A Small Gray Dot

The man who put forth that theory hadn’t been able to answer those pertinent questions asked by the radio host except with some bullshit about how he was still doing research.

There was the group who declared that alien invaders brought it all about and the government covered it up. The host pointed out that no spaceships full of aliens showed up following the Event, and how or why would anybody cover it up? The answer from the group’s spokesperson amounted to “We don’t know but we’re sure that’s what happened and we’re going to prove it”.

Right.

On another day, some guy hopped in and said it was due to the magnetic fields of the Earth having undergone a sudden reversal.

Will, who was listening to that particular broadcast with me, shook his head at that one, and said, “We learned in science last year that the magnetic fields wouldn’t just haul off and flip all of a sudden. It’s a slow process. Heck, it’s happened before, several times, and the poles didn’t simply suddenly flip then, either. It’s a process that builds up over a number of years, probably thousands. While it was taking its time flipping, our magnetic shield would weaken so the earth would get more cosmic rays.

“The teacher said it might affect the ozone and that would cause a rise in cancers in people, and the rays would be hell on our satellites and electronics and stuff. It could get bad but it wouldn’t cause a problem like this. I’ll bet the dummy hasn’t even thought to check a simple compass to see which way it points. He’s gonna have to come up with something else.”

I had to agree with him and we both chuckled because apparently, the man hadn’t looked at a compass. When the talk show host called for someone to round up one and showed the guy that it indicated north still pointed towards the Arctic Ocean and south towards Antarctica, he shut up.

Another theory was that it was due to a sudden climate change. This one seemed centered on the so-called fog that appeared that morning. In fact, no one knew what the substance was that rolled down and spread around the entire world in a matter minutes. Having gone out in it, I knew it hadn’t looked or felt like a regular fog. I didn’t see it lift but others had and they reported that it didn’t really dissipate. It was there one moment and then it was gone. There was nothing gradual about it. Apparently, it appeared the same way.

Everyone agreed that the Event caused the encompassing haze and not the other way around. The weather-change theory was plainly absurd because the one thing everybody knew was that once the fog dissipated, the weather returned to normal. As established a while back, the climate was changing all right, but it wasn’t doing it any faster than before. The change had, in fact slowed in recent years due to international laws put into effect back in the twenties. Moreover, there was the fact that the particular theorist couldn’t say how a climate change would’ve caused what happened.

There were others but none of them held water.

One day, the talk show brought some real scientists on. They did a lot of speculating but only one theory caught my attention. It was one presented by a group of research and theoretical physicists. Because a number of people wound up in improbable or even impossible places, places they hadn’t been in beforehand, they conjectured there’d been some kind of temporal and spatial displacement. Unfortunately, there was no way to test the theory or even to determine what any of these people experienced since none of them lived through whatever caused the theoretical displacement. They’d all been in that same gut-wrenching condition.

The physicists talked about black holes, continuity fluxes, dimensional shifts, and time warps but none could say exactly what might’ve caused those phenomena. I was an English teacher and not a research scientist so though I’d heard some of the terms, I didn’t know what all of that meant. Then, I thought about the vague figures I’d glimpsed in the fog that morning, especially the one that passed me on the sidewalk, and I thought of Zoni, who’d impossibly gotten back to our apartment before I did. Maybe the theory had some merit.

One said that some of the laws of physics seemed to have changed because there was no reason otherwise why some technologies still worked but others didn’t, and that set off an argument between all of them. I turned the radio off. I didn’t care about that. I’d been listening to see if anyone would come up with a reasonable explanation for the Event. I felt they could argue about physics at some other time.

The day after that, the radio show brought in a couple of groups of religious people. A shock to no one, there were some who thought it was a punishment from God on a sinful world. They wanted everyone to join their particular “one true religion” or the world was forever damned.