The Golden Opportunity

                                     The Golden Opportunity          

     The sunburn cases began to mount up as the year 2300 drew to a close. Not just first degree burns, but second and third-degree burns--from only a half-hour exposure, in the middle of November. 

     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 96.16 degrees Fahrenheit, but its daily temperature now had averaged positive 90 degrees Fahrenheit for a solid week.

      Because the overall temperature of the entire earth had increased gradually--only one degree every six months--noone but the most geeky meteorologists or the world’s top scientists seemed concerned.   They alone, at least at this juncture, believed that dire consequences loomed for the planet.

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

        Even though political leaders outside Russia saw the signs mounting in their own countries, the effects--for the time being--were so small that they continued to put off taking united and concerted action.

         However, those working in the gold-rich mines around Oymyakon, normally accustomed to laboring at full tilt in gold mines 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 them filled every available ambulance, as emergency medical services transported to the district’s hospital to prevent their death from sun poisoning.

      Demetrius, the 10-year foreman of the most rugged mining crew in the district, saw no alternative but to call a halt to the largest extraction operation in this area of Mother Russia because he feared all of his crew members might eventually perish in the explosion of solar heat.

     Mining company executives and government officials alike began breathing down the neck of Demetrius to increase his production, but 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.

     Dr. Ivan Makalevich, head dermatologist in the district’s hospital, tried desperately to find a treatment for the apparently incurable sunburn that wreaked havoc on the bodies of every man, woman and child 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 in this region.

     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 extreme 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--a combination of  international brinksmanship and cyber blackmail, both alleged and proven, within both Russian industry and government. This meant that Russia, of late, had become one of the least popular countries on the globe.

     Thus, the remainder of the nations on earth, whose leaders felt considerably less threatened by the developing crisis, didn’t exactly feel overwhelming pressure to rush to the aid of the overly-aggressive Eastern power mongers.

     Leaders outside Russia also believed the road to a solution would come much easier for the nations with normally more moderate climates than it would for Oymyakon, which had a much longer and complicated summit to reach.

      Demetrius saw himself and his family in a hopeless situation with his country’s top experts apparently with no solution to the crisis and the rest of the world apparently shrugging its shoulders at the possible coming extinction of his homeland.

     The only path all these experts left open to the gold mine foreman was to get out as soon as they could before gettin trampled in the stampede of those fleeing what eventually could be the end of our world.

      Demetrius 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 every Russian household in the dawn of the 22nd century.

     Demetrius, who had won a doctorate in cibertechnology prior to seeking what he thought would be a more productive future in gold mining, established an intergalatical communications system that enabled him 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.

     As Demetrius plotted his course for Huchoron and prepared his family for the intergalatical voyage he made sure his entire crew pledged themselves 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. 

       Demetrius and his family believed their new dream home in Huchoron would offer them a new and exciting opportunity as vast as the area of space between their extinct planet and their new solar system.