Rohit Nalluri

I don’t know what it is about watching the dawn sky – a great calm fills us all, and the constant anxious murmuring subsides. There is in every sunrise the silence of a deep inhalation that today gives us all some much-needed sense of space, of peace. It is surprising, this tranquility, because I am standing in the middle of the largest gathering of humans ever witnessed, a pixel of grey in a sea of multi-colored heads. Two and a half billion people, a massive chunk of humanity, a gene pool centuries in the making, wait with me to witness this last sunrise. Our immense diversity of language and culture and race and religion have all melted away in the singular truth of this moment – we are all doomed.

06:45:37 UTC, July 24th, 2034.

Sunrise.

The sun hoists itself over the pink-blue horizon, and a shard of gold pierces our eyes. It seems to linger for a minute, almost as if it were surprised at being greeted by two and half billion pairs of eyes. I would be too – five billion eyes is a lot of spirit, a lot of hope. What is more surprising – heart-wrenching – is that the sun doesn’t stop. It continues to rise after hovering uncertainly for a hopeful moment, and time continues to move on, forward towards the inevitable moment of destruction. My knees quiver.

06:59:22 UTC

The sun has risen higher now and is throwing the flat expanse of the distant Tibetan plateau in sharp relief. Crags, nooks and cliffs fill with shadows, while everything that faces the sun begins to yellow and glow. Tired of looking at the sun, I start walking around, nodding at people, recognizing a few faces here and there. Tired souls that had fallen asleep through last night’s vigil are waking up now, and the crowd is growing restless. More and more people start moving about like birds do in sunlight, the murmuring of the masses gathering until it starts filling up the valleys like thunder. People everywhere; the valley is enormous but still feels crowded. They are forming clumps and groups, extended families both old and new, with faces drawn and taut, crowding together for warmth against the cold of the passing night.

Today, across the Hindukush, the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Kunlun, two and a half billion representatives of humanity have gathered, as they have been gathering over the last six months, to witness the futile inevitability of it all. Mountains and valleys around the world are being stuffed with humans – the entire North American continent is being drained into the Andes, Europeans into the Alps, Micronesia into the Australian desert and Southern Alps of New Zealand. A migration on this scale has never before been witnessed and never before did it seem possible. Those who will live to see tomorrow’s sunrise will wake up to a whole new world. The geopolitical landscape of our planet will never again be the same. Nor will its geographical landscape remain without being scarred permanently.

07:03:13 UTC.

When it was first discovered, the comet was thirteen and a half million kilometers away, rushing ominously towards Earth, but uncertainly so. Initial calculations of its trajectory predicted that the comet would swing past Earth at the same distance as the moon – a very close call indeed. A month later, when the trajectory was rechecked, scientists around the world suddenly had reasons to be worried. Comet L/2032 R2 was eight kilometers in girth, heavy and dense, and was predicted to smash into Earth in less than two years.

Governments around the world had no say in how this information would be released to the media and public. It was common knowledge across Twitter and social media in less than ten hours. Hashtags like #earthbound, #bulldoze, #doomsday2034 and #thisistheend sounded ominous at first, then became commonplace. Surprisingly, most of humanity decided that if it only had a couple of years to live, it would like to live the way it had been living until now. ‘#sowhat?’.

The comet by now was being tracked nonstop, by amateurs and professionals alike. On 15th April, 2033, months after being discovered, the comet broke into seventeen fragments, eleven of which continued towards Earth. Shit hit the fan only when a detailed map of where these fragments were likely to end up was released online. The map revealed a massive swath of destruction, a smiling, scimitar-shaped slash on the face of the Eastern hemisphere stretching from the Caspian to the East China Sea. Nearly four billion people lived in the grip of that threatening smile. Evacuation was as impossible as the ‘grin’ (as it came to be known) was inevitable. Countries that lay directly in the impact zone included Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh, the northern-edge of Myanmar where the grin began to curve upward and into China, stopping finally near the North Korean coastline. The destruction would be merciless and total.

07:22:19 UTC.

In the immediate aftermath of the release of the ‘grin’, countries around the world started closing their borders. The tourism industry came to a grinding halt. To be clear – no country on the planet was safe from the deadly impact the comet would have. The eleven fragments would in total release the energy equivalent of half-a-million megatons of TNT, 50 times more than the combined nuclear arsenal of the world. They would land within seconds of each other, exponentially increasing the magnitude of chaos.

As humanity reacted to this terrifying news, a section of society still un-enthralled by the thought of dying came up with a series of white papers on how to survive the coming apocalypse. They had a simple plan and a simple motto – seek the mountains. The ‘grin’ itself was slashed, right through the middle, by some of the tallest and longest chains of mountain in the world. These mountains could accommodate any number of people, if only temporarily. They were capable of providing enough water, if not enough food. The massive walls of the mountains would protect the population against the most violent Tsunamis, and the cold would protect against the firestorms that would rage around the world in the wake of the comet. A long winter would follow, where the nights would be dark and the days darker still, and nothing green would grow to live.

07:55:54 UTC.

The eleven fragments of the Comet L/2032 R2, ranging from the 400 meters of fragment Q [Myanmar-China Border] to the 4 kilometer large fragment D [right outside the Chinese city of Chengdu], have come glinting into view now that the Sun has risen higher. They are behind us, hovering one hand’s length over the horizon, eleven white streaks against the deep blue mountain sky. A collective gasp of fear slips through the crowd.

There is only one clear thought – how many of us will survive. Humanity has come to the inevitable conclusion that not all of us will live to see tomorrow. Prediction models showed that the Koreas and most of the Japanese archipelago will disappear from the face of the planet. The impact will eject the almost the entirety of the Caspian Sea into the surrounding countries, and it will submerge Georgia and Azerbaijan to form a water bridge connecting the Caspian to the Black Sea. The collisions on the East China Sea (three fragments) will be uncomfortably close to the Ring of Fire, possibly setting of massive earthquakes and volcanoes and Tsunamis across the pacific. The aftereffects will last months, if not years, until the planet stabilizes again in time. But the climate of the world will not be the same for the next ten thousand years at least.

These cataclysmic set of events will begin when the first fragment lands in the Caspian in 18 minutes.

08:13:07 UTC.

18 minutes later, a glow in the west. A distant rumble. A sound like the crack of a whip splits the sky. A few mountain birds take to the sky screaming. A deep resounding boom follows. Another brilliant glow; now an explosion that is visible near the horizon. People are crying and shouting. Embracing each other. Things are happening fast. The sky is curling now, orange and red, burning at the edges, like a piece of paper that’s too close to a lit matchstick. The rest of the fragments whoosh past us, right over our heads, making a deafening noise. We cover our ears and kneel. Our ears are ringing. Many have closed their eyes; some are sitting down, some are crying, some running around in a daze as the madness of this moment infects them. A group of Tibetan monks decide to sit down and wait it all out with a smile. I sit down; I’m tired of standing. I bend my knees to sit, smiling at another man, a person I’ve never seen before and probably don’t even share a language with. But as I do a brilliant white light vaporizes what’s left of the burning sky, then a blast of wind knocks me down, and then the air begins to boil and burn us all alive. That’s when the sound reaches us, a great rending boom, the sound of ancient rock smashing into ancient rock; the sound of doom. My last thought is of the inevitability of it all. I cannot tell you what will happen. I cannot know.

I will not wake up.

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