Maura Della:
Open journal. April 14,2012.
Maybe I’m just getting too old.
I should have expected this, this brush fire of panic that has swept the planet after every TV news channel and Net site carried the pictures of the Blue kids sailing out of a nuclear explosion. After the confusing messages and visions from the sky, a consensus seems to have emerged: that we were shown a false future, that the Carter prophecy is real, that we have just two centuries.
To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes — information, ideas, fears, and hopes — spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed.
It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.
Anyhow I guess this is what happens when the lead story — all over the TV and radio channels and info Nets of a wired-up humankind — is doomsday…
Atal Vajpayjee:
Atal lay in the undergrowth and focused his binocular corneal implants.
The Pakistani soldiers who guarded this place walked back and forth, weapons on their shoulders, oblivious in the dense sunshine. It gave him a pleasing sense of power to be able to see those soldiers, and yet to know they could not see him.
He had found his spotting position without disturbance. He had followed the Grand Trunk Road between Rawalpindi and Peshawar until he reached a modest track that led into these wooded hills. From here, the buildings of the Topi scientific research institute were clearly visible.
Topi was the place where scientists had developed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
Now he need only wait for the command to come through.
The day was hot. He wiped his forehead, and his fingers came away stained with camouflage paint. He wondered if the boy who had come home that day more than ten years ago would recognize him now.
Atal had been just eighteen years old.
He had grown up knowing that Kashmir was India’s most troubled province. Still, he had been happy, his father a prosperous cloth merchant in Srinagar. Even the crackle of gunfire at night, off in the hills, did not disturb him.
Everything changed on the day he came home from his studies — he would have been a doctor — to find his mother crumpled on the step, crying, wailing. And in the house he had found the remains of his father.
Remains. A cold, neutral word. Only the lower half of the body had been identifiable as human at all. His mother had been able to identify it only by a scar on the left foot. The authorities were able to provide no comfort, to produce no suspects.
Atal soon learned the truth.
His father had worked for many years as an agent of the central Indian government. He had striven to maintain the precarious stability of this troubled place. And in the end that cause cost him his life.
Since then, Atal had worked for revenge.
The war had already begun, with skirmishes between troops in the hills, border raids by Pakistani jets, the firing of India’s Agni missiles against military targets.
It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted. If the strange predictions of the Western scientists were true — if the world really was doomed, if superhuman children had defeated the U.S. Army in the desert and flown to the Moon — then it was important that ancient wrongs be righted before the darkness fell.
He knew he would probably not live through the day. But that did not matter. There would be no future, no world for his children. There was only this, the goal, the taste of victory before the failing of the light.
The radio screeched. Grunting, he gouged the little device out of his ear. It lay on the grass, squealing like an insect.
Electromagnetic pulse.
He looked over his shoulder. Contrails: four, five, six of them, streaking from the east. Ghauri missiles, nuclear tipped. Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta had only minutes to live.
But the returning fire from India was assured.
It was the day, at last. He stood, raised his weapon, roared in defiance.
A movement to his right.
An explosion in his head. Light, sound, smell became confused, whirling.
He was lying on his side. Darkness fell.
Xiaohu Jiang:
Xiaohu opened her window and gazed out at the Beijing night. This tower block was one of a series, well maintained but utterly cheerless, marching like tombstones around the perimeter of the old city. Her mother had told her that the Beijing sky, at this time of year, used to be famous for its clarity. Now, even the sun at noon was sometimes obscured.
Xiaohu was particularly tired this night.
Her work, at the state-run municipal waste-processing plant, was as ever grim and demanding. And — notwithstanding the strange news from America, the bright new spark everyone could see on the face of the Moon — she had no choice but to attend the xuexi hui, the weekly political study session, in the large communal area at the base of the building.
Still, somewhat to her surprise, the materials distributed this week had actually been interesting.
Here, for example, was a new edition of an old pamphlet, An Outline of Certain Questions About Socialism, which dealt with the official Party response to the Carter prediction. It had surprised her. If Carter was correct, the pamphlet claimed, then only misery lay ahead for future generations. If a child never existed, it could not suffer. Therefore the moral thing was to stop producing children, to spare them pain.
The new doctrine was surely designed as a buttress for the Party’s long-standing attempts to control the national population. Everyone was used to official manipulations of the truth — to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.
But still, this resonated in Xiaohu’s tired mind. There was truth here, she thought. Genuine wisdom. But what did it mean for her?
She closed the window and stepped silently into her bedroom. Here was her daughter, Chai, sleeping silently in her cot, her face itself like a tiny round moon, her bud mouth parted.
Chai was not legitimate. Few people knew of her existence, not even her father. Xiaohu had been hatching elaborate plans to provide Chai with a life, an artificial background, a means to achieve respectability, education, a way of life.
Or rather, Xiaohu thought bleakly, a way to get through her life with the minimum pain. But now, the American predictions had made that impossible.
Negative utilitarianism, Xiaohu told herself, reducing evil rather than maximizing good. Perhaps that was all that had ever been possible in this flawed world. She felt enormously tired.
Xiaohu kissed her daughter. Then she took a pillow and set it gently on the child’s placid face.
Bob David:
He had always been good with his hands. By the age of seven or eight he had been stripping down truck engines with his father. By twelve he was building his own stock car from scrap.
The thing he was building now — here in his basement in this drafty tenement block in downtown Cambridge, Massachusetts — was simpler than that.
The key to it was a fancy new stuff called red mercury: a compound of antimony and mercury baked in a nuclear reactor, capable of releasing hundreds of times the energy contained in the same mass of TNT. Thanks to red mercury he would be able to fit his bomb into a briefcase.
Bob had grown up here, in Cambridge. He had spent his whole life resenting the asshole nerds who passed him by in class; even as a little kid he’d known that the future was theirs, not his. He’d learned the hard way that there weren’t too many places in the world for a guy who was only good with his hands.