Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Prompt: The end of the world

They assembled the most discrete and aberrantly brilliant. In secrecy they prayed and designed and built it over a decade. In the final days before they used it, before world ended, they named it Shiva.

It was too large to deploy from the air and too heavy to tow behind a barge. Instead it simply remained in the tower it was constructed in. On the street seventy-three floors below, no one would realize what was housed inside it's benign facade. From the outside it was only a bank, but there was no money in it's vaults. Instead that money was poured into bringing The Destroyer to life.

No other bomb constructed bore a resemblance to it: Six large spheres orbited a seventh, smaller one: one covering each pole and one over each hemisphere. The design was inspired by previous concepts of implosion bombs, however the inward-firing explosives used to start the reaction were atomic in nature themselves. Only a kiloton each, they still provided more than enough force to crush the mass of plutonium at the center and create an explosion equal to ten billion tons of dynamite. Two hundred times larger than the highest-yield device ever detonated before, there was no need for it to be deliverable by jet or rocket - it would reach all targets.

Then, just before daylight, a prayer was uttered and it was detonated.

The flash of the initiating devices was so bright as to temporarily blind those looking in it's direction. A nanosecond later, the flash of the main unit was so brilliant and immense, that the world felt sunlight on the Eastern and Western hemispheres at the same time. Five hundred miles away, the light was intense enough to burn and blind any not behind cover. The flash burned shadows into walls, and turned grass and trees to flame.

Before the light had faded out, the hot compression wave had already reached the sea and set the surface aboil. Already the sky scraper it was born in had been pressed into the ball of liquid earth that melted beneath. The surrounding buildings were dismantled by the sweep of The Destroyer's arms. It ripped open tunnels and hillsides. It uprooted trees and crushed homes. The tremendous air pressure caused those within a hundred miles to have their muscles ripped off their bones without breaking the skin. Their lungs collapsed.

In place of the building grew a pillar of smoke and ash that lifted a fireball the size of a moon. It was lifted so high into the atmosphere that it was suffocated and extinguished. However, the stem still stood, miles across and seemingly infinite in hight. It turned slowly like a rooted tornado. The spinning continued for hours, and took weeks to settle in a cloud of fine dust.

The wrath left a molten crater that dwarfed nations. It dispatched millions and spread across half the continent and into the sea by hundreds of miles.

What destruction remained was carried across the world on high winds.

In a few years, the sounds of animals ceased. Crops did not grow. Babies died of leukemia. The survivors died, cowering in fear and muttering unheard prayers. A decade passed and finally all were lost to the anonymity of death.

What would remain would be unending fire and the roar of an angry god consuming the last of the Earth.

7 comments:

Gunslinger said...

I'm not sure I can call this beautiful given the subject material, but it is certainly well described. I definitely formed quite vivid pictures in my mind of the explosion. Specifically, for reasons unknown, the fireball and cloud, especially the swirling "trunk" of the cloud.

I am torn as to whether or not I want to know why they built such a device and why they triggered it. A sort of doomsday cult? Was it an accident? Or are we dealing with a populace facing a third term of George W in office?
I think that if you went into the reasons and backstory of it, it would be another story unto itself. This piece is about the end of the world, the planet dying.

My favorite line was also the first, which hooked me in very well.
"They assembled the most discrete and aberrantly brilliant." I love the idea of "aberrantly brilliant," it's deliciously wicked.

If you were aiming for a less humorous and more dramatic piece, then - bam. Or should I say boom?

Lacey said...

Wow, Evan. You sure nailed the serious prose.

The 'voice' in my head of this story was a sort of combination of Galadriel from LOTR and Michael Cain. It read like a voice-over for a movie intro to me - it was highly visual, with all the flashes of light, and the huge tower in which Shiva was constructed, and of course all the destruction.

My favorite line: "Already the sky scraper it was born in had been pressed into the ball of liquid earth that melted beneath." What a beautiful and horrifying image!

I think your first sentence is incomplete - what is discrete and brilliant?

I disagree that we need to know more about why Shiva was built. Clearly it was a religious cult, building this tower in secrecy... especially because of the last line:
"What would remain would be unending fire and the roar of an angry god consuming the last of the Earth."

Although I understand the ending, I'm not sure the last image of that angry god destroying the world quite fits with the rest of the story. The words anger and destruction are ugly words, whereas up until that last sentence the destruction has been beautiful, and even holy.

Gunslinger said...

Well, I didn't actually say that I wanted to know why Shiva went off, it wasn't about why, it was about the end.

I don't think that Evan was going for a litteral "god destroying the earth" thing with the line at the end, I think we was merely being descriptive. However, I agree that the use of emotions in the description at the end contrasts with the rest of the piece, which is very beautiful, but more directly explanatory in description.
Despite the name of the bomb, I don't get a supernatural (supra-natural...it's like a whole 'nother level above super) or religious feel to the story at all. It seems to me a lurid description of the horrors science can unleash.

Of course, we'll ahve to wait for Evan to speak up to know for sure :)

Evan said...

I had the loose idea that it was constructed by some kind of Hindu-death cult with ridiculous financial backing from a large bank. I was being far too vague with my writing to be able to get away with saying that the bomb was set off in LA - the top floor of the US bank building in downtown LA. Also it wouldn't really have added much.

I originally had a last line that read: "And then a milenia later he came back to re-create the world." The idea was to wrap up the whole role that Shiva plays as destroyer AND creator, and to perhaps suggest that the reason it was set off was to force the cycle along. I left it out because I really liked the bleak feel.

As for the whole "angry god" bit, I don't know why I put it in there. It sounded cool to me, I guess. Looking back at it now, it seems like it would be better to omit the "angry" part because up to that point, it appears as though the god/bomb is indifferent or uncaring as to what it was doing.

Gunslinger said...

I like the idea of incorporating Shiva as the creator as well as destroyer. But I agree that it would have changed the feel of the story. Not necessarily in a bad way, though. Wrapping the new beginning of the world into the end of the world could have been very cool, but I think it would have been a much different approach and you would have had to write it much differently to lead into it.
The name Shiva and the angry god line are slightly incongruous, but I don't think they interrupt the story, or break the flow at all.
I think it's interesting how differently I took the story as it was written (Lacey guessed right on apparently). The bleak, indifferent and uncaring tone of the piece really led me to see it as science gone mad. Men who built something that destructive because they could. Of course, my mind was cast in that direction as soon as I read about those "aberrantly brilliant" men :)
I'll be interested to hear how everyone else saw it.
I might drop the "angry" part of the last paragraph as well, but I think it stands strongly as it is.

EDL said...

I think it's the most literal translation of the prompt I've read so far, but I still have Bryan's to read.

Whether this is a compliment or not is up to you ;) I get the sense that this is part of something larger, like a prelude to a longer story.

I agree with Aron on being torn about the origin. The sense that there's more to the story mediates it, though, because my "reader instinct" is that it would later be explained to me. All I have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

It could use some minor edits, like "Instead, it simply" and "No other bomb constructed bore a resemblance" is passive voice.

I loved this: "The wrath left a molten crater that dwarfed nations. It dispatched millions and spread across half the continent and into the sea by hundreds of miles." Very vivid.

Fandros said...

Sorry it took so long to comment.

I could fully imagine the end of the world in this post, the detail of the destruction.

The events unfold in my mind, you have very vividly described each part of the story.

my mind runs away with me, I can imagine an evil Overlord, sleeping deep in the earth, waiting for this bomb to go off, and to eventually rule what remains of the world. or what mutants might Arise