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9 August 2020

The Ends of the World

It transpired that it was a place, not a time that the world met its end; or perhaps we should more correctly say, its ends.

After all the arguments, in a way Malthus had always been right but for all the wrong reasons. The incalculable weight of all the quantum cloned souls was gathered from across the multiverse, only to settle at the bottom of our oceans — all for the sake of one last experiment with the Josephine’s Terrible Junction. It took a while. The first people to notice were the airlines, of course. They found it harder and harder to arrive on time, and people started to miss their connections. Then shipping companies started to spot their containers of perishables were perishing more often than before, and complaints to the satellite TV companies went through the roof.

The astronauts on the ISS had known what was happening all along, but were forbidden from mentioning it, and by the time some of them came home, it was far too late for any one to do much about it - if they ever could have.

It seemed that the tectonic plates drifting faster and faster, driven by the weight of all the souls now on earth. Day by day, the movement speeded up, til now it was faster  than you can travel even in the fastest plane or rocket.

People were stranded often far away from their families. Cruise ships and oil tankers were never going to make it to shore.

Jean et Jacques are sadly now continents apart, never to be re-united. Not even for one last granite.

Undersea fibres snapped and even bouncing radio signals off of the ionosphere became unreliable, and eventually, ceased to work. Each continent was now a separate world unto itself, living in the new normal, a geometry that defined mathematical explanation, but somehow changed the human race’s manifold destiny, but unravelling the manifold density of space time, without any impact on orbits or gravity or even the earth’s magnetic field.

Even seismic activity remained much the same, but of course, the occasional volcanic eruption was now no longer a threat to the defunct air travel industry. Newsreaders no longer had to struggle with the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajökull.

Would there now be global peace? We will never know.