Chapter 1
Twelve Years Prior to Anomaly
There was a festive atmosphere at first, people grabbing cameras and dancing in the streets, such was their surprise at seeing a sudden eruption so close to home. But the mood quickly turned, as pyroclastic flows began to incinerate the hillside communities, barreling down on the horrified population like a roiling specter of death. Those who couldn’t drive were doomed. No cover was sufficient to save them. Then, a second eruption flared. This time from the south, a long dormant volcano springing to life, eliminating the chance of escape even for the ones in vehicles. An entire region destroyed in a fury of ash and terror.
Like champagne corks popping off, the ring of fire lit up like a hellish festival of lights. Unlike seismic events, this particular horror came unattached to undersea megathrusts or population decimating tsunamis, thus garnering fewer mentions in the press. Only a handful of climate alarmists took up the charge, ready to bang the drums afresh, using this unprecedented spate of activity as fodder for the cause.
The eruptions appeared unrelated except for proximity. An intercontinental ducks-in-a-row fireshow, from far to the south on up through Asia, around the horn in Siberia and Alaska, then tracking back down as far as Peru. Some extreme watchers actually booked cruises and flights in the hopes of catching an eruption in real time, but though more predictable than usual, they weren’t that predictable.
Scientists claimed it was nothing more than an odd set of coincidences. Most vulcanologists agreed, though the global warming caveat was always quick on the heels of all official statements. By and large the scientific community considered it to be nothing more than an odd footnote. Even as the incidences mounted, all was considered well. The rumblings of seismic trouble-spots elsewhere in the world raised no eyebrows until the surprise eruption in Italy. Conspiracy theorists had a field day at first, but even that event was written off as unrelated, a one-off coincidence.
In the ring, the death toll mounted, and emergency teams were assembled. Appeals for help resulted in a decent number of cash donations, but underneath it all there was little sense of concern. If a quarter of a million dead under tsunami waves in the Indian ocean couldn’t shock the unaffected, half that amount burned to death barely even registered. People wrote their checks or clicked their links, then they moved on. For the displaced and the injured, support was hard to come by in remote locations, but it came eventually, and life began getting back to normal even there.
Top-level government scientists had been placed under guard, a top-down gag order affecting all communications, so as not to be forced to confirm or deny any idle speculation. To them, this was not only expected, but something they’d been counting on since long before the notion of global warming. To them, this was the start of something even more significant, but they were in no position to share that information with outsiders. When the time was right, government leaders would do so—but the scientists themselves were only authorized to wait. And watch.
Research Fellow Dean Eckert, on loan from UC Berkeley, was under orders to observe patterns of refraction in the northern lights for comparative atmospheric data. Quite a mouthful to explain to people, but the work wasn’t particularly daunting. Most of the students who spent time in the great north returned home with a fair number of stories, and a warm recollection of the experience. It was entertaining enough, so long as you didn’t have to live there permanently.
For the locals, heavy drink and recreational smoke were the tickets to sanity. A method of escape for the forever-trapped. But for their colleagues-on-loan the abuse was more intense, a semester-long haze underwritten by their hosts. Many returned home with well established habits that had to be broken.
Dean had never been much of a party guy. More the social pariah, at least through high school. But even he wasn’t immune to the allure of the northern lifestyle. After experiencing some epic parties, regret-tinged hangovers, and plenty of that next day solution known as the Total Hangover Cure, he was beginning to get used to life in the wilderness. He even considered the possibility of a permanent assignment, either in Alaska or some other such remote outpost. For the heartiest types, there was always McMurdo Station, way down under in the south pole, but he wasn’t that much of a cold weather junkie.
His research was going much as expected, and it was coming time for the wrap-up and finalization phase of the fellowship. This was sure to be accompanied by more imbibing, at ever faster rates, but before that happened he had promised himself a decent tour of the facility. He reasoned that to get the most out of the experience, he had to see all the place had to offer. That was the plan which led him, along with a couple of freshmen assistants, down into the cosmic dustbin late on a Friday night. The distant noise of classmates gearing up for the weekend filtered into the dank dungeon, in the middle of the middle of nowhere, reminding all three of them there were better places to be. Still, he had made up his mind to catalogue the specimens, and so they set out for the dustbin.
‘The Dustbin’ was a tongue-in-cheek campus reference for the asteroid and near-Earth object repository. One of a dozen such collection centers within the research complex on the campus of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Unimpressive though the heaps of rocks and dust might be to the untrained, countless revelations could be found under the keen gaze of an expert. Makeup and composition provided valuable hints about the cosmos. Shape and wear could indicate lifespan and interactions, myriad scrapes and scars bore the history of collision and gravitational events. The whereabouts and trajectories of these objects, prior to their fateful fall into the gravity well to their final resting place, could also be determined to a precise degree. These were just some of the intriguing facts that could be gleaned by the right observer.
One of these wanderers, an unassuming rock amid larger, shinier objects, bore a particularly significant scar. It should have raised alarm bells from the dustbin to the Houston observatory itself, if anyone had know what to look for. Instead, the rock sat in obscurity, only notable as the subject of skin-deep undergraduate papers, not a one among them noticing the vital element. The specimen, later noted as the IO-88 ‘key stone’, was a find cosmologists would later offer up their eye-teeth for a look at, but it went completely unnoticed for years.
