Home Planet

A change in the weather.

Home Planet

If you’re reading this I have to assume you are of an inquiring disposition, can access basic computing equipment, and are able to open, close, and copy documents.

PLEASE SAVE THIS DISK!

Or make copies, if you can, and send them to any known survivors, and to any agencies--especially those expressly formed to deal with this horror. If you have a printer, print this out and distribute copies to all parties capable of plumbing it for clues. I can’t print off this thing, even if I could find an AC source.

I’m not a scientist, I’m not a journalist, I’m not some hot-shot professor able to pull strings and make noise. I’m just a guy with a little solar-powered word processor. I’ve been retired for some time now, so I’ve had plenty of opportunity to take notes. Due to my analytical nature, total lack of family, and a penchant for hoarding provisions, I’ve been able to ford the death and the madness, and still remain reasonably sane and emotionally cool. But I’m slipping, damn it. I’m slipping.

This entire electronic record shows exactly as processed, from the first keystroke to the last. What you are now reading is a recent addendum, cut and pasted to the top. If the following seems stupid, it’s the stupidity of honesty. If much of it comes off as trite and ignorant, well, I guess that’s the real-time scratch-and-stumble of innocence. I could proof and edit, provide a neat and cogent trail--I’ve learned enough from just banging away to produce a strong file. But I’m not going to polish this, for one simple reason: I could be unintentionally deleting clues--no matter how clumsy or seemingly inconsequential; clues that might be needed by some surviving researcher. Also, as I’m not a diarist, I did not include dates. For this I apologize--but who could have predicted, from those very first terrible whispers, this horrific reduction, this brutal extermination--this impossibly repulsive obliteration of man.

Here is my journal; unadulterated, naked, done with. It’s over. I quit.

We pass.

Icant’ believe it.My first wordprocessorrr@ Its’ just like a typweriter. but it saves ontoa disk, Very cool. I’ts solarpowered so I don’t n’eed to chargeit.

I bought it to record myobse=

rvations on the ozone layer issue. Evrybody and their mother’’’s running around like chikcens.but I don’t’ see anybody else taking notes

Okay. I’m going to hunt-and-peck until I get good. Here’s what’s happening:

The ozone layer is breaking up into what meteorologists call Z Pockets. There’s that famous one over the Antarctic. But now there’s one over New Zealand, a couple over Europe, six more around Africa, and that really big one over the Pacific. The layer is undergoing an effect described as “tattering”. You can see it. Kind of. Here and there the sky shows streaks, or “rifts”; sort of a burnt umber look, approaching maroon. These rifts seem to vanish as you stare, though every once in a while something resembling a crack will appear for a bit. I’m talking over great expanses of sky here. Yet from a ground vantage you do get this tectonic effect. It’s okay, we’re told; the atmosphere is stabilizing. I sure do hope so.

Storms are all the news. Not a surprise; not with the atmosphere breaking up the way it is. Hurricanes are common, typhoons out of season. Yesterday there was that tsunami in the Philippines; thousands dead and nobody even blinks. And we keep getting this “Earth will heal” stuff. Maybe. But it’s pretty obvious the scientific approach is a dead end.

Well, we did it, people: you and I. With our cars, with our factories, with our lousy aerosol. Just had to deodorize that room, didn’t you, Homo sapiens? Just had to gun that engine. Hey, I know! Let’s take the tires off our cars, put ’em in a gigantic pile in the rain forest, cover the whole mess with gas (just make sure it’s unleaded) and let it burn forever. Maybe drop our discarded plastic and used batteries on the pile for good measure. And afterwards we can alll;;/////

Whoops. Sorry about that. Spilled my artificially flavored instant coffee with saccharine and MSG and had to stomp the damned Styrofoam cup into the dirt. But that’s okay--I dug it down way deep, and covered it up real good.

That’s because I care.

I’m catching some weird sunsets from the jetty, and I just wish I had the vocabulary to do them justice. Purplish, instead of fiery…how strange is that? It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope on an overcast day, but with breaks in the barrel, and with morbid Day-Glo stains in the glass. So odd. How can I put it clearly…it’s beautiful, because it’s nature, but it’s ugly because it’s…wrong. I want my world back.

When twilight hits, you get these funny spots in the sky. Climatologists attribute this to residual glow, but we lay folk seem to know better. Ghost-specks…like minuscule eyes…millions of them…watching you. Wanting you. And gone with the night.

I just don’t like the looks of the ocean. She broods, rather than breathes. Spume left on the sand stands for hours before dissolving--creepy. It has traces of purple, like everything else. I’ve begun to despise that color.

The sun, with all this on again-off again cloud cover, is intermittently obscured. The air has a sticky tropical feel--scientists ascribe this to a kind of greenhouse effect. I heard on the radio that crop plants aren’t failing, as one would expect with the diffusion of sunshine, but appear to be altering their chemical structure somehow. This is apparently due to profound and complex changes in the soil, to those weird wind currents, and to the air quality in general. They’re calling it “stepping”. We are witnessing our world falling apart: eight billion greedy, shortsighted, extravagant fools in a Petri dish. And now, all over the globe, those crops are being declared inedible: bitter, covered with purple blotches--as ugly, noxious, and undesirable as we’ve selfishly, almost casually made our once-beloved planet.

Ah, this lightning--these tremendous discharges lacing every horizon--how does this fit in with stratospheric changes? Is the whole phenomenon “stepping” down?

It’s the most awesome spectacle…mushrooming bursts of light, as though whole cities were exploding, pyrotechnic pockets that blossom and sag, the sky humming like high-tension wires in fog. At night these displays have a kind of iridescent beauty, with their buggywhip streamers crackling overhead…they leave a burnt odor, but odd. I can’t put my finger on it. And clouds--they’ve begun to remind me of jigsaw pieces, only expanding, like taffy, gradually closing gaps in the fried violet sky. Just goes to show how indifferent are we vain little bipeds to that high plan of nature. Our sky, our lives’ breath, is now a polluted and failing lung. This glorious structure Earth--we tore off its skin, man. We turned a wondrous hothouse into a vile outhouse; with our fossil fuels, with our mercury and acids, with our belching refineries. We don’t deserve this place, maybe we don’t even deserve this existence. Ah but, God in Heaven, it breaks my heart to watch our poor world die.

I’ve been examining some of these plants. Creepers and other supple varieties in particular show extensive change. But they seem healthy enough--though diseased. Does that make any sense? The coloration invariably leans to mauve and purple; greens and yellows are nearly nonexistent. The smooth-cell feature common to supple plants is strangely spiny--not woody, but scaly. Larger plants droop heavily, giving all the visual impression of dying flora. But why don’t they die? I tried bending a stalk, intending to break it for internal study, but it seemed to snap back at me, almost aggressively. Then it just drooped again, waving side to side and shivering fitfully. It scared me in some way. It’s only a plant.

The air’s very dense; now sunlight seems to refract. I don’t know if the shift will further affect this little word processor’s struggling solar charger, but I’m going to hang with the document as long as I can.

I hate this air. Everybody does. It makes you angry, embittered somehow; makes you despise your neighbors, makes you want to use foul language--and I’m a pretty genteel guy. Biochemists say it’s to be expected: the oppressive atmosphere is producing unbecoming, albeit perfectly understandable, mood changes. Don’t fight it, they tell us. That only increases the body’s tension-factor. Okay. Whatever you pricks say.

I’m getting skin sores. Just like everyone. Boils, rashes, fungal patches. Fingernails are turning black and green. It doesn’t hurt. Maybe it’ll pass.

Another change has come to the air.

Tiny particles--those ghost-specks I wrote about, are kind of, well, fattening. Now they look like chubby grains of salt, just hanging about in suspension. Millions of them, glinting high in this heaving damson sky. I’m reminded of those glass snow bubbles we had as kids. Turn them upside down and white flakes would drift about in the water. These particles behave similarly. But they disintegrate upon touch, so scientists are only able to investigate at the molecular level. Silicon is the base. There are traces of phosphorus and molybdenum, apparently released by the soil as a consequence of organic breakdown.

Other folks, theorists mainly, argue that these specks are the result of unusual oceanic evaporation; one physicist states that atmospheric dissolution has created an arena wherein consequences bizarre to our way of life will become the norm. Well, give the f****r a cigar. Has he been living underground all this time? There’s a thought. A spokesman at Cal Tech goes so far as to suggest we’re witnessing what conditions might be like on another planet. These are typical of the fools and frauds who have always capitalized on catastrophe: anything for your fifteen minutes--even if it’s the last fifteen you’ll ever see.

There are creeps running “safe suit” swindles, hookers making purple-spotted love with sticky old men, parvenu preachers with their quickie flocks and stale promises. Where are the poets? Where are the thinkers and visionaries? Same place they’ve always been: ground under the hooves of the shameless crowd. People will believe anything, as long as it appeals to their lizard brains.

So now there’s this video hoax with the granules. Some guy fast-motions a sunup-to-sundown sky-frame. Somewhere over Baton Rouge.

Yeah, we all see it: granules arcing and combining with a serpentine motion, moving independently and in groups--what the media has the audacity to call “schools”, as if people aren’t freaked out enough. Even though a university electronic arts class immediately shows how this video is easily effected using the crudest home equipment, it’s too late. People are running around with their heads up their asses. It just makes me sick.

God, the air stinks. It has a putrid smell. I feel like I’m going to swoon.

A totally bizarre thing.

That guy with the video wasn’t running a hoax after all. Now that the granules are clumped to the size of golf balls, you can see how they do proceed in a sort of choppy, spasmodic manner--what newscasters are calling “attitude”. The biggest reason for this visual factor, though--and I can see it quite clearly from the jetty--is that the process is speeding up as the clusters’ mass appreciates. Clumps appear to oscillate for a second before swerving in to impact clusters--“hosts”, they’re called. I swear I can see them growing before my eyes. It’s awesome.

This is getting beyond ridiculous.

Some stupid lady in South Dakota claims a low level clump attacked her dog, for Christ’s sake. It’s these lunatics who are driving away what little sanity’s left, and it’s the media that’s supplying the leverage! Everybody knows that dogs, and especially those breeds trained as guards, have been leaping and snapping at these ground clumps all along. It’s inevitable the twain should meet, and it’s obvious reports will become more numerous as the phenomenon intensifies.

Oh, so now petroleum giants are being forced to curtail the distillation and sales of fossil fuels. So now the soulless behemoths of Big Commerce are paying closer attention to the common man! Thanks a bunch, capitalists. So now NATO, SEATO, and PUTO have begun clamoring for an international “hiatus” on commercial manufacturing. So now microwaves are being taken seriously.

GOOD! Spare us the Global Warming juggernaut. Stop this damned Oceanic Incursion. Put us right back in the Stone Age, when men ate unadulterated food and our children weren’t poisoned from birth. Keep your guns and missiles. Keep your stupid nuclear bombs. The only weapon I’ll need is a good old solid chunk of sweet, unrefined terra firma. Just make sure I get a fatcat or two to try it out on.

This is just godawful sickening; no biology assignment could be more depressing.

It shows how the senses are hard-wired to focus on the beauty of nature, instead of on that gruesome underbelly usually reserved for a microscope, or for a coffin’s interior. The clusters are doing what biochemists call “attaching”, similar to the blind function of viruses. What this means, as far as I can understand, is that elements in our blood, mainly iodine and calcium, are “marrying” (now scientists are calling us the hosts, for the love of God) non-active elements in the clump-colonies, molecule for molecule, so that the hosts’ plasma is bled out the skin surface, or “leeched”.

I positively loathe this reckless use of leading terminology!

It just rekindles already inflamed imaginations. And so we get more asinine reports of colony attacks, preposterous rumors of people bled dry, wild stories of “gang clumpings”. As I say, all this nonsense only makes the situation worse. Yet, in another way it’s understandable--I’ve had to dodge a few myself. Some are the size of medicine balls. But that’s just the point: stay out of the way, people!

I’ve set the save function to every minute. That way, even if I’m cut off halfway through something, this journal will be very up-to-date, as opposed to the old method of entering a manual save at the close of each

It’s all a mess!

A panic.

Folks are running this way and that, begging for a solution, screaming for their Maker.

The heat’s unbelievable. It lashes at the skin and eyes, strangles the tongue. The air is actually sour; you can taste it.

Bael Laboratories has come up with a “peel ‘n’ toss” disposable protective suit, for Christ’s sake, but what’s the point? We’re already covered with sores. God, I can’t breathe. They’re telling us that going out without a suit increases the risk of skin cancer. Morons! Who’s gonna live long enough for it to develop!

This is impossible. Now there’re reports of colonies smashing through picture windows and attaching to homeowners! Idiots! Alert One is ordering all civilians to don those stupid suits: they say the material will mask hemoglobin.

We’re one step away from martial law.

But nobody gives a crap. People are going nuts with shotguns and flamethrowers. There’s simply too many of those things; and now some are “bonding”, as opposed to just “replicating”.

911Radio reports one the size of a house over Connecticut.

I’ve had it with scientists and theorists! I’m fed up to here with one-dimensional explanations about chemical interactions. I’ll believe my eyes, not some lecturer.

You stiffs tell me how a “mass of inert silicon-based clumps” can swoop on a lady and carry her off screaming!

You tell me how a couple of colonies can fight over a child like a pair of hammerheads fighting over a surfer.

You tell me how a “secondary osmotic exchange” can leave the streets littered with bloodless corpses.

To hell with you all.

I don’t need some stammering scientist to tell me our Earth’s been appropriated, and I don’t need the ground rules of the new food chain explained to me.

I don’t need a climatologist to tell me that our atmosphere’s somehow been altered by an extraterrestrial species to suit its physical needs.

And I don’t need some botanist to tell me our plant life’s been morphing to suit that species all the while.

And I sure as hell don’t need some dissembling scientist to tell me that that ugly thing swooping my way is coming to suck me dry.

Yeah. Right over here. Come and get it. Yeah! That’s right: carbon-based; sweet, pink, and juicy. Over here! F**k you f**k you fuckyoufuckyoufu