A Case of Time-Travelling Shorts

When the Earth fights back

A Sci-Fi Smackdown Short-Story based on prompts 4, 6, and 8. 

29/4/63

I've discovered a bunch of scratches and bruises that I must have got yesterday, either from the initial impact, or from fleeing down into Lazarus in a panic. Dad thought it was a bomb, hence the bomb shelter. "Better safe than sorry, Maizey," he said. It felt like the Earth was trying to shake us off its surface. The first Earthquake in ninety-four years, the headlines said: a malfunction of the crust drills that are meant to relieve tectonic plate pressure. There's a nasty-looking bruise that spans right across my elbow, and I've had nothing to do but lie in my berth poking at its black surface. No terminals. No screens, besides the dumb holo-sphere in the middle of the room that's now filling with strangers. I've been reduced to writing in this dull journal that Aunty Mabus gave to me last year. Luckily, it came with a pen. I have no clue where you'd buy one those these days.  

PS. Dad says you're meant to start each entry with Dear Diary, because it's traditional, but it seems like a waste of time, so we'll be skipping that.

PPS. Handwriting is hard.

 

30/4/63

Everything is some awful shade of grey or white. The lights are harsh, and fluorescent: I'm sure those are illegal above ground these days.

They wouldn't let us out of the shelter this morning. So now I'm rooming with thirty-five angry, technologically deprived Londoners. The holo-sphere in the center of the room relays the dismal news from yesterday on a loop, but nobody except the snot-nosed kid to my right seems to be watching. I unsynced my headphones yesterday: I heard it all the first time. There was a massive earthquake in Newcastle, which Dad is worried about, because Aunty Mabus lives in Newcastle. But what are the chances of it actually killing someone? There wasn't even much to see, just a rising dirt cloud. I'm going to get breakfast. Not that shelter rations ever taste good. The last time I had them, I was seven. It's been a decade now. Back then, a holo-sphere was the biggest technological advancement since regular lunar shuttles. Now it's just another remnant of the past.

***

I was right. If anything, the shelter rations taste worse than I remember them. There's something about dehydrated meals that means they never taste quite like the original. When I got back, there was a new set of images on the holo-sphere, like something out of those cringe-worthy 20th century Science Fiction films, all smoke and torn up Earth. It's not just Newcastle: everything around it out to Middlesbrough has been obliterated. A giant, crater-like hole has been scraped out of the Earth: like a director took out a pen knife and cut it from the set, along with a chunk of the ground. The news lady reckons that its five kilometers at the deepest point. She didn't sound that heartbroken when she said that bio-scanners revealed no signs of life. Dad looks crushed. I can't believe that Aunty Mabus is dead. It just doesn't seem possible. Dad told me he thinks its the start of a war with China. Only there's no soldiers, I pointed out.

 

31/4/63

Just before the lights turned off last night, a new report lit the holo-sphere. There's been a massive earthquake in New China, a small island nation off China's coast, and another one in Australia. I get the feeling that we won't be leaving the shelter anytime soon. The berths lining the walls are beginning to feel less like a sanctuary, and more like coffins, stacked three high and twelve along the square of our sector like an old crypt. I lay in mine, on the top, with nothing to do but wonder what's going on.

The kid with the snotty nose is called Dave, and while we aren't running out of food, he's taking quite a chunk out of our sector's toilet paper ration with his nose. He's fascinated by my ability to write things using a pen, so I've decided to teach him.