Manifest Destiny
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines manifest destiny as: a future event accepted as inevitable.
Never has it been more relevant than in the pages of this story. Can fate and destiny have so much power as to intertwine not one, but two world's inevitabilities? I'll let you be the judge of just how cruel or kind the goddesses of fate and destiny really are.
…..MD…
Events starting in the age of New Moon: (circa: 2253 a.d.)
History recalls some of the last formally written pages in the last days of the world, as an epic meltdown in the propensity of mankind to hold onto his own future, that fear and despair so completely took over the rationality of mankind that they destroyed themselves and it was no one's fault but their own.
There were so many years, so many scientists' worldwide programs to watch just one thing, the stars. How this passed by any of their views, no one will ever know for sure. Perhaps, tiredness set in, and the one on duty at the time, had a rowdy night before and fell asleep at the wheel per say.
Whatever the lapse, the ensuing collapse of the known world could never have been perceived in this way; no most figured the world would end when the world's politicians forgot how to make nice with each other.
It was something that should have been seen beforehand, but never was, and that created the world's worst disaster.
An asteroid that should have been seen from so far away, but it wasn't, it was bypassed and when it was discovered, it was far too late to stop the desolation that occurred; it was inevitable, of course fate already knew this, the sly goddess.
No, it didn't crash into the earth and cause hydrogen bomb-like disasters. It wasn't epically enormous; it was small as asteroids go. It was relatively harmless and unimposing to the observers watching, studying it once discovered.
You see, by the time they found it, it was near mars already. It took very little time to get from there to where they thought would pass by earth. Oh, they all had their plans and plots, and targeted trajectories laid out, they were all so sure it would completely skip by earth as if skipping a pebble in a lake.
But in what can only be described as god-like intervention, the damn thing caused ripples across the world, just like the rock on the lake, when it suddenly got bounced around and pulled into the moon's gravitational pull.
This was actually so intriguing to the scientists and they were nearly orgasmic in their excitement when the object gave the earth for several months, what amounts to being a second, smaller moon.
It's what happened in those months that are so utterly devastating to mankind and no one saw it coming. Like a snake slowly, silently slithering its way to prey, so was the asteroid to humans.
In the months after the new moon appeared, people began to panic. It was like they deemed it magical, spiritual, some even called it apocalyptic. Little did they know they were right, it was apocalyptic.
The new moon caused a disturbance in the gravitational pull; in essence, the moon and the asteroid were fighting each other for the rights of being Earth's only orbital object. The moon of course was bigger, so it won the battle. The asteroid however, it was slowly chunk by chunk disintegrated.
When the asteroid first arrived scientist were so excited to study one up so close and personal. Astronauts and cosmonauts around the world were sent up to check the new celestial being out. What they found is that it was made of a material never seen before.
They concluded that it was likely from a destroyed planet from just outside our solar system, as it had biological properties to it. It was made up of earth-like materials. There were bacteria, rocks, soil all present in samples, but they were unknown elements to earth.
While the scientific community was outrageously excited and studying to their hearts content, they failed to see the warning signs.
The co-worker that got a nose bleed and two weeks later shot herself in the head. Or maybe they never thought to putting that together with the lab worker that caught a nasty cold, and a month later was found dead in his own bathtub. There was also the mystery of a night watchman and his entire family being caught in their burning home unable to get out, only having their bodies discovered tied to chairs in the attic so they couldn't escape the inferno.
Not that it would have mattered if they had caught any of it. It seemed as if fate was determined, as if she needed, no it was as if she was driven with a burning passion to commit her next act of atrocity; the destruction of earth itself.
As the asteroid/moon started to disintegrate, pieces fell to earth in large chunks. People would wander to these fallen objects in droves, all wanting to have a part of history, not realizing they should have followed their instincts and run fast and quickly as far away from it as possible.
It would be recorded that within ten months of new moon's arrival, that things for the little earthlings started taking a turn for the worse. Humans began acting erratically, crazy, like they had all lost their minds.
Landfills spread across the globe as people didn't care where they laid their trash going so far as to trash their own homes and just leave the pile of destruction there spread out as if a hurricane had passed over. They stopped realizing there was indoor plumbing, and they forgot common manners and would walk around coughing and bleeding on each other without remorse, thereby spreading the disease even more.
There was a long history of movie violence revolving around zombies that humans enjoyed watching, this was like that, but this time only fate herself was sitting in her lounger with a bucket of popcorn enjoying the turn of events.
So many people were destroying themselves committing acts of violence and insanity on each other. Some were quieter than that, as if they were under the influence of the heaviest narcotics one could imagine. They simply lost their minds and wherever they landed is where they would take their last breath.
Buildings were set on fire, bodies lay strewn carelessly everywhere, bloodied and bruised or torn apart. Satellites fell from space as no one was manning their orbits, electricity was turned off as no one was manning the stations, and wildlife was running around free, as the plague seemed not to affect them at all and there was no one to care for them. People would stand outside during storms, fascinated and since they lost all sense of safety, would get electrocuted, or in certain circumstances, blown away never to be found again.
No region on earth was safe from the sickness caused by new moon. Populations were decimated within months. It's amazing really, how quickly people turned against each other and there were few that were immune to it, but those that were rallied together in remote regions, away from the insanity of the world.
Those survivors sometimes had to make hard choices, if someone in their newly formed colony started to show symptoms of the plague as they all soon began to call it, they were taken away for the safety of the rest of the group; it was never questioned and all agreed that it had to happen, even if it was them that went insane.
Those unfortunate humans that were so close to surviving the apocalypse were never to be seen again; and the person that took them always came back with a stressed expression, and a changed attitude. Thankfully, this did not happen often, as it was a daunting and life-altering task to have.
The humans that lived to see the new age will remember and pass down their memories; it will become a very large part of their culture, everything will revolve around what happened, the good and the bad, the hope and the consequences of a life that's not lived in a wholesome way. Their ancestors surely will live to be a different kind of human being, but the point is, they will live.
They'll learn that the plague had no boundaries within the survivor's stories. Unlike human battles, where there are rules, it had no rules; man, woman and child alike were all taken by the sickness. It didn't matter if you were a week old, babies would simply scratch themselves till they were bleeding and usually there were no adults capable mentally of stopping the poor things.
If a woman was nine months pregnant, it simply did not matter, she would simply smile and jump off a bridge into what she thought would be a very beautiful sunset lake, only to have it be the heated concrete below.
The plague was a ruthless and cunning killer, enhanced by the ugliness of people, and their uncanny ability to care about no one but themselves nor did they care about their own world and the plague mourned no one. It took the worst of mankind and flipped it on itself.
Only the meek, kind at heart humans, those that took responsibility for not only their lives but also those around them, they cared about what they took from the world, even if they were unable to stop the madness from happening. Only those people seemed to survive the insanity that the plague caused. That is, if they weren't killed by those who were at full capacity in the realm of crazy land.
Most of those left were women; very few young people were left alive as they were most vulnerable to the hands of those who were deep in fate's hands. Most men were utterly consumed by the disease and were lost to the world.
Why this was, no one knew and it was unsure why it chose to be so discretionary about the population. It was true that women already outnumbered the male population beforehand; perhaps this was just a rollover effect of that.
Before new moon's arrival there was an estimated 9 billion people on the planet. In the age post new moon, worldwide, there were roughly 10,000 human beings left in colonies spread across the globe, and of those perhaps only 2000 men and a few hundred children were left to deal with the aftermath of the apparent end of life as they knew it.
This is the story of the survivors, years after new moon who were eclipsed by a sadness and a grief that the generations before them bestowed upon them through the long years of their lives.
Their ancestors fought through the enormous and life altering changes in their sometimes overly busy, unproductive and product driven lives and somehow prospered with so little to rely on and gave this sad, quiet, but hopeful new world to them. This is the story of their fruits of labor, their new beginning. This is the story of their Breaking Dawn.
...MD...
an: Disclaimers stuff
All recognizable characters are property of their owner (specifically Stephenie Meyer in all her gloriousness) thank you for letting me play with your toys. (this is true for the rest of the story, I'm only going to say it here, the one time I hate long an's )
This story and my characters are my property, please don't plagiarize it or fate will get you too *grins*
I make no promises on this story, how it's written, how long it is or how long it takes to write it save one. It will get a HEA. Firm believer in those! lol
first time author, be kind in your constructive criticism please.
and last but most importantly I hoped you enjoyed it and look forward to seeing you on the flip side... next up we meet the leftover humans.