Giovanni scribbled notes on a pad of paper: Survivor testimony #GR14; Event +62hrs; Name: Aubrey Leaming; Reported location: England, undetermined. He compiled a log of all the survivors he contacted.
This morning, at least morning on their clocks, there was a rush of excitement when Giovanni contacted their first other survivor group. Excitement and tears. They weren’t the last people on Earth. All digital electronics aboveground had been fried in the solar storms, but some older electronic equipment seemed to have survived, things like shortwave radios.
Giovanni leaned his ear toward the speaker of the shortwave. He’d run another antennae up the way up the tunnel, patching together wiring he scavenged up top, all the way to the observatory tower.
“…your location?” the speaker asked.
Giovanni clicked the microphone. “Italy, we are Station Saline, again, repeat, Station Saline in northern Italy.”
Jess paused her simulation. The Earth and planets stopped moving, frozen in space. She zoomed in, locked her viewpoint into the Earth, then panned to celestial north and looked for Venus. Her father’s notes were scattered on a pile of barrel wood beside her, the backpack open, the tapes and spools spilling out of it.
She pushed reset on the simulation, adjusted Nomad’s trajectory, and let it fly again, tearing through the middle of the solar system. Increasing the speed of the simulation, to one week for one second, she watched Mercury shoot away from the Sun as if it was fired from a cannon. Venus looped outward past Mars, while Saturn was dragged backward into a retrograde orbit, rotating around the sun in the opposite direction. The Earth, though, that was the key: in this simulation run it was dragged into a high elliptic orbit.
It didn’t look like it would leave the Sun, not entirely.
Opening a climate simulation tool within the software, she watched the estimated average global temperature of the simulated Earth. Normally, this hovered at an almost-constant global 15 Celsius. As the Earth in Jess’s simulation climbed in the elliptic, the global average temperature dropped rapidly, to below 8C, then started rising as the Earth dropped back toward the sun. 15C. 20C. 30C.
Too hot.
Everything on that planet was fried. She stopped the simulation and rubbed her eyes.
“Temperature here is…” Giovanni paused to convert from Celsius, relaying information to this new band of survivors he got in touch with. “…twenty-nine Fahrenheit and dropping. What is your temperature? Do you have cloud cover?”
He glanced at Jess. This morning, they’d even contacted someone in America. On a pad of paper beside him, Giovanni scribbled names, locations, frequencies of anyone or anything they contacted. Shortwave operated by bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere, skipping them inside the Earth’s atmosphere, sometimes all the way around it. Atmospheric conditions were unpredictable. The ionosphere was probably still glowing. Communications were patchy and sporadic.
Still, Giovanni had spoken to pockets of survivors all over the world. Moscow, Paris, Madrid, Baghdad, Kampala, Nairobi, even Brasilia in South America. They hadn’t spoken to anyone in coastal cities, except this one Coast Guard ship from England that had somehow survived. Africa seemed to have been the least affected.
They were starting to piece together a picture of the new Earth.
Whole areas of the Middle East, India and Pakistan were destroyed by nuclear strikes, becoming irradiated wastelands before Nomad even had a chance to tear them apart. The radioactive fallout must have carried up into the atmosphere, mixing with the vapor clouds and ash from hundreds of simultaneous volcanic eruptions.
Temperatures had plummeted around the globe, although the fastest and most dramatic was in Europe. Clouds covered the skies everywhere they talked to people, and were getting thicker and darker as freshly opened volcanic rifts spewed ash across the continents.
“Temperature here is five Celsius,” the radio crackled, coming to life again. “Thick cloud cover, almost as dark as night during the day. How many people are you, Station Saline…?”
When Giovanni told Jess he found someone in America, she got excited, but this quickly turned to numb terror. A contact in the Pennsylvania mountains had detailed what he’d pieced together staying in touch with other radio operators when Nomad hit.
It started with a huge quake in the Pacific Northwest, destroying Seattle and Portland, sending towering tsunamis up the coast. The San Andreas fault had followed, laying waste to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, and then the New Madrid fault had devastated Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee.
This was only the beginning.
Power grids and electronics were fried in the massive solar flares just as the Yellowstone supervolcano had erupted. It had covered the entire Midwest, from Iowa and Montana out to Illinois and down to Texas, in two to four feet of thick ash, smothering everything. The final blow was a wall of water a thousand feet high that swept in from the North Atlantic, destroying New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami. Washington was gone.