The New Dryas, Part 1

A serialised story, set to music. Listen while you read. This is a first draft so it's pretty rough.

CREPT THE AQUARIAN AGE

There is no such thing as Atlantis. The idea of one advanced society enveloped in a deluge and wiped off the archaeological records is a mistake, a myth. There was no one civilisation that suffered this fate; there were countless numbers of them. This Atlantis story was Plato’s distillation of innumerable stories of survival, handed down through generations of storytelling, each version differing from the last. Stories that may have had their origins in the populations of migrants leaving coastal cities as the seas slowly rose, water creeping through the lanes and buildings of fishing villages during the last interglacial period. Stories that may also have had their origins after the catastrophic Younger Dryas event 12,000 years ago, an extinction-level event resulting in a global cataclysm that wiped the slate clean.

Or a combination of both.

Beats me. I’m no historian but I figure that these stories were passed down to each consecutive generation in the form of dance, song, allegory, and folktale. So it’s likely that over several thousand years the message may have become distorted somewhat.

Anyway, let me try to recall where I first learned that my life, indeed everyone’s life on this planet, would change forever. Bear in mind, not only am I not a historian, but I’m no journalist, no writer, not even a good joke-teller, just a survivor with the means to record my experiences.

In February 2104, I had just moved back to Elsternwick, an inner suburb of Melbourne. I grew up there, as did my mother, but her parents both grew up in Elwood. Around the time my mother was born, her family was one of the last to move east from Elwood to the nearest suburb due to the encroaching shoreline. Indeed, from their house atop a shop on Glen Huntly Road they could see the bay lapping along the old Nepean Highway less than a kilometre away.

By the time I was born, Elwood’s famed beaches had long disappeared under the rising waters of Port Philip. Brighton’s dog beach, a little south of my home, where my grandmother played as a child was just a memory in my photo-drive. Elwood Beach itself - once home to the more-money-than-sense class, lathered up in sunscreen, sizzling on the yellow sands - was now a shoal, and the 6-month long heatwaves we now had would fry any of those thalassophiles to a crisp within minutes.

Now, news agencies of every country - online, on TV, radio and elsewhere - for the last two weeks, had been covering the appearance of a large comet with all the breathless, earnest-faced reporting that they cunningly knew would have eyes glued to their various brands. Since CNEOS alerted the US government (who consequently alerted the comet and NEO monitoring organisations in the Five Eyes alliance) of the appearance of an 80-kilometer wide comet in the outer solar system two weeks ago, every news broadcast, update, and pundit reported on its current condition, location, direction, etc. Some even gave it a name, so ridiculous I refuse to acknowledge it here. Apparently, the reason that we only had two weeks to prepare was because (and this is from memory) it came from the direction of the sun.

I learned that the comet was part of the Taurid meteor stream, and that the earth actually passes through this massive cloud of rocks every year, like a blind man crossing a 6-lane highway. What?!

Anyway, there were several billionaires who quickly (and probably illegally) diverted their productions of vessels designed for the decades-long-established space tourism industry into one-way nuclear bombs, designed to explode on or near the comet to either divert its path or break it up. Which method was effective was argued at great length and intensity online and face to face, until finally 3 of the vessels were launched within days of each other. These totally independent ventures were funded by the individual billionaires themselves, with few or no subsidies from their respective governments. Those governments, namely the US, China and India, had given up listening to the pleas of their people, had retreated to their bunkers under mountains or wherever, and left us to fend for ourselves. It was the small handful of billionaires, still unable to even come together in a consensus about what to do, who moved into action, possibly in order to be entered into every future history book as the one who saved humanity, rather than any altruistic leaning. And it was that even smaller handful of billionaires whose rockets were launched, looked on, as did the entire world, as their kamikaze multi-billion dollar machines raced past the comet, to explode hundreds of thousands of kilometers behind it, failing completely to effect any change in course of the comet and indeed, of human history.

CAME THE COMET

Maybe it was a Monday. Anyway, the world went to shit after that. By now, the comet was about 40 hours away. When we watched their pathetic rockets speed slowly past the oncoming monster, there was a palpable movement in hearts around the world. At least in my neighbourhood, huddled around their tablets and phones, those that had not embarked on the exodus to god knows where, which included me, were shocked into action at last. There was swearing of every colour, people came out of their houses running to their already packed cars baking in the afternoon heat and screeched off, seatbelts be damned. As I ran out to my own car, packed and charged to its limit, I glanced at my neighbours house to the left. They were a retired couple, with a great camper in the driveway. I had assumed they were ready for the exodus, and was surprised that they had left it this long to go. There they were, sitting in their camping chairs in their front yard under a big umbrella, barbecue going, beers in hands. They saw the look on my face and both gave me a smile and a thumbs-up that said ‘thanks for being a good neighbour, bye’.

Where was I going? Where were all these people going? Of course, the roads quickly became kilometers-long parking lots. In front of me was a trail of red brake-lights, snaking into the distance. Behind me, a seemingly infinite number of vehicles, engines running, not moving, containing a seemingly infinite number of people, minds racing, not moving. Cars started peeling off and driving through and over the spacious and well-manicured nature strips, once the pride and joy of the wealthy former residents of Elsternwick and Caulfield. Drivers threw their cars here and there, with little regard for damage to their and other cars. Drivers leant on their horns aimed at an unsure or hesitant fellow panicker. Drivers began ramming their cars into others in order to escape the jam and find another route, only to find it blocked by like-minded stampeders. 

The comet didn’t technically strike the earth. It air-burst over the Atlantic Ocean, throwing water vapour, super-heated ejecta and the dust and debris of the seafloor and coastal regions of eastern Canada and the US into the upper atmosphere. Here on the other side of the planet, I swear I could feel a tremour as I jogged along the heat-shimmered Princes Highway towards Prahran. Others stopped and I could hear someone screaming “It’s hit!”

Mostly everything that had been thrown up by the initial strike, we later learned, fell back to earth over a massive area. Given the direction the comet was going, that material mostly fell over Canada and North America, resulting in continent-wide wildfires, burning what biomass was not buried. The ice sheets of Greenland and Canada then suffered sudden and catastrophic meltdowns, releasing millions of cubic kilometres of fresh water into the oceans in the hours, days and weeks following. Nobody really talked about the millions of people in the northern hemisphere, just like us - panicking, running, driving, yelling, praying - who were instantly vapourised. Their fate seemed almost insignificant compared to the magnitude of planet-destroying damage that ensued.

Back on Princes Highway, now a parking lot, we jogged and sweated. Some of us had luggage, some had children, some had nothing but the clothes they wore, but we all wordlessly seemed to have the objective of heading north, running through the baking dead city streets, making our way up to Sydney Road and eventually out into the even more dead countryside.