreed the lawyer. ‘I’m looking forward to it. But the reason that I wanted to introduce you to my two colleagues here today is that they have been developing the Berkeley model of the Earth’s magnetic fields that I showed you a few weeks ago. They’ve linked it to climate records – and to climate-management data – and we thought you’d like to see the result.’

  Steve Bardini patched the updated, revised and now much-enlarged simulation onto the wall-screen.

  ‘I’ve speeded it up considerably,’ he explained as they sat watching the 3-D image of the Earth as global seismic chaos developed.

  As the simulation finished running, Perdy Curtis tapped her fingertips slowly on the glass table top.

  ‘It’s certainly very topical – what with that Indonesian volcanic eruption,’ she observed. ‘Could you speed it up still further?’

  Steve nodded. ‘It all depends on how much detail you want. You can have anything from thirty seconds to thirty hours.’

  ‘I’d like to use it during my part of the debate,’ Michael explained. ‘That’s if you can find the budget to b
ring Steve along to run it for me. I’d also like viewers to be able to download the data for themselves, if they’re interested.’

  ‘Ah, budget, budget,’ sighed Perdy. ‘This thing’s really getting out of control. It looks like becoming the most expensive live broadcast the BBC has ever done.’

  ‘President Underwood is opening the debate, right?’ asked Emilia.

  ‘Everything’s gone mad since that announcement,’ confirmed Perdy, nodding. She ran her fingers through her short hair. ‘It seems as if everybody now wants to come to the moon. Even the Director-General of the BBC says he wants to be part of the audience.’

  ‘And I want you to invite Doctor Knight, too,’ said Michael. ‘I’d like her to speak immediately after me.’

  Perdy sighed and glanced down her lengthy list of names.

  ‘I’ve got forty-two contributor places available and three hundred and seventeen world-class experts all asking to attend. Plus I’ve got to find room for some genuine audience.’

  ‘It was Dr Knight who found the plutonium on the Samoan volcano,’ explained Michael. ‘I’d like to see President Underwood’s face when she announces that on a live TV broadcast.’

  *

  The instant TV ratings polls proved once again that Nicholas Negromonte had an outstanding talent for dreaming up publicity stunts guaranteed to attract world attention. Over two hundred million people had tuned in to watch his blast-off to the moon in the refurbished back-up Apollo 11 spacecraft.

  In recent years, every major surge in ERGIA’s corporate expansion had been preceded by such a headline-grabbing stunt. Now the forthcoming initial public offering of shares in LunaSun Inc was to be publicized by this historic re-enactment of mankind’s first-ever moon landing.

  Just as entrepreneurs of previous centuries had broken ballooning records, climbed mountains or raced yachts, Nick Negromonte had continued the tradition of entertaining, amusing and seducing those who might become his shareholders and customers. Many critics and competitors dismissed him as a cynical exploiter of the media. Some said he patronized and despised the public who admired him so much. Others felt that all such acts of self-display were in bad taste.