《Scalarian Prologues - Legacies of Scalaria》
Prologue 1 - Lt. Gen. Selman
On the wall mounted screens, a hundred signals and indicators and gauges and the such blinked and beeped and swam about, trying to sort themselves into intelligible information.
Selman had eyes for only three of the signifiers.
One, a long string of numbers, rose unsteadily, in ones and two of hundreds here and there, pausing for a moment or two before leaping up again, by the tens and hundred of thousands, then stabilizing back into slow rise or more large leaps. The one thing it never did was stop climbing.
Dear God¡ Selman almost couldn¡¯t¡ couldn¡¯t take it, couldn¡¯t believe it, or maybe just couldn¡¯t accept it. It didn¡¯t seem real to him.
His mind skipped and spun, half-unmoored from reality.
As far as he knew, the most people to ever die in one day in a war was something around 80,000. The Battle of the Somme, he thought. He wasn¡¯t too sure.
100,000s of people killed by the atom bombs.
He had stopped outside, shaking as he lent against the wall some hours ago, desperately typing at the screen of his phone.
830,000.
That was supposedly the most people to have ever died in a single day. In China, in the sixteenth century. An earthquake that was said to have reduced the population by almost sixty percent.
Not anymore, he thought, with the odd, detached mindset that had come to dominate his thoughts these last few days.
He almost couldn¡¯t believe the number scrolling up on the screen.
His eyes flickered to the second indicator.
500 Kiloton - 3.5 Megaton¡
The pictures from LEO satellites had shown a clear, semicircular scar torn across the surface of the lowland delta. Freshly exposed soil, bare flesh of the earth; the detritus of millions of lives and the slow trickle of water flowing in to fill the massive crater. Ringed mounds circled around, almost a new range of hills with their bumpy, malformed structures; but for the almost perfect circle they left behind in their absence.
The third number his eyes almost couldn¡¯t find in the flood of constantly changing and updating information.
Zero.
0.00001 Roentgens/hour. Less than estimated background radiation.
The first indicators had come from low fly-overs, from FEMA response teams and other IR organizations and UN response efforts, had trickled rapidly up the information structures of the world, showing the startling lack of residual radiation.
India had been the first to mobilize massive relief efforts, following immediately in the steps of local response forces. The world as a whole had pitched in quickly, following the lead of the United Nations, larger nations and smaller neighbors alike each attempting to show solidarity and lack of hostile intent.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Hundreds of international and national organizations had rapidly mobilized in the first few days after the unexplained devastation. Thousands of volunteers and responders had swarmed and crawled into the open, seeping wound left behind.
Accusatory eyes and sharp gazes had been turned upon the greatest suspects. The Indian Government, Pakistan, Russia, China, even the US¡¯ own intentions and actions had been searched and savaged, picked through and inspected upon the stage of international politics.
The fundamental questions had gone unanswered. Even here, in the center of the US military¡¯s own massive information networks, the two most pressing questions hung heavy, unanswered and oppressive over the heads of the hundred or so gathered figures of importance.
Selman himself had been rounded up from his own home, shoved without dignity into a military convoy, and shipped out of the capitol to this blacksite, where he had hidden for the last few days with the other dignitaries and important figures quarantined alongside him.
The world was in panic, nowhere so much as in the spheres of power and influence.
Who? And how?
These were the two questions, the only two significant questions left to ask, it seemed.
Other questions, human, realistic questions of death and loss and how to respond in the face of such tragedy, those had been left for the less important, the less busy to answer, it seemed.
For him, and for the other men and women shoved alongside him into the too-small conference room they had inhabited for the last few days, the only two important questions were who and how.
Who had done this? How had they done this?
The three numbers his mind kept catching on swam across his vision, competing with each other for attention.
830,000, the most people to have ever died before in a single day. Not anymore, his mind repeated.
The first number had steadily risen past thirteen million early this morning, and seemed to be steadily on its way past fourteen.
14,000,000.
The highest estimates guessed at something between seventeen and eighteen. He almost couldn¡¯t accept it.
The second, .5-3.5 Megatons, wasn¡¯t much on its own. Horrifying, yes, devastating in potential as the yield of any ordinance, but only in context did it gain the new horror with which it grasped at Lt. Gen. Selman.
That was the third number. Functionally zero radioactive remnants.
It hadn¡¯t been a nuclear device?
It meant that something new had been found. A new weapon, a new device of massive destruction. A new unparalleled threat.
And no one knew who had wielded it. No one knew how it had been delivered, or the simplest basics of the explosives composition. No information had been forthcoming.
So, they sat, and squabbled, and bickered and debated. Trying, trying and failing, to tease truth and understanding from the hundreds of thousands of conflicting and confusing information and rumor and data flows.
Somewhere, deep in his mind, Selman had realized something.
A new world had dawned.
Something new had been born. Something unknown.
Whoever captured or mastered it first would find themselves by default at the top. A reshuffling of world order such as anything unseen since the last world war.
He shivered, deep inside, and tried not to fear.
Someone out there wielding an unknown Power. An unknown actor who could hold power over death and life akin to an atom bomb yet seemingly untraceable and undetectable by known methods.
He could feel it, grating against his conscious. A world changing, restructuring. Dawning.
Prologue 2 - The Jade Heart named Sacrifice
In a hospital, just on the outskirts of a bustling, million population city, in a small ward tucked off the side of the maternity wing, a baby had started crying at the first touch of the morning¡¯s pale light on its smooth, bald head.
The nurse on night duty; a young woman new to the job and nervous but excited to be responsible for caring for the newborn lives entrusted to her; had popped up quickly, rushing off over to lift the baby from its cheap plastic crate, rocking and cooing the little boy back to sleep.
She had learned very young that soft, easy motions, and soft, easy sounds were the best for calming babies.
For all the warmth and joy the little baby¡¯s face stirred in her heart, a small thread of jealousy couldn¡¯t help but worming in.
From early childhood, the only option for her had been medicine.
It had been a thing remarked on, at family events and around holiday dinner tables and while the young girl had rocked and cooed and doted over younger cousins and siblings.
¡®Destiny,¡¯ or ¡®She¡¯s found what calls her.¡¯
She had been the one to play doctor, when the children played war games. When other kids had hurt themselves, on the playgrounds or running through the marshy fields and half-collapsed buildings where they congregated to play, she had always been the one to care for them. Comforting, bandaging, wrapping clumsy attempts at bandages around their wounds as others rushed for parents.
Blood had never scared her. She had never been squeamish - wounds, dead bodies, pus, shit, decay, these had always only been simple threats to her. Where maggots and dead animals sent others running, a small voice in her head only wanted to lean in, to look at the muscles exposed beneath the torn flesh; always thinking of how such a wound should have been treated or cared for, if gotten to in time.
Her younger brother had asked her once how she heard the world differently, how she heard the stories of far off wars and deceased relatives and the bodies of the horrifically dead and all the horrors of the world so easily. She had thought for a moment and responded, ¡®It all just feels like a simple wound, that must just be stitched or fixed. It all feels simple, when you look for how to heal, not anything else.¡¯
It could be said that this was the soul of the nurse, the young woman bouncing the baby gently in the pale-grey mist of dawn that day, to heal. To help.
Medicine had always been the only career option for her, the care for the helpless and wounded and young. Nothing other than motherhood and .
But the world had intervened, as it always does, denying her her wish of a degree and a job in delicate surgeries and fast-paced operating rooms.
So she had compromised, studied for nursing instead, scraping by on what money she could scrounge and borrow and loan. Always striving, driven by her calling.
Then, the News.
The word that had shattered her world.
A routine doctor''s visit.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
And one word.
Sterile.
She had almost broken.
Learning that she would never be a mother herself had devastated her.
But she had kept forging ahead, getting a job in nursing, specializing in infant care, all to hold the broken shards of her own dreams that much closer to her own heart.
That was the jealousy that wormed through her in the light of that pale shaft of dark morning glow.
The jealousy of Motherhood, stolen by fate from her, gifted so carelessly to others who didn¡¯t or couldn¡¯t care for their children.
The baby she held wasn¡¯t her own, but some part of her mind, some small delusion hidden from even her own sight, kept on believing.
She felt that for almost every baby that had passed through her care here, her heart breaking fresh again with each one taken away, sent back home, reclaimed from her temporary care. Each one a new devastation.
Those were the emotions swirling in chaotic mix through her mind and soul.
Love, care, jealousy, possessiveness, and the smallest taste of spiteful arrogance. Clearly, she could do a better job of caring for these babies.
Far away, a new sun dawned, hanging low in the sky over the center of the city on who¡¯s outskirts the hospital perched. The shockwave passed in seconds, almost without being noticed.
Almost in symphony, the twenty or so babies began wailing. Not from the sound of the explosion, for that had gone unheard even by the unnamed nurse, but because, in almost perfect unison, their eardrums had ruptured.
The nurse, far more aware than the babies and thus far less observant, had been more puzzled.
For a brief second, she had wondered what the sensation in her ears had been.
That was the last thought.
A wave of¡ something washed her existence out.
Uncolored color,
Unhearable music,
Incalculable energy,
Incomprehensible Change.
An eternity or a second later, something opened its eyes, hanging spread out in a long, thin streak of presence, smeared through the fabric of reality, trailing away from the epicenter of the unexplained explosion.
Or¡ no. It hadn¡¯t opened its eyes for it had no eyes.
It didn¡¯t, or couldn¡¯t, question that.
For another eternity or singular second, it only hung, unmoving.
Then its awareness began to move.
Sorting, searching.
Shuffling unconsciously past the millions of dead and shattered and broken bodies.
Searching for signs of life. Searching for survivors. Burning itself, the very fabric of its own existence, in sometimes futile, sometimes successful attempts. Trying to force the few living bodies it could find to Breathe; to live; to continue... to Survive.
Always, a part of its awareness was faced backwards, watching fifteen or so tiny, subtly thrumming heartbeats it could somehow feel even from the farthest distances.
Days later, searching through the ruined pile of rubble left from some hospital or other, rescue workers were shocked by an unexpected sight.
There, amidst all the ruins and death, fifteen pristine, alive, and somehow happy babies.
A miracle, it was called. The babies that survived.
The word spread slowly at first, then rapidly, then died beneath the greater wave of tragic and terrible news, swamped out by obituaries and death notices.