A Matter of Conscience
an excerpt

Tess flopped onto the couch and flipped on the TV. There was probably some big story about this. Just like back when the bridge in Minneapolis collapsed. Only this was bigger. She had been receiving non-stop calls for half an hour; her friends telling her that they had just seen this bridge or those bridges only just collapse. She’d felt an earthquake and heard sirens about the time of the first call too. She could see fires in the distance. After the fourth call, she’d started writing down how many bridges had collapsed so far. Now her list was quite long, and she knew it wouldn’t be getting any longer. After some of the bridges had collapsed she’d gone on Google maps and counted up how many major bridges there were. By the last few, she’d been predicting which ones would fall next.
What she saw on TV was even more disconcerting than the uncanny collapse of every bridge in Portland. Things were happening everywhere. Panama had been covered by 100 feet of water, part of California had dropped off into the sea, and half the Caribbean islands had disappeared. Earthquakes, fires, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, floods and all sorts of other natural disasters were happening all across the globe. The only unnatural thing, it seemed, was the accidental explosion of several minor nuclear missiles across the globe. Apparently all of this had started less than an hour ago. And apparently none of the news bases had been terribly damaged. And apparently these news people had it together enough to not only report on the damages done to the major cities, but interview highly opinionated people—who also seemed to be collected and together for the amount of time there was—about their explanations for the disasters. The first one they interviewed was Al Gore. Predictably, he blamed global warming as the trigger for all these things. Various other radicals were interviewed, with everything from “the Perfect Storm”, “Just major coincidences”, “The Apocalypse” and “Alien intervention” listed as reasons.
Tess stared at the TV, transfixed. She had not felt so completely helpless since she was a little girl, and even then she had been able to find reasons and manipulate. There had to be something, something that would be a giveaway as to what this was about. The interviews ended and the newscasters showed an airport, every plane destroyed in an earthquake. Then it snapped in Tess’s brain. She grabbed a notebook and started scribbling furiously.