John Karr - Detonation Event

“Make sure you’re on the next one out. I’ll find a way up!”

She looked away. “We’ll never see each other again, Ry.”

“I’ll be up there before you know it.”

Devans turned from Karen Wagner and the escape that space could have offered.

Death had advanced in relative silence, cloaked in anonymity. Now that it had been exposed, Dr. Karen Wagner’s deepest fears were creeping to the fore. She arrived back at the NIH labs on Lunar One in a state of rising panic. Paton Schiflet had tested positive for the Martian microbe, and now she received results from the tests of the recently deceased fetuses, infants, and several grieving mothers and fathers.

Almost all were positive for MS274S34.

She ordered a broader swath of tests, highest priority. More results came in from other regions in the United States. And then other countries.

They were too late to contain the spread.

“Get teams of lab researchers from every country involved,” Karen Wagner told her superiors at NIH. “We don’t know how to fight this alien microbe, and the clock is ticking now.”

They asked if she was exaggerating. What was her most realistic opinion of the effects on humans?

“Extinction,” she replied.

The government actually listened and followed her direction, despite the presence of many EFF proponents whom she suspected secretly welcomed the event.

SCONA also dispatched researchers, astrobiologists, and physicians to try to find a cure.

The EFF made use of the situation. The Department of Justice sued SCONA financially, and Congress passed legislation to ban further expeditions to Mars. The president signed it into law.

SCONA fired back with a naked threat. If it had to pay the fines, it might no longer have the funds to provide adequate asteroid protection, and the technology to do so would be at risk.

The government replied that if the microbe were not stopped, asteroid protection would be irrelevant.

While they bickered, the number of failed pregnancies and miscarriages rose exponentially. As did infant mortality. Even the strictest controlled laboratory pregnancies failed, including the cloning farms.

The news stories followed suit and flooded in afterward in a plethora of links on the internet sites.

Crisis: Where are the babies?

Martian Epidemic Targets Human Young.

Curiously, there were also some very different, far less alarming stories. These planted the seeds of reassurance in the minds of many. Various scientists pointed out that while tragic, a generational gap in Homo sapiens was favorable for the Earth. In just a year, the population had declined ten percent. There were no births to offset the thousands of adult deaths that occur each day. They would find a remedy for the alien microbe, but in the future, population controls were a must if the Earth—and humans—was to survive.

The media aligned themselves to this point of view. They worked to acclimate humans to lower expectations of generational gap and fewer offspring. They often cited one story in particular as “proof” the scenario was not a bad thing: Pros and Cons of Fewer Humans for Ultimate Survival.

But even the most rabid Earth First proponents were alarmed with one documentary:

Human Eclipse.

And they sought to have it banned. But while it was removed from many news websites, bootleg links to the report remained.

Video footage drove home the threat.

Playgrounds creaked and groaned as the wind pushed empty swings back and forth, chains red with rust. Several seats dangled at extreme angles, one side detached, to scrape the sand. Another spun just above the ground in a lifeless spiral.

Baby strollers vanished from neighborhoods, parks, malls. The ones in use were either empty or harbored dolls or small dogs instead of children, and the gazes of those who pushed them were haunted from the loss.

Preschools closed. The colorful letters that once drew the wide-eyed gazes of bright young faces were lost on adults. The playtime blocks and spaceships and hovercrafts and computers and picture books were all abandoned, not even sold secondhand.

Pods and hallways of elementary schools became hushed. For a while the fourth and fifth grades still met, then those thinned to silence as older children perished.

Janitors had the run of the places. They cleaned and replaced light bulbs and painted, in the hope that the structures would someday see an influx of children.

But fewer humans was a good scenario for the Earth and ultimately would lead to more resources for humans when a cure was found, many news stories maintained.

Manufacturers of baby supplies went out of business. Diapers and baby clothes and food and rattles and pacifiers vanished from store shelves. Software to entertain and teach the basics of the alphabet and numbers were put on hold.

And the economic spillover did not end there.

Orders for family-size hovercraft vehicles, including campers, fell drastically. Those who still traveled to vacation spots no longer had tricycles secured to the rear, only bicycles for older children and adults.

Hoverboards had long since taken over the role of skateboards, but these were in use only by older kids and young adults.

The list of compromised businesses grew longer with the death of each child.

Unemployment rose sharply.

During the early phase of the Martian Plague, news programs used graphics to display an impact map. In them, the first solid red circle covered the Washington, DC, area, including northern Virginia and Maryland. From there, red bands formed. The circles were dubbed IDAs, or Infant Death Areas. Thin red lines shot from these and extended to central and western regions of the United States to create more IDAs. New lines crisscrossed into more death circles until the North American continent went entirely red, eventually reaching such sparsely populated areas as the Arctic Circle.

Central and South America followed suit.

Red lines shot across the oceans. Red circles soon dotted, then encompassed Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia. Red lines crisscrossed one another. Preventive measures failed. Red dots formed and spiked outward to form more IDAs.

Millions of babies perished, in and outside the womb.

In the midst of this arose another phenomenon—all but overlooked with the pandemic of infant deaths.

Adults were living longer.

Those with disease were beating their illnesses and living in numbers that paralleled the fetus mortality. Specifically, deaths due to disease plunged to a relative trickle.

The news stories abounded at both ends of the spectrum: a lack of births offset by adult longevity.

The blame was placed squarely upon SCONA for meddling with Mars.

SCONA blamed the NIH Lunar Labs for allowing the microbe to escape to Earth.

The United States government, and many others that followed the EFF doctrine of a lighter human footprint upon the Earth condemned SCONA for bringing the microbe to Earth, but pointed to the benefits as well. They congratulated one another, believing their time had arrived.

The hardline EFF seized upon the chaos of the worldwide tragedy and activated its vast network of operatives. Finally, the moment to enact their ultimate solution for the Earth had arrived.

Devans was not good at waiting. Period. You’re either doing something or you’re done doing something. Idling is a waste of time. Waiting in a loud, increasingly tension-filled airport while the world was going to crap was taxing his mind to exponential degrees, but it wasn’t about him right now, so he set aside his impatience as best he could.

Karen Wagner had boarded her flight for the moon, despite the agitation building up in the airport. The EFF was making bold moves at an alarming rate now, and he wanted to know she at least made it off the planet before they struck with their true intentions.