The Last Christmas On Earth

"Copy that," Cindy replied, then turned back to go to the switchboard.

"Now leave, before I change my mind," Helen ordered the agents, they sighed and began to leave the room.

"There is another thing," Benelli informed her.

"Yup?"

"Ms. Murphy called me at least a dozen times, today she was waiting for that famous story of border measurement. I promised her I'd call her back, what should I tell her?"

"That we are now busy with a more important case and we have no time for a stupid question of boundaries," she replied, throwing her eyes to the sky, then accompanied everyone to the front door to lock it.

Once alone, Helen went to check all doors and windows, then went to the guardhouse to pull a camping cot out of the closet and finally went to the bathroom to prepare herself for what it might have been another sleepless night. After brushing her teeth, she removed the very thin layer of makeup she applied to her eyes that morning. She did not like to make up her face, but after a few nights awake, the female part had taken over the Sheriff one, and like any self-respecting female, she had felt the need to hide those dark circles she had considered as deep as the Grand Canyon. She checked her little finger and had the impression that the itching had slightly decreased, on the contrary, the infection had already spread from her first phalanx to the second one, and even there the most superficial layer of the skin had begun to dry out. She decided to go as soon as possible to Dr. Parker, then she took off her shirt to take a quick shower. Instead of the uniform, she would have liked to wear her comfortable nightgown, but it didn't suit the place or the moment. "Patience, even dressed in this way I would be happy to sleep at least six hours," she thought, shrugging her shoulders, then finished combing her hair and went wearily into the gatehouse. The police station staff had self-assessed to buy a small TV, a very useful companion through the long lonely hours of the night on watch. Helen had turned it on and set the automatic shut-off to twenty minutes, hoping it would be enough to fall asleep. She had just lain down on the cot with the blanket pulled up to her nose when the phone rang causing her a heart attack; she threw away the blanket cursing the fact she had forgotten to leave the cordless closer and got up to go and answer.

"It is Larry speaking, I was hoping I'd still find you at work."

"You were lucky, tonight is my guard duty..." she said ironically.

"Ready? I have something incredible to tell you," he told her with a certain agitation in his voice.

"What is all this euphoria due to?" Helen asked, sitting down on the cot. She was convinced that after such a day there would have been just a few incredible things he could tell her, yet she was ready for the worst.

"Are you ready?"

"Shoot."

"Your blue powder is mainly composed of silicates, carbon, graphite, and solidified helium that works as connective tissue.

When they penetrated into the earth's atmosphere in the form of dry ice, ultraviolet radiation altered the molecules producing ..."

"Sorry if I interrupt you, but couldn't you speak easier? I don't understand much about all these big words," said Helen without bothering to dampen his enthusiasm.

"Cosmic dust," Larry summed up.

"Dust what?"

"Space dust! That stuff is dust that comes from space."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I already suspected it last time because I remembered I read something similar on a scientific publication of Pasadena laboratory, which is affiliated with NASA. However I used my special reagents and made a couple of phone calls, and the response always seems the same."

"... does it seem?"

"At ninety-nine point nine percent! That stuff is very similar to the one found in meteorite impact zones."

"You mean that stuff comes from space?"

"From deep space, to be precise."

"And do you think the cause of the mummification of their bodies is the dust?"

"If I have to guess, I think there is a high chance it is so, in its composition there are also highly corrosive elements," replied Larry. It came to her mind the image of her finger trying to remove it from Harry's bike and the very painful twinge she felt when she touched it with the part of her fingertip causing the small wound. "Oh my God," she thought, fearing that she could die like the two corpses, then repeated herself it couldn't be true. Larry must have been wrong. "And how did that stuff get to this point, from deep space?"

"Honestly, I haven't an idea yet," Larry confessed, fantasizing about some kind of investigation, and imagining an increase of his reputation that would have been a real stroke of luck for his profession. "What do you think about it?"

"That it was not necessary this thing!" She said, cooling all his enthusiasm.

"Ah," He murmured, disappointed.

"Don't get me wrong, of course we'll go all the way and you'll help us, because you deserve it and because I owe you," Helen assured him. "But right now I'm really exhausted because in the last few nights I didn't sleep at all and so many things have happened today, I absolutely need to rest," she added.

"I see ..." mourned Larry frustrated.

"I'll call you as soon as possible, okay?" Helen proposed, realizing she had been rude. "I will keep you updated and I will surely still need your help," she added, rewarding at least morally his efforts.

"As you wish, my favorite Sheriff," Larry replied with a hint of dissatisfaction in his voice.

"Well, then have a good night," said Helen. "Cosmic fine dust ..." she repeated, scanning the sky through the half-closed slats of the rolling shutter, then she looked at her finger and thought about mummies and Harry's bicycle. "I have to warn James, if Harry has been in contact with this stuff he is really in danger." She took the phone to call him, then she considered it was late, and bothering him at that time would only serve to give him an extra worry. In any case, James had spent the whole day with his son, if he had any problem he would certainly have noticed. She set the device down, turned on the table lamp to examine her finger meticulously and verified how much that infection had progressed in just twenty-four hours. "I have to call the doctor so that he prescribes me a drug," she thought troubled, taking the cordless phone again. "And what do I tell him, that I have an allergy to space dust?" She replied then, shaking her head and putting the device back on the table. "Cosmic fine dust, it doesn't make any sense. Moreover, I started talking to myself, I am going crazy," she concluded, falling heavily on her cot. She lay down and began to brood over what had happened, and at that point, she was sure that was going to be her third consecutive, completely blank night.

Eve and James had finished their dinner in silence and had sat down in front of the TV without actually looking at anything, everyone was chasing their thoughts waiting for Harry to calm down. The boy showed up after a couple of hours, but contrary to what they expected, he walked by ignoring them and went straight to the kitchen where he ate something, cleared the dish, as he used to do when he was upset, and walked the path backwards to go back upstairs in his room, a clear sign that he was still angry for the loss of the dog. At that point, Eve considered that the day was over, so she went to put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and then went upstairs. James watched the TV, zapping in an attempt to find something interesting, but after a few minutes, he switched it off and went upstairs too. He slept a few hours during those difficult days, therefore judged that sleeping a little more than usual could only be better for his health. Thinking about it, he concluded that remaining locked up at home would have been good neither for him nor for his son, so he decided that the day after he would accompany him to the Scout Camp and then he would go to work, trying to get back to their daily lives. By the time Eve came out of the bathroom James was almost completely dozing off, she lay down beside him and he heard her invading his half of the bed and as usual, he moved towards the edge, to avoid misunderstandings. But instead, she moved closer and he felt the contact with her body warmer than usual, he stretched an arm to push her back, but she grabbed his hand and brought it to her naked breast.

James raised his head surprised, she turned and pulled him towards her. It was a fleeting and silent moment, in the dark as always, it lasted barely enough time to count to ten, without exchanging a kiss or a caress, nor a single word. Immediately afterward, Eve fell asleep and he stayed awake to wonder why the weirdness just seemed not to want to end. First, she suggested a vacation all together and then they had sex, and that could be the prelude to a new beginning. But he did not dare to really believe it. Deep down inside him, he thought that he didn't even know anymore if that was what he really wanted.

While waiting for the unpleasant meeting that awaited him, the President had begun his usual relaxing chess game against the PC, and slowly he filled in his mind with reflections. "Benjamin Hope ... sometimes life really enjoys playing with people's names. How can a man, with a profile similar to that of a vulture and with a zombielike complexion, have such a name? Not to mention the few times we met was just to tell me the bad news ... how can a man so similar to a scavenger be called Benjamin Hope?" He was wondering, when the sudden "bip" of the intercom startled him. He checked the time on the PC application bar and snorted in resignation, the time for the dreaded appointment had arrived.

"The people you were waiting for arrived," the secretary informed him via intercom.

"Thanks, Elisabeth. Please let them sit in the anteroom, I will receive them in two minutes," he replied.

"As you wish, Mr. President."

The President saved the game and closed the computer, finally sorted out the desk and placed two large files on it, as to make a good impression. He tidied up his shirt and walked to greet his guests. Walking along the short stretch that separated him from the door, he passed in front of the United States flag, placed between a philodendron and a pachira plant, and stopped to look at her perplex. How in a lightning movie trailer he relived the path that, starting from so far away, had brought him there, and for a moment he wondered if all the efforts and sacrifices he made to be in front of that flag in that precise moment were really worth it. Aware that there was only further delay in his torment, he shook his head and decided to go and open the door.

Helen was lying on a metal table and two voices kept telling in her head she had nothing to fear. She could not remember how she ended there, she only knew that the contact of her naked skin against the cold steel was horrible and that she wanted to escape, but her body did not respond to her commands; she felt like a piece of iron resting on a magnetic surface.

She opened her eyes and looked around, but what she saw let her wish to have never done it. She was in a laboratory, strange machines were hanging from the ceiling next to a lamp, it was so powerful as to blind her and some metal tentacles were threateningly leaning towards her. Shining surgical instruments were arranged in order of size on the top shelf of a trolley on her left, and on a metal shelf, just a little further back, there was a collection of crystal jars containing human fetuses. Helen suddenly felt completely lost and a sensation she had never had before, a completely resigned terror. One of the two silent figures in white coats grasped an instrument and stretched his arm towards her belly, meanwhile, he mentally kept repeating to her to stay calm. She felt a kind of tickling and when she finally managed to figure out what they were going to do she tried again to rebel but she couldn't, everything seemed muffled and she felt helpless, the only thing she was able to do was crying. She closed her eyes, so as not to see what they were doing, and tried to gather all her energy, tried to scream as hard as she could, and her own voice woke her as she fell from the cot. Not even the time to touch the ground and she was already on her feet, she turned the light on and ran towards the bathroom because she almost shitted herself. Going out of the bathroom, she stopped in front of the mirror in the anteroom and rinsed her face with trembling hands, continuing to look around hallucinated. Although she had been awake yet for a few minutes, those terrible sensations had stuck to her like a second skin, almost as if they weren't the fruit of her stressed mind but rather memories of a truly lived experience. She repeated to herself to calm down, it was only her cursed recurring nightmare. She knew that in that dream there was also Harry, she had never been able to see him, but she was sure he was there too somewhere. Suddenly she realized when she had really tried that kind of annoying tickling in his lower abdomen: that nightmare had brought back the memory of when, years before, she had thought she was pregnant. She had lulled the dream of becoming a mother for a few days until Dr. Parker, just on the third check-up, informed her that there was no fertilized ovum in her womb and dismissed her saying it was a simple hysterical pregnancy, brutally extinguishing all the emotions she had blossomed in her mind. The woman began to cry again, when she calmed down she sat at her desk and took out a sheet and pen with the intention of finding a rational way to go with her mind. She thought back to Larry's and coroner's words scribbling notes about it, and the more she thought about it, the more obvious it seemed the chemist must have been wrong about it. The worst thing of all was that there was probably at least one killer among them and, surely, it was the author of the anonymous call. All the faces of her fellow villagers passed in her mind one by one, in one line. She tried to imagine each one of them in the guise of a homicidal maniac. She was sure that none of them could go in the woods in the middle of the night to kill a couple in a moment of intimacy, but if it really had been one of them, how could he have done it without leaving a single trace?

Such a job was worthy of a professional and certainly not a beet grower or a skipper. And then, what was casing the fact those corpses were mummifying? Perhaps a malfunction of the morgue cells? And that phosphorescent powder what was it? And her finger? What was happening to her finger? She looked at the clock and realized that it was barely one o'clock in the morning, she decided that she had to do something practical immediately or once finished her shift her colleagues would have found her completely and definitively out of her mind.

"As you certainly know Dr. Benjamin Hope is the coordinator of the working group that completed the Project Earth, which NASA itself commissioned to the National Academy of Sciences during the previous presidential term," the Chief of the National Security Department, Jason Ross, began after the customary pleasantries.

"I know Mr. Hope very well," the President replied, extending his hand. "Over the past few years, our roads have crossed more than once. And it is a pleasure to see him again because I respect him greatly both as a man and as a scientist" he lied in order to flatter the scholar. The way in which Hope had insisted on meeting him had given the President the certainty that he had come to bring him a very bitter pill to throw down and he hoped that, if he had flattered him a little, he would at least have the foresight to sugar coat it a little. Doctor Hope nodded his lips in a vague smile, but the firm expression of his eyes did not change by a thousandth because something in the words of his interlocutor had sounded out of line.

"In our opinion, we can begin to talk," announced Ben Kowalsky, Jason Ross's deputy.

"At least let me offer you something to drink first, to cool you off, you walked a long way," the President proposed.

"No compliments and no offense, Mr. President, but we know this will not be a five-minute thing. We are all very tired and the sooner we go straight to the point the sooner we can go to sleep," said Ross, certain of interpreting the thought of everyone present.

"Well then, let's not waste any more time," the President agreed, pointing to the seats.

"The Ring of Fire is a forty-thousand-kilometer-long belt that borders the Pacific Ocean basin, it looks like a horseshoe and is characterized by an uninterrupted series of oceanic trenches and volcanic chains that generate a strong instability, due to the continuous plate tectonic boundaries," Dr. Hope began. Then he paused and looked directly at the President to make sure he was following him. The President thought "as I predicted he has come here to talk about misfortunes" and for a moment he was tempted to send him away. Instead, he invited him, with a slight nod, to continue.

"About ninety percent of earthquakes in the world occur along the Ring of Fire, where, among other things, about seventy-five percent of the Volcanoes on Earth are located. And it is precisely in that area that the most devastating earthquakes and volcanic eruptions recently have occurred: the 2012 tsunami caused by a major earthquake in Indonesia, with the consequences that we all know; the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in 2010; and then there was the tremendous episode of the Fukushima earthquake. But it seems that Earth is awakening everywhere. In the opposite hemisphere, exactly in the same period, there was a great earthquake that devastated Christchurch in New Zealand. And then there are Kamchatka volcanoes in Russia and Indonesian ones like Merapi, Krakatoa, and many others, which since then have consistently increased their volcanic activity. Recently the Fuego and the Santiaguito also erupted in Guatemala ... and then many other incidents occurred that it is useless to mention," stressed Hope interrupting the rosary of catastrophes he was counting one after the other because he realized that the President had assumed an indecipherable expression on his face. He turned to Ross and Kowalsky hoping to get some help, he had been in that room for less than ten minutes and was already deeply uncomfortable.

"Go ahead, please, we don't have all night," Ross urged him, and he obeyed.

"Our planet intensifies periodically its seismic and volcanic activity, it is something more than normal, but we suspected that generally climatic changes could not have been caused exclusively by this phenomenon, that even if very intense it was not however sufficient to justify this significant changes in every part of the globe," said Hope, but immediately afterward he paused again. He had talked while everyone present was listening to him in silence without blinking; the way they looked at him made him feel more like a guest than ever before.

"Come on, don't stop right on top of it," the President urged him. Hope could not have said if he was really interested in what he was saying or if he was ironic about it, in any case, he continued to have the feeling that man actually blamed him, but he just couldn't understand the reason. "Very well" he resumed after drinking a glass of water, more to stall than to thirst. "The first thing we found out is that climate change is partly due to the fact that many places on the planet are no longer present where they were until recently."

"Explain that better please," the President invited him.

"Tectonic plates movements, a slight shift of Earth's rotation axis caused by all the events I mentioned earlier, and finally a slight variation of Earth's orbit due to an alteration of gravity fields. The result of the sum of the effects of these three changes, as I said earlier, is that many places are no longer in the geographical position they were in until a few months ago. And so now they are subject to different climatic situations."

"It's incredible," Kowalsky said. Ross nodded silently.

"I suppose you didn't ask to see me just to talk about the weather ..." the President said.

"Yes," agreed Hope, "here the climate changes are the minor problem."

"Are you kidding? So what would be the biggest one?" Kowalsky asked.

"What really opened our eyes was a sudden and drastic reduction of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which we accidentally discovered during a research session on the thinning of the permafrost layer at the North Pole. When we arrived at the site, in order to find out the causes, we were stunned, the surface of that floating plastic island, thousands of square kilometers wide and thirty meters high, had reduced its size by about forty percent in just a few weeks. This phenomenon resulted from an intense overheating that caused the island to crumple upon itself. Whole shoals of fish floated upside down, literally boiled, and in many parts of the ocean, we recorded temperatures well above fifty-celsius degrees. And while we kept monitoring sky and sea and discussing several hypotheses, other scientists were making a series of discoveries that I would call scary," said Hope. Then, feeling more and more uncomfortable, he stopped again.

"... What are you talking about?"

"It's about solar activity."

"Explain yourself better."

"The Sun has a repetitive functioning cycle, approximately every eleven years our star records on the surface a peak of activity that for some weeks produces geomagnetic storms that end up right on us. This phenomenon will reach its climax soon, after which it should fade and return to normal."

"We already knew it," the President said, interrupting Benjamin Hope's speech for the first time, who was almost happy because that intervention meant they were listening carefully. "And it has always happened," the President continued, "I don't see what is so worrying. At worst, if our planet will really hit by solar wind particles, we will have serious problems for months and many people will die, but at least nothing irreparable will happen. This was established by your research a few years ago."

"I'm sorry to contradict you, but it changed a little since then," Hope objected. "The comparative analysis we did, using the spectrometer, showed something completely unexpected and not very reassuring."

"That is?" Kowalsky urged, paling slightly; when too many big words began to buzz in his head he lost the focus on his speech and got nervous.

"During our research, we identified deep fractures at many Mohorovicic discontinuity locations, which are nothing but wounds in Earth's crust, at very great depths, and so we finally realized what is causing these intense localized temperature increases. The nature of solar radiation is changing. Until recently, the frequency spectrum of emissions that reached the ground has always involved a range from three to ten Gigahertz, but lately, it started to fall and touched more than once values very close to 2.45 Gigahertz.

This fact has contributed significantly to triggering the phenomena that recently occurred in the area of the Ring of Fire. Moreover, it seems that emissions are about to become more or less stable around those values."

"I still don't understand what is your point," the President confessed.

"Practically, in this phase, the Sun is gradually turning into a huge magnetron, the tube for operating microwaves."

The President questioned Ross and Kowalsky with a quick glance, who responded by sticking their chin forward to indicate they too had not understood.

"I'll explain it easier. Let's take a silicone balloon, fill it with water and put it in a microwave oven. If we..."

"I get it now," the President interrupted again. "The silicone will not change, but the liquid inside will boil, and increasing its pressure due to overheating, it will explode, shattering the casing."

"Unless fractures are created on the surface of the balloon to allow some liquid to escape and to rebalance the internal pressure," Dr. Hope pointed out.

"So according to his theory the Sun is slowly overheating all the magma contained within the Planet sending it to boil, and if the right conditions are met we run the risk that the Earth will explode" hypothesized the President; then he stopped waiting for a confirmation.

"Your theory is very fascinating, but in my opinion, it seems too much extreme, the chances such event occurs are minimal," replied Dr. Hope after thinking it over.

"Then what is the real problem? Why are we here tonight to discuss instead of saying goodnight to our children?" Asked the President angrily, he almost had the impression the scientist was having fun behind him.

"The real problem apart from the various active volcanoes scattered all over the planet lies in the chain of super submarine volcanoes located in Antarctica," explained the scientist.

"What volcanoes?"

"The British Antarctic Survey discovered them a few years ago, they are twelve volcanoes located not far from the South Sandwich Islands, a stone's throw from the South Pole. Some of them are three thousand meters high and still seem to be active."

"I don't see what problem they can cause, they are so far from civilization," the President objected.

"We know the cracks that affect the Mesosphere are so large as to favor the flow of real huge underground magma rivers, you have no idea of what could happen if all the thermal energy absorbed by the Ring of Fire would channel in that direction without getting lost along the way."

"So you tell me," the President replied impatiently, the researcher was treating him as ignorant and he didn't like it at all.

"The ashes produced by the possible eruption of many huge volcanoes would poison the sea and obscure the sky for years, depriving us in a short time of all the resources we need daily and generating a sort of nuclear winter that would affect the whole planet. The biggest explosion would then be located just where Earth's axis of rotation ideally meets the surface, and this would have irreparable consequences. In the worst scenario possible, such an explosion could give the planet a tremendous boost, that our engineers have established to be comparable to the rockets on a spaceship ..."

"That's enough!" The President surrendered, he didn't want to imagine other catastrophic scenarios. "Are you suggesting that we must wish for a further increase in seismic and volcanic activity so that Earth can, let's say," discharge "? Should we hope that many great calamities rather than one huge catastrophe occur? "

Dr. Hope raised his eyebrows as to say "there you go".

"If I'm not mistaken, you also said that the culmination of the solar crisis will come soon," the President then asked to take control of the situation.

"A fortnight, maximum twenty days. Perhaps less," the scientist confirmed.

"How many chances do we have that the sun really works like a microwave and triggers the grand finale?"

"I suppose we have good chances to survive, but I am not able to state this with certainty because we do not have similar precedents to study. Making predictions would be unscientific, but if I were forced to venture a number I would say fifty and fifty."

"And does one chance out of two seems good to you?" Ross remarked, annoyed. The scientist answered spreading his arms.

"Will there be any warning before it happens?" Asked the President.

"A maximum of four or five days' notice, I assume. The internal pressure of the magma chambers will increase exponentially by transferring part of its energy to the Astenosfera, which will be significantly affected by the effects of this phenomenon. Earthquakes and chain eruptions will occur, but it will still be a fairly slow process. The first consistent signal will be the large masses of water that will start to evaporate from lakes and rivers and then from the sea with rapidly increasing speed and intensity. When water vapor comes into contact with the colder air in the upper parts of the atmosphere tremendous storms will break loose. Once fallen, the water will immediately start evaporating again to start the cycle again increasingly devastating. Meanwhile, even living beings..."

"Did you say living beings?" Ross interrupted him, he wasn't sure he understood.

"Exactly. We, for example, we are made of water at seventy percent, what do you think would happen to our bodies in such a situation?"

"Does that mean we're destined to burst like that balloon in the microwave?"

"It's a possibility. It is not certain that all this will happen, but if it really happens then there will be no single safe place on Earth, if this is what you wanted to know."

"What can we do?" The President asked Benjamin Hope, and he did it in a way that for the first time since he had stepped into the White House had seemed humble. The scientist looked at him strangely, because he could hardly believe that the President himself had really asked him a similar question. Then the President immediately regretted asking it to him. Dr. Hope had asked him a meeting for a long time, telling him that he had to expose vital questions to him, but he had always done everything he could to avoid that meeting.

"What can we do?" Dr. Hope echoed, the President nodded and let him rub salt in his wound. To rub it in for how much superficial he had been in postponing that meeting was the least he could have done.

"As far as I am concerned tonight I will go back home and dedicate all the time I have to my family, I will try to prepare as best as I can for what could be our last Christmas on Earth," he replied quietly, without arguing. The President looked strangely at his collaborators who shrugged their shoulders, then returned to seriously look Dr. Hope because that was certainly not the answer he expected. Dr. Hope noticed it and nodded, he knew that the President was asking what humanity could work out about that specific problem and so he took a few moments to think about it.