Several months back I collaborated with John Wagner to write a book entitled SoulStone:Book 1 of the SoulStone Saga in which:
A very long time ago, hundreds of thousands of years, a linear accelerator orbiting a nearby star launched a capsule that would eventually land on earth. It was identical to millions if not trillions of other capsules. The linear accelerator was a mega-structure hundreds of thousands of miles long orbiting as close as possible to the star, using the energy from the star to accelerate the tiny capsules to near light speed and launching them into interstellar space.
It was the original ‘spray and pray” strategy. If enough capsules were thrown down range eventually one would hit something. When it did hit, the modified tardigrade passengers would activate, begin to reproduce and migrate toward the poles of the planet. There, over millennia, they built an interstellar reef.
When the reef was complete a pilot portal opened and ships sailed through to the new planet. Their purpose was to integrate the new world into the network.
Something went wrong. A star had serious indigestion and disrupted the network. The portal on earth didn’t stay open very long. The Gamma Ray Burster emitted from the sick star sterilized half the planet. It also killed one particular service tech.
As luck would have it the service tech’s portable computer was discovered by the descendants of his surviving shipmates.They had little idea what it was or what it could do but they used it the best they could. Legends of the supernatural were spawned from those episodes. Over millennia the computer and, possibly, others like it were found, lost, found, lost and found, again again, seriously affecting human history.
The last time it was found was by a combat vet during the Vietnam war.
The SoulStone was a cybernetic tool containing ultra-dense data stored in a memory diamond along with it’s associated nanotechnology.
The Vet, Shelby Winslow by name, eventually learned to control some small part of the SoulStone technology. In so doing he helped a small village to survive a global catastrophe.
The reef had activated, unintegrated and uncontrolled. It flooded the planet.
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Prologue
For 75,258 years, the island of Sumatra, containing Lake Toba lay –more or less-in gentle repose. The deadly paroxysm that had caused the volcano below it to erupt, and had driven the human race to near extinction had been quiet for all that time.
A gamma ray burst had wreaked havoc on portions of an interstellar transportation network a century or two before earth was due to come on line. All the technicians had been killed, The machine phase nanotech had gone into crash shut down before the Portal Scepter had finished growing. Seven hundred millennia later when the Portal Scepter re-powered, and the portals opened they opened in the wrong place. The technicians who would have prevented that from happening by making the final alignments for that phase of growth were eons dead.
The portals were all buried in ice, snow, and sometimes rock. The opening mechanism burped, clearing the obstructions. The way was open for transit to other planets. Earth suddenly found its seal level half a mile low.
There were thousands of gates in the circumferential portal ring around the earth at the 80th parallel South. They opened onto thousands of other planets. There was only one Earth.The aquatic balance was unfavorable. Earth’s sea level had to rise half a mile while the thousands of other worlds oceans needed only to fall a few inches each in order to align. On the other planets it was barely noticeable, less than the height of the fluctuation of tides.
The waters around the portals of the other worlds were NOT arctic. None of those worlds were in an ice age like earth, and none of them had icecaps. When the thousands of portals on earth opened relatively hot surface water encountered walls of ice. The Portal Scepter began to warm up to operating temperature. It was powered by an integral planetary core-tap running out of power wasn’t a problem. Even so it took a while clear it’s pipes. The breakthrough was gradual and thus unnoticed for some time except at West Antarctica where it was attributed to Global warming. The scientists felt vindicated, briefly, when the ice sheet disintegrated.
Trickles of hot water increased in number then increased in size to streams, then to raging torrents. Pulled by the force of gravity the rushing water melted and eroded the landscape as it made it’s way to the sea. In many cases there were MAGNIFICENT steaming water falls almost half a mile high. In other cases there were steaming miles long and wide cascades. The ice cap broke up and avalanched into the southern sea. Millions of cubic miles of warm water followed it. Antarctica transformed completely within a few months. The earths sea level rose nonlinearly at first then it stabilized at constant rise of about half a foot a day.
The resulting flooding devastated the Earth, the extra-terrestrial water mixed with local water, and wiped out species after species. Anything that couldn’t adapt within a few short years..............died.
In the United States Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin eventually were just gone. Many of the others had large portions, such as the coasts, submerged. It only took about a decade.
Anette had awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of snapping wood and the forlorn wail of her Momma screaming. The scream transformed into a liquid, bubbly, gargled sound as she listened, as if her momma was trying to scream from underwater.
It was very dim. Anette could barely see.
Her Poppa roared. Anette remembered hearing his howling enraged furious scream when he rampaged down the hallway to her room. It was dark and he didn’t even bother to open the door. It didn’t matter.
Poppa was a bull of a man and he slammed right through her flimsy bedroom door. He didn’t even slow. He crossed her suddenly tilting bedroom floor in an instant and snatched her out of bed by one ankle. He threw her across the room at the faintly, faintly illuminated window. Annette instinctively curled up tight into a ball before she smashed through the window. It exploded outward and she flew far out from the collapsing house and cannonballed into dark swirling water. She surfaced immediately and instinctively began to fight the current. It only seemed like forever before she was pulled from the angry torrent by a Sheriff’s deputy.
The local Search and Rescue boats were fighting their way through the raging current rescuing as many people as they could. This particular boat was so full of people that the men were in the water beside it hanging from the sides so that the women and children would have a place onboard. It was horribly overloaded yet they kept loading more. People in the water had one shot at rescue and that boat was likely it. If they missed the boat they died.
Her house had been hammered to destruction by flotsam from the flash flooded, raging river. The junk had pounded her house into wreckage. It’s splintered remnant collapsed with a splashing crash behind her in the darkness. Shattered timbers, soggy sheetrock, broken glass and everything that had been her house vanished into the raging torrent. It had been her home since birth. Minutes before it had been standing and now it was just, gone.
Anette never saw her mother and father again..
She cried until she was too hoarse to speak. No one could tell that she was crying because of the rain. Anette wasn’t the only one that was weeping.
She and the other soggy flood refugees had been put into that first FEMA camp. They had fed her, given her minor medical attention and a warm bed to sleep in.
The the rising water had forced them to move the camp.
Again.
And again.
Many times, almost constantly it seemed. The roads flooded time and again until finally not even the big trucks could get through. Boats and helicopters picked them up from the beds of the stranded trucks and moved them to another camp on higher ground. Much of the original camp equipment was lost.
The next camp was bigger, but definitely NOT better. There were many more people. It was crowded, dirty and wet with less food and fewer medical provisions for those who needed it. More and more people needed it.
Again the camp was moved and again because of the rising water.
And again.
So it went. Her life had become a soggy hell. It seemed that she was always moving. The water was chasing her. The FEMA personnel had scrambled to move the camp to higher ground numerous times. Once they went so far as to put it on the top of a low hill, that was a mistake. The hill became an island over night. They had had to be hurriedly removed by boats the next day. Equipment was lost and people died.
People died, lots of people died. People were always dying.
She’d not dealt with death before. Now it was a daily occurrence . The number of dead dying daily increased daily. At first it had been a rare event, then one or two a day, now it was by the hundred. The poor sanitation, the stress of constantly moving, the damp and the cold wore everyone down and killed the weak.
Wilbur Liked to tinker. The problem was that Wilbur was of limited financial means. He was a day laborer when he could find work, unemployed when he couldn't. He lived in an old trailer house out side of town and tinkered in a small shop in the back. He built things. Wilbur was pretty smart when it came to “things.” Not so much when it came to people, especially gurls.
