August 3rd 2066
I have decided to keep a personal journal, so I can keep a record of these events that have been imposed upon us by the random hand of fate and this bleak comet that seals all our fates and now tars every day with its shadow hanging over us, unseen but easily detected by our telescopes in the far flung reaches of our solar system, like an icy reaper upon his cosmic horse.
The first shadows of our blackest days were nothing more than binary whispers, a rumour here, a speculation there and the usual colloquial cynicism that always echo around the edges of such grandiose conspiracies on the webworks and serpentine freeways of the net. Oh, if only that were to have been the end of things. But alas, deep within the web’s forums and highways, the ghosts began to take on a more solid shape, as if morphing into the cold flesh of a horrible truth, whatever its hideous form would turn out to be. There was such a gentle breeze before the cyclone; such fine and fickle droplets of rain before the storm, before this slow and horrible decent into anarchy and fear.
Soon enough the experts began to coalesce on a singular truth and the dusts of misinformation slowly parted. Then there it was upon us. It was no longer an interesting aside to a friend or colleague, or a low down news item on the national network; it was on every channel, on every news site, on every radio stream: revealed, the cold flesh of our demon, a vile wretched truth, this end of ends.
It was early July when I remember the panic start to take hold and spread. Perhaps it was a little before that but that was when it seemed to become palpable. Real.
For a time there was nothing to do but watch the news come in. Many continued to doubt. Many simply refused to believe it and ranted and screamed at the government as if they had concocted the whole sorry mess for some unknown and inevitably malevolent agenda. But even the doubters lost their faith in conspiracies, as if the power of the planet’s collective dread was a force to compelling to ignore, compelling them to look to the heavens; to the seed of their demise; to feel the fear and helplessness begin to course like the onset of some vile and irreversible poison in the blood, in the gut.
And an eerie calm descended upon the earth like a thin veil, until finally, cracked and brittle, it fell to pieces around the feet of humanity.
I will never forget those first few weeks, the noise of collective dread, of societies breaking down. Shared fear on this scale is deafening to the senses when it is allowed the space to writhe.
And so we at the Facility sat, we watched, we listened. We watched the world come to life in a riotous frenzy of undirected anger and confusion, a maelstrom of futility like a species-wide death throw. For those of us too paralysed by fear, those of us whose lives have hence been buffered enough by our decadent untroubled lifestyles to have never had the need to reach for the rifle or the bomb, we could only sit, watch, listen.
We avoided the demonstrations and the tear gas and the rioting and simply tried to take it all in.
The hysteria is like an epidemic. It is as if the social fabric of human civilisation is suddenly beginning to tear apart at the seams.
Some even seemed to even doubt their own sanity, as if the premise of their species seemingly arbitrary and indiscriminate destruction by something as inauspicious as a huge lump of rock and ice hurtling through space, was so implausible that it became almost incomprehensible; thus somehow the culmination of a severe mental breakdown or catatonic state. They say that in those first weeks the intake of the psych wards and asylums burgeoned to near breaking point.
Doomsayers and preachers of all faiths and creeds now fill the social spaces of this city and beyond no doubt the earth’s cities and towns are full of them, shouting their salvations to those who will stop to listen. But few do. They say if we survive this, it will signal the end of religion, the ushering of a new era. The New Secular.
For me these notions seem irrelevant in the face of such an unprecedented event (irreverent to many as well, I am sure – although not to me, being a man as I am of a scientific disposition and trade, I cannot, and do not, take solace in an afterlife or a omnipotent deity). But believer or non-believer, comet or hand of god, it is a matter of no debate that we are all now inexorably tied to each other in the rising tide of this our bitter global cataclysm. If we can survive it, if any of us can survive it, then it is for them to define any uncertain era that follows this.
But for now, for me, for here, it is as if every sleepless night has become just a prelude to another fear-riddled day.
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