A Matter of Degrees

     As a lifelong resident of the Northern Hemisphere, I  normally looked sadly on the onslaught of fall and winter. During the summer my friends and I had romped with as little attire as possible in our local lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.  This year, though, we didn’t realize that the sun whose disappearance we so sadly mourned could become the instrument of the world’s destruction.

     As Mother Nature began to close the curtain on 2300, news reports began to surface about nature playing a cruel joke on humanity by having the sun shine continuously–24 hours a day.  Medical personnel working in emergency rooms across most of the civilized world failed to get the punchline.   They couldn’t find humor in the fact that the third-degree sunburn cases began to overwhelm hospitals across the globe, and they feared that death-toll records soon would follow. 

       Amazingly, most of the patients received their burns from only a half-hour exposure in the middle of November, when the majority of the hemisphere usually began hunkering down for winter.

     The epicenter of the weird climate reversal? The normally most frigid inhabited place on earth--Oymyakon, Russia. This area had set a record of negative 153 degrees Fahrenheit–in 1933.  Its daily temperature in the penultimate month of 2300 had averaged positive 120 degrees Fahrenheit for a solid week.

      Even though the overall temperature of the entire earth had increased only one degree every six months the world’s top climate scientists at first seemed unconcerned. As the illnesses and deaths began to pile up they realized that dire consequences could loom for the planet.

       The scientists also saw signs that oceans around the globe soon could dry up--putting even the most plentiful water supplies in danger.

        International news outlets also revealed that. although leaders outside Oymakon saw the signs mounting in their own countries, the effects--for the time being--were small. Politicians being politicians, therefore continued to put off taking united and concerted action.

         My friends and I resolved to follow the global situation closely, but felt as unconcerned, for the time being, as the rest of the world outside the Russian mining district.

         However, those working in the gold-rich mines, normally accustomed to laboring at full tilt for a maximum of  five hours a day in the most intolerable cold, now began to faint after an hour of minimum effort. Hundreds of workers filled every available ambulance, as emergency medical services transported victims to the district’s hospital to prevent their death from sun poisoning.

      International news outlets rushed to interview Demetrius Yarostikof, the 10-year foreman of the most rugged mining crew in the district. Despite warnings from national law enforcement authorities, Yarostikof saw no alternative but to call a halt to the largest extraction operation in this area.  He feared all of his crew members might eventually perish in the explosion of solar heat.

     The foreman complained that those supervising the operation and government officials had continued to breathe down his neck to increase production.  Eventually they, too, saw the devastation mounting not only in their offices, but in their own homes, as one person after another fell victim to the unbearable heat.

     In an interview. Dr. Ivan Makalevich, head dermatologist in the district’s hospital, said he had tried desperately to find a treatment for the apparently incurable sunburn that wreaked havoc on the bodies of hundreds in a region where the overwhelming sickness for centuries had been frostbite.     Due to their many years of experience, he and his colleagues had learned to deal with the results of living in the most frigid conditions in the world, but this heat and its resulting burns were an entirely different animal.

     The pressures on Demetrius and Dr. Makalevich paled in comparison to those on Dr. Igor Federych, Russia’s chief meteorological expert. He kept pushing his sub-skeleton staff, down to almost nil from the mysterious sunburn illness, to their limits to discover a cause for the startling reversal in their normally extremely cold climate, but none of them ever had seen anything like this and they saw no possibility for a solution to the crisis in the near future.

      Making the situation more dire--centuries of international aggression by Russia against many of its former client states had caused support for investment for a global-backed rescue operation to become nearly non-existent.

     Also, the remainder of the nations on earth, whose leaders felt considerably less threatened by the developing crisis, didn’t see an urgent need to risk scarce resources to prop up a regime that possibly might turn against them in the future.

     Leaders outside Russia also believed that, if the crisis kept expanding in more moderate climates, the road to a solution would come much easier for them than it would for Oymyakon, which had a much longer and complicated summit to reach.

      In the mining territory, Demetrius  and his family saw themselves in a hopeless situation. His country’s top experts apparently could find no solution to the crisis and the rest of the world continued to shrug its shoulders at the possible coming extinction of his homeland.

     In off-the-record interviews, the foreman confided that the only path left open to the gold mine foreman was to get out as soon as he, his family and close friends could before getting trampled in the stampede of those fleeing what eventually could be the end of their world.

      Demetrius secretly scoured the Internet for an alternative to what most certainly pointed to the coming of the destruction of his homeland and probably the apocalypse for the entire earth.

      His research brought him to an article on ScientificAmerican.com about exploration of a newly-discovered planet, Huchoron. Apparently this planet had a climate and atmosphere very similar to that of Earth and it existed only a day’s travel time via space vehicles available to Russians of the socioeconomic level of Demetrius in the dawn of the 25th century.

     In addition, he had won a doctorate in cybertechnology prior to pursuing  gold mining, which he had seen as a more rapid path to great wealth. He now tapped into his educational background to build an intergalatic communications system.

      Although communication proved extremely challenging because of the outdated Huchoron technology, he managed to  establish relations with the Governing Council of the Planet Huchoron and pave the way for the future domicile for himself and his family.

    The Huchoronians also saw an alliance with Demetrius as their best opportunity to tap into earth’s more advanced gold-mining technology in order to more easily open their own substantial gold reserves. Huchoron’s outdated mining methods had left these reserves untouched for more than 50 years.

     Although the Stone Age Huchronian technology made a return trip to earth impossible for the present, Demetrius saw this alliance as his only hope.

       He plotted his course for Huchoron and prepared his crew for the intergalatical voyage and swore those in his small circle to top secrecy. No use tipping off the rest of the world and causing a massive exodus and panic that could sabotage their voyage.

      Finally, the day of the voyage came and Demetrius and his crew took off for their new world.

      As their space vehicle cleared earth’s atmosphere they looked back in horror as the only world they had ever known exploded into a huge black hole in the vast darkness of space.

       It looked like a small group of Russian miners had more wisdom than most of earth’s intelligentsia and my friends and I became victims of our own naivete.