The Rock

Diary preamble (Thanks to Sven for helping me with it)

The Earth completely changed in one day, which took a whole year. A change that no living thing could deny. A change that would test the resilience of all life on earth.

Humanity, in an orgy of hubris, declared history over, as if nothing could derail its success. In many ways it succeeded. No other organism in the evolutionary history of Earth had attained such a profound level of ubiquity. In fact, had it been another species, humans would have called it an unstoppable pest, a catastrophic invasion. An existential crisis.

Is that what the other sentient life forms of the earth thought?

Our collective "reality check" happened on July 30th 2024.

On that day a meteor skimmed so close to earth that it shed a significant portion of its mass to our far greater gravitational force. So intimate was the encounter that a significant part of the Earth's atmosphere was also ionised in its wake, but this would go completely unnoticed. The most pronounced effect was what the meteor left behind.

In the months and weeks before the event,  Astronomers speculated wildly about the trajectory, composition and even categorization of the celestial body. The entire topic dominated news cycles all around the world. Would it actually hit us or simply come uncomfortably close? If it hits, who will be the unfortunate victims?, as if anyone would realistically survive anyway - (spoiler, some of us sadly did). Being right under the thing as it landed may be the ultimate mercy of an immediate and spectacular end.

Its composition was the most hotly debated subject. The most ridiculous prognosis was sadly the most accurate in the end. Most spectrographic observations suggested that the meteor, dubbed X-489112, but most widely known simply as “The Meteor”, was actually made up predominantly of ice. But a wide body of scientists and pseudo-scientists belittled this theory till it became a subject only discussed in hushed tones amongst the core of what is normally the compact community of professional astronomers.

While its composition was a hotly debated mystery, its size was not. Comet, asteroid, or meteor, the classification of the body was irrelevant, because it was huge! Its diameter was measured not in meters, but in hundreds of kilometres!

Because of its orientation to earth observations, there was some ambiguity as to accurate mass measurement, that is till it entered our solar system. A close pass by Pluto shocked the world when astronomers announced a revision to their size estimates when they discovered that it was able to affect the orbit of our most distant of planetary siblings!

The Day

On the day, debate on whether it would be an impact or a near miss continued to rage. Pundits offered a deluge of comments and prognostications like drunks trying to get their last orders in before closing time.

Half the world would witness the nearest miss of a celestial body in recorded history. The Meteor loomed large as it streaked across the sky, its fiery tail visible even through thick cloud cover. The earth literally rumbled as the atmosphere directly between, vibrated violently. Birds fell dead from the sky and nature herself seemed to hold her breath for the inevitable outcome. A dark purple, blue stain marked its passing through the sky so profoundly, that those right underneath it were thrown into an eclipse of virtual darkness.

The Rain

And then it started to rain!

A strong steady rain that enveloped those directly in the path of the Meteor, but the dark cloud which everyone took to be a fleeting souvenir of our visitor, spread over the whole world within a short few days.

To everyone who was so elated that we avoided impact, what’s a little rain? People were giddily celebrating, despite the inclement weather.

We were alive and the danger had passed.

But the rain persisted.

As days stretched into a week and a sense of calm returned to the world, pundits who had found new fame in the frenzy of speculation on social media platforms, desperate to cling to their stardom, now turned to a new target, the Rain!

When will it stop? What is causing it? Is it related to the Meteor?

If the Meteor had caused confusion, debate and speculations, the Rain brought all that back. Meteorologists and climate scientists replaced Astronomers as authorities on whose words the world hung.

The seriousness of the new threat captured everybody's frayed nerves by surprise when oceanographers joined in, announcing that they were observing radically abnormal rises in sea levels which could only be attributed to the Rain.

Then disturbing reports started appearing. Nobody really knew if this was more crazy speculation, prognostication, or fact. First low lying islands in the south pacific vanished, then low lying coastal cities were inundated. People moved further inland and upward. Then came the first anguished catastrophe: an entire island population suddenly engulfed in just a few days as king tides conspired to drown several tens of thousands of inhabitants. No one came to help. No one survived.

Their fate was to be repeated on ever grander scales in the weeks and months that followed. Conflicts broke out as land vanished under the waves. Biblical analogies flourished. Humanity’s being punished was a common rant. But the preachers could offer no respite, only illusions of spiritual salvation.

Soon the death toll became too overwhelming to comprehend. Numbers became estimates, and then they became percentages.

Then the news became patchy. The internet, the hive mind of humanity was shutting down. Europe lost Holland and Denmark and large swaths of Germany. French and Germans swarmed the borderlands of Switzerland and Austria desperately seeking higher ground. The latter, soon followed by the former imposed strict border closures. Here in Norway, we felt a false sense of security as our tiny population found enough higher ground as our fjords swamped our largest of cities.

Many took to any ship or boat they could find, and many became overcrowded and sank. All were shocked at the hostility and desperation that would greet them at each landfall.

Asia suffered massively, its huge coastal populations simply not able to keep ahead of the encroaching sea. Those who could, found dry ground in the high deserts and the Himalayas.

So my life went from boring, nothing much happening, to a life and death struggle against a malign atmosphere that has turned against us, and the unpredictable and desperate reaction of the survivors around us. Everyone wants to live, but like this?

So this preamble hopefully makes my patchy and amateurish diary more illuminating. I hope for whoever finds this diary, that you may learn what life was like in wake of what we euphemistically call the ROCK.

***

Diary

20241107

I was meaning to start a diary weeks ago, but it simply did not work. I feel stupid to write this line as my first sentence of my first entry. It strangely captures my life though. I have always denied what I saw and felt till its impacts were too late to avoid. Starting to dig my car out of snow 2 hours after I should have already been at work. Trying to negotiate a cheap drink an hour after happy hour ended. A week late to send my fathers birthday card. Every year! I think I will end up missing my own funeral!

So it has taken 100 days of procrastination to start this diary. How do I know it's been 100 days, it's because I started drawing a line on my arm every day since the meteor changed everything. Shit my first marker was for 6 days because I was too late to even start this stupid tattoo calendar.

At least now the calendar is marked on the wall of our hut.

I am exhausted and cold.

We have had almost no electrical power over the last few weeks and the last news I heard from the outside world was about 50 days ago. For 7 weeks we have been alone.

We are taking shelter in a cluster of mountain huts here. Foraging for food but there is never enough, and we live in a constant state of hunger and exhaustion.

We have some...

 older people with us, but they are succumbing to the hard conditions fast. Some simply cannot muster the energy to go on, and some simply stop eating and give up.

The work to keep us going is gruelling. We spend virtually all our energy on gathering food, and firewood. (not much time to mess around with a diary)

A few days ago a profound event took place. Upon rising in the morning, we noticed something missing. It was difficult to place at first but something was profoundly different.

It was the constant drone of raindrops. Our constant companion. At times loud, the pounding would make hearing each other speak impossible. At others, a gentle but persistent drizzle which would still soak your clothes within an hour.

But this morning it was silent. Deathly silent.

We rushed to the door to check and were dismayed to see it snowing. Yes winter was upon us, turning our rain to snow. Norway is no stranger to snow but before that day was over, the snow would already stand just under our knees.

20241112

Early morning. Today is the 5th day of steady snow, and a heavy realisation is settling on all of us. We are in real danger now. The snow is at our elbows and yesterday it took every able bodied person clearing snow to be able to move around our shelters. The inevitable result: nobody spared to forage, so this was a very hungry night for most of us after a full day of hard labour. Today we will try to…

Later today. A tree weighed down with snow fell near our hut and crushed two people who could not get out of its path. Young men in their prime. What a terrible loss. The loss will be painfully felt.

Digging graves was easy work when it rained. The earth was heavy but soft. Now the earth is hidden beneath a thick layer of snow. We barely have the energy to clear snow let alone dig a grave below it. We decided to  just cover them with snow  where they lay.

This was a huge blow to us all. Two young men, one of whom I was quite fond of.

The old and the very young stay sheltered during the day and busy themselves with repairing clothing and tools, cooking and cleaning, and caring for those that need it. All the rest of us are busy collecting firewood and food. Anything remotely edible is collected.

20240101

I am still counting days so according to me, last night was new year's day. 2024!

A year ago, not a soul at the new years eve party I attended would believe a fraction of what life is like just one short year later.

I told the rest of our group about new years, and most showed a lacklustre melancholy about the grim milestone.

We are still here in the same knot of huts, but life has become harder and harder as the snows keep piling up. Our hut is completely under snow, the only marker to its entrance being a colourful stick poking in the ground at the mouth of the tunnel that leads through the hard packed snow to the hut.

The only other sign of life below the snow is our chimney out of which constantly oozes a lazy tendril of dark smoke. We have no wood nearby that is easily felled to feed our fire and fresh supplies are so far away as to make them basically inaccessible. We burn anything we can to keep the fires going.

The talk is of moving now. We have exhausted all the resources in the immediate vicinity around our settlement, and because of the sheer effort to go any further afield, our dilemma has come to a head.

Where do we go? Where will we sleep? How would we find a new shelter under all this snow?

In the beginning our group numbered in the dozens. Now we are down to 11 souls. I have deliberately avoided talking about any person in particular in my diary because our relationships are so powerful and volatile. People we love one day, we could murderously hate the next. We were so unprepared for the deluge which has become our real tragedy.

I mentioned the ROCK in passing and some had almost forgotten about the event that set all of this into play. Others just did not want to talk about it.

I am finding this more and more as our situation gradually, day by day, descends into desperation. Everyone has adopted their own coping strategies, but a commonality is a sullen silent depression. Nobody laughs, nobody sings, nobody tells any jokes.

It is getting harder and harder to cooperate with anyone on anything since communications have devolved into short pragmatic grunts and whimpers.

I fear leaving this hut will be the death of us all.

20240107

I think this is it. The group bonds have broken. In the last few short days, foraging has degraded into a “just look after yourself” activity. Sharing is an exception now.

Since new years day, 4 more people have died. We took them out as far as we could and left them unceremoniously in the snow when our strength gave out. Why waste precious calories on burying the dead.  I cannot have been the one to think of it. We should be eating the dead, but it's too painful to say out loud. Yet!

I am still doing OK and am preparing myself for leaving. Looks like most of us who are left will also leave shortly. Two of the seven of us left, refusing to leave. They think leaving is suicide. I now think staying is.

20240109

We left this morning at first light to find a new camp. There was a heated discussion last night. We (those of us leaving) want to take as much as we can carry to make sure we have the best chances possible to get to a new shelter or build one if we must. The two remaining claim we are selfishly leaving them with not enough to survive. It did not come to blows, but there were some moments.

We have been plodding through very deep snow all day and now we have decided to use what is left of the light and of our energy to build some kind of snow shelter. None of us have done this before, but some of us claim to have seen it done on Youtube. How useful it would be to see those videos again. In fact all our electronic devices are now junk. How fragile was their usefulness, and how fragile was our grasp on survival, comfortable in our centrally heated homes, how were we to know this is what a stupid rock in space could do to us.

The next morning. Our shelter collapsed in the middle of the night which had us frantically digging with bare hands through the snow to save two of our group from certain death.

20240111

Morning. Our second shelter was much better built and done in much less time than the night before. We were lucky to find a natural berm of snow which made our shelter much easier to build.

But this was not the best news. While digging we came across a pretty fresh carcass of a deer buried in the very snow we were digging through. Frozen solid it was. Once we had scraped off the fur and skin, we could shave off layers of meat and fat which would deliciously melt in our mouths before we swallowed it. The first few pieces made me retch, but my hunger overcame any previous notions I harboured on veganism. Before long I was wolfing the meat down.

So it makes such a difference to go to sleep with a full stomach!

This morning someone shared a joke. I was surprised to hear some of us join in and laugh.

We have taken as much of the frozen meat as we could carry, but we have no idea what awaits us this evening. One of the men in our troop announced that he spotted what he thought was a polar bea…

[Lost or illegible text in the artefact]

…as so fast! I saw him one second, then the next, a white flash and he was gone. Hidden below snow level a few metres away, all I heard was the tearing of flesh and cloth and grunting sounds. Someone grabbed me by the shoulder and forced me out of my trance and we ran.

Everyone is quiet as we huddle around the tiny fire we managed to start. Nobody wants to talk about the bear. I’m still not sure if I dre…

[Lost or illegible text in the artefact]

Epilogue:

The year is 431PE

This transcript is a direct translation from old Latin Norsk. The text comes from a book found together with a collection of artefacts and bones at a remote archaeological site located approximately 2500km from Swanutna (located just north of the ancient city of Genoa) where it is believed the Norsk civilisations may have survived for some time after the event.

The dig continues on site with a high focus on finding the rest of this diary. From it we hope to learn more about the dark century which followed “the ROCK”.