1
Noah stood upon the upper hull of his spacecraft, which hovered just above the top of a thousand-foot-high butte that was located a few miles to the east of the town of Green River, Wyoming. He scanned the million-strong crowd sprawled out one thousand feet beneath him. Taking a deep breath, he wrapped his left hand around the master time chip, which hung around his neck by a thin piece of leather, then looked straight up. His eyes locked onto the lethal menace hanging in the sky directly above him like a giant celestial chandelier. His people named it Wormwood some six thousand years before. He could clearly make out the 25-mile-wide core and many of the accompanying satellite projectiles that were hurtling directly towards him at 12.5 miles per second. He knew that in 60 seconds time, Wormwood would bury itself forty miles into the Earth’s crust right where he was standing. He raised his right arm and pointed directly at the plummeting projectile.
2
By design, the master time chip was to be activated telepathically. When activated, it in turn activated 144,000 other time chips that were implanted in 144,000 carefully-selected human beings located all over the Earth. Also activated were over six-million time chips that were embedded in every kind of creature that walked, crawled, flew or swam above or below the surface of the planet. When activated, these time chips were programmed to time shift 36,525 rotations of Earth around its axis. Essentially, the time chip disappeared from the present and reappeared in the same location 100 years in the future. In accordance with the law of connectedness, the time chip pulled whatever was physically connected to it through time with it.
3
Five seconds before Wormwood entered the atmosphere, and ten seconds before it slammed into Green River, Noah activated the master time chip.
In that moment, he saw the comet disappear from the sky and the sky change from a clear, cerulean blue to a smoggy, yellowy brown. His next breath came with an acrid smell of sulphur. He looked down and observed an endless, smouldering lava pit. Where before his ship hovered a mere foot above a flat-topped butte, it now, all of a sudden,
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hovered thousands of feet above what he saw as the ‘pit of hell’ for as far as the eye could see. There were smoking pools of glowing-red, molten lava, interspersed by miles and miles of solidified, black igneous rock with patterns in it that made it look like toffy. He could hear hissing and cracking, and the occasional explosion, and he could feel the radiant heat rising from the hellish cauldron below. Finally, it was the sulphuric stench that drove him back into his ship, but before he did so, he took a moment, looked up into the sky, placed his hands together and gave thanks to ‘the One’ for allowing him to successfully be time shifted one hundred years into the future. He also prayed for all the humans and animals that were time chipped and for their successful time shift. Done praying, and comfortably settled inside the silver disc, he set off for his first scheduled stop, a mountaintop in the Californian Sierra Nevada Range that went by the name of Pike’s Peak.
4
Although he knew roughly what to expect to see one hundred years after the huge impact of the 25-mile-wide comet slamming into the Earth at 12.5 miles per second, he also knew that there was much that was impossible to predict. He knew that the final crater should be over 220 miles across and that it should have cooled down enough to allow the rest of the Earth to revert back to a semblance of pristine wilderness. He also knew that the impact shuddered the whole planet and that the stability of things such as geological faults were impossible to assess. He knew that earthquakes, of the magnitude 10+ on the Richter scale, rampaged around the planet, shaking all the infrastructure of human civilization into rubble and dust. He knew that tsunamis the size of mountains swept everything out of existence clear across whole continents. However, no one could predict the stability of fault lines. There was no way of knowing which ones would snap and which ones would hold. So, this initial venture into the unknown future was still very much a journey of discovery for him, and a profound education.
He began to rise vertically from what was previously ground level. He sat in his seat and observed the scene outside the ship on the spherical holographic display, which completely surrounded him. He rose slowly, about one thousand feet per minute, and took everything in. Pure hell boiled and hissed for as far as the eye could see. He levelled off at about five thousand feet and headed in the direction of a green cross, which glowed on his display and which marked out the position of Pike’s Peak, California. He flew over the boundary of the giant crater. It extended right out to where Salt Lake City used to be.
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He observed that the Great Salt Lake was completely dried up and the huge, brilliant-white expanse of the Great Salt Lake Desert was barely discernible due to it having been peppered by a layer of ejecta. Everything was black and charred for at least 500 miles radius from ground zero. He looked west and saw mostly blackness and charring right up to the Sierra Nevada Range, where he could see that the tops of the peaks were covered by snow. Embedded amongst the peaks was the green cross towards which he was flying.
5
He flew in from the east, about a thousand feet above the top of Pike’s Peak. A broad smile appeared on his face when he saw a group of survivors standing right where his friend, Thebe, instructed them to be, exactly 109 years before, to the day. As he approached close enough, he counted them. To his disbelief, there were seventeen of them. He shook his head with delight at how successful this time shift turned out to be.
Their time shifter saved another sixteen of them.
‘This could set a record,’ he thought to himself.
As it was the afternoon, with the sun being well to the west of the Peak, he decided to hover his ship about 50 feet to the east of them. That way they could look at him without having to look into the sun. He still wore his levitation suit from his previous assignment. He opened a panel on the upper surface of his ship and floated out through it. He then floated down toward them. They all stared at him with their mouths agape. He floated in and landed amongst them. He pulled off his goggles and balaclava, allowing them to hang behind his neck, smiled a handsome smile, and asked in a calm, kind voice,
‘Is everyone OK?’
…….
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