literature

An Egg

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(A collaborative short story by Tyler Jones and Cody Thomsen.)


No one could have guessed.
   
Our accrued body of geological knowledge had made some pretty safe assumptions about the Earth's core. We were right about some things -- that molten metal and rock was at the center of our planet, driving tectonic activity. It seemed entirely logical to assume that a swirling mass of magnetic metal was generating the gigantic and measurable magnetic field surrounding the planet. But as we sometimes learn in science, even the most plausible of assumptions can be wrong, and what we are left with are implications based on evidence we can put together.

No one could have possibly gathered evidence about this. Not before it was too late for everyone.
   
It wasn't a day like any other before the volcanoes began erupting simultaneously all over the planet. It began in the Ring of Fire, the fault lines that surrounded the Pacific tectonic plate. Throughout recorded history, at least ninety percent of volcanic disasters had occurred there, and now it seemed as though each of these catastrophes had found their own echo today as the ocean swelled with the volume of newborn lava.
 
A man stood on a shore, and didn't see this expanse. His eyes were on the sky, which was filling rapidly with the darkness of the mantle's outpouring. He couldn't stop thinking about how quiet it all seemed. He was too far away from any of the eruptions, but not too far, he knew, to avoid the inevitable fallout of this unthinkable vista that was unfolding in front of him through the dying light of the afternoon sun.

   
The asteroid hadn't killed the dinosaurs, his friend had been telling him the other day. It was the debris from the impact. Everything bigger than a chicken was either killed by the poisoned atmosphere or starved in the weeks after, searching for the large prey that its ecosystem no longer supported. The scavengers dined on poisoned meat, and the smallest of the creatures with the hardiest of stomachs had managed to scrape out some meager existence on their new, damaged planet. These scavengers were his lineage, his deep ancestry rooted in their twisting, underground burrows.
   
They had survived the asteroid by the skin of their teeth, but his kind was larger now, and stood on a foundation of anatomical interdependencies that had become progressively more complex -- and in some ways easier to disrupt -- over the course of its evolution. His kind had been given every horizon, and now the boons were to play unwilling partners to the finality of this new disaster as the consciousness that they enabled was forced to drink it in.
   
It was far bigger than he could have hoped to put together into a sensible recognition of what was actually happening. It was clear enough that a seriously massive volcanic event was happening, but there was no way to confer with internet science IRCs for the speculation of experts as to the workings of its cause, for no electronics were working at all.
   
No one could tell each other what was happening on their respective sides of the world, but no one in the world needed to talk to each other to recognize their mutual disaster. The columns of smoke were visible on every horizon as humankind was collectively veiled from the stars -- and from so much of what it had dreamed that it would reach.

The tremors came just as suddenly. The force with which the volcanoes released this unspeakable pressure had launched crust and instant ash into the sky with enough velocity for him to be able to see the light reflect from the debris before he could feel the seismic ripples of the force that sent it to the skies.
   
Those who would survive this initial tectonic disturbance would witness something truly fantastic.
   
It was not any kind of natural disaster, if you tend to associate 'natural' with the absence of sentient influence. It seemed straight out of the terrible fantasies of cultures myriad. It was to be a coincidence -- a convergence, rather -- of a scale that none would live to appreciate.
 
   
Privileged populations tend to grow. The human civilizational enterprise epitomized our evolutionary privilege. We grew quickly upon the fountainhead of petroleum. Like a cancer, for far too long we did not -- or could not, perhaps, by nature -- check our growth. As it became clearer that the release of carbon into the atmosphere was going to trap enough heat to force whole ecosystems -- and thus, food -- into adapting at a pace that would become absolutely unrealistic, the international complex could no longer sweep the problem under the rug. We finally threw our collective weight behind truly alternative sources of energy to trade, rather than different flavors of increasingly expensive carbon.
   
Growing dissatisfaction with the ability of corporations and the governments they controlled to properly regulate and maintain nuclear fission technology pressured investors toward geothermal extraction, which was believed, if done right, to be able to supply enough electricity to sustain the world's economies with marginally less oversight than fission would continually require. Solar technology had never gotten off the ground with enough efficiency to be an immediate option, and at the point being reached, immediate options were needed -- the further development of solar would be a crucial supplement until it could take over completely. The plan, put all too simply, was to punch holes in the Earth's crust, collect the resultant heat from the layer of mantle underneath, and convert it to electricity.
   
We were an unwitting creature searching the cave in which slept the agent of our doom.

   
Our species first dreamt of dragons as an outlet for the ancient fears harbored by the early mammalian minds of our evolutionary lineage. We abstracted all of the terror we felt about reptilian biology into a single beast, embodying remorselessness, fury, and death. To defeat such a beast would be to embolden ourselves past our most potent fears and into the province of the deific.
   
So was the dream, so was the fantasy, and such was the reality of the human situation as the planetary apex predators for so long. But a population's growth is always contained within the environment enabling it, and it would seem, to any that could appreciably see, that the Earth was actually hatching. We were bacteria on the surface of its shell.
   
None would really comprehend that bigger picture, and none would need to. This was an event that nature was creating, like any other. Our picture of the world, through whatever common threads weaved through the fragmented cultures that had sprouted upon the surface of the Earth, was only but a frame.
 
   
Its massive head reared, and it filled the sky. The plasticity of the man's brain struggled to integrate the novelty. The scale of this creature, this entity, was incomprehensible. The tendons of the man's jaw slacked involuntarily. It was turning, an eye was beginning to swivel, a pupil beginning to dilate. It was scaled, but the scales were coated in carbon, barely visible in the dim light that managed to penetrate the smog.
The spaces between bodies of paragraphs are not intended to imply author changes -- it's all mixed up.
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