Chapter 1 - Confusion

“In every end, there is also a beginning.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

If you're reading this, know that you're lucky, because it hasn't happened yet. I'll be posting this on the days I write them, but you may be reading it six months or 10 years in the past.  I don't really know.  Time is doing funny things lately and that's part of it.  I want to warn everybody what's been happening.  Or is going to happen.  I'm a bit confused as to how it's all working, and things are getting a bit jumbled together, so you'll just have to bear with me.

I guess I should start at the beginning of the end.  Because that's what this is all about.  You know those people that walk around with signs saying "The End is Near"?  They were right.  They may have been crazier than a bag of wet cats, but they were right.  We didn't realize the signs were there, but they did.

Do you remember all those memes about socks disappearing from the dryer, never to be found again?  Or how you end up with Tupperware lids for containers you don't remember having, and containers with no lids, and you never know why?  Those were the signs, and it wasn't just things being misplaced.  Those were the first signs we could see that the universe was unraveling.

I'm going to bet that you're laughing right now.  But the 1(40s were the beginning. It started slow, but it's been speeding up.  We started seeing additional weird things.  The first one I remember as being really spectacular was when every car in a 100-foot radius in a parking lot in Boise, Idaho exploded.  That one happened on Sept 21, 20@$, and it killed almost a dozen people. When the fire investigation was complete, they were confused because there was no gasoline in any of the vehicles that exploded.  Knowing what we know now, all of the carbon atoms in the gas and diesel in their tanks just broke apart into hydrogen atoms.  I know the scientific minds out there are saying "That's impossible!", and it is, except it happened.  There was no fission energy released, because that's not what happened, exactly.  All the carbon atoms just suddenly became 6 hydrogen atoms.

Now, I'm not a math or science whiz, but I do know that all of that liquid gasoline suddenly becoming a much larger volume of pure hydrogen gas doesn't do good things to a gas tank that can't handle the sudden pressure change.  Thirty-six cars were obliterated, shrapnel everywhere, and poor Mrs. Dodd didn't stand a chance of getting away from the fireball on those ridiculous electric scooters the grocery store lets you use.

We found the gas-to-hydrogen thing gets fairly normalized when it happens somewhere in the world about once a week.  Usually just one car at a time, randomly, but sometimes it'll happen to a bunch of cars together.  You get sort of used to it, sort of like Americans used to just get used to school shootings.  It really did speed up the adoption of electric cars though, not that that really helped.

Weirder things have been happening.  Ever wonder what a house looks like when the cellular structure in the wood of the frame of a house just breaks apart?  Not in the plywood used in the floors and ceiling or the roofing.  Just the wood in the frame.  Instant sawdust instead of a support structure, and it could happen randomly at any time of day or night to any house around the world.  Houses would collapse with people in them, fast asleep, or in the middle of making dinner, or in the middle of a really good makeout session, and suddenly, you're just dead because the roof kinda needed some support.

There are a lot of other dangerous, but not obvious things happening too.  Sometimes the unraveling affects anything a single person touches.  One of my high school friends, Rachel Hunter, started losing weight, no matter what she ate.  They checked her for cancer, ran a bunch of tests, and there was nothing wrong with her.  She was quite overweight to start with, but you could see the panic in her face as she dropped pounds fast, and she ate a lot of food.  Like, she was always hungry.  They found out that whenever she put food in her mouth, it would become....  inert?  The food still looked like food, still tasted like food, but when she swallowed, it became calorie and nutrition free.  

Thankfully, they did find out that it was only food that entered her mouth that was affected.  She's now equipped with a feeding tube, and has been able to eat that way for the past (year? decade? 30 years?  I don't know).  She was one of the first, but not the last.  

Occasionally, food from a location around the world becomes inert too.  It'll keep growing in the fields, but people can't eat it, birds and insects die from starvation in those areas, and we've come up with some testing at several steps along the supply chain to make sure people can eat and survive.  We're mostly successful.

There are a lot of other things happening that I can't get into all in one post.  Scientists have called it the Unraveling, but everyone just calls it Collapse.  It isn't just happening on Earth.  As far as we can tell, the universe is going to end.  They're trying to figure out how to stop it and the rest of us are just hoping the way we go isn't painful.  Oh yeah, I should mention that. Remember when I mentioned gasoline and how the carbon just broke apart into hydrogen?  Did you know that all life on Earth is carbon-based life? Imagine all the carbon in your body just breaking apart into hydrogen all at once.  At least it's really, really quick, if it happens to your whole body.  Not so quick and painless if it's just your arm, or your heart, or your tongue.  

I think that's enough for today.  Oh yeah, I should introduce myself.  I'm Shannah.  I have no idea how old I am, because time works different now.  I was born in the former US in Topeka, Kansas.  I think that was in 19&6, but I'm not sure anymore.  We might have had dates wrong by then.  I went to college to become a teacher, and I even got to teach middle school for a few years before Collapse made that a waste of time.  Now I work in one of the UN science divisions.  One of our computers seems to see the internet from years ago instead of now, so I'm tasked with posting this blog in the hopes that it'll be seen and read by someone that can start work on a solution before things get bad.  We don't know if it'll work, and we don't know if the posts will be reliable, but we have to try.

Signing off
Shannah Beekman
Sep&^%ober 36, 2)^4