We were living in an artificial city that had risen from the ashes of the earlier lunar base, so we named it Phoenix. On Phoenix we had thirty-six seismologists that were happier than a kid in the playground. About sixty assistants, all of them students with Masters and PhDs, buzzed around the place and filled it up with life. That picture was completed by engineers, technicians, psychologists, doctors, astronauts and geologists bringing the personnel total at about five-hundred people at any given time. Phoenix was such an enormous project that made the International Space Station look like a fishing boat. The incredible pressure of building Phoenix in no-time by the prideful Chinese had made us forget that our main goal was to figure out why the last base was destroyed by a moonquake.
Of course, we knew why, but now we had to learn the cause. Even back in ‘71 they had studied a weird phenomenon, that of seismic swarms. The phenomenon is quite simple: for some reason we have yet to figure out, periodic quakes with a frequency of one hour propagate endlessly on the moon, dissipating only slightly. It was during one such seismic swarm that the Chinese base was completely destroyed. We were certain that if we figured out why, our understanding about celestial objects and planet cores and quakes would evolve, leading us to who knows how many new discoveries?
The experiment of ‘71 was passive observation, but were planning a more active approach. For five years we collected data. Apollo 15 had done its best for the time it took place and was a sold foundation for us to build on. It’s funny to consider that those men came all the way to the Moon with computers that pale in comparison to a cellphone. Funny but daunting. The new data we collected was so vast that we tried everything anyone could come up with in order to crack them, even those late-night drunken theories by our assistants.
And why shouldn’t we? Every month like clockwork a moonquake would originate from one of the twelve notes, as we had named them. Today was a La, next month was a Sol, the one after that was a Fa. One of the programmers had put the notes into a simple program, and every time we recorded a moonquake it would add the final note, appending it to the song. On a dare, he hooked it up to the public address system one day and once a month, all of us would hear the Lunar Song. It became something we just did every month, appreciating its melody, which grew longer a note a month. The first few years it was just a touching piece of noise, but as we approached our goal the cosmic melody mutated into an anthem. Phoenix’s anthem.
The destruction of the Earth started when the Phoenix Anthem dove itself into a guitar solo.
When we finally got a seismic swarm, we were ecstatic and terrified. Phoenix was quake-proof, but we were ready to bolt to the life boats at the first sign of trouble. I was staring at the screens with bated breath. On one hand, I had the real-time data from the sensors at the twelve epicentres. On the other, I had the supercomputer results, who was struggled to predict in real-time the next seismic swarm from the patterns emerging in the older data.
I was paralysed, the only thing I did was wait for the next line on the computer, the vibration that would follow seconds after that and the real-time prediction on the second screen. At first, I couldn’t believe it, I distrusted my own eyes. I ran diagnostics and reparsed the data again and again. The computer kept showing a simple number: 99.7%. That number hid a lot more behind it’s plain facade.
99.7% match to the predicted and the recorded seismic result. No, even that wasn’t enough to accurately describe what the number meant.
That number was the culmination of my life’s work. Ten years of research, three years of preparation, five years collecting data and fine tuning algorithms and sensors.
It meant, that I could predict an earthquake at the very first second of its manifestation.
‘And what good is that to us?’ an army general had asked me, years ago when I was still begging to get my research funded. I had replied, that if you can predict an earthquake in real-time, then you can cancel it out.
He stared back at me full of surprise, but I don’t blame him. Even my colleagues doubted the validity of my work.
The idea is quite simple. There are two things that can happen when you have two waves of the same frequency interfering with one another: You either get constructive interference or destructive. It all depends on the phase modulation. Now, when that wave becomes the same with an object’s natural frequency, you get resonance, with impressive results. Like when a soprano breaks a crystal glass with her voice. A more everyday example is when we tune in a radio’s capacitor to find a broadcasting station. The signal is amplified and reproduced by the speakers.
So, resonance can work either way. A quake is nothing but a massive wave that carries a lot of energy. If you know the precise origin, duration and energy levels of a quake you can channel another phase-shifted wave to cancel it out.
But how do you produce vibrations with energy levels equal to nuclear megaton explosions?
This is where the second ironic thing comes into play. We have the data from the Apollo mission. We also have something more. It’s not by chance that Einstein said he climbed on the shoulders of giants. Every great scientist builds on the collective work of centuries of work and experiments.
I’m no exception. The one shoulder I needed to climb on was the Apollo 15 program, but the second one was even older than that. The shoulder of Nicola Tesla, an inventor back in the 1900s. Even though a lot of his inventions are used today, safely and worldwide, there was one that when it was announced everybody though it would bring about the destruction of Earth. But it was too soon to fear so.
The destruction of Earth would come about a hundred and eighty years later, from a small town called Phoenix, with a national hymn made of Luna’s singing.
I used Tesla’s studies on resonance, more precisely his invention called a seismic machine. The man himself claimed it could produce quakes with seemingly negligible input of energy, and I don’t think he’d ever imagine a future seismologist that would use his device to create counterquakes.
Maybe the genius himself had never conceived of such a use. But even if he had, there was no way for him to predict quakes with the technology available at the time.
That was what 99.7% meant. All the pieces were in place. All I needed was the next quake in one Lunar month. Hours later, after the alert stopped and everybody relaxed, we listened to the addition to the Phoenix anthem and we cried.
That sound made us feel so small, so insignificant…
I celebrated my success with a hydroponics student who was twenty years younger than me. We make good use of her side-experiments in creating moonshine.
I was planning to marry her, but the destruction of Earth caught up with me.
The following month seemed endless. I tested and retested the equipment, checked the readings, ran simulations one after another. I kept checking the reports from the telescopes for any stray meteors that might mess up my experiment. I kept drilling my technicians and engineers that were assigned to my project. I drove my assistants nuts. My favourite student had to slap me to calm me down.
I tried to hide it, but the stress of the last few days was unbearable. The minutes of the final day was Chinese water torture, but I never said that out loud. I waited in the control room with my colleagues. Everybody had dropped what they were doing and were there to observe. I kept holding her hand and biting my lips.
It was the moment of truth.
The destruction of Earth started when a little human decided to imitate Atlas and tried to lift the sky on his shoulders.
My nerves were shot, my knees trembling. The realisation of the titanic experiment I was attempting hit me square in the face and made me terrified. For some reason I imagined a tidal wave, and me trying to stop it with my hands as it swallowed me whole in an instant.
The destruction of Earth started when I pressed a button and a piece of the sky fell down.
She sang La minore, my favourite. The supercomputer prophesied the outcome of the quake milliseconds before it a
ctually developed. That time was long enough for the twelve seismic machines to start resonating, spread out over each epicentre of each note. The energy differential that was missing from the seismic cancel-wave was covered by human intellect, laws of nature, flawless math and pure human arrogance.
The seismic cancel-wave that was produced by the seismic generators left only 3 per thousand of the moonquake to pass through, and the highly-sensitive seismographs recorded a mere whiff of the quake.
I had done it. I had held with bare hands the tidal wave for eleven entire seconds.
I pulled her in my arms and kissed her enthusiastically, when a piece of the Moon the size of Australia detached itself and started falling towards Earth.
Up and down made no difference. Phoenix was crumpled up like a tin can, and the only thing that saved us was the flawless reaction of the security personnel. I don’t remember any details, but we were grabbed and shoved into the life boats that would keep us safe till we landed back on Earth.
I was tied down to the seat and could barely see the pieces of Lunar rock heading towards Earth. The tiny circular window peeking out of the life boat showed me a part of South America with moonrocks raining down slowly.
The world’s armies reacted quickly. Concurrent flashes blinded me, with non-existing nuclear missiles launched from officially disarmed silos. Harmless military satellites unleashed secret technologies to the oncoming storm of lunar rocks. Nuclear submarines, that had been decommissioned according to the International Disarmament Treaty of 2036, came up for air and torched the sky. Short range missile defences tried but failed to intercept the endless shower of fireballs screaming towards the ground.
In my mind’s eye I could hear the single order being given by officers in a thousand tongues in a thousand places: “Fire at will!”
I was tried and found guilty by all the afflicted countries. Many of the trials represented countries that were no more than a memory.
There have been more than thirty attempts on my life. My own wardens tried to kill me bare-handed. I have scars in my ageing body from knives, bullets and severe burns. I was buried in a dark cell and they placed a digital reading with scalding red numbers. The numbers started from two billion, and rose every day, slowly but constantly.
Perhaps, someone else in my place would kill himself. I’m not sure why I haven’t.
Scientists from all over the planet gathered to perform studies and propose solutions. Crazy, far-fetched, insane ideas were considered seriously. One of them suggested we fill up the remainder of the Moon from the Earth’s oceans so we could restore its mass and stabilise its orbit. Another suggested we construct a superstructure, a ring around the Earth and displace all of humankind up there. A third pointed out which comets we should divert out of the sky to hit the Moon and kick it back into place.
Humanity was at a loss. They had to work together and solve problems regarding everyone’s survival. They pushed aside their differences and petty squabbles. Oil was just black goo, influence was a joke, political power was laughable in a dying world.
Our planet became more and more inhospitable every year. The climate was destabilised for the first five years, but became deadly after that. Every single day someplace on Earth would be ravaged by hurricanes, floods and storms. The unsteady orbit of the Moon and it’s trail of debris was making things worse. Thousands of souls were lost every day, either by hunger and disease, or by violent destruction. The red display kept rising, it became my personal timekeeper.
Predictions showed that we had thirty more years before Earth became completely uninhabitable. The remaining countries opened up and cooperated with one another for the Exodus. Thousands of Arcs, the biggest space haulers in the history of mankind, were built to carry entire biomes of Earth. The terraforming of Mars was originally calculated to take eighty years but we finally listened to a lunatic from long ago and nuked its poles. That dropped the timeframe to fifty years. The jumps we made in terraforming technologies allowed us to consider Venus as well, with the crazy floating cities not looking so crazy after all. Titan was next, planned decades ago but never given the get-go. Kilotons of supplies and equipment were carried out in those funny transports with antennae and golden sails, to cruise slowly in the solar winds and resupply the colonies after a few decades.
January of 2078, seconds before Earth’s climate collapsed if you counted in geological timeframes, the Exodus began. The Arcs aimed towards a journey with no return, leaving a green antimatter halo in their trail.
My punishment was unanimous. The Arcs left and I was left behind.
I hope that you, the descendants of mankind will find this recording when you finally come back. We calculated that Earth’s climate would take at least five thousand years to stabilise once more, but I can’t imagine what humanity will be capable of in a few centuries time. Perhaps you’ll find the way to come back sooner. Perhaps you might not even want to do such a thing, now that space has opened up to you. I do not know.
What I know for certain is that in the historical archives in the Martian capital, New Rome, you will find me under the listing of ‘The Destroyer Of Earth.’
I do not deny that title.
But you have to understand that through this world tragedy, humanity was finally united and sailed towards the stars.
Nowadays, I’m not quite sure that the destruction of Earth was such a bad thing.
The End
Fluffy or Shiny?
Toula’s job was simple: Kill everything on the alien moon.
As tasks went, it was so straightforward even she could wrap her mind around it. She knew she wasn’t that bright, and that self-awareness was a rare attribute among stupid people. Toula had a one-track mind, usually involving shiny things.
So they told her there was a shiny thing on the other side of the moon, but she needed to kill everything she encountered while getting there.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Toula had no idea what that actually meant but she liked saying the words.
They dropped her off from orbit. The moon was small so the gravity was softer. That meant she’d weigh less, they told her! How lovely, she’d been wanting to lose some extra weight for months now.
She saw the ground coming in closer as she fell. The moon was lovely, lush with vegetation and sparkling waters. They actually had her learn some things about the climate and all that crap, but Toula didn’t pay much attention to it. She told them to make a video, but no! They insisted on boring graphs and squiggly lines that meant nothing to her.
Stupid scientists.
Anyway, the ground was coming up pretty fast right now, so she needed to focus. She had the self-preservation instinct to let her limbs loose and cover her head. She used two hands to cover up her head, two lower arms to wrap up her knees close to her body, the other middle two to brace inside the pod, and the top two were pretty much useless in this particular situation so she just bent them over her shoulders.
BANG!
SCRACHOW!
Dirt all over the place. Her drop-pod popped open and she got out, squinting. Yup, she had landed. She always nailed her landings. Toula was proud of that.
Cough, cough. She waved the dust out of her mouth with two right arms. Then suddenly, a roar!
A gigantic maw came straight at her and snapped shut around her, a wet tongue slapping her in the chest like a truck.
How rude. Well, Toula was here to kill everything, after all. She brought her top two arms down, the malformed ones. She always disliked using those, but what else could she do? None of her eyes could actually see anything in the dark, even the ones that spun around to give her a 360 field of view. In retrospect, those would have come in handy two seconds ago, but there was just too much dust kicked up by her landing.
Oh well.
She brought her malformed hands and just punched in front of her, straight at the gigantic tongue. She injected her poison into the beast as it took to walking around with her in its
mouth.
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then a gurgle which sounded more like the fizzing sea between rocks, and then they fell on the ground. The beast’s mouth opened and she clawed herself out of there, smashing a giant tooth in the process.
Toula looked back at the dead beast. Well, one down, a million to go.
She had her shiny reward to get to.
Days went by, but they were funny days, because the moon was smaller so they literally went by quicker than what she was used to. She had killed plenty of beasts and felt really good about herself. Checking the kill counter, she had killed about…
62.457 lifeforms.
That was a lot, wasn’t it?
Well, she poisoned one more flying beast she found on a tree next to her, then doused those little beasties in the nest that were waiting with their mouths open.
Those sure made her job quite easy.
She just sprayed them with her poison and they gobbled it up. Dead in an instant.
She checked the rest of the trees, since she hadn’t thought of it before and she really didn’t want to backtrack now. The shiny was that way, the indicator said so, and going back would take her… Well, the other way.
She killed a few smaller beasts, the ones that grazed on the underbrush. Those were easy to kill too.
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