Darkness Before Dawn - HD1

Hominis Dei
Part One- Darkness Before Dawn
By David Hoghton-Carter

I don’t remember how it all started, I was too young, maybe three or four. I just know what I’ve found in the Library. There are a few disjointed memories from a few years later, though.

The most powerful memory I have is of finding the Library. It was during the riots, one of the bad ones. I recall that I’d been separated from my mum and dad; I’m not sure how, it’s just a kind of discontinuity – one moment they were there, holding my hand as we were trying to get some food from one of the kitchens, the next moment I was alone, hiding behind a dumpster down an alleyway, covering in fear as things kicked off a few metres away. There were gunshots, then the roar of engines as an evac ship flew overhead – that one just seemed to makes things worse, and as I look back on it I’m pretty sure it must have been one of the last to depart, leaving the rest of us behind as the world went to shit.

I picked a moment (not sure why) and set off running, trying to get away. There was a motivation, I think, someone telling me to run away and hide, maybe my dad. I don’t know how far I ran, but I know I was flying blind, just trying to get away, as the eruptions of gunfire and the screams of the dying became more frequent behind me.

Then there was the Library. It awed me – all that neo-classical architecture somehow spoke of safety. I walked up the steps, and the door just opened. George was there (I didn’t know his name, then), with the biggest, most high-tech gun I’d ever seen, the SOCOM PM-9 I still keep handy just in case. He waved me inside, into this place of learning everyone now ignored in the day-to-day quest for survival. There were questions, then words of comfort, then some food from the hydroponics Garden under the Dome, all now a blur.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little. As I say, I don’t remember how it all started, but I have studied what happened. Of those still alive on this world today, I’ve probably got the clearest picture of what led us to this point.

The best way to put it would be to say that the environment just broke. There was plenty of preamble, all the years of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, even before that, the decades and centuries of industry before the Caleman Drive and the Mecha.

OK, I know, I need to explain. The Caleman Drive and the Mecha were both a product of the Scale Revolution, which in turn were together products of the Tuscon Project and the resolution of the Higgs boson. With what was learned about quantum physics and nanotech, pretty much anything became possible. It was nothing more than the next logical step to turn all this science into living technology, to invent the Caleman Drive – to invent space travel.

Yes, I know, it could be argued that space travel was invented in the 1950s, but not like this. Before, inertia always won. As soon as it became possible to overcome inertia – to prevent an astronaut from simply becoming a red smear on a bulkhead with too many Gs – it opened everything up like never before.

But still, the first missions were tentative, cautious, and that’s where the Mecha came in. Automatons designed using nanotech, meant to simulate the stresses humans would come under, made to record everything. The technology translated out of the space programme pretty quickly, too, took just a few years to go from the Radical Transit Experiential Systems Tester to my old Teddy, then on to Domestic Defence Mecha, especially the grotesque ones designed to look like something out of ancient mythology.

Some people blamed the experiments, of course, but the facts don’t support that hypothesis. There was just too great a weight of degradation, and too little willingness to do something about it. By the time the deterioration became really noticeable, there were already settlements on Mars, Proxima Centauri Three and Eridani Five.

But the Exodus wasn’t an inevitably. The technology was there – and it stills is – to clean up this planet, right there in the new science of space. In this case, there was a definite, identifiable departure point. When Caleman himself said the world was doomed, and that he was taking his whole company to Mars, that’s really what did it.

After that, the new shipyards couldn’t produce fast enough. Anyone who could afford it bought a ship for themselves – corporations paid billions to decamp their best people to the stars, rich families took their whole extended clan to bask in the promise of paradise on Eridani, groups of professionals clubbed together and sunk millions of their own money into getting themselves off world. The more people left, the more the panic spread, and the less people cared about what was being pumped into the rivers and the atmosphere. After all, the world was screwed – the world’s greatest genius since Isaac Newton had said so, and hundreds of equally clever folks agreed. It became one giant, catastrophic, self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy.

Finally, there were the Lotteries. Things were already starting to fall apart. 20% of the world’s population – a whole two billion people – had got out while the going was good, and industry and agriculture was struggling to cope with the loss of so much talent and the slow, certain collapse of the world economy. Simply put, the guys with the money were getting the hell out of dodge, and really didn’t give a crap about anyone they didn’t need.

China was the first nation to start official evacuations. Of course, that really put the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons. Their Lottery saw two million people added to an official list of one million to be evacuated to the Chinese colony on Proxima. The US followed within days, then the frenzy began as every other nation on Earth that had enough money to buy a ship got in on the act. A black market in real and fake tickets off world mushroomed from nothing – and almost every other kind of trade on the planet ceased abruptly. And what was left of the world descended into anarchy.

Police and armies augmented their forces within next-gen Mecha, real heavy duty hardware, most designed in the hope of simply terrifying people into compliance, set to guard a spot and make sure no-one who didn’t have the right clearance got past. And those fuckers were good. Cold, efficient killing machines, they didn’t make a distinction between a mob trying to storm a food warehouse (or, more often, a launchpad), and a crowd fleeing some nihilist with a plasma rifle or a machine gun. Durable, too, Even after all these years, there is still a Draco model over by what’s left of the West Bridge, standing guard over the route to the Stadium evacuation area, squatting amidst the ruins of the city and surrounded by the corpses of the hundreds of people it’s killed over the years.

So, the riots. On reflection, I’m pretty sure it was a food riot. I vaguely remember the crowd surging. Of course, there are no formal records from those years – all the newspapers had stopped printing, the Net had gone dead – but George always said there was always one nut-job who couldn’t wait his turn, and one guy getting out of line was all the motivation needed for a dozen others to do the same, and from there things always spiraled out of control.

I’ve lived here in the Library my whole life. There’s always been plenty to read – George always said that by now I should have a dozen PhDs. Getting out has been a problem, with all the Mecha still around the city, but human beings became rarer as the years passed. I haven’t talked to one since George died last month.

I’ve decided to begin keeping this journal because I can’t carry on just sitting around here, alone, waiting for something to happen. The Garden is in pretty bad shape, anyway, and these last couple of years the water quality has been steadily deteriorating. It’s been hard to keep the generator running, too.

It’s time to make a move, to risk going out into the world, see if anyone else survived this hell. I’ll have enough food and water to last a few days, at least, and some of the spare kit George and I accumulated over the years is portable enough to fit into a backpack. Then there’s that PM-9 – a pretty serious piece of kit, there’s enough wattage in that baby to put down a Mecha, though I not sure how many shots I’m going to get before the cell dies on me.

Time to get going.