Jeff awakened with a start, and reached to clear dirt from his facemask. His body ached, his head was ringing. At his heavily-gloved fingertips, there was sand.
What was this place? Undoubtedly, an alien planet, and one nearly certain not to support human life.
His heart leaped as he noticed a break in his helmet visor, a missing piece larger than a quarter. Must have been a hell of a wreck, but why wasn’t he dead? Was the atmosphere breathable here? What stroke of Providence had put him on a planet with breathable air?
Pegasus III was a pilot mission, a top-secret trial to send a man in a spacecraft to another star. Jeff had known what it was, a near-suicide mission, but he’d volunteered anyway. There was just too much at stake to turn it down; six years in experimental stasis in an experimental craft traveling at near-lightspeed, then automated slowdown, during which, he was supposed to be automatically awakened. At least that part of it had failed. Jeff was supposed to be able to select from planets in the new system and to plan a landing, and thus have at least some chance of survival.
But the spacecraft was already down, it had crashed, on God-knows-where of a planet, with Jeff laying half-in, half-out of it, and not laying flat. One leg was overtop of something and his head seemed downhill from his lower body. Jeff checked himself to find out what was broken; move his hands, his wrists, his arms, finally, his back and legs. Oddly it seemed he was okay, just sore from the pummeling he’d taken when the spacecraft came down.
So he lay there a few minutes longer, allowing his thoughts to clear and to assess the situation. He’d been told he’d be hungry when he came out of stasis, and he was, so he reached into the vest pocket of his suit and extracted an energy bar, pulled his gloves off and opened it, then realized the broken face shield was in the way. Screw it. Off it came.
The air that struck his face was at least, fresh air, and it smelled of salt. And what could be more lifeless than salt? Well, perhaps sand, he imagined, chewing and glancing around him. No one would be communicating from this spacecraft, all of its antennae had been torn off when the ship skated across the desert floor, and the batteries were not in their receptacle. No one would be coming to save him, either. This ship was not built to come down without retro rockets, and it wasn’t designed to tumble to a stop, either.
After a while, Jeff sat up, and then slowly stood up. The gravity felt normal for an earthling, so after confirming what he believed about the rough landing, he gathered up any canned water and foodstuffs he could find and set out, toward the rising star. Whether the landscape changed for the worse or for the better, at least, it would be someplace different.
After an all-day hike and after dropping his heavy spacesuit, Jeff spotted something in the shimmering distance that almost looked like a tree. And it was; the closer he got, the surer he was of it, until at last, he walked right up to it. It didn’t appear to be a dead tree but it wasn’t obviously alive, either. It was completely leafless, but its leaves, a carpet of green plastering the ground around it, seemed pressed into the surface. What the hell was going on, here?
Walking on, Jeff realized that the soil beneath his feet had changed from sand to sandy soil, well, that was a positive. Perhaps he would find some water.
Suddenly, his vision was attracted to movement. Far up ahead, he thought he saw a child, running away. He called out, “Hey! Heyyy!” But it may have been an apparition, and he knew that was a possibility, what would a young girl be doing on an alien planet?
A few hundred feet further, he came upon a definite footpath, where something had walked, innumerable times. So there was indeed life on this planet, could it be humanoid? Jeffrey felt a chill of hope and expectation, and then he saw it. A fallen road sign, obviously ancient, lay near his feet. It pointed, likely to the east. The single word on it was still quite legible; “Brasilia.”
Jeffrey fell to his knees and wept openly.
He was not on another planet. However it had happened, this was Earth.
Earlier that day, another spacecraft had entered Earth’s orbit, then nearly left it, moving farther out.
Ba-DOM-quit!!
From his very-high orbital position, self-made astronaut Terence Boehm watched the planet beneath him suddenly darken. It wasn't an absence of light. What he was seeing was billowing clouds of everything from the surface of the earth, headed skyward, toward him. "I did that," he whispered, softly. "That was me."
It was the most humane planet-wide extermination imaginable, a surprise crush, immediate loss of consciousness for every living, thinking creature.
As far as Terence knew, none were spared. There were no creatures alive down there, anywhere.
A concentrated gravitational pulse had just radiated outward from the Earth's core. The net effect was, absolutely everything had been crushed under its own weight. What had weighed one hundred pounds suddenly weighed one hundred thousand, and yet, for the briefest of moments. A moment was all it took.
Terence hadn't been sure it would even work, but it had. He wasn't absolutely certain what would follow, but his best guess was frightfully close. That which had the lowest density had moved fastest and farthest, and of course, that was air.
So now the wind, suddenly released from the deep gravity pulse and now nearing zero-gravity, was rebounding, skyward. And taking most surface objects with it. Soil, bodies, cars, trash cans, rocks and all.
Nothing at all was either fortunate or unfortunate, any more, so it didn't matter that gravity would shortly normalize, and that everything that had gone up would come down. Cars, with a crash and soil, much more softly.
The bacterium had fared only very slightly better than had creatures, their very genetics modified by the crush, but over an extended time, would clear most of the aftermath of flattened, formerly living tissue. Much of the plant life had been extinguished, as well.
The trick, Terence had found, was in that tricky core. There was no gravity generated by it, but the core at the center of Earth was a functioning fusion fire that was trapped within the planet when it spiraled away from the sun. That fusion fire generated the fields and belts that protected the planet from cosmic radiation, and the sun. However the very scale of that reaction gave it far more destructive potential, and it was that potential which Terence had harnessed.
Terence was a self-made billionaire, a dot com startup wizard who had made it and then invested for profit. He was also a closet scientist with zero remorse for any deed he imagined, including the destruction of all life on earth.
Terence had a theory, about the earth’s core and another about the origin and nature of gravity. Thus was generated a diabolical plot to generate a monstrous gravitational pulse out of the core, through external excitation and without physically accessing it. If in fact his theories were correct, the carnage would be both massive and instantaneous. World-enveloping. In the aftermath, the core itself would remain, fundamentally unchanged.
And if his theories were incorrect, oh well.
But now, what? Terence had just destroyed his home, and his personal wealth, as well as anything else that had ever mattered, to anyone.
Terence just wasn’t feeling it. He turned his spacecraft away and headed into deep space, where he would surely perish.
Jeff’s ship had been in low Earth orbit, awaiting launch codes when the pulse hit. The capsule’s chutes deployed on re-entry, and that is why he survived the fall.
Jeff had no idea what transpired on Earth, and he would never imagine its completeness or its scale. The girl he thought he saw was another living being who happened to be walking along in a crack in the gravity dome, so to speak.
So he found her, held out his hand and she hesitantly walked to him. That the only two living souls on earth had met, was the true Providence.
Do I need to say it?
The Earth started over.
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