A Butterfly Effect
by Gustavo Bondoni
The ground shook. Hard.
“This can’t be.” Rita grabbed the table to stay on her feet as equipment crashed to the floor around her.
Edwards stumbled into the room, sporting a cut under one eye. “Did we get any warning?”
“No foreshocks, no tremors,” Rita replied. “This is a big one.”
“How big?”
“Too big for the seismometer,” she replied, pointing at the machine which was well off the measurement scale. “We’ll need to check the strong motion unit in Gerardo’s lab.”
As they contemplated trying to walk the ten yards to the next office, from outside came a crash. Rita looked out the window; an office block across Wilshire collapsed. “Oh, God. That was a modern building. Utterly to code.”
“It’s the big one!” Edwards screamed.
He tried to run to the office holding the strong motion unit.
He’d barely taken four steps when the floor buckled hard and launched him headfirst into a table. The crunch echoed around the room and Rita feared the worst as she crawled in his direction.
In the end, it made little difference. Seconds later, the building crumbled and she was flattened by several hundred tons of concrete and steel.
The sea had calmed enough Wu Cheng felt safe coming to his feet. The succession of enormous waves had pitched them around. They must have knocked them well off course. It nearly swamped them. Water ran off the deck and he ran up to the bridge of his 80-foot fishing vessel. He always told his crew: “Take care of the Tiāntáng, she’ll take care of you.” Wu was sure they were dead.
Every window on the empty bridge was broken. Hsu should have been there. The same surge that had torn the windows out must have washed him away.
He tried the intercom to see if his engines were working, but it was waterlogged.
The sea was calm now. He would go below and talk to the engineer in person, and also check on the rest of his crew. He was particularly concerned about Hsu. The man was more than an employee. He was a friend who’d sailed the Pacific with him for seven years.
He turned to check that the sea ahead was clear. He’d already looked, and seen nothing, but he looked again. A dense fog rolled in. It was such a thick and noxious-looking thing that he half-expected the stuff to be poisonous, to dissolve the ship out from under him.
It wasn’t. It was warm, and smelled of water vapor, like the steam in a shower.
But it felt thicker than shower steam.
The wind howled through the open windows of the bridge. It took him several moments to realize that it wasn’t wind but that the ship itself was picking up speed, impelled by the water.
How could water in the middle of the ocean suddenly accelerate?
Wu tried to turn in a different direction, but without engine power, there was no way he could fight this current. He only understood what was happening when his ship reached the enormous crack that had opened in the crust beneath the ocean. Water, billions of gallons of it, fell onto the magma below and turned into thick steam.
That was the last thing Wu saw.
Dmitri Pachenko watched in horror as the blue marble below slowly cracked open. As the commander of ISS expedition 74, he’d been on the radio with Johnson Space Center after the first big quakes struck.
At first, Mission Control had reassured them that, though the quake had been massive, the damage was under control and everyone was fine.
Then another quake hit.
The last thing Dmitri heard was Evelyn Carter’s voice, the one that had guided and calmed him since the first days of the mission, rising in a terrified scream.
After that, no one on Earth responded. Not Brussels. Not Baikonur. Not even the usual radio cowboys who clogged up the comm waves.
“Are you seeing this, Dmitry?” Francesca asked.
“I’m seeing it.”
“What’s happening?” Her face was drawn and pale… and even so, she was taking it better than he was. He wanted to cry like a baby.
“The end of the world,” Dmitri said.
The Earth now resembled a cracked egg, a jagged crack splitting the two slowly separating halves. The magma inside seemed to be spilling out near the North Pole.
“The center of the planet is leaking away,” Francesca whispered.
Alarms lit up his control panel, but he ignored them. Dead men didn’t need to check their instruments. Orbital decay would kill them now, even if nothing else did.
He watched the glowing molten rock. It looked like the entire core of the world was rushing out into space for no reason. There hadn’t been an impact, which was the only explanation he could think of for something like this.
Yet, there it was, flashing off into the distance, leaving behind nothing but a thin freezing husk.
They watched it go, glowing through the vacuum of space.
Suddenly, the rock appeared to expand. Thin parachute-like screens opened onto either side of a central glowing tube, built on a planetary scale.
“Feeding membranes,” Francesca said. “They can capture atoms across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.”
“No,” Dmitry replied, staring in fascination. “Wings. That is a space butterfly. Earth was just a cocoon. And only humanity’s pride made us believe we were ever more than parasites on its husk.”
Francesca was about to argue, but her biologist’s mind had already analyzed the creature and its environment and theorized how it would survive and live. Theories emerged fully-formed: it would use floating interstellar gas to build its structures, maybe combine them with oxygen taken from earth to keep itself warm. Or maybe the membranes could absorb sunlight. Yes, that would make sense. The energy came from the sun, the building blocks from the gas clouds. Would it then lay an egg in another planet? Mars, or venus? Or a moon of Jupiter? That was how life propagated.
But she just nodded. “You’re right. It’s beautiful.”
They watched as the mammoth creatures swung in their direction. They watched until they died.
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About the Author
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of Codex and an Active Member of SFWA. His latest science fiction novel is Splinter (2021), a sequel to his 2017 novel Outside. He has also published four monster books: Ice Station: Death (2019), Jungle Lab Terror (2020), Test Site Horror (2020) and Lost Island Rampage (2021), two other science fiction novels: Incursion (2017 and Siege (2016) and an ebook novella entitled Branch. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019) Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011). In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest. His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
