The End - Visions of Apocalypse

For decades, accepted tectonic science stated that the East African Rift marked where the great African Tectonic Plate had been slowly splitting into two smaller plates over the last few million years, creating a valley that ran for some 4,000 miles down the eastern side of the continent. The two plates would continue racing apart, at least, racing on a geological scale, until the sea came flooding in, turning the East African coast into a brand new island and making the western side of the rift beachfront property. Of course, this would take millions more years, far beyond the time when it would be a problem for anyone currently alive. So said accepted tectonic science.

The seismographic station in Kilima Mbogo in southern Kenya detected it first, its needle beginning to scratch away shortly before midnight GMT. Minutes later, the Mt. Furi station in Ethiopia chimed in, followed by Ar Rayn in the Saudi peninsula and Mbarara in Uganda. Madagascar’s Ambohimpanompo station burst to life, Lusaka piped up in Zambia, and even Boshof perked up and brought South Africa to the party. Weaker activity was detected in Ankara, in Kabul, in Masuku. Across the globe, bleary-eyed seismologists roused from their beds and conferred with colleagues who’d been up all night monitoring the outbursts. They hurriedly examined the data pouring in from Africa, and determined Mother Earth was quite possibly gathering up for something big.

Actually, she was just clearing her throat.

“Hello?” her voice boomed from the East African Rift, shattering windows as far away as the East Coast of the United States, and sending tsunamis hurtling through the Indian Ocean to mercilessly pound the western end of Australia. “Oh my goodness,” she said somewhat more quietly, like an old grandmother who’d just spilled her tea. “It’s been so long, I’d forgotten what I sound like.” Despite her restraint, this utterance triggered avalanches in the Alps and the Himalayas. “Dear me, I guess I’ll have to whisper,” she said, this time with far less catastrophic results, only a few minor landslides up and down the length of the Rift. “Is there someone in charge I might possibly speak with?”

Those words snapped the world’s various powers from their collective shock and got them back to doing what they did best: bickering with one another. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council nearly erupted into violence when each member claimed the planet was speaking in their language, and that therefore their representative should be the one to engage her in discussion. In the main assembly, delegates from Kenya and Tanzania rattled their sabers at one another, both sides laying claim to authority due to the Rift running directly through their respective countries. From Rome to Jerusalem to Mecca, clerics and scholars shouted and argued and prayed over how to reconcile this turn of events with everything their scriptures had told them. The American and Russian militaries escalated to the highest alerts seen since the Cold War, and the Arabian Sea and the Mozambique Channel became so crowded with ships, one could nearly walk from Madagascar to Oman without getting wet. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set their Doomsday Clock 11:59pm, its closest approach to midnight ever. As the day of Mother Earth’s awakening slowly slipped into night, many went to bed wondering if humanity would blow her up before they’d even said hello back.

However, as the next day dawned, the airport at Nairobi buzzed with activity, and a sleek black limousine, a blocky white van, and a barely-running rented coupe were soon racing across the Kenyan countryside, their occupants cringing and cursing at every bump in the road. Soon the Rift came into view, and around it the crowds of onlookers who’d been gathering since the previous day. The possibility of further quakes and aftershocks offering no deterrent to the growing city of tents and improvised shacks that had quickly sprung up. News crews were everywhere, set up in fleets of trailers and mobile satellite vans, their cameras trained on the Rift as talking heads sweated beneath their suit jackets and their caked on make-up, trying to find new and interesting ways to convey that nothing was really happening yet. The only beings in the area that seemed disinterested in the whole affair were the herds of zebra and gazelles that idly grazed nearby, sparing only an occasional glance at their strange new neighbors.