Flashes

—which was now leaning over, maybe twenty degrees off vertical. The radio station I’d been listening to went dead; it had been transmitting from the CN Tower, I supposed. Maybe it was a terrorist attack. Or maybe it was just some bored school kid who’d read the entry on how to produce antimatter that had been released last week.

There was a seven-story complex of observation decks and restaurants two-thirds of the way up the tower, providing extra weight. It was hard to—

Damn!

My car’s brakes had slammed on, under automatic control; I pitched forward, the shoulder belt giving a bit. The car in front of mine had come to a complete stop—as, I could now see, had the car in front of it, and the one in front of that car, too. Nobody wanted to continue driving toward the tower. I undid my seat belt and got out of my car; other motorists were doing the same thing.

The tower was leaning over further now: maybe thirty-five degrees. I assumed the explosion had been somewhere near its base; if it had been antimatter, from what I understood, only a minuscule amount would have been needed.

“There it goes!” shouted someone behind me. I watched, my stomach knotting, as the tower leaned over farther and farther. It would hit other, lesser skyscrapers; there was no way that could be avoided. I was brutally conscious of the fact that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were about to die.

The tower continued to lean, and then it broke in two, the top half plummeting sideways to the ground. A plume of dust went up into the air, and—

It was like watching a distant electrical storm: the visuals hit you first, well before the sound. And the sound was indeed like thunder, a reverberating, cracking roar.

Screams were going up around me. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I felt like I was going to vomit, and I had to hold onto my car’s fender for support.

Somebody behind me was shouting, “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I turned, and saw a man shaking his fist at the sky. I wanted to join him, but there was no point.

This was just the beginning, I knew. People all over the world had read that entry, along with all the others. Antimatter explosions; designer diseases based on new insights into how biology worked; God only knew what else. We needed a firewall for the whole damn planet, and there was no way to erect one.

I abandoned my car and wandered along the highway until I found an off-ramp. I walked for hours, passing people who were crying, people who were screaming, people who, like me, were too shocked, too dazed, to do either of those things.

I wondered if there was an entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica about Earth, and, if so, what it said. I thought of Ethan McCharles, swinging back and forth, a flesh pendulum, and I remembered that spontaneous little eulogy Chiu, the security guard, had uttered. Would there be a eulogy for Earth? A few kind words, closing out the entry on us in the next edition of the encyclopedia? I knew what I wanted it to say.

I wanted it to say that we mattered, that what we did had worth, that we treated each other well most of the time. But that was wishful thinking, I suppose. All that would probably be in the entry was the date on which our first broadcasts were detected, and the date, only a heartbeat later in cosmic terms, on which they had ceased.

It would take me most of the day to walk home. My son Michael would make his way back there, too, I’m sure, when he heard the news.

And at least we’d be together, as we waited for whatever would come next.