Microstory 2614: The Cooler Side is Not the Safer Side, Which They Will Learn Soon Enough

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August 21, 2526. The caravan has been roaming up through the Terminator Line at a decent pace. They have come across some pretty rough terrain, but these rovers were built for the harsh environment, so they either go around them or even right over. The lead car has the most trouble, but they still make it through. They’re combatting two different things here—besides the physical obstacles—and those are fear and boredom. It is not a clear split. Everyone seems to be feeling both emotions, as well as plenty others, simultaneously. The vactrains are incredibly fast. They would be in the safe zone by now had they been able to take them. It’s going to be several days before they reach it at this pace, and there is really nothing they can do to speed that up. It’s a trade-off, being able to traverse all of the rocks and crevices, but not being able to do it super fast.

There is also some ignorance. Even though the Levins have been advancing for 300 years, they don’t really understand concepts like the sun and tidal locking. This is the first time they’re even seeing outer space for real, and there are some misconceptions about how it works. “Is this thing working, can you hear me?” a voice comes in through the radio.

“This is lead actual, I hear you four by two, who is this?” Breanna asks.

“Uh, my name’s Langer.”

“No, I mean your callsign. You should see it on the light field display in the corner of the radio. I just need the last three numbers.”

“Zero-one-zero.”

“Go ahead, zero-ten,” Breanna encourages.

“Where are we going?” 010 asks.

“North,” Breanna replies plainly.

“Yeah, but where exactly?” 010 presses.

Breanna rolls her eyes. “The safe zone.”

“How do you know that it’s safe?” 010 goes on.

“That’s the science. The poles are the only safe regions in the world right now. The closer you get, the safer you are. We are already better off here and now than we were ten minutes ago back behind us.”

“Wait, we’re in the back!” a girl cries. “We are where you were ten minutes ago!”

Breanna sighs. “You are not ten minutes behind us, and the logic stands. You are still better off than you were before. We just need to keep going to reach our destination. Please stay off this channel unless you’re actually facing trouble.”

“Oh, we’re all in trouble,” 010 argues. “Because it’s the sun, isn’t it? The sun is what caused this whole thing.”

“Yes,” Breanna agrees. “We don’t have all the information yet, but it’s looking like our host star, Proxima Centauri underwent a sudden, violent polar reversal. This caused a snap, which released something called a coronal mass ejection. It’s important to note that the gravitational instability was going on for some time leading up to the event, and is still wreaking havoc on the surface, subsurface, and atmosphere. As I said, the poles are the only safe regions.”

“Our ancestors came to this planet on ships,” 010 begins. “Why can’t we just get back on those ships and fly away?”

“Because the infrastructure has been destroyed,” Breanna explains. “There is no way to get to the ships. They are not designed to land, and even if they were, they could not land on this terrain. We are doing the right thing, and moving as fast as possible.”

“Why would the poles be safer?” This Langer guy is not letting up. She’s holding back the urge to warn him that his ignorance is showing, staying silent as he continues. “The poles are still in the sun. We have been driving in the sunlight this whole time.”

“Yes, this is called the Terminator Line. Proxima Doma is tidally locked, so one side always faces the sun, and one side always faces away from it.” She has spent her whole life around people who learned this stuff as babies. It’s frustrating, having to go over it to a bunch of adults, even though she fully understands why they don’t already know it. “Right in the middle, all along this longitude, it’s temperate enough for habitation. They still had to build domes, because the atmosphere is too thin, but it would have been impractical on the night side, and nigh impossible on the day side.”

They hear him sighing. “If the sun is over there!” He’s probably pointing. “Then why wouldn’t we go..over there!” He’s probably pointing in the opposite direction now.

“The stellar activity still has an impact on the night side. The heat passes from the day side, to the night side. As it does, it creates its own turmoil on the night side. Ice sublimates, the ground becomes unstable. It’s still freezing, but now it’s unpredictable, and non-uniform. Believe me, you don’t want any part of that.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” 010 shouts. “We’re in between them! If what you’re saying is true, we should be dead, or at least worse off here than over there!”

“I don’t have the time or patience to explain tidal heating and basic atmospheric science to you! My father died dedicating his life to protecting people like you, and you didn’t even know he existed! So trust me, we have to stay in the Terminator Line! It’s shrinking, and will eventually disappear too, but we still have time...if we don’t stop!”

There is some silence for a few moments, but the eerie kind, not peaceful. Finally, 010 returns. “We just took a vote. We’re going to head into the dark. The way we see it, it’s getting too hot. The air conditioning is at maximum, and we’re still burning up. Anyone who wants to may join us. We can teach you how to take manual control.”

“Shut out controls right now, Cash,” Breanna orders.

“It is too hot,” the woman in the back agrees. “I’m barely wearing anything.”

“You should be wearing IMS units,” Breanna instructs.

“We don’t have those here,” 010 claims. “We only have respirator masks.” She didn’t realize that. That was poor planning. The 010 car veers off in the wrong direction.

“I can block future override,” Cash divulges as she’s operating the console, “but I can’t reverse it for anyone who has already switched to local control.”

“Don’t do this!” Breanna urges. “It is not simply more dangerous. It is uninhabitable. You are not maybe going to die. If you leave us, death is a guarantee.”

“We’ll take our chances, thank you very much. Zero-one-zero, over and out.”

“You don’t have to—never mind.” She hopes to appeal to anyone who managed to gain control of their own destiny before Cash locked them out. “No one follow them. Please. Even if you don’t get hit by a geyser or thermal cyclone, or fall into a hidden chasm in the dark, there is nothing for you out there. They didn’t build anything.”

That rear unit complaining about being hot, naked, and in the back decides to go with Langer, but fortunately, no one else does.

Microstory 1602: New House

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In 1981, after Japan House was finished being built, the Bicker Institute started trying to think of other ways to allow the human race to survive. Eight full bunkers were already up and ready to go, with another House in New Zealand, which was designed to maintain its population mostly above ground. Jumping off of that idea, they decided that keeping people underground wasn’t necessarily the only way to survive the end of the world. In fact, it may not even be the best way. The organization was not founded upon the basis of some specific disaster. If they had those answers, they probably would have channeled all of their efforts into stopping it. They wanted to prepare for anything, and massive global earthquakes, for instance, might just bury all of their bunkers, so they wanted to come up with new strategies. People in the ocean could conceivably survive such a thing. It wasn’t guaranteed, but nothing was, and again, this was all about preparation. They needed a ship. They needed the best ship in the world. And they needed it to potentially endure a tidal wave or tsunami. Their next interim deadline was in seven years, which was important, because the hope was to support a certain percentage of a growing population. The project leads started looking around, hoping to find something that would meet their requirements. It didn’t have to be perfect, they had time to modify it, and bolster its features, but after a few months, things were getting ridiculous. Nothing fit the bill. Nothing was good enough for them. All ships were made to weather storms to some certain degree, but none of them could last through the worst storm in history, should it occur. Before wasting any more time, they decided their only solution was to build their own vessel from scratch, which they did over the course of the next eight years. They went about a year past their deadline, but that was okay, because the actual end of the world wouldn’t start happening until around 2021, and even then, things weren’t bad enough to warrant populating the Houses. This latest project made them better with their time management, and before it was finished, they ended up getting to work on the next plan for survival, which was a submarine. As for the ship, it was a magnificent beauty, far beyond anything else 1989 had to offer, and probably even superior to the ships built in 2021. I won’t tell you whether it, or its Inheritors, survived what came to it.

Microstory 648: Peninsula Removed from the Mainland

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This taikon was at particular risk of being instigated unnatural, which is against the rules. In general, we are at risk of mischievous nonbelievers attempting to artificially create taikon in order to corrupt our beliefs. The fact that the taikon must be fulfilled in a particular order protects us from this, but only to a degree. It’s still possible for these evildoers to keep tabs on our progress, and prepare for the right moments. While we must all be vigilant against the corruptors, we have also curated a number of verifiers. This position, between standard Lightseers, and Highlightseers, is a coveted one. Verifiers are trained their whole lives. They memorize not only the Book of Light, but also contemporary records, to better recognize valid Lightseed events. They are extremely important to the process. We cannot simply rely on hearsay and fake news media reports. We have to see for ourselves, and people who have been trained their whole lives have to ensure every single taikon’s legitimacy. As it turned out, however, this taikon didn’t require any special precautions against corruptors. The peninsula in question was an obvious one. The Cleansing Light did not return the planet’s oceans to its original state, for that would be impossible. The removal of the oxygen irreversible altered the terrain, which meant that the oceans of now are different than before. One thing that came out of this was a new island. The Hargrave Peninsula was a large bit of land that protruded from one corner of the mainland. On one side was the Morbek Sea, and on the other was Linta Bay. Though other terrain had shifted, it had remained stable and unchanging. About an hour after the new oceans were created, however, the peninsula began to split off, forming a perfect canal that now separates the new island from the rest of the continent. Though it would be entire possible to achieve this through technological means, this did occur natural, and our verifiers have confirmed its validity.

Microstory 647: Substantiation of the Cleansing Light

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The exciting thing about this taikon is that no one knew how it would be made manifest. Unlike other religions, we are very aware of the fact that the sacred cleansing light is metaphorical. As people of both science and faith, we recognize the true physical properties of light, and its wave-particle duality. We know how it’s scattered, reflected, and refracted. We know how fast it moves, how it’s possible to move beyond its speed, and we know the entire spectrum, and all of its uses. We are not ignorant or childish. Because of all this, the “substantiation of the cleansing light” was not something we could predict or understand. What exactly does that mean? Many have thrown their theories into the ring over the centuries. Some thought an actual entity; one that could be called God, would spontaneously come out of a source of light. With the simplex dimensions, people move in and out of what we perceive to be light all the time. That someone would do something like that could not possibly fulfill the requirements for a taikon. They are meant to be rare, if not impossible, and not provoked too thoughtfully by believers. In order to explain this, some in this camp of belief have guessed that light itself would somehow be made whole, so that the entity would not be so obviously a person, but something beyond. Of course, we now know that a person made of solid light could never be trusted, as one of our current primary irritants could mimic this power. She was born as the result of ancient genetic modification that gives her the ability to manipulate light to her will. She has regularly used this ability to render herself invisible, generate holograms that are nearly indistinguishable from reality, and even impersonate others. It would not be inconceivable for her to show up somewhere as a human of light. We would have to be wary of this, as she is a false prophet, and would only be doing this to garner support for her evil cause. Still, as unlikely as these theories were, they were still the most popular, because they were the easiest to understand. What happened instead was a demonstration of the cleansing light’s power. The entire ocean on Kesliperia was replaced with a new one. This has been done before, with Lake Wurveol on the Roepl moon where the Sacred Savior was buried, though on a much smaller scale. Furhter, while the Wurveol bloodwater returned from a spontaneous wormhole, the new Kesliperian oceans were created out of a sea of light from the new star that formed recently. This was a true miracle, and proof in what we now know to be the very real power of the Cleansing Light.

Microstory 646: Tidal Lock a Planet

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Lots of celestial objects are tidally locked to each other. It’s not a particularly rare phenomenon. It can happen between planets orbiting their stars, or between satellites and their parent planets. Due to some complex deformation in relation to each other, these objects will lock into a sort of rhythm that prevents one side of one object from ever facing the other object. This will leave one side of the object in perpetual lightness, with the other stuck in perpetual darkness. Oirpelne is one example of this, along with Earth, and its one moon. It’s important to understand that tidal locking does not happen upon a satellite’s formation, but as a result of changes over time. Furthermore, cosmic scales are not the same thing as other perceived scales. Though locking happens in a relatively short amount of time, it still takes vast amounts of time from the perspective of anything capable of witnessing it. Not so in this case. One of the effects that the complete deoxygenation of Kesliperia had on the world was complete restructuring of its topography. Mountains, canyons, and tectonic plates shift around, and under, each other. The terrain is unrecognizable today to anyone who saw it last week. This deformation caused Kesliperia to begin an irregular orbit around its parent star. And this happened immediately; on human timescales. Less than one day, to be exact, for it was occurring during the Week in One Day taikon. As with many other taikon, this should be a physical impossibility. Thankfully, the Sacred Light is unimpeachable, and this all happened within the timeframe useful to Lightseers eager to see the realization of the taikon prophecies.