I am reposting this vignette under a new title because it is part of the Future History I am putting together which has generated some interest. I hope you will indulge me and allow me to add it to the collection. The time scale for this is near the middle of the first volume.
It was a dark and stormy night.
From the crisp black of space, the storm showed as tiny blurred pinpricks of light against the barely visible Earth. Emily fell toward it, unwilling and unable to change her course. The random stuttering flickers seemed to draw her in from beyond the moon. In an hour she had crossed 30 thousand miles and the storm had half piled against a mountain range and half spilled across a sea, the brief hands of lightning spreading their fingers over hundreds of miles, grasping first here, then there, as if looking for something in the dark. Emily fell faster.
From one hundred miles above, the storm was everywhere below her. It had intensified and the twelve mile high tops were outlined by the almost constant shatters of light. Emily passed from the midnight of space to the midnight of the world in a shower of her own sparks. She opened her arms to the atmosphere that burned away her cloak of ice. After seven million years the last seconds were far too brief to notice. She exploded in the midst of the storm, casting debris and violence over hills and valleys already ravaged by the deluge and her death brought an instant of daylight to nearly a third of the planet.
On a porch over 3000 miles to the west, under another evening storm, another Emily looked to her father and said, "That one was bright, but where's the thunder?"
The thunder was coming for them.
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Image from imgur.com
I assume from NASA but no creator listed.
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