The Portal in the Forest

by Matt Dymerski

  ***

  I knew it hadn't been my imagination. Each day had been slightly warmer than the last, until all the snow had melted and people were out in shorts. An Indian Summer they called it, for some reason. Others laughed about global warming.

  It was global warming, alright, though not for the reasons anyone suspected.

  Most began sensing something wrong with the night soon after that. It was subtle, really, but disruptive to sleep: night time just wasn't as dark as it used to be. The first reports came out that week, with the first inexplicable data.

  The stars were growing brighter.

  It was light. Light was our problem. The stars had grown twelve percent brighter than previous recorded values - all the stars, all at once, for no measurable reason that anyone could discern. What could make the entire universe grow more luminescent all at once?

  But, see, that was the wrong question.

  The Sun and Moon were both affected, too. The Moon became a painful white beacon in the sky, illuminating the night with stark silver. Sunglasses became mandatory during the day, along with sunblock, air conditioning, and shade.

  It was rather astounding how long life went on as normal. People turned up the air in their cars, stayed indoors, and let technology furiously resist the growing heat. As a scientist, I had a rather longer-term view of our situation, and I wondered what they would do once the crops started dying and the food stopped being shipped in.

  Nope. That didn't happen. My intelligent colleagues adapted. The food harvests dipped for a year, but then shot up the next, as a global initiative switched major crops all over the world toward genetically engineered plants that thrived on the extra light - forty-two percent more than usual, and climbing.

  From that perspective, things actually started to look up. The added heat and light were just more energy for the human race to capture and use. Fossil fuels crashed in favor of solar, which now never, ever had dull moments - when the Sun went down, the Moon and the stars took over energy duty. With almost all of our energy being produced cleanly, and the atmosphere undergoing severe weather changes, the global temperature actually began to drop back down for a time.

  It was enough time for us to prepare. Thanks to the heat, war ended as a thing. It was simply impossible to field troops, and energy and food had become practically free, so what was left to fight over? More than that, we had a global threat on our hands, and the human race banded together to overcome.

  The weird thing about all this, though, was that the light wasn't the right color. It was growing more and more blue, regardless of source, and we simply had no idea why.

  I was stationed in one of the pleasantly temperate Antarctic stations for several years. I'd never really had family per se, and I'd certainly never had more than passing relationships. I'd mostly been a loner that observed the world and felt isolated from it. So, my sudden placement with thousands of intelligent and capable colleagues was a shock. I made friends. We debated philosophy, argued about the cause of the Blue Brightening, and played clumsy games of volleyball. We drank alcohol like our military staff - to excess - and then regretted it utterly. We even raided the Biology Lab's dorms with water balloons. They retaliated by stealing a month's supply of pudding from our cafeteria.

  All in all, I'd have to describe it as the slowest and most pleasant apocalypse imaginable.

  Over the years, and ever so slowly, that pleasantness began to unravel as the level of incoming light from the rest of the universe reached double, and then triple. The surface became a scorching azure desert that was all but unlivable. Our temperate Antarctic outpost became a savannah, and then turned tropical, until, finally, all the plants except our genetically engineered super-crops died.

  It was strange to look back on half a life, and on a youth spent unhappy and apart from the world as it was, only to find that world gone. Of the seven billion people alive at the start of our decades of heating, almost all had moved underground, into space, or onto the new cities on the now strikingly sapphire Moon.

  The first colony to successfully set up on Mars soon had terrifying news for us: it wasn't blue out there, and it wasn't brighter out there. The technology we'd sent out into the solar system hadn't been malfunctioning. With their very eyes, the first interplanetary pioneers confirmed it.

  There was nothing wrong with the universe at all. There was something wrong with us.

  The theory had already been proposed, of course. Now a civilization of scientists, we'd had plenty of time to guess. Politics had split along ideological lines, but, now, we had proof: the Slow-Time Bubble theory was correct. For unknown reasons, the Earth and the Moon, both, had been encompassed in a slow-time field that was growing ever stronger. The universe wasn't brighter; it just had more time to shower us with light, and that light had been growing more and more blue-shifted due to the time dilation.

  It took another thirty years for us to figure out why. In the meantime, we watched the Mars colonies rapidly expand, terraform, cover the red planet with humanity, and then - just as quickly as they had come - they were gone. An expedition sent there found nothing but a world of silent monolithic cities that were hundreds of thousands of years old.

  Except we weren't that bad off, not yet - the Mars colony should only have aged a few hundred years to our two decades. The opposite of our fate had happened to them - they had been caught in a fast-time field, the Sun and stars had faded to weak red-shifted darkness, and they'd all starved, died, and faded away in the blink of an eye.

  Strangely enough, the fast-time field had departed with them, and the reason behind both our predicaments revealed itself from an impossible vector: our food.

  Specifically, a bacteria living in the roots of our genetically-modified crops. Somehow, a bacteria had evolved with time-slowing properties - the cellular organism itself existed in dimensions higher than three plus time. Its internal structure literally branched off into higher dimensions, and an emergent property of its shape was to bend the fabric of time. We had no idea whether this organism had evolved on Earth, or whether it had fallen from space, but it was here.

  And as we'd planted more and more of it globally, the bacteria had grown in total number, and our problem had worsened exponentially. Mars had had the opposite problem; with its own genetic crops, adapted to live in a much different environment, they had unwittingly bred a new kind of bacteria that had sped up time instead of slowing it down. Just like that, ambient cellular life had wiped away a planet… and, when those crops on Mars had died, so had their fast-time bacteria. It was strangely ironic that Mars, the Red Planet, had died in a lethal red shift, and now Earth, the Blue, was dying in its respective color, too.

  We knew what the cause was, now… but the problem presented itself: how do you cleanse an entire planet of all cellular life?

  Nothing we had could fight it. It didn't respond to antibiotics, and our three-dimensional nano-machines simply couldn't interact properly with the multi-dimensional bacterial cells. The only solution, we found, was the oldest answer in the book: fire.

  We'll come back once the Earth is cleansed. We'll come back… and we'll start anew… we'll just escape to the Moon for a time, and then it'll all be fine. I'm boarding the ship in an hour - or, I should be, when it gets here. The people on the Moon are supposed to be sending the fleet to pick up the two or three billion people still here, but there's been no contact yet. I'm not sure what we're doing about food and supplies for everyone, but I'm sure we'll figure it out. Humanity's evolved beyond selfishness, cruelty, and repugnant survival instincts.

  That's what I tell myself, at least. I got to live a mediocre life, and I got to feel at least partially like a person for a time - partially included - and, for that, I'm thankful. The crowd is growing restless out here in the blasting blue sands, all waiting in their hermetic suits, but what's an old man to tell them? There are children out here, so many children, and telling them that nobody's coming would only be cruel.

  But
I really thought they wouldn't turn the satellite cleansing system on with us still out here. At least let us get back underground, so we don't see it coming! You sick sons of bitches! And they're running, the crowd is running, intent on going east, moving east to escape the cleansing, ever east… how long can they run? Minutes? How long can they walk? Hours, days, weeks? I'm an old man, I can't join you, but you keep walking, keep going, and never give in… show those sadistic bastards that human willpower doesn't -