Rifting

A short speculative SF story

This is the short story I wrote that triggered my new novel. After this short sketch I had a follow up idea that, now two months in, has grown into fifty chapters. Around two thirds in and at 65.000 words. Right on track. Some days I have difficulty getting back to the present. Some days I feel I have a time machine that takes me almost fifty years into a possible future. I hope readers of the book will have the same alienating experience on their return….

Besides it also taking place in a near future world this story has no connections to the book. Enjoy.

Rifting

When the word arrived, it was too late. Words only make sense when applied to what is. Or has been. Mostly to what is. Here and now. But living phrases fade, dissolve, and turn to the kind of dust in which nothing grows. The kind of dust compared to which desert is fertile ground. Then other words rise with new meaning. Horrid sounds forming from what was familiar and taken for granted.

Only the slow could see it happening. And they knew it was out of reach. Nothing could be done. Or said. Or organised.

Rifting became mainstream with the event in full swing. As the unstoppable was happening. Like in spring, when you forgot to pay attention and the field had suddenly changed. The lawn turned to a wild patch of high weeds. Flowering nightshade had seemed to appear overnight. Hemlock, as tall as a man, shot up in the instant of your lapse. You blinked and it was here. And no human can avoid closing their eyes now and then.

Only the slow were quick enough to respond in ways that mattered.

It started as small cracks. Ignored hairlines wriggling their way across surfaces unnoticed, places unvisited. Underneath thick layers of paint and stretchy fabric. Rapidly filled with the dust shed by daily life. Dawn rises with all the world asleep. We slept through our ending.

Or so it seemed.

Jeffra Shennan was an early riser. Mainly because he also retreated way before most. He followed the light on average days. Sleeping long hours in the endless nights of winter. Dreaming deep dreams of spring in between the shortest of days. Days filled with nothing but mundane movements like watering the garden beds first thing, according to a mysterious pattern with his warm, handheld outlet, barely calmed enough by the crisp night air. Thick and soft and sensitive and longing to enter his woman still asleep. Hot and moist. Soft and surrendering. She'd named the lingering smell. Found a word for it. Eyes closed, mouth content, she had breathed in through her nose and christened the merging. Wintercourse. And it was. Sometimes short and rough. But often lasting until time dissolved in their rhythms. Coming and going in waves of accelerated breath. Conspiring in a mutual plan of release. Wet and sticky. As slow as they dared. Until empty and full, traded places beneath thick blankets.

Then he got up to make coffee for them both. Just two large cups. Drunk as a ritual, made with sacred silent moves, with water heated on a stove rekindled strategically with an armful of logs brought in between urinating and morning sex. It roughly took half an hour for the kettle to boil.

Jeffra Shennan knew the coffee had to go too. Sooner or later, as they say, but probably sooner. But it also did not make much sense to not enjoy the still available.

Shennan knew he most likely wasn't the only one out and about this early. But he had long given up on striving to find proof. He had done his fair share of digging. Until he'd had enough. Until he decided it was enough. Until he became content.

When the widening crack appears between your feet. When you see the rifting happening by looking down, you are forced to choose. And this choice happened again and again as the rifting progressed. As the process sped up, decisions had to come quicker. And though they seemed to be all different, all new, incomparable at first glance, it was the same choice over and over. To hold or not to hold. Left foot or right foot. Take or leave.

It worked until it stopped working. And then things went into reverse mode. Starting with a few unexpected flips. Each time taking half the world by surprise. Dividing the whole into half, time after time. Until whom remained could no longer ignore the inversions as part of a much bigger move. Rifting is a strange phenomenon. There are no half islands. No half cities. No half populations. The work cut in half is still the entire job. A life shortened by a cut through the middle still is a life completed.

So, when Jeffra Shennan walked out on that yet unspoiled spring morning and looked up, he forgot about the wicked imminent plans of his bottom half. His foggy breath quickened while he tried counting the silent airborne dots high up in the fragile blue. Those were the carbon shelled designs he'd read about. Unnaturally big insects, exoskeletons ready to carry anything light enough to anywhere from anywhere. Relative Low Density, Jeffra recalled. A new form of flight, abbreviated to Re-lo-de. It had been unclear to him wether Relodes were a fality until he saw the murmuration filling half the sky like migrating birds once did.

Falities have this habit of turning real. They are half real. Or so we thought. But there is no such thing as half real. We learned that the hard way. There is no half bad or half good. You cannot be on two islands at the same time. You can only live in one reality.

They were heading east. Quick as a storm-cloud. Steady as a plague. Forming a dotted band across the empty sphere. A literal highway. Locusts shimmering in the rays of a sun not yet visible from the east facing sloped potato patch. He could hear no sound from the thousands and thousands of wing-propelled craft. Paired to cancel each other's noise. He felt awe and dread and disgust and disbelief. A nauseating anticipation settled in his stomach. This was it. The rumours had been right. This was the day.

And now with it being visible, he sure wouldn't be the only one witnessing? He went back into the house and fetched the compass from the kitchen drawer. He measured the angle. Roughly seven, it said on the azimuth ring. He went back in and dug up a paper map. With a pencil, he drew a straight line. Could think of no reason for the convoy not to travel the shortest possible route. And his heart sunk as the line crossed nothing substantial until it first ran through the heart of London and then crossed the channel to cut through to Amsterdam. Then the direction they came from dawned on him. The Atlantic. That was utterly weird. Full on unexpected. But then again, who knew what went on in the America's nowadays? Jeffra stopped his questioning mind and tried to estimate the speed of the swarm. They were relatively slow. More like helicopters, or birds for that matter, than planes or even military missiles. Somewhere between fifty miles an hour and double that pace max. That meant between three and five hours before it started. He bit on his lip as his face twitched with sudden grief. A roar of anger flooded his eyes. His innards now accelerating to a full burn.

"Marge," he roared, "wake up. I need you to make a racket that gets all of London on their feet within the next fifteen minutes."