From space, it looked like a ball of blue and brown; there were blue oceans swirling with windblown whitecaps and the occasional tiny island could be found but most were scoured clean by the Last Storm. You don't see much of the surface anymore because of the cloud cover. The white polar ice caps were tiny buttons on the top and bottom of the globe.
During the year, they could be seen to appear and disappear. If you took a vantage point from the the lone satellite of this blue planet, you would notice on the night side, there was no light emitted, no radio transmissions to disturb your electromagnetic slumbers. It was a quiet planet circling a nondescript yellow-white dwarf with eight other planets and assorted planet-junk. Strangely enough, if you had vision sharp enough, you would see hundreds of artificial satellites circling the planet.
You would see communication satellites beaming signals to each other, reminding each other where they are to ensure signals moved from the ground to other places on the planet were not interrupted. They never receive those signals any longer, since there is no one to send them. There are many global positioning satellites. Each designed to know every single street and every square inch of the planet and tell you where you are at any moment in space and time, anywhere on the globe.They have not had to answer a single query for a little longer than a year.
Military reconnaissance satellites watch key sections of the globe for threats to countries that no longer exist. Linked to those satellites are space based weapons platforms using a variety of technologies to deliver death from above. There is now nothing to shoot at, nor anyone.
There are two satellites still doing their jobs. The first is a weather satellite. They are still happily chugging along gathering information about the Last Storm. The Last Storm came into existence nearly ten years now. It did not look like it does now. Today, it covers half of the northern hemisphere at a time, blocking the sun, from a quarter of the planet. Swirling above the planet, a Great White spot on the surface of the Earth, similar to the Red Spot on Jupiter, just hundreds of miles across instead of tens of thousands.
Weather satellites would make the pivotal discovery of the Last Storm in 2096, when it was just a tropical depression in the South Pacific Ocean. This storm is the greatest weather pattern on the planet sweeping across every land mass, driving sand and debris into the air, at almost four hundred miles an hour. It has scoured the Earth clean of nearly all traces of her former tenants. It did not happen all at once. It took time.
The other satellite still working has only one man left on board. One solitary human who had chosen to stay here ad document what he was seeing. His name was Sergei Balmasov. We say was because he is no longer living in the classic sense. He mostly sits and looks out the observation window of the International Space Station in muted horror. His mind is broken.
He listened on the wideband radio to the world coming to an end. He listened as people called for help that could never come. He listened while radio stations told people not to panic and that this was just a really large hurricane forming in the Pacific and when it hit the coast Hawaii, it would be devastating so they should evacuate Hawaii. He listened when they said there would not be enough time or enough ships to move everyone in time.
They told those who could not make it in time to shelter in place. That would be enough. In the year 2096, the state of Hawaii became the first casualty to the last storm.
They sent ships to Hawaii. They rescued a hundred and fifty thousand people and fled east toward the coast of California and Oregon. But the storm was too fast and too wide. Two hundred thousand people died on the islands and another one hundred and twenty thousand sank as their ships were capsized in the torrential storm. The remaining population died in the storm awaiting rescue ships that could never come.
Hawaii, born of fire, home to people for five thousand years, was washed away in a single night, all of her people returned to the sea.
Sergei had no time to grieve as the storm approached California. People began evacuating and fleeing to the mountains. Storms break over mountains was the conventional theory. This was no conventional storm. As it came within a thousand miles of California, the rains began.
The storm slowed over Hawaii and continued to absorb water and energy from the environment. When it began to move again, it was twice the size it had been before. It approached the coast of California, driving in swells of water which damaged anything along the shore, turning any building on the coast to splinters. The forty-foot swells had never been seen and thrashed the coast, drove water into the streets of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. People who did not believe what they had heard about Hawaii re-evaluated and began to run for their lives. How could they have known?
The roads to the mountains were jammed with cars and trucks. The storm was inexorable. When it reached the coast, the winds were in excess of two hundred fifty miles per hour. Nothing made by man could withstand such winds. Skyscrapers lost windows, cars were flipped and carried for miles, trees uprooted, homes swept away by winds, rain and waves. When the storm reached the mountains, everyone's hopes rose, even as people ignored the carnage. The mountains would break the storm, it would run out of energy and die.
Instead, it did the unexpected. It turned south, but did not die.
It rode the mountains south, destroying the San Francisco Bay Area, and everyone in it. Heading South, Los Angeles was the next major metropolis to be swept away. The storm was being fed by the Pacific and kept moving south. As the edge of the mountains receded, the storm proceeded East into the Gulf of Mexico and continued to grow. Most of Mexico to the borders of Costa Rica and South America were completely inundated by water.
Refueled by the heated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the storm's power increased and with its increased size it affected the Southern mainland states and basically erased them, from Nevada to Florida. Nearly one third of the population of the United States was destroyed in the first forty hours of the Last Storm of the Century. Nearly all of Mexico, and Costa Rica had been decimated. Tens of millions were believed dead.
As the storm pulled away from the United States, its size increased again, absorbing water from across its entire area, and energy from the very warm waters of the Atlantic, it swept across the Southern tip of Europe, but even that tiny brush destroyed most of the UK, Greece, France, Italy and all of the Mediterranean. At this point, emergency signals criss-cross the globe with everyone trying to determine where the most need for service would appear next.
It didn't matter.
The storm grew larger and more powerful, as it recrossing the Pacific. It would become immense and unstoppable. It was considered such a threat, militaries threatened to throw nuclear weapons into the heart of the thing. A great carrier attempted, since it had been caught in the wake of the storm to tried to use a nuclear device, but it had no effect. The storm had simply grown too large to do anything.
People fled where ever they thought they could go, but climate models had begun to reveal a startling truth. The storm was so large now, it could feed from any ocean, any where, at nearly any time, until it ran out of energy. Climatologists theorized it would become a permanent fixture on the face of the planet. Those climatologists called it, The Great White Spot. It swept across the Earth over twenty five times before stabilizing at its current size of one quarter of the globe.
Sergei listened to the radio until the signals grew less and less. Communications from the ground lasted two years, but by the year 2099, there had not been a single radio message he could detect anywhere on the planet. He held out hope that somewhere, somehow, mankind had survived. Until the cloud cover broke enough to see the planet.
Until today. Then he wept like a child.
The mountains were gone, ground away by the five hundred mile an hour winds. The Rockies, the Appalachians, The Himalayans had been scoured from the planet. Nothing made by man had survived. Even the best made skyscrapers had been worn away to nothing. The Earth was a smooth and uniform brown. He stared looking for any landmarks. Nothing remained.
Sergei lasted a year eating the stored food onboard the ship. The satellite could keep him alive alone for five years, easily but his mind was shattered by what he saw. In order to cope he used climatological models from weather satellites under his control to determine the Great White Spot would last for another twenty years, reducing the earth to little more than a windswept ocean in that time. He then found out that without land, the storm might never stop.
Sergei Balmasov, the last Human being left alive anywhere opened the bottle of vodka he carried aboard all those years ago and drank a toast. He finished the bottle in about an hour. He set all of his notes into the computer and set a radio broadcast into space repeating what he learned about Humanity during their last days on Earth. He stepped into an airlock without a suit closed the door behind him. He held his breath while he cycled the lock and jumped out into space, with his dying breath he chose to look upon the Earth.
His message to anyone who might one day come across our blue planet was a tombstone marker. "Here Lies the final resting place of the Human race. We saw the future, but could not embrace it, until it embraced us. May God have mercy on our souls."
The Great White Spot © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved
Comments