John Adams - Wastelands 2

The end was near, and Rabbiteen didn’t care to watch the cosmos collapse from inside her cramped room in her parents’ house in Fremont. Nor did Angelo want to meet the end in his survivalist bunker in the foothills of the Sierras near Fresno—a bunker which, to untrained eyes, resembled an abandoned barn in the middle of a sun-killed almond farm.

So, after a dense flurry of instant-messages, the two bloggers had joined forces and hit the great American road together, blasting one last trump from the hearse’s dirge-like horn, a mournful yet powerful blast which echoed from Rabbiteen’s parents’ pink stucco house and all through the table-flat development of a thousand similar homes.

Chastely sipping biodiesel through the apocalyptic traffic, they’d made it over Tioga Pass onto Nevada’s Route 6 by midnight. They were out well ahead of mankind’s last lemming-like rush to universal destruction.

“I’ve been obsessing over Peak Oil for years,” Angelo confessed. He was feeling warm and expansive, now that Rabbiteen had promised him some pre-apocalypse sex. “As a search term, my name is practically synonymous with it. But now I can’t believe I was such a sap, such a piss-ant, when it came to comprehending the onrushing scope of this planet’s disaster! I was off by… what is it? By a million orders of magnitude?”

Rabbiteen patted his flannelled arm supportively. Angelo was just a political scientist, so he was really cute when he carried on about “orders of magnitude.”

He was rueful. “I was so worried about climate change, financial singularities and terror attacks in the Strait of Hormuz. And all the time the parallel branes were converging!” He smacked the Volvo’s cracked dashboard with the flat of his pale hand. “I’m glad we escaped from the dense urban cores before the apocalypse. Once people fully realize that cosmic string theory is unraveling, they’ll butcher each other like vicious animals.”

“Don’t insult our friends the animals,” said Rabbiteen, flirtatiously bending her wrists to hold her hands like little paws.

Rabbiteen’s “What Is Karmic Reality?” blog cleverly leveraged her interest in scientific interpretations of the Upanishads into a thriving medium for selling imported Indian clothes, handicrafts and mosaics.

Angelo, unable to complete his political science doctorate due to skyrocketing tuition costs, had left Stanford to run his own busy “Ain’t It Awful?” website. His site tracked major indicators for the imminent collapse of American society. The site served to market his print-on-demand tracts about the forthcoming apocalypse, which earned him a meager living.

The end of the universe had begun with a comment from trusted user “Cody” on Rabbiteen’s blog. Cody had linked to a preliminary lab report out of Bangalore’s Bahrat University. The arXiv.pdf report documented ongoing real-time changes in the fine-structure constant. Subtle dark and light spectral lines hidden in ordinary light were sashaying right up the spectrum.

Rabbiteen had pounced on this surprising news as soon as it hit her monitor, deftly transforming the dry physics paper into an interactive web page with user-friendly graphic design. To spice up her post for user eyeballs, she’d cross-linked it to the well-known Cyclic Universe scenario. This cosmological theory predicted that the fundamental constants of physics would change rapidly whenever two parallel membranes of the cosmic twelve dimensions were about to—as laymen put it—“collide.”

Although Rabbiteen didn’t feel supremely confident about the cataclysmic Cyclic Universe scenario, that theory was rock-solid compared to the ramshackle Inflationary notion that had grown up to support the corny, old-school Big Bang.

Cosmologists had been tinkering with the tired Big Bang theory for over fifty years. Their rickety overwrought notions had so many patches, upgrades, and downright mythologies that even the scheme of a cosmos churned from a sea of galactic cow milk by a giant Hindu cobra seemed logical by comparison.

After Rabbiteen’s post, Angelo had horned into the act, following a link to Rabbiteen posted by that same user Cody on Angelo’s “Ain’t It Awful” blog. With the help of vocal contributors from a right-wing activist site, Angelo quickly unearthed a pirated draft of speechwriters’ notes for an impending presidential oration.

Tonight the U.S. President was planning to blandly deny that the cosmos was ending.

The leaked speech made commentary boil like a geyser on Angelo’s catastrophe blog—especially since, unable to keep his loyal users in the dark, he’d been forced to announce to them that their entire universe was kaput. The likelihood of this event was immediately obvious to loyal fans of “Ain’t It Awful,” and the ripples were spreading fast.

“Listen, Rabbiteen,” said Angelo, tentatively slowing the hearse. “Why bother to find a motel? It’s not like we want to sleep during our last night on Earth. It’d be crazy to waste those precious few remaining hours.”

“Don’t you want to dream one more great dream?”

He turned his thin, abstracted face from the bug-splattered windshield, his expression gentler than she’d expected. “I’d rather post one last great blog-post. Exactly how many minutes do we have left in our earthly existence?”

Their Linux laptops nestled together on the gray-carpeted floor of the hearse, the screens glowing hotly, the power cords jacked into a luxurious double-socketed cigarette-lighter extension. USB jacks sucked Internet access from a Fresnel antenna that Angelo had made from metal tape, then jammed on the hearse’s roof.

Rabbiteen plopped her warm laptop onto her skirted thighs. She scrolled through a host of frantic posts from her over-excited readers.

“Still almost five hundred minutes,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s two a.m. here, and the latest doom estimate is for ten-twenty a.m. local time. Hmm. This scientist woman net-friend of mine—Hintika Kuusk from Estonia—she says that, near the end, the force of gravity will become a quantized step function. Six minutes after that, the strong force drops to the point where our quarks and gluons fly apart.”

“And then the Big Splat hits us?”

“Full interbrane contact comes seven yoctoseconds after our protons and neutrons decay.”

“Seven yoctoseconds?” Angelo’s gauzy, policy-oriented knowledge of hard science was such that he couldn’t be entirely sure when Rabbiteen was serious.

“That’s seven septillionths of a second,” clarified Rabbiteen. “A short time, but a definite gap. It’s a shame, really. Thanks to our crude nucleon-based human bodies, we’ll miss the hottest cosmic action since the start of our universe, fourteen billion years ago. But, Angelo, if we hug each other ever so tightly, our quarks will become as one.” And with this, she laughed.

“You think that’s funny?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t it funny? How could it not be funny? If I let myself cry, that’ll be worse.”

“There’s no time left to weep and mourn, not even for ourselves,” mused Angelo. “I realize that you approach the problem of death in your own way. That motto you posted—‘the dewdrop slides into the shining sea.’”

Rabbiteen was moved by the proof that he’d been reading her blog. She clapped her glowing laptop shut and gazed out at the stricken moon above a purple ridge of low mountains. “The moon looks so different now, doesn’t it? It’s redder! The changes in the fundamental constants will affect all electromagnetic phenomena. No more need for fancy big-science instruments, Angelo. We can see the changes in the fundamental constants of physics with our own wet, tender eyeballs.”

She wiped her eyes, smudging her lashes. “In a way, it’s wonderful that everything will dissolve together. The mountains and the moon, the rich and the poor, all the races and colors.”