FICTION
The Last Human in the Milky Way — 5
Excerpt from Chapter 5. The Incident
5
He was restless. Around him, in his immediate environment, things had happened that he did not understand. Like everyone else in the Milky Way, he had struggled a lot to understand what had actually happened. And like everyone else in the neighbourhood, he had had difficulties to understand and grasp the scope of what had apparently happened. What consequences would this have for him, for the people in the Milky Way, and for their future?
The Event, as the authorities, news media, and independents called the series of unimaginably powerful explosions in the air over the country, was consistently referred to in the singular, as something enormously large, extensive, and destructive — almost an invisible force that had gone off over central parts of the country, close to where the political elite resided.
The internet had crashed at the same time as the first reports of the incident had arrived. The story about the various components, the various explosions in the Event was therefore mostly hanging in the air, supplemented by scraps and bits of individual stories from people who had been in the parts of the country where the attacks had taken place.
It eventually became a multifaceted picture, with varied theories about who the attackers were and what kind of weapon the attackers had used. The main feature of this picture was that it was vague, lacking in detail, and almost completely failing to consider fact-based explanations of what had happened.
The Incident was described by some as a series of violent explosions which, it was said by people who were supposed to know about it, had come like lightning from the blue. The force of what had happened was hundreds of times stronger than the annual, destructive tornadoes that had razed large areas and killed hundreds of people.
In the first hours after the first two explosions, which had come less than 45 minutes apart, it had been very quiet in the news media, while social media was boiling. At the start, the regional authorities and the government had denied that anything unusual had happened.
A day later, when private audio — and video recordings that in the hours when the internet still worked had been spread on social channels on the internet, there were different divergent explanations.
One of the most referenced explanations was that it was a massive nuclear attack. A foreign power had sent a swarm of intercontinental missiles carrying nuclear bombs against the nation. The Defense Forces and the National Emergency Management Board had managed to neutralize most of the rockets so that they had gone off so high above the ground that they could not do the damage they were intended to do.
Other theories that circulated were that this was staged by the government and the secret organization Under Cover, which many said had been responsible for blowing up the two WTC towers many years earlier. For a segment of the population, what happened during the Event was yet another proof that 9/11 had been staged by the authorities through their super-secret organization, UC.
For several hours he had walked restlessly from room to room in the house thinking about this horrible thing that was about to happen. It hurt to take all this in.
He walked over to the computer and touched the control pad with two fingers. Surprised and excited, he saw that the internet was apparently back. He began to enter the address of the most reliable news channel and unexpectedly came straight into a live news broadcast where the reporter was standing in an open space with buildings in the background and reported that both the Army and the Air Force were in place and that they had investigated a large area and in fact could not find traces of such destruction as a massive, nuclear attack would have caused.
The journalist in the studio began to ask about the radioactive measurements that should have been carried out, but just as he switched to the reporter, the screen turned gray again, as it had been the day before.
The author is currently reviewing, rewriting, and editing the manuscript for the novel The Last Human in the Milky Way. Excerpts from selected chapters will be published as previews on Medium.
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