Flash Fiction Friday: We Apologize for the Error

A few weeks ago, Chuck Wendig asked for people to come up with (just for a variation on the usual) the final line of a story. I enjoyed reading through them, but I admit that most felt more like the first line to me. I managed to snitch this one (I'm sorry that I no longer have the record of whose line it was) and use it at both ends of the story.

It's just a bit of speculative fiction. If you think it's anything else, think what you will.

I give you my story, in 834 words.

We Apologize for the Error…

I always knew I’d be present at the end of the world.

I just didn’t know it would look like this. I didn’t know it would be my fault.

I suppose I should explain: I am immortal. I have no memory of my beginnings, and I can have no end, no matter how much I may wish it. And I have wished it many, many times, for all the good it does. So of course I knew I’d be around when the world ends. But I never meant to be the reason it ended.

It happened like this.

I won’t say it was just another day, because days have little meaning for me. Time washes past in waves, drowning me for long periods—what you would call long periods—then flinging me to the surface to glimpse a single moment or a century before I lose myself again.

This time, I surfaced at a very bad moment. Several major governments around the world had apparently been taken over by madmen or children—toddlers prone to tantrums, they appeared to me. Toddlers who would break and destroy if they didn’t get their own way, just because they could.

Things didn’t look great for the world. My mistake was thinking that I could help.

In fact, I probably could have helped, if I’d just managed to get the timing right.

My idea was to remove the maniacs, which even I could see had to be done pretty much all at once. I was pretty sure I could at least create the illusion of simultaneity. It would take careful timing and meticulous planning, which I was quite capable of.

Where I failed was in my understanding of human nature. You can hardly blame me for that. After all, humans are a pretty new thing from my perspective, and they aren’t that easy to understand. The last time I’d spent any significant time watching them, they were just learning to make things explode.

So, secure in my over-confidence, I headed first for the leader I thought was the craziest. I had to neutralize him—and yes, all the mad rulers were male. In my opinion, and I’ve been watching, more or less, for all of human history, women are chosen far too seldom, and most have been sane and interested in peace. There have been exceptions, of course. Look at Queen Mary—the one they called “Bloody Mary”—or that Isabel woman in Spain. And there have been plenty of sane and humane male leaders, of course. I just happened to come up for air at a time when there were at least three madmen in important positions, and all armed with nuclear weapons.

I was trying to prevent the end of the world, at least as a sphere habitable by humans.

So I dealt with the worst one, as I saw it, first. It was simple enough: I put him in a coma. Don’t ask how. I won’t tell. I thought his minions would keep that quiet as long as possible, to maintain his power. I have my own ways of getting around, so I only needed a few hours, and surely it would take longer than that for word to leak out.

I didn’t realize that the madness went several layers deep in that country. The second in command claimed power within minutes, which I guess was protocol there. And he, too, sat with his thumb on the red button. That was okay, or it would have been; it was an orderly transition even if it did put everyone on edge.

But my second target expected the sort of chaos that would come if he vanished, and tried to take advantage of it. He shouldn’t even have known about the coma before I could get to him, but that orderly transition was all done in public, so it took about 30 seconds for the whole world to know, what with the new kinds of instant communication humans had invented since I last looked.

So the second madman pushed his button.

I suppose he thought that confusion, or even fights over who was in charge, would delay the response long enough for his bombs to destroy their bombs.

It didn’t.

I was only minutes away from neutralizing him when he set loose Armageddon, and the new leader on the other side didn’t hesitate. I might have misjudged who was the maddest, or maybe at that level degrees of madness don’t matter.

Armageddon is kind of pretty, seen from a distance.

Well, it was pretty at first. I was when I realized that I wasn’t going to die along with the humans that it became something else. By the time the madmen were finished, nothing could live on this god-forsaken planet.

Nothing but me, because I can’t die.

Not even of boredom.

I always knew I’d be present at the end of the world. I just didn’t know I’d still be there afterwards.

###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017

As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Flashback Friday & Eclipse Report

First the eclipse. As regular readers of this blog will recall, I drove to Oregon last weekend with my oldest son in order to witness the total solar eclipse. I have to say that it was a fantastic experience, and worth the cost of a rental car (because ours chose just that moment to develop a perplexing electrical problem) and 3 days of driving. At least we avoided the massive traffic jams that made some people's trips home 2 or 3 times longer than they should have been.

Okay, I'm lying. That's not an eclipse. That's sunset in California, thanks to the fires everywhere. And the reality was even redder than the photo shows.

We targeted the National Forest lands east of John Day, Oregon, in hopes of avoiding the worst crowds. Our plan worked pretty well. That is to say, the small towns along the path of totality were absolute zoos, but we needed nothing there--we'd filled the gas tank farther out, and had all our own food and water with us. The National Forest was also pretty well populated with people camping as we were (unofficially, in what is known as "dispersed camping" and is perfectly legal on most Forest Service and BLM lands).

Every farmer, school, and town rented out pretty much any flat ground for camping. I hope the schools made some good money, but the crowd scene wasn't for me.

We found a campsite, set up camp, and located the perfect viewing point: a pile of columnar basalt, tipped sideways in some long-ago upheaval of the earth.

The offspring took a good close-up of the roughly hexagonal columns, formed in the cooling basalt.

Stair-steps up the columns to the viewpoint.

 Waiting for Totality.

We shared our summit with a dozen other people, all excitedly watching the change in light.

 Someone brought "eclipse cookies" and shared.

Yes, I know--this one was backwards, making it a lunar eclipse. Or something.

Making progress.

When the light started to change, it happened fast.

The down jackets in the background were overkill, though it did get noticeably cooler.

The main event, as captured by my little Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS100 (for those who want to know).

Now for...

Flashback Friday!

It took some looking to find a story to match the eclipse. But I found this 2012 homage to Douglas Adams, and it felt about right. So, with apologies to the master, here in 855 words, is...

An Elegant Apocalypse

Sunrise on Planet X-4732B was one of the most stunning and beautiful events in the Universe. This is a well-established fact, determined by a complex algorithm developed by the Ultra-Computer housed on the 4th Moon of Planet G-7512, known to locals as Home. The lunar location was originally meant to isolate it and prevent the most powerful computer in the universe from running amok.

Naturally, by the time the Ultra-Computer was completed, there were six more computers being built on six asteroids, each one an order of magnitude more powerful than the Ultra. That is not germane to the issue, but does explain why the Ultra was free to spend its time determining the nature and location of the most stunningly beautiful sights in the universe.

So the morning of the last day of the world began with the last most beautiful sunrise. If anything, the approach of the disaster gave the sunrise a more vivid coloration. It was not, however, beautiful in the eyes of the beholder. There were no beholders, for the same reason that X-4732B has no local name: there are no higher order inhabitants on X-4732B. Lower-order organisms abound, or did before the world ended, but they had failed to evolve to create pollution, disrupt the perfect order of the landscape, or anticipate the apocalypse.

The absence of human or human-like observers was, of course, central to the elegance of the X-4732B apocalypse (for every apocalypse is local, until the final event, the end of the universe so eloquently documented by Douglas Adams). Besides a failure to muck up the view, lower-order organisms tend to lack the necessary glands to panic. Had the planet evolved so much as a muskrat, the day would have taken a different turn, and the Ultra Computer would have had to recalculate the event’s standing in its ranking of events approaching perfection.

Naturally, just when it seemed safe to assume that the apocalypse would proceed with dignity and quiet splendor, everything changed. A lone, tiny, and definitely lost space capsule spiraled down through the oddly Earth-like atmosphere.

In the best of all possible worlds, the man who emerged, dazed, from the erring and now disabled spacecraft would have been Arthur Dent.

It wasn’t.

His name was Johnson Bob, and he’d been in transit between two planets far from X-4732B when his flight path took him a hair too close to a concert by the intergalactic band Disaster Area. The cosmic disruption of the loudest band in the universe had put an end to his tedious business trip and landed Johnson on X-4732B in time to witness the end of that world, and potentially to disrupt its tranquil order.

The event was saved from the contamination of panic, despite the intrusion of a more-or-less higher life form, by the simple fact that Johnson never left the ship.  He was sleeping off the disconcerting effects of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster he’d had in the space port bar before leaving, a task that requires the full concentration of all bodily forces for a full day.

Johnson Bob therefore slept through the end of the world.  He failed to observe as the sky turned from its usual chartreuse to an odd shade of puce and finally a perfect shade of red-orange.  Nor was he aware when the atmosphere boiled away, as his ship maintained the ideal balance of gasses for the continuation of human life.

Johnson Bob likewise missed the exquisite moment when all factors coalesced into the perfect, nearly silent yet symphonic finality.  It was this perfect coordination of elements that led the Ultra Computer to designate the X-4732B Apocalypse as the most elegant apocalypse of all time. Millennia of constipated volcanism beneath the immense chain of volcanoes that ringed the planet burst through the plug in every peak simultaneously, exactly at the instant the asteroid that had boiled away the atmosphere struck precisely at the southern pole, and the sun went nova.

Johnson Bob should have been boiled away with the atmosphere, of course, but the Ultra Computer considered the final touch that perfected the X-4732B Apocalypse to be the manner in which the volcanic cataclysm ejected the one bit of alien matter from the planet in time to make it a purely local event. When Johnson Bob eventually awoke, he had a nasty hangover but no awareness of where he’d been or what he’d done. The blast had flung him back onto his orignal trajectory, and he landed without incident and went to the nearest bar for another Gargle-Blaster, in hopes of clearing his head.
To a human observer, the tiny space capsule as it exited would have looked like a watermelon pip spat contemptuously at the remainder of the universe as the planet exploded into a nearly infinite number of identical fragments.

But of course since Johnson Bob was unconscious the whole time, there was no human, or even sentient, observer.  That, the computer decided as the final rays of the perfectly symmetrical pattern of dissolution faded into empty space, was perhaps the most elegant feature of the apocalypse.  Perfection could only unfold unobserved.

***

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Flash Fiction Friday: When Worlds End

Chuck Wendig is finally back on the job with our weekly challenges, and for reasons that don't take a lot of parsing, our challenge this week was to write an apocalypse. We weren't supposed to do the usual apocalypse, though, but instead to come up with a whole new sort, which I didn't really do. Instead, I picked up on something he said about writing "your uniquely-you" apocalypse, and that got me to thinking about how one person's world can end while everyone else's goes on. I was also thinking about the book I just finished about "Wicked Women" of the frontier, and got some ideas going in my head. So you don't really get a story about an apocalypse, just one human's personal end of the world, in right about 1000 words.

When Worlds End

I read the book of Revelation when I was a little girl, and found there a story of how the end of the world that turned out to be rubbish. Well, I don't actually know that. It’s just that we don’t get to see THE WORLD end very often. But I know that worlds end every day. What matters is what happens next.

My world ended on a March afternoon on a pass in the Rocky Mountains, standing in the snow next to what was left of a train. An avalanche had come down and caught the tail end of our train, putting a halt to forward progress for the time being, as everyone gawked over the edge of a cliff .

“It’s not so bad. Just the caboose and one car,” the conductor said. "Not the end of the world."

“It sounded like the end of the world when that snow came down, but I reckon you're right. Joe wasn’t in the caboose,” the fireman answered, and they walked off.

It wasn’t much to them. But that car had been carrying passengers, the ones with cheap tickets. It had gone over the cliff under a load of snow, and I wasn’t fool enough to think anyone in it would be dug out alive, if they were dug out at all. But I wanted to run down there anyway, because that car had held my world: my family. That one car lost was the end of the world, as far as I was concerned.

I wasn’t dead because I was always wandering off when I shouldn’t, as Ma would say. Only, this time, I guess it was good that I did, though just then I wished I’d died when the world ended.

But I’d been off in the observation car with the friends I’d made in my wanderings. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but Belle and Suzy were bent on showing me the sights. I guess they hadn’t had a youngster to play with for a long time, and we were having a good time admiring the new snow, when we got knocked down by a sudden stop.

I don’t think I understood how completely my world had ended until the rescue train came. That was when the railroad people discovered that I was supposed to have been in the car that was lost, and that now I was an orphan. I probably wasn’t supposed to hear their discussion of what to do with me.

“We can take her on into town and find someone to take her in.”

“Let Belle and Suzy take her with them. Kate’s always got room for one more.”

“She’s too young. Look at her. Just a skinny kid!”

“Some like 'em that way.” The men shrugged and moved off, leaving me shaking with cold, fear, and fury.

I wasn’t stupid. I’d learned a lot from Belle and Suzy on the long train trip, and I knew what they did for a living. I remembered Belle telling me, “The ones with weird tastes, those are the ones to watch out for. Me and Suzy, we’ve learned. We won’t do any of that. It just leads to a heap of hurting.” I was pretty sure that a skinny 12-year-old would be in for a heap of hurting in their business.

So before I even got on that train, I vowed that whatever I did, I wouldn’t go to Kate. I’d find my own way.

I started by insisting that they not put me off the train in that tiny mountain town. Our tickets had been through to San Francisco, and I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Then I said that the railroad owed me for the luggage I’d lost. I got lucky there.

The storm that ruined our train trapped everyone in town for a week. The one hotel wasn’t big enough to give me a room of my own, and since I wouldn’t let them send me to the “boarding house” with Belle and Suzy, the railroad folks found a couple from the train to take me in.

The luck came when I found out that Mr. Carlyle was a lawyer. He had his own grudge against the railroads, though I never found out what it was, and he said he liked a challenge. So he set to work on my case, and he didn’t drop it or me when we got to the coast. I went on staying with him and his wife while he fought the railroad, and got me a nice cash settlement, not just for my baggage, which was all I’d thought about, but for the loss of my family. I didn’t think the weather was the railroad’s fault, but Mr. Carlyle said that the pass was known to be unsafe in winter, so it was a matter of poor judgment to have sent the train over it in a snowstorm, and he made the case that they did it to save the cost of delays, and for a wonder the judge agreed.

With the winnings, I set myself up in business. That wasn’t easy to do, being female and young, but I was stubborn. I also let Mr. Carlyle help me. He was male and old—fifty, at least—and it wasn’t so hard for him. Never mind what business; it was profitable and I was good at it.

By the time I was 16, I was had built a new world from the remains of the one that ended on Rollins Pass. I’d grown and filled out, and I could pass for 21, which let me take control of my empire when Mr. Carlyle died that winter. I promised to take care of his widow, and I did, even after the world ended again.

It wasn’t just my world that ended that April. The flames that ate San Francisco after the earthquake devoured my business and my home, and sent me to a tent in Golden Gate Park with Mrs. Carlyle in tow. Plenty of people thought it was the end of the world, but I knew better. Worlds never end, not really. And this time I knew how to rebuild.

###

I'm sorry I have no photos of a train in the snowy mountains. But here are a couple of a mountain train ride, followed by some nice snowy terrain!

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Flash Fiction Friday--Finish the Story

This is the 3rd week of a Chuck Wendig challenge, whereby I pick up a story that has been 2/3 written by two other followers of terribleminds.com and write the conclusion. I took on an interesting tale begun by JD Stoffel and continued last week by Lisa Shininger. We were each to do 500 words. I only ran over by about 50 words. Incidentally, I had to look up "eschaton" so you can too.

I'll add a link to the story I continued last week as soon as I find an ending for it.

The Reaper’s Eschaton

Part I (by JD Stoffel)

“Reap, you have to wake up.”

Charlotte, the Senior Reaping Manager, shook Reap’s shoulder, jostling her blanket of cobwebs aside.
“Ugh,” said Reap with a crackling yawn. “What time is it?”

“2014 CE,” said Charlotte. She shoved a black cloak into Reap’s grasp. Reap opened her mouth to argue, but Charlotte cut her off. “I know you wanted to sleep six more years, but we have a situation.”

“Not Xanaxes,” Reap groaned, sliding the cloak over bony shoulders.

“Xanaxes,” Charlotte confirmed. “Started the apocalypse, like I told you he would.”

Reap did some quick math, accepting a sheaf of pages. “Sixty-three years ahead of schedule. Idiot.”

“There’s your best candidate. Now move!”

Brushing aside the compulsion to come down on Charlotte for bossing around her boss, Reaper swung her scythe. The blade hummed through the air and through the fabric of reality at just the angle necessary.

A tear opened and Reap passed through.

She stood in a city park.

Her reaping staff was in evidence. They stood by, waiting for buildings to fall, meteorites to strike, the ground to swallow people whole.

“Ronald, uh,” Reap called aloud, then squinted at the pages. “Ronald Passitelli?” She botched the pronunciation, but it got the attention of a passing low-level reaper.

A glance at his identification aura gave his name. Jim said, “You looking for Ron?” Reap nodded. “Oh, thank God. He’s over by the fountain. Electrocution in about five, so watch out.”

“Thanks, Jim,” said Reap. “Just handle that load.” She pointed at the collection of souls trailing behind the junior reaper. “I’ve got Ron.”

With a relieved sigh, Jim swiped his scythe to reach the Below. Reap paid him no mind, focusing on the now-identified Ron.

Ronald Passitelli stood ankle deep in the large basin of the fountain. A bland young man in a dress shirt and khakis, now soaked, he reached out toward a child. The child took refuge from the hell raining down from the sky in the bulky fountain sculpture.

“C’mon,” said Ron. “It isn’t safe.”

“Where’s my mommy?” cried the child.

“I don’t know,” Ron admitted. “Let’s find her together.” He made another grab but the child dodged around the fountain.”

“Ronald,” Reap boomed in a voice only moderately intimidating. She did not want to blow the man’s simple mind.

Ron looked at her, able to see Reap now that she had spoken to him, and gaped. “Oh, no,” he said, knees quivering a bit. “I’m not ready!”

Reap rolled her eyes, an impressive feat with empty eye sockets. Humans gave her a lot of practice. “I don’t want to reap you.”

“But you’re the Grim-”

“Yes, but we haven’t the time. Some ancient schlub of a god no one remembers named Xanaxes kicked off the apocalypse early, and you’re the only one who can stop it.”

Ron gaped again when the child in the fountain screeched, “I am not a schlub!”

“Oh, great,” Reap muttered. Xanaxes had found the chosen one first. “Ron, run!”

Part II (by  Lisa Shininger)

Of course, he didn’t.

Xanaxes wailed, so Ron turned his vacant expression on the fake toddler instead.

“Oh, come on.” All these humans ever did was gawp at things. Reap whipped the sleeve of her cloak around her bony hand and tugged on the back of Ron’s shirt to pull him out of the fountain.

Xanaxes sploshed through the water and wrapped two chubby arms around the man’s legs. “No! I got him fair and square!”

“Yeah, well…”

It took just a flick of the scythe’s handle against Xanaxes’ curly dark head for the god’s body to slacken and drop back into the fountain. Reap tightened her grip on Ron’s shirt and lifted him clear.
“Look, like I said, we haven’t much time. You’re Chosen, it’s an honor, blah blah. Close your mouth before you choke on brimstone.”

Ron did, but not before asking, “What am I chosen for?”

You would think that "you’re the only one who can stop it" covered all the bases. You couldn’t assume anything with humans, though.

“For saving me from a literal eternity of paperwork. Let’s go.”

There were rules upon rules for how Reap was allowed to act while Above. Even during emergencies, she was authorized to interact only with the humans on her lists. She wasn’t supposed to scare the birds who went out of their way to shit on her cloak–no matter how rude they were about it. She definitely wasn’t allowed to use the scythe for anything but traveling, not even dealing with recalcitrant toddler gods. But in for a penny…

Ron dropped to the ground like a sack of meat. Reap slashed at the air beside him.

“Abs, turn off the heat. Live one coming through!” she called, before twisting the scythe to open the seam to the pit enough to let Ron drop through.

Her aim wasn’t the greatest. They slipped into the next world a few inches off an ash-strewn floor. It crunched lightly under Ron’s body.

Abaddon stood a few feet away with his hand still on the shut-off valve. His chitinous skin gleamed. His black eyes did, too. His wings, his robe, the army of locusts screeching behind him. In fact, everything down here gleamed, like it was all covered in a thin film of oil, which it probably was.
He pointed at Ron, who had progressed not just to consciousness but to looking around in terror. “Chosen?”

“Yep. Ron … something.”

Abs grinned. He always loved these things. “So, what do you need?”

Reap blew a stray flake of ash off her sleeve. “You guys doing the brimstone for this Xanaxes creep?”
“No, we’re still on the Icelandic contract. It’s probably Lucy.”

“It’s the same pit, though, right? Can’t he just sacrifice himself here, save us a few minutes? We’re up to my skull with souls to process already.”

Ron made a squalling noise. “Wait, sacrifice?”

Abs laughed his horrible deafening chitter and looked fondly at Ron. “They really don’t remember anything, do they?”

Part III (by me)

"Stop scaring him," Reap said. "He'll do what he has to do."

"Don't count on it," Ron said.  He was looking around now, and seemed to be developing a backbone.

What rotten timing, Reap thought. If the fellow didn't take the jump, she was going to be stuck processing souls for eternity. And then there was the paperwork for dealing with an apocalypse. Plus the trouble she was in for using her scythe in an unauthorized manner. Several eternities. Ron whoever he was didn't look like he cared about her problems.

"Come on. We're going to find Lucy, and find where you're supposed to jump."

He planted his feet stubbornly. "I'm not jumping off anything, and you can't make me."

Drat! The toddler god really had gotten him. The man's simple face had taken on that look, the one small children got when defying the adults who were just trying to keep them alive. Though in this case Reap wanted him dead, which he was going to be no matter what. She just wanted to make sure he did it in the way that would stop the Apocalypse and save her a few millennia of paperwork.

She hoisted him by the scruff of the neck. "Let's go." She could take him to the brink, and did. The hitch was, he had to take the leap himself or it wouldn’t work. She started talking, working on his sense of public duty, destiny, fame, whatever. They were standing about ten feet back from the brink now, Reap running arguments at top speed and checking the eternal clock every third word.

“Time’s running out, you fool!” Reap snarled it. “You’re dead no matter what, but if you don’t charge over there and jump in the next 30 seconds, so is every other person on earth.” She finally had Ron’s full attention.

“I’m dead?”

It wasn’t strictly true, but close. “Yes!” He’d be dead soon enough, even if he didn’t jump, so it wasn’t a lie.

“If I’m dead it won’t hurt.” He didn’t phrase it as a question, so Reap didn’t have to answer. That was good, because lying to the Sacrifice meant more paperwork.  He took a few wobbly steps toward the brink, and stood there, unable to make the leap. Ron might believe he wasn’t going to notice when he dove into the lava. But on some level his body knew better.

He was going to funk it. Reap could see that. She stepped up closer behind him, seeing his knees were shaking with terror. She couldn’t push him. But she could encourage him.

“Watch out! Snakes!” She screamed it as loudly as possible, and it worked. Ron leapt instinctively out of the way of the snakes…and went over the edge. Reap took a look into the pit, which flared and belched. It was working. She turned.

Five Junior Reaping Managers stood by the door, arms loaded with piles of paper. With a deep sigh and a repentant bowing of her head, Reap led them to her office. Four piles of souls to process, and another, larger pile, to explain her illicit use of the scythe.

“I’ll be here forever,” she moaned, taking up a quill.

###

Flash Fiction Friday--In a Starbucks at the End of the World

I didn't get anywhere with the Chuck Wendig prompt this week, so I decided to go back and do another from last week's settings.  I really liked the idea of "a Starbucks at the end of the world" so I took that and ran with it.  A note on the science of this one: it's bogus.  Climate change is real enough, but the rest I totally made up.  To the best of my knowledge, caffeine is not holding the physical world together, only the social one.  I have no idea if coffee bushes could grow at high latitudes.  And I'm almost 100% sure that sacrificing caffeine-hyped 20-somethings to volcanoes will not prevent them erupting.

Here you go.  The end of the world in 996 words.

In a Starbucks at the End of the World

No one ever said the world would end like this.  In all the movies and novels, the apocalypse was always about zombies and explosions and asteroids, or the sun going nova.  Nuclear war.  That sort of thing.

No one, ever, thought it would come this way.

Oh, everyone knew that climate change meant big trouble.  Rising sea levels, bigger storms, more fires out West.  It got to be routine, cleaning up after disasters.  And farmers—they adjusted their methods, moved into new areas as some grew too hot or too wet for farming.  It’s hard to farm beneath the ocean, but it seemed like there was always somewhere to go.  And we never noticed the bigger threat, never saw it coming.

Coffee is grown in parts of the world most First World people just don’t think about much.  Somewhere way off in equatorial lands, coffee plantations were moving gradually up the mountains, and sometimes farther north.  But coffee doesn’t adapt well to some things, and even warming northlands aren’t the same as old-style equatorial highlands.

When people talked about adapting to climate change and shifting toward the poles and all that, they forgot one thing: climate change doesn’t change the length of the days.  Some plants love the long summer days.  Cabbages and squash are happy to grow 24/7 for a few short weeks.  Tomatoes, not so much.  And coffee, not at all.  Efforts to introduce coffee bushes in Canada simply failed.  Every one died, after a year or two of refusing to produce a single coffee bean.  So the growers stuck with moving higher up the equatorial mountains—and then they ran out.  Nowhere any higher to go.  Fine, everyone said.  Coffee’s a luxury.  People don’t need it, except maybe a few crazy writers.

Everyone was wrong.

Somehow, while no one was paying much attention, coffee had become the glue holding the world together.  And I don’t just mean us humans, though civil society was the first to go.  People in caffeine withdrawal get testy, and civilization began to collapse pretty fast.  They tried to switch to tea, but most tea cultivation had already been lost, to rising seas and rising temperatures and everyone drinking coffee instead.  And it just didn’t do the same thing.

That’s how I ended up here, at Starbucks.  The coffee source.  One on every street corner from Boston to Bombay.  Before the collapse, they had spread literally everywhere.  Tiny villages in Africa and the Andes.  Now those remote Starbucks were the last places with any beans, mostly because they never did much business.  Most have been raided or run out by now.  Maybe this Starbucks is the only one left, in a deserted mountain village so remote no one ever knew we were here.

The coffee is stale now.  It’s been three years since there was a coffee crop, and the strange fellow who runs this place saw it coming.  He bought up every bean he could find—the stuff the big buyers wouldn’t touch, the sweepings from the floor of the dryer buildings, anything the local farmers would sell him.  He even tried to keep a few bushes going in his own yard, but in the second year they died along with the last of the commercial plants.  The wild ones were long since gone.

I had already moved here, hoping to solve the problem at the source before it was too late.  All I’ve managed is to be one of the last survivors.  When the crop failed most people left this place.  Only the owner and I are here now, with our dwindling supply of coffee beans.

While the Coffee Riots destroyed Seattle first, San Francisco, New York, Paris and London weren’t far behind.  Then the smaller cities in every country around the world.  Smart people migrated outward, buying whole beans and Folger’s ground with equal abandon, and hoarding it all.  Perhaps a few of them are left, but I fear most were killed in the panics.

Civilization is gone, but it’s worse than just that.  I’ll die before the end, because our beans are nearly gone too.  But I’ve seen the beginning of the end.  With the caffeine removed from the water cycle, entire ecosystems are collapsing.  In the hundred years since the first Starbucks opened in Seattle’s Pike Place Market we have grown, ground, brewed, drunk, and excreted so much coffee that no water supply on earth is untainted.  Because it happened slowly enough, the ecosystems adapted.  But the change back has been too sudden.

I wasn’t surprised when the marine animals began dying off.  But it shocked me when it hit the trees.  First to go were the great forests of red cedar and fir up along the coasts near Seattle.  That made sense.  But it spread, and with the loss of the forests came a huge influx of carbon into the atmosphere, which spelled the end.

It no longer matters that even the tectonic plates seem to have been made restless by the loss of coffee from the hydrologic cycle, because it’s already too late for earth.  Oh, the planet will be here.  I suppose it’s not really the end of the world, just of all living things as we know them.  Including us, of course.  But I won’t be here to see the super-heated ball this globe is bound to become, because the volcano is restless and uneasy.  They used to keep it happy with sacrifices of young daredevils.  All fully hyped on coffee, of course, and under the impression they were climbers.  Now the supply of both coffee and daredevils has run out, and the eruption will come any day, and take us with it. 

We’re ready.  Without coffee, the two of us here in this dingy, dusty Starbucks on the slopes of a volcano are more than ready to be done.  I can feel the earth shake.  It won’t be long now.

Short Story--An Elegant Apocalypse

  Sunrise on Planet X-4732B is one of the most stunning and beautiful events in the Universe.  This is a well-established fact, determined by a complex algorithm developed by the Ultra-Computer housed on the 4^th Moon of Planet G-7512, known to locals as Home.  The lunar location was originally meant to isolate it and prevent the most powerful computer in the universe from running amok.

  Naturally, by the time the Ultra-Computer was completed, there were six more computers being built on six asteroids, each one an order of magnitude more powerful than the Ultra.  That is not germane to the issue, but does explain why the Ultra was free to spend its time determining the nature and location of the most stunningly beautiful sights in the universe.

  So the morning of the last day of the world began with the last most beautiful sunrise.  If anything, the approach of the disaster gave the sunrise a more vivid coloration.  It was not, however, beautiful in the eyes of the beholder.  There were no beholders, for the same reason that X-4732B has no local name: there are no higher order inhabitants on X-4732B.  Lower-order organisms abound, or did before the world ended, but they had failed to evolve to create pollution, disrupt the perfect order of the landscape, or anticipate the apocalypse.

  The absence of human or human-like observers is, of course, central to the elegance of the X-4732B apocalypse (for every apocalypse is local, until the final event, the end of the universe so eloquently documented by Douglas Adams).  Besides a failure to muck up the view, lower-order organisms tend to lack the necessary glands to panic.  Had the planet evolved so much as a muskrat, the day would have taken a different turn, and the Ultra Computer would have had to recalculate the event’s standing in its ranking of events approaching perfection.

  Naturally, just when it seemed safe to assume that the apocalypse would proceed with dignity and quiet splendor, everything changed.  A lone, tiny, and definitely lost space capsule spiraled down through the oddly Earth-like atmosphere.

  In the best of all possible worlds, the man who emerged, dazed, from the erring and now disabled spacecraft would have been Arthur Dent.

  It wasn’t.

  His name was Johnson Bob, and he’d been in transit between two planets far from X-4732B when his flight path took him a hair too close to a concert by the intergalactic band Disaster Area.  The cosmic disruption of the loudest band in the universe had put an end to his tedious business trip and landed Johnson on X-4732B in time to witness the end of that world, and potentially to disrupt its tranquil order.

  The event was saved from the contamination of panic, despite the intrusion of a more-or-less higher life form, by the simple fact that Johnson Bob never left his ship.  He was sleeping off the disconcerting effects of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster he’d had in the space port bar before leaving, a task that requires the full concentration of all bodily forces for a full day.  In fact, in an act of incredible bravado, or idiocy, he had consumed two of the Gargle Blasters, and would be fortunate to wake up at all.

  Johnson Bob therefore slept through the end of the world.  He failed to observe as the sky turned from its usual chartreuse to an odd shade of puce and finally a perfect shade of red-orange.  Nor was he aware when the atmosphere boiled away, as his ship maintained the ideal balance of gasses for the continuation of human life.

  Johnson Bob likewise missed the exquisite moment when all factors coalesced into the perfect, nearly silent yet symphonic finality.  It was this perfect coordination of elements that led the Ultra Computer to designate the X-4732B Apocalypse as the most elegant apocalypse of all time.

Millennia of constipated volcanism beneath the immense chain of volcanoes that ringed the planet burst through the plug in every peak simultaneously, exactly at the instant the asteroid that had boiled away the atmosphere struck precisely at the southern pole, and the sun went nova at the same moment.

  Johnson Bob should have been boiled away with the atmosphere, of course, but the Ultra Computer considered the final touch that perfected the X-4732B Apocalypse to be the manner in which the volcanic cataclysm ejected the one bit of alien matter from the planet in time to make it a purely local event. When Johnson Bob eventually awoke, he had a nasty hangover but no awareness of where he’d been or what he’d done.  The blast had flung him back onto his orignal trajectory, and he landed without incident and went to the nearest bar for another Gargle-Blaster, in hopes of clearing his head.

To a human observer, the tiny space capsule as it exited would have looked like a watermelon pip spat contemptuously at the remainder of the universe as the planet exploded into a nearly infinite number of identical fragments.

  But of course since Johnson Bob was unconscious the whole time, there was no human, or even sentient, observer.  That, the computer decided as the final rays of the perfectly symmetrical pattern of dissolution faded into empty space, was perhaps the most elegant feature.  Perfection could only unfold unobserved.

With reverent apologies to Douglas Adams