Excerpt: Beneath the Crust

Prologue
June 27th, 1991
The cold war was coming to a close. The world knew it, and Mikhail Gorbachev knew it. While the Russian super power struggled to maintain the world's fear and respect for them on the surface, they had one last card to play before the end. On June 24th, as the rest of civilization went about their business—sleeping, eating, working their daily jobs—the U.S.S.R launched Sputnik II, a seemingly harmless satellite which would reportedly allow them to map the world from above. It was loaded with the largest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in history, one built not with the premise of nuclear warfare, but with an enormous electric coil the length of a football field surrounding a magnifying glass eight meters in diameter. This would harness the concentrated light of the sun and allow a pinpointed beam of energy not unlike a huge strike of lightning that was not only predictable, but controlled. The other major powers of the world knew something was amiss; a spy employed by the United States named Grom Viktor Tull sabotaged the computer system before the unmanned rocket launched, unaware of the hidden weapon on board.
Three days after reaching orbit, General Gregzor von Chriztophssen gave the order to fire a warning shot of the energy super weapon. His subordinates pressed the button, and havoc ensued. The sabotaged missile computer sent the coil weapon's beam into a wild spin, effectively scorching much of the earth and heating up the atmosphere by several degrees. Icecaps began melting at an alarming rate. Coasts all over the world were flooded. Inland growth zones on all continents were scorched to near-desert dryness in a matter of days. Mikhail Gorbachev had ordered a self-destruct mechanism be built into Sputnik II, and that device was triggered at his command, but not before the damage had been done.
Millions died in the storms that swept the world. The myth known as global warming was rapidly sped up. Plants in temperate areas shriveled and died in a matter of minutes. Only areas used to very high temperatures—such as tropical areas near the equator, and desert areas—had any plant life that survived. Trees dropped their leaves overnight, and many hardened their trunks and retreated into a deep hibernation as their water sources within the soil dried up. In the deserts, patches of sand miles across were melted into great glassy sheets. Animals who survived migrated toward cooler climates, which now more closely resembled their natural habitats.
The ice caps were melting. The overall temperature—both of the ocean and of the atmosphere—rose by a full 5 degrees Celsius. While this change was temporary, and over the next few years the heat slowly abated, it wreaked havoc on the icecaps and melted much of the snow on the highest peaks through the world. Rivers went into hiding underground, and volcanoes went wild with the fury of released fire. Islands never stood a chance against the unbridled rage of a rapidly heated ocean. Dead fish washed up on the shores in the millions of pounds. Many ships were destroyed, although people would later say it was safer to be out on a boat than on the shore staring out to sea.
Flooding and a sudden scarcity of food drove the populace into a wild panic. The media blamed the scientists—who else could happily create a weapon that could destroy the world? The United States government was partially overthrown by angry mobs. The reaction was similar everywhere—governments were overthrown, destroyed, or taken over by people moved to action by the threat of their lives. Science became taboo almost overnight. Computers were destroyed. Anyone known to have a scientific background was either imprisoned or murdered by enraged masses.
Most of the coastlines were wiped out during the floods. New York City in particularly was swimming, and California fell prey to the predictions that it would fall into the sea. People fled, stampeded, trampled one another in their need to survive, and the government rode in to take control.
Over the period of the next twenty years, billions of people died. The earth's population began to stabilize about the same time that the global heating came to a steady head. From five and a half billion, the number surviving was probably less than three hundred million. Governments became little more than groups of gang lords, particularly in what had been the United States—though they clung to that name out of hope for some semblance of civility.
One man took control as the dust first cleared, though he worked from the shadows and left the people believing democracy still lived. He was young—only twenty-five and a new senator when the storms took the world. His name was Gordon Trundman, and he was nothing if not ambitious. He rallied the people together into armies and pitted them against each other, using any means necessary to control the populace—fear, threat of death, imprisonment, or even bribery with food.
Militant rule was the only effective method for maintaining control, according to those in power. Guns were less prevalent, given that the means necessary to make modern gunpowder and bullets involved factories, and there were hardly enough people to man the factories that had not been destroyed. Electricity was a luxury reserved for the few resourceful enough to either create or rig solar panels or design self-powered kinetic electricity. Hydraulic power was unrealistic for anyone living away from the coast. Windmills had been primarily destroyed by the tornados that ravaged the land.
Survivors clustered together in small villages scattered far away from other people. Most of these hamlets were built with salvage, primarily wreckage. Cars became extinct dinosaurs, their parts used to make modified engines that ran on easier things to acquire than gasoline. In self defense, humanity was required to become particularly inventive, building useful mechanics out of useless scrap, powering it with mostly easily-acquired things like steam, water flow where it could be had, burning garbage. A particular village was likely to have no more than a hundred residents, and each village had its own methods for keeping order and maintaining the peace. It was well-known that no one village could really stand up to the gang lords if it came down to a fight. So they kept low and avoided conflict.
Computers ceased to exist. Without science they can hardly be recreated, and petroleum is a key ingredient in the synthesis of silicone chips. Children born years later began to believe that computers were a myth—just another story told by the grown-ups to keep them in line, like the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Television, too, was eliminated. Word of mouth became the most reliable form of communication, because newspapers were few and far between. Some books survived, if they were inland and avoided the fires and destruction. Paper was scarce after a few years, and some took to writing on stripped bark or torn out pages from coloring books that had survived the book burnings led by Trundman’s men.
In the aftermath, slowly people began to put aside their skepticism and listen to their children. Anything might happen, including the world ending tomorrow. The children were dreaming. As each new generation was born, their parents began to realize that—without prompting or the right books or television to watch—the children were dreaming about things they could never have experienced, such as dragons and war and conquest. Some even dreamed that they were a particular person, in a place far away. And as the years passed, the dreams grew stronger. Children who vocalized these dreams loudly enough had a habit of disappearing. Sometimes they came back, but never with dreams in mind.
The world turned.