The cracks started appearing on the 1 st of November 2008 . The first one appeared in London . It was a hairline crack that went diagonally from one corner of Trafalgar Square to the other. It was big enough to drop a ten pence coin into it. Some people did before the officials cordoned it off with yellow police tape and bollards.
鈥淲arning 鈥 Do Not Cross.鈥
Subsidence. Geological faults. Continental drift.
They were all suggested as explanations. No one was worried. It was just a curiosity. The only reason it was even worth mentioning was because it happened at a national landmark.
Then another one appeared. It was in Philadelphia and it was larger than the first one. If you had wanted you could have put your hand into it. This time no one wanted to. It ran straight through the middle of Saks 5 th Avenue .
They cordoned it off too.
Then more of them started appearing. Soon the newspapers didn't even bother to report them on the news. Not even the really big ones. They were only worth mentioning if someone died. After a few months they were only worth mentioning if a lot of people died.
The largest one appeared in Russia . It was the width of a motorway and zig-zagged from one side of the country to the other. Houses had fallen into it. One woman appeared on the news across the world. She was a middle aged woman who worked as a secretary. When she was interviewed she was still in her pyjamas. Someone had given her a large puffy jacket to keep warm. She sobbed at the camera and told the story in broken Russian. The translator spoke over her.
鈥淚 had gotten up to go to the toilet. Then I heard a crack. It was not a loud noise. It was soft. Quiet. But when I finished and opened the door, everything was gone. My bedroom, my husband my Ilya. It was all gone. The earth ate them.鈥
The earth ate them.
Everyone shuddered when they heard that. Families started sleeping in the same rooms. They couldn't do anything about the cracks but they could at least die together.
After that the scientists came up with a name for the phenomena. They still couldn't explain it but they had a name for it.
Kronos Faults.
The Titan eating its own.
Only there was no emetic to feed him to make him vomit them all back up.
The world was ending. Not with a bang, not with a whimper but with a soft crack in the night.
There was some religious hysteria but not much. It was hard to work up a good fervour over cracks. Mostly they wanted it to stop too. People prayed. It did no good.
Dimensional shifts. Alien experimentation. Hollow earth.
What the scientists couldn't explain the cranks did their
best to. Eventually, however, they too fell silent. There
were no aliens swooping down in their shiny silver ships
or Men in Black sent by the government. That would have
been better. Aliens could be fought. There would be a resistance.
Brave men, heroes all, would stand up for earth. And they'd
win. They always did in the movies, didn't they?
This was just the earth falling to pieces around them like something rotten. It wasn't glorious. It wasn't exciting. It was just inevitable.
The children adapted best. Some of them had never known any different, after all.
鈥淪tep on a crack,鈥 they chanted, hotscotching between the cracks in the street. 鈥淏reak your mother's back.鈥
Adults reacted one of two ways.
Either they were terrified of the cracks, fearful to go
out unless the earth swallowed them up, or they pretended
they weren't there. It was not unusual to see men in suits,
black leather briefcases in hand, walking a brisk zig-zag
route to work. They avoided the cracks but never looked
at them. They never acknowledged they were they.
No one stepped over the cracks either. No adults, at least. The children would over the smaller ones, screaming their rhyme and pink with terror and exaltation. An adult would walk five blocks to avoid stepping over a crack. They seemed so much larger than really were. If you stood back you could see it was a crack no wider, say, than your little finger. The closer you got, the bigger it seemed to get. If you stood on the edge of one it seemed huge and went down forever.
Eventually, however, people stopped going out at all.
The government worried about food. Scientists worked on creating hypernutrition powders and foods that would last for decades. The government arranged for food drops over areas cut off by the cracks. They would, they assured anyone listening, be able to survive.
No one worried about water. They should have. In hindsight. You can last longer without food than water.
The seas drained away first. Fish, whales and dolphins
lay dying on the dry seabed. There were creatures, to, that
no one had even seen before. They were things that lived
in the depths of the ocean and never saw the light. A decade
before their discovery would have amazed scientists. Now
no one cared.
Then there was no more rain. Then the rivers disappeared.
Bottled water, recycled water kept people going for a few more years.
The lights went out six years after the first crack appeared.
The last television signal sent out was from a tiny TV station in Dallas. Before the cracks it had broadcast an evangelical programme. But everyone involved had lost their faith. It was the engineer who made the last broadcast. He was a thin, lanky long man with brown hair and glasses mended with scotch tape.
鈥淲e were the plaything of a clumsy god,鈥 he said. 鈥淏ut he dropped us. Now he has a new toy. Goodbye.鈥
At night, in the sky, you can see the new planet.
It is orange and grey instead of blue and green. The people on it have tails and no noses. They have not written their scripture yet. Perhaps one day they will send a probe here and be amazed when they find microscopic signs of life.
