by Alan Seeger
What only a very few people knew was that Rules #2 and #3 had been blatantly and repeatedly violated beginning in 2016, but that these violations were all part of a concerted effort to prevent the possible extermination of all life on Earth.
As the saying goes, that’s just how things happen; you never think you are going to get a traffic ticket until you do. You never think you’ll get a terminal illness until you do.
And you never think the world’s going to end until it does.
BOOK ONE
CRISIS
I woke up from what I thought was a dream
Couldn’t believe what was happening to me
Looking out my back door
I saw the release of the dogs of war
And I thought to myself, dear God, this can’t be…
Then I thought of what they were saying on the TV
That was falling on my ear as I was sleeping
The man said, “It looks like there’s no hope in sight,
The end might come today, or it might be tonight,”
And I looked up just in time to see that…
The sky is falling, falling down,
The sky is falling, crashing on the ground,
The sky is falling, no Chicken Little scare,
The sky is falling, children crying in despair,
Ohh...
“Sky Is Falling,” Brad the Bard
CHAPTER 1
The Past
The morning that everything went south for the residents of the Western Hemisphere of Planet Earth dawned pretty much like any other morning; like practically every morning had, in fact, since time began. Of the roughly 5.1 trillion days that had passed since then — thinking in terms of how we measure days on Earth, that is — October 29, 2020 was nothing particularly unique; at least not at first.
Certainly, there had been some individual days over the countless millennia that were exceptional — particularly memorable, unusually beautiful or spectacularly catastrophic, but with rare exceptions, there had been no one around to keep a record of those days, at least not so far as we on Earth knew.
No one took notes, for example, on the day roughly 65 million years ago when an unnamed and unforeseen asteroid that we now refer to as the Chicxulub object came careening into the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. It was unforeseen by the residents of Earth, at least, but then they were primarily reptilian creatures of only moderate intelligence that paid little attention to things in the sky, apart from whether or not the Sun had risen.
The six-mile-wide rock detonated on impact, releasing more than two million times as much energy as the most powerful nuclear devices ever devised by present-day Man. It created a crater 110 miles across and instantly wiped out a significant portion of the fauna in North and Central America. It reshaped the Yucatan Peninsula and resulted in conditions very similar to what we now would refer to as a nuclear winter, globally devastating the dinosaurs that ruled the earth at that time and paving the way for Man’s mammalian ancestors to take over in something akin to a coup d’état.
Another somewhat smaller impact, but one which was much more devastating to human beings (who had long since become the dominant life form on the planet), came on June 29, 3123 BCE, when an asteroid nearly a mile wide entered the Earth’s atmosphere on a shallow trajectory. It clipped the peak of a mountain near present-day Köfels, Austria, causing the asteroid to explode before it ever had a chance to impact the ground. Because of this, it left no impact crater as such, but the plume of rocky debris that was thrown into a suborbital trajectory came raining down on the territories beneath its path, bringing fiery death to the inhabitants of the open plains of the Middle East, including thousands in the city-states of Sodom and Gomorrah. The event was forever immortalized in what would later be known as CHAPTER 19 of the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis (Bereshith in Hebrew) as “fire raining down from God in heaven.”
Then there was a similar event which occurred on June 30, 1908 when a relatively small comet crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now central Siberia, in eastern Asia. The heat of friction with the atmosphere caused it to explode while it was still several miles above the ground, in a blast roughly equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear weapon. The blast blew down trees in an area of more than eight hundred square miles, and left them pointing outwards from the center of the blast wave, in concentric circles.
There have been other, more recent events which had a less widespread but just as emotionally powerful impact; some of these were well documented, some less so, but the ones in recent memory all demonstrated the enormous, consistent and unfortunate capacity which human beings seem to have to kill each other for reasons political, religious and philosophical.
Prime examples include the events which took place on the evening of April 14, 1865, in which an American stage actor and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth fired a single bullet into the back of President Abraham Lincoln’s skull, mortally wounding him and bringing about his death in the wee hours of the next morning…
…or was Lincoln actually shot to death on February 27, 1860 by an unidentified man in strange, mottled green clothing who was wielding an unfamiliar sort of rapid-fire weapon, while Lincoln was delivering a speech at the Cooper Union Hall in New York City? There is conflicting information in some of the historical records, and it is unclear just why this might be so.
Similarly, November 22, 1963 sticks in the minds of many Americans of a certain age as the day that Camelot’s shining glory was shattered. They watched helplessly as the news came that the young President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had had his brains blown out while riding through Dallas, Texas in his limousine, shot by a former U.S. Army sharpshooter and Soviet sympathizer by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet there are those who seem to have a different recollection — that it was the Soviet KGB who had formulated a plan to assassinate the American president, but botched the attempt, instead causing the death of his beautiful young wife Jacqueline — and that Kennedy, in a rage over his wife’s murder, launched a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union mere hours later, bringing about the Third World War, as documented in a book entitled “Saving Jackie K” by author L.D.C. Fitzgerald.
Here and there certain people seem to share memories that are in conflict with those of the other ninety-nine point nine percent of the world. These people insist that their stories are not fictional accounts, yet their experiences do not seem to agree with the majority. So which is our real history, and which is false? Which memories are authentic, and which ones are fictional?
Either way, history is rife with examples of man’s inhumanity to man, many of which are so vivid that one need only mention their dates to bring the images to mind:
December 7, 1941
April 19, 1995
September 11, 2001.
The strange thing is that nothing particularly historic happened on October 29, 2020, until many years later. Confused? We all were.
As the sun rose on that mid-autumn day, no one knew that events were occurring which would forever outshine all these other dates in the collective memory of mankind.
CHAPTER 2
2020
The roots of the crisis extended back several years, growing out of the increasingly competitive financial services market. The resources of the United States were already stretched dangerously thin by the two-front war — in reality now three fronts, if the truth be told — which was being waged in the Middle East.
The incumbent president, Sanford Williams, and his vice president Charles Scofield Mann had been elected in 2016 on a platform of peace and prosperity as well as a bit of an anti-Democratic backlash orchestrated by the GOP in the aftermath of the controversial two-term Obama presidency. Instead, however, the nation continued to be ensnared in the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which had begun after the attacks on America which took place on September 11, 2001 — the same wars from whic
h the Obama administration had tried to pull out, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, during the period from 2012 through 2015 — as well as the disastrous foray into Syria which began in early 2015, in response to the pleas of the rebel faction attempting to overthrow the corrupt and utterly ruthless government of President Bashar al-Assad.
In 2020, nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks and the start of the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ the United States was still spending more than $10 billion a month on these wars, and the toll in American lives during the nineteen years of fighting was drawing near to the 90,000 mark. It was not at all uncommon to hear American citizens refer to the entire debacle as “Vietnam II.”
The people of the United States as a whole were sick of the continuous drain and cost of war, but seemed bitterly divided as to the best course of action to take. President Williams continued to proclaim that America would “stay the course,” saying that the urgency of the situation in Iraq, which had flared up once again with the rise of ISIS (the organization known as the Islamic State in Iran and Syria) after the withdrawal of American troops in 2013, necessitated it. This had brought about further military action to prevent additional, deadlier attacks on the U.S., including the grim spectre of nuclear strikes on American cities by terror organizations such as al-Qaeda. Despite the fact that the first ten years of action in Iraq had turned up nothing but conventional arms, there were still those who insisted that it was a serious risk. The Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had been captured, tried and executed more than a decade ago along with most of his subordinates, but many critics of the both the Obama and Williams administrations privately intimated — and, at times, publicly proclaimed — that the entire action in Iraq had been based on, as Benjamin Disraeli once put it, “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” Most pointed back even further, to the George W. Bush administration which had sent troops to Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, saying that Bush had used 9/11 as an excuse to kick the ass of the Iraqi leader who had dared to stick his finger in the eye of W’s father, President George H. W. Bush, during the 1990 Gulf War.
The credit market had become an increasingly competitive place as the price of oil more than tripled between 2002 and 2019, affecting the prices of virtually everything else. Regular unleaded gasoline had reached an average of $8.42 per gallon in the United States by early 2020. The agriculture industry was hard hit because of the high cost of fuel, as was the airline industry. Thousands of long haul truck drivers had been forced into bankruptcy because, in most cases, it cost them substantially more to fuel their trucks than they were earning to drive them.
The financial sector seemed to be of two minds. On the one hand, the stock market appeared to be robust — the Dow Jones Industrial Average remained well above 18,000 and the Federal government continued to incrementally cut interest rates in order to boost the economy. Lenders, in turn, reduced their rates, making loans more affordable for both businesses and consumers.
However, the unexpected effect of these conditions was that the profit realized by many financial firms, while substantial, was based on artificially inflated income which, in many cases, originated from the refinancing of old loans by borrowers desperate to stay afloat in the turbulent financial seas. Foreclosures and loan defaults continued to increase as more and more small businesses were forced to close up shop, homeowners lost their jobs and subsequently their homes, and Americans in general felt their belts tighten bit by bit as the economy teetered on the brink of collapse.
In the summer of 2017, a chain reaction had begun which threatened to bring the nation to its knees. Keller and Keller, a financial brokerage with 2015 revenues of $37 billion, declared a loss for the second quarter of 2017 of some $209 million, citing its failed investments in the medical infrastructures of several African countries as well as a number of Central and South American nations. The following week, the Keller board of directors announced that they had relieved the company’s CEO, Richard Blue, and its CFO, John Peter Villanueva, of their duties, pending investigations of possibly illegal actions.
The loss meant that Keller was not able to meet its financial obligations for 2Q17 and a number of its creditors began to circle like sharks smelling blood. To compound the crisis, the following day the second largest consumer bank in the country, Shield Security Bank of Manhattan, announced that foreclosures had taken a toll on its business and it was dangerously close to insolvency. In the days that followed, more than a dozen other financial services firms announced similar problems. The degree and severity increased as they seemed to line up for a fall as if they were so many dominoes. It seemed like an instant replay of the events of 2008-2009.
Finally, ten days after the Keller announcement, every news outlet in the United States bore banner headlines reading things like SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION LOOMING and 1929 CRASH REPLAY PREDICTED. Critics cried out for the Federal government to intervene. Opponents and pundits warned against the already overtaxed Federal treasury being expected to shore up the financial sector.
In the years since then, the nation’s economy had flirted with the line between progress and decline almost on a daily basis. Through the Obama years, it seemed as if the economy was recovering; in 2013 and 2014, the nation’s mood actually became somewhat hopeful that the worst of the crisis was over.
However, during the last two years of Obama’s presidency, the Republican Party, spurred on by its Tea Party extremist faction, dug its heels in and refused any hint of compromise or cooperation, even more so than they had done during his first term.
By the last six months prior to the November 2016 presidential elections, the mood of the American people was best described as frantic. Banks and mortgage companies were failing all over the country, dying like the proverbial flies.
Sanford Henry Williams had been elected president in November 2016, in an election that saw a mere 32.8 percent of registered voters actually cast ballots, the lowest since 1824. When asked why they had failed or declined to vote, the typical response was “Why should I bother? The country is headed for the shithole.”
CHAPTER 3
13.7 billion years ago
The “universe” has been defined as “everything that exists,” and yet the truth of the matter is that many scientists believe that the universe that we see when we gaze into the night sky, with its dusting of diamonds on black velvet, or even the amazing images that tools such as the Hubble Space Telescope can produce for us, are only a small part of all that there is.
In reality, some of the theories of quantum physics say that the true universe — the multiverse — is like the internet; it seems to be endless, and just when it seems that one is getting close to observing or understanding all of it, someone, or something, seems to go and add more.
Our particular universe began as a sort of bubble, a bud, you might say — something like the way one yeast cell produces another one. It sprang out of another, older, preexisting universe, which itself had spawned from another one which was older still. Our universe actually came about — as each of the virtually endless number of individual universes typically do — when a star died in our parent universe. It was a very old star, having existed for many billions of years; it had used up nearly all of its supply of hydrogen and begun fusing the helium that it had made from that hydrogen over its lifetime. Subsequently, the helium began to fuse into carbon, the carbon into oxygen, the oxygen into silicon and finally the silicon into iron.
That was where it stopped; the accumulating iron core was too dense to fuse into anything heavier. Try as it might, even the extreme gravity of the massive star was insufficient to create any elements heavier than iron. The fusion reaction that powered the star came to an end, and with it, the balancing act that kept the star stable utterly failed. The immense gravity of the huge ball of gas was no longer checked by the energy of the nuclear furnace at its heart, and the gravitational force began to crush the star in on itself. The denser it became, the greater its gravity, until it reached a point where
the core of the star became superheated and unstable, and what was left of the star exploded, blowing its less dense outer layers out into space. These shells of gas gradually began to expand into a majestic planetary nebula.
However, the gravity of the remaining core of the star quickly began to reverse the process, drawing the surrounding shells of gas back toward itself. It wasn’t long before it became so dense that it began to crush its own atoms. Positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons were crushed into each other, forming neutrons, and the traumatized star eventually became a neutron star, a type of stellar corpse left over after the gravitational collapse of a star during a supernova event. They are the tiniest stars known, only measuring somewhere around twelve miles across, yet having a mass of several times that of our Sun. They also spin at a remarkable rate, sometimes upwards of 600 times a second. A matchbox containing the “stuff” of a neutron star would weigh something like five billion tons.
If a star’s mass is less than what is called Chandrasekhar’s Limit — roughly 1.44 times that of the Sun — that’s the end of the line. It becomes a neutron star, and nothing more happens.
In the case of more massive stars, such as those several times the mass of the sun, a different process takes over. That was the case with the star that gave rise to our universe. Over a period of several million years after the initial explosion, the star had drawn so much mass back into itself that it reached a sort of tipping point, and its corpse suddenly seemed to disappear, leaving only an invisible mass which continued to draw matter in from its surrounding shells of gas.
