Transmat World: Prologue, Episode 4
Jakarta, 2045 A.D.
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He figured it could not hurt to go the 46th floor. If it still existed. It is high enough to escape the water sure to come. Answered shouts to the bank guard and his group verified they still trudged upward. Daniel and his gang continued up the stairs from the intermediate landing to the 30th floor.
“Let’s take a look,” said Daniel.
He turned the handle with caution. As the latch cleared the jam, the door blew open, shoving Daniel back, and slammed against the concrete wall of the core with a boom. A stiff wind was blowing, but sixty kilometers per hour, not six hundred. It startled everyone. It was not the noise of the door that was surprising. Everyone’s hearing remained temporarily muted by the din of semi-sonic wind. The door opening revealed something astonishing.
A band of Jakarta skyline looking south instead of the interior of an office building inhabited the door frame. The facade of the building had disappeared, exposing the steel framework to which it attached. Scoured of ceiling tiles and hangers and everything else, the ceiling revealed major utility pipes and cable trays. Water squirted from smaller, broken pipes. Wires dangled from broken conduit, devoid of power and vibrating in the wind. Furniture was gone. Interior walls gone. An occasional bare metal stud stretched from floor to ceiling. Patches of scorched carpet still adhered to the floor here and there. The sky swirled an angry, pinkish gray.
Offices and glass on the east side had vanished, unprotected by the building core as they were against the ejecta. One thing remained intact outside the core walls, a storage vault welded directly to the truss steel top and bottom. Daniel walked as close to the edge as he dared. He felt the wind trying to herd him over the edge so he stopped four meters shy of the chasm. The rest of the group stood on each side and behind him. They looked upon devastation they had never imagined.
Some buildings had no intact floors and ceilings, unlike the tower they stood in. Some had collapsed like the World Trade towers. Others were but frames of bare metal. The tops of steel columns curved to the east, ending in points where wind had frozen metal in mid-melt after ripping burning upper floors from the buildings. Streets were scoured clean of rubble and bodies left by the barrage of ejecta. All of it had blown somewhere east of them, perhaps into the ocean.
At least the fires were gone, candles blown out at a birthday party of the gods by winds of more than 500 kilometers per hour. They checked each floor as they went up the stairs. Each level looked the same, up to and including the 39th, their intended destination to ride it out. All of them would have died.
The climb to floor forty-six registered high on the miserability index for everyone but Liani. She was not in complete denial of everything she saw, but was still eager to see her father. Daniel opened the door and looked around the floorscape. It mirrored the rest of the floors except for a vault like the one on thirty. On closer inspection, this vault appeared different in several aspects. Broken utility connections at one corner suggested a storage freezer, perhaps for the restaurant. The door stood solid and closed.
Daniel allowed himself a lottery ticket chance of hope but said nothing to Sujatmi. He tried the handle. It turned, but the door did not open. The frame was racked during the earthquake, and the door is jammed. After a particularly hard tug with no results, Daniel smacked his hand on the door in futility. There followed an immediate banging from inside the vault. Sujatmi was at the door in an instant yelling “Indro! Indro! Indro!”
“Sujatmi? Is that you? What are you doing here? Can you turn on the power? What was that noise and shaking?”
Sujatmi laughed and cried at the same time. Liani jumped up and down yelling “Poppy! Poppy! Poppy!”
Daniel found a steel wall stud and twisted back and forth until its tentative grip on the floor gave way. Newly liberated pry bar in hand, he forced open the freezer in creaky partial arcs. Sujatmi, Indro, and Liani hugged and yelled and cried. Indro looked around and joy turned to incredulity as his gaze fell on sky everywhere he turned. They explained the situation as Daniel explored the freezer. He mentally combined the contents with the foraging in the lobby to estimate how long they could hold out. Twenty people have survived, including the lobby people still hiking up the stairwell. He estimated they had food and water for a week. Daniel sent one of the kids back down to thirty to bang on that vault.
Scraps of drywall litter the base of the west wall of the concrete core. He carted debris upstairs two floors to the roof to spell out a giant S.O.S. on the graveled tar. Two of the boys followed out of curiosity and started helping when they realized the plan. Taking a break, he walked over to the western edge, scanning the horizon. A boy popped out of the stairwell with an armload of scraps; Daniel motioned for him to approach. He pointed at the horizon and looked at the boy for confirmation. Young eyes widened, and the boy dropped the drywall he had gathered. White gypsum powder puffed and disappeared in the wind. Daniel’s fears were confirmed. Something on the horizon was getting bigger. The boy got his brother from the roof, and Daniel ran down the stairs to warn the others. Liani met him halfway.
“Daniel, it’s coming!”
“I know, Liani. Let’s go downstairs.”
He opened the stairwell door on 46 and chuckled. It looked like the rear view of a police lineup to identify the “batik” killer. Daniel walked up behind them, lifting Liani to peer between heads. Small movements in the line of gray on the horizon were visible where the water hit a hill or a building. It looked alive.
“We should go to the stairwell,” said Daniel.
“Let us watch a little longer. I think we have time,” said Sujatmi.
She was right. Daniel said nothing.
“Before this gets here, thank you, Daniel. You saved…” Sujatmi’s voice trailed off in quiet sobbing. A brief hand squeeze in acknowledgement and they stood in silence, watching the approaching water. He estimated a distance of five kilometers and a speed of forty kilometers per hour. It looked to be fifty meters in height. Daniel had no trouble now herding them into the inner core of the building to huddle in the stairwell. The sound and concussion occurred together. Anticlimactic compared to what they had been through; they don’t mind. A tubular steel outer frame of the structure offered little surface area for the water to exert its power, and the concrete inner core proved too substantial. Silence became an irresistible lure as they ventured out and crept to the edge. The water was down to ten meters and receding fast.
Indro was on the roof directing preparation of the last of the meat from the freezer on a smoky fire of paper ripped from drywall scraps. The boys were learning how to cook at the most basic level. It was the fourth day Post-Hit. An unmistakable swelling beat of helicopter blades caused everyone to look at each other in hopeful anticipation. The boys removed their ever-useful shirts and waved at the now visible trio of choppers flying over the bent metal tiara of the BNI building. Helicopters hovered, dropping supplies onto the roof along with a message that they would soon return. There was jubilation on the roof of the BNI Tower. They were saved.
Sawyer, G. T. (2063), The incredible survival of Daniel Fulbright and company, Tales of the Hit (pp. 98–117) Denver, CO: Kornbluth Foundation Press
(Postscript)
Enhanced telescopic satellite video feeds showed a previously undetected chunk of rock struck Isadora, changing the near-miss trajectory calculated by scientists. Three billion deaths from volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, exposure, disease, and starvation over the next five years made it clear to those that thought about these things that, if humanity insisted on keeping all its eggs in one basket, the universe was determined to make an omelet someday. Space travel was about to get a shot in the arm.
Before the ash and rumblings died, wise men of power and wealth took action. “Agreement for the Survival of Mankind” was adopted by the nations of the world to pool resources in protecting the human race from the vagaries of the universe. A Board of Agreement was formed by the treaty and put in charge of those resources. The Board would be a powerful force driving technological advances for the next one hundred years, culminating in the Age of Transmat.
Excerpt and postscript above are reprinted by permission of the Maynard P. Kornbluth Foundation for the Preservation of Mankind founded in 2027. Concerned a nuclear winter might cause the starvation of millions, Maynard P. Kornbluth founded an organization that spanned the planet with information and tools to help feed mankind should this unfortunate event ever occur. Mr. Kornbluth’s far-flung foundation sites house millions of spores of every edible mushroom known to man and the literature in appropriate languages on how to grow them. These provide protein even without sunlight. 18 years later, the Hit proved Mr. Kornbluth a prescient genius. His mushrooms saved an estimated one billion people from starvation. The Foundation is still taking its job of protecting humanity very seriously, so take time today to go online to www.kornbluthfoundation.com, or stop by one of the friendly Foundation outlets and pick up your syringe of mushroom spores with instructional smart paper. Donations are always welcome online and in person.
Thanks from the board of the Maynard P. Kornbluth Foundation for the Preservation of Mankind.
