End
of Days
Victor D. López
Copyright
Victor D. López 2014
Published at Smashwords
Victor D. López is a tenured
Associate Professor of Legal Studies in Business at Hofstra University’s Frank G.
Zarb School of Business. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from St. John’s University
School of Law and a B.A. from Queens College, C.U.N.Y. (English Honors Program
– Writing) and is a member of the New York State Bar, New York State Bar Association,
the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) and the North East Academy of Legal
Studies in Business (NEALSB). He has been an academic for more than 25 years and,
prior to joining the Hofstra University faculty, he served as a tenured Professor
of Business, as Dean of Business and Business Information Technologies, and as Academic
Dean in urban, suburban and rural public and private academic institutions.
Professor López is the author
of several textbooks and trade books and has written poetry and fiction throughout
most of his life, some of which has been published in anthologies and literary magazines.
End of Days
God spoke to me last night. No, I am not
schizophrenic or a Jesus freak. Nor am I a conspiracy theorist (well, except
for JFK’s assassination, of course--unless the principles of quantum mechanics
somehow apply to bullets fired from book depositories with inhuman rapidity to
perform a dance macabre through the bodies of governors before striking their
intended target), but I know precisely the series of events that will result in
the end of the world and will eventually give birth to a new universe. It came
to me in a dream. No, really, it did.
It all started pretty much like a bad
Hollywood disaster flick (sorry, I know that’s redundant) with well funded mad
scientists doing what comes natural in fiction as well as in fact. “Build us a
big Hadron Supercollider, and we’ll find the elusive Higgs boson God particle.
Maybe we’ll even come up with a unified theory that incorporates the pesky
behavior of subatomic particles and allows us to demystify quantum mechanics
once and for all.” It turns out, not surprising to anyone, other than
scientists of course, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that
allowing children to play unsupervised in a chemistry lab or with a
super-duper, neat-o particle accelerator is not such a good thing after all.
Who’d have thunk it?
The first hint that something was just a
bit off-kilter came in the form of assurances by project scientists delivered
with the smug expressions and thinly veiled contempt with which they usually
approach any communication with the unwashed masses, that yes, miniature black
holes could probably be created by subatomic particles accelerated at nearly
light speed through a 17-mile circular particle accelerator and forced to
collide in a massive release of energy, but such black holes would quickly
dissipate. “No,” they smiled complacently, “there is absolutely no danger in
these experiments.”
The second hint of a problem (and by hint
I mean claxons going off, red lights flashing, and Robby the Robot’s accordion
arms waving wildly while proclaiming “danger, Will Robinson!”) came when the
Hadron Supercollider suffered some unspecified problems that caused it to be
shut down for months on end after its first full-scale test. When the 17-mile
supercollider was once again brought back on line, headlines proclaimed the
countdown would begin again for the end of the world. Smile, snicker, hah-hah.
What was not reported was the actual reason for the shutdown, since no one,
including the geniuses running the experiments, knew the real cause: a
miniature black hole that did not quickly dissipate in the lab as expected and
caused a nearly catastrophic shutdown as it drilled an invisible hole a few
molecules wide, eagerly sucking up anything that crossed its tiny event
horizon, as it accelerated slowly but inexorably downward, worming its way through
the containment chamber, rapidly vacuuming vital bits of the temperamental
equipment on its way to the center of the earth.
Not to worry, though, it is still
relatively small despite its voracious, unquenchable appetite, though it is
exponentially increasing its mass as it swings like a pendulum through the
earth’s core and beyond it in decreasing arcs that will eventually settle it at
the earth’s core. It will be many months and perhaps years before we begin to
feel the cataclysmic seismic effects of its inexorable violation of the earth’s
core, and longer still before the entire planet and every living thing in it is
sucked into its vortex, followed thereafter by the moon, and then the outer
planets as the growing black hole continues its feeding frenzy, eventually
consuming the entire solar system and Sol itself.
But that would be many years, perhaps
millennia, in the future given the diminutive size of the black hole at
present. And scientists still believe that the equipment failure was unrelated to
its actual cause since the unreported black hole the initial full-scale test
produced dissipated soon after its formation according to their classified
reports. Therefore, the supercollider was repaired, and billions or Euros
later, the scientists have their plaything once more and science is free to
continue its happy march towards oblivion. If it ended here, we’d have little
to worry about in the short term, other than perhaps ever-increasing seismic
activity. Even the hungriest little black hole needs a great deal of time to
ingest a planet from the inside out, and if later laboratory-created black
holes don’t ingest other vital pieces of sensitive equipment on their way to
joining their older brother down the rabbit hole in their inexorable journey to
swallow our blue planet, we’d probably kill off our species through war,
pestilence, famine or other forms of humanity’s endless capacity for galloping
stupidity long before daddy’s and mommy’s little darlings consumed the world.
If my prescient dream had ended there, I’d
shake it off with a smile and go about my day without another thought,
compartmentalizing the certain knowledge of future doom in the nether regions
of my mind, right next to the knowledge of the unsustainability of our
ballooning federal and state deficits and the possibility of an asteroid hit
that would once again eradicate most plant and animal life on this planet.
Unfortunately, scientists are not the only
ones who like to play God. They are just more tragic and contemptible in their
efforts at doing so because they should know better. They are like amoebas
attempting to extrapolate the secrets of the universe by examining in minutest
detail the drop of fetid swamp water atop a floating leaf that they inhabit. In
a very real sense, scientists are among the smartest amoebas, all hail their
boundless wisdom! But others like to play in the hedonistic God sandbox, too.
And here is where my prescient dream grows infinitely darker.
It so happens that terrorists pay
attention to science. Science, after all, brought us TNT, the A-bomb, the
H-bomb, weaponized anthrax and lots of other cool goodies that are wonderful
additions to the terrorists’ toolkits. As it happens, one particularly well
funded, well connected group in the Middle East thinks it a grand idea to blow
Israel off the face of the earth before that even better funded, and better
connected state has the chance to do the same to them or to their proxy states.
They have acquired a gaggle of disaffected, under-employed Russian physicists
and funded them generously to come up with “outside-the-box” ideas for a
doomsday device on the cheap. They did not have 17-mile supercolliders to play
with, and Jihadist physicists are a rare breed. But not to worry, they had
something better: money, lots of it, and the ability to entice scientists who
view themselves above pedantic, bourgeois notions of ethics and for whom
science is the only religion.
Undaunted by any notions of right and
wrong and guided by the simple principle that “if it can be done, it must be
done,” these brilliant men and women soon developed a working experiment that
presented an elegant solution that their benefactors immediately approved.
Their plan was exquisitely simple and
required very little by way of resources beyond two suitcase nukes that could
be easily obtained either from Russia (cheap, old-world loose nukes listed
simply as “missing” from the former Soviet inventory), or spanking new,
state-of-the-art but untried ones from the secret Pakistani stash. They opted
for the Russian suitcase nukes, in part because they did not want a trusted
ally compromised in the event that their experiment failed to attain the
desired end.
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