an accident
Racing beyond Saturn, the Earth continued cooling. Two years and fourteen weeks after runaway, copper spool resistance measurements yielded an average outdoor temperature of -131 degrees Celsius. Colder than Earth had ever been but still warmer than the moons of Saturn. Enceladus measured around -200 Celsius, but Enceladus was in thermal equilibrium, and the fleeing Earth was not. Mineshaft temperatures hung around -50C outside the inner box and much colder in the garage. All their heating hacks failed. Pitiful attempts to direct warmer air deeper into the mine no longer worked. The mass of rock around the ever-extending shaft cooled air faster than they could heat it.
Shortly after installing the hot tent stoves, Alex started tracking the amount of coal they mined and burnt daily. Initially, they consumed about one beer cooler worth of coal daily for both stoves. Now, they burned four big coolers per day. It wasn’t enough, and they could do little to increase output. Filling four coolers with “good” coal required twelve hours of mining and breaking.
Since entering the mine over two years ago, they’d dug another thirty meters. At first, the shaft moved back a meter every two weeks. Now, it moved a meter or more every few days. It was exhausting. It was dangerous, and they had run out of shoring wood. All the wood left over from building the boxes and whatever they could salvage from Grampa’s house, along with some fence posts they had found around the valley, had been cut and rigged into shoring. Their beams were not as thick or well-cut as the rail ties; they probably wouldn’t hold back a cave-in. The further they dug, the more likely the entire shaft would collapse. They were “literally” digging their graves.
Even worse, they were always hungry while working. Working in the bitter shaft cold increased their calorie requirements. Bodies require more fuel to do more work. Gravity could take runaway holidays, but thermodynamics still ruled with a steel fist. Their food supplies were running out, and Alex’s spreadsheets of doom now had them starving in four months.
Their candid mining chats, diverting at first, had tapered off; they’d said all they needed to say. Mining had always been hard work, but now, everything got harder with the shaft so cold. If they sat down and caught their breath within minutes, the cold would penetrate their sweaty mining outfits. They started using Alex’s graphene jacket while working the seam. While one pounded away or broke mined chunks, the other would slip on the jacket to rest and warm up. The jacket got filthy black, and that, of all things, bothered Alex. He didn’t complain about the dirty graphene jacket. It was petty and stupid, and nothing could be done about it.
Not only did mining get harder, but everything else did, too. It got so cold they only opened the mine to let in fresh air. Alex had given up using his astrograph. The Earth would not pass any more planets, and with the moon and all the inner planets behind them, the seasonless southern sky looked the same night after night. It wasn’t worth freezing for anymore. They had also stopped emptying shit pails outside. With all the wood they salvaged from Grampa’s house either burned or used as shoring, they started dumping shit pails in the little side shaft. Their shit and piss quickly froze. Alex figured they could dump a year’s worth of crap before they had to do anything about it. They didn’t have a year.
As for replenishing shaft air, they waited until one of the carbon monoxide detectors in the shaft went off. To silence the alarm, they opened the mine shaft’s outer door and both airlock box doors to let the -130-degree Celsius demon in. With the doors open, the -50C shaft temperature rapidly dropped. It now got so cold in the shaft they couldn’t reliably measure shaft temperatures. Alex considered moving the copper spool mounted outside into the shaft but abandoned the idea for two reasons. It wasn’t worth taking the risk of working outside, and he remained dedicated to recording outside temperatures for as long as he could.
Their lives were hard, but they were still alive. Yesterday, they couldn’t find a single station on the radio, not even Morse code dots and dashes. If anyone remained alive, they maintained radio silence. Until the radio failed, it still felt like a world with people: struggling people, desperate people, imperiled people, doomed people, but people, nonetheless. Now nothing. The world shrunk down to them, and they were tired. It wouldn’t be much longer.
Their discipline wavered. While working the seam, they carefully maintained their distance, lined up their tools before swinging, and did their best to stay out from under overhanging rock. Lately, the seam narrowed and angled up. Clearing away overhanging rock got more difficult, and the quality of the surrounding rock changed. The mineral grains were finer and better cemented together; they got much harder to break. They strived to clear overhanging and basement rock whenever they dug a meter or more into the seam. It made swinging mallets and sledgehammers easier, and they felt safer. Whether they were safer, they honestly didn’t know.
Alex kept busy pounding chisels against the overhanging rock. Not long ago, the overhanging rock broke easily when beaten with sledgehammers. Now, they had to chisel cracks into the stone. Short chisels seemed to work the best for this job. Steadying the chisel against the stone, Alex swung the mallet. Hitting with all his strength. The chisel shattered, and the mallet head drove one of the sharp chisel shards into his left hand. The steel cut through his gloves and mittens and punctured the side of his hand.
“God fucking damn it.” Alex dropped the mallet and grabbed his hand. The shard stuck in it. Doug dropped his coal-breaking hammer and rushed to Alex’s side.
“How the fuck did that happen?”
If it hadn’t hurt so goddamn much, Alex might have answered. It was a freaky break. Instead, he pulled back from the seam and sat beside the breaking pan.
“I’m going to yank it out.”
“Wait,” Doug said as he leaned down and searched the seam pit for chisel shards. Without thinking, he crawled under the overhang and grabbed some shattered chisel fragments. Picking up a few, Doug turned around and started crawling out. Before he could react, a huge slab of overhanging rock sheared off and fell on him. The rock crushed his legs and pelvis. Alex heard Doug’s bones snap. Doug screamed.
“Oh god, oh god, Oh god, no.” Alex yanked the shard out of his hand and jumped to Doug.
Doug, pinned face down, screaming in pain, flailing his arms, tried to crawl. Alex grabbed a mining pike and attempted to lever the stone slab off Alex. He couldn’t budge it. Panicking, he looked up; the mine shaft had caved in on both sides of the slab, trapping Doug. He would have to hammer it away. Jumping up, he looked around for sledgehammers.
Doug cried before Alex could get a hammer, “Don’t leave me, Dad. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”
Alex knelt beside his son. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”
“It’s OK, it’s OK.”
Doug pulled the bloody mitten off his injured hand and felt under Doug’s parka collar for his neck. Touching his son’s warm neck, he cried, “I’m here, I’m here.”
With his other hand, he clasped Doug’s mittened hand. Doug squeezed back, holding on for a long minute, then Doug’s grip relaxed.
“Doug … Doug … Doug, wake up!”
Kneeling beside Doug’s trapped body, Alex felt water on his knees; he looked down: dark blood flowed out of the rock vise that crushed Doug.
Feeling Doug’s neck for a pulse, he felt no pulse. How could someone die so fast? The blood pouring out of the stone ran thick now. Did the rock cut a major artery? How could there be so much blood? Doug wasn’t coming back.
“No, No, No.”
Alex hugged Doug. He didn’t want him getting cold. They had worked so hard to keep warm. Stripping off the graphene jacket, he wrapped it around Doug’s shoulders and tucked him in, just like he did when Doug was a baby so many years ago. Without letting go of Doug’s hand, Alex burst into uncontrollable sobbing.
Alex wasn’t sure how long he had kneeled beside Doug. When he stopped crying and noticed his surroundings again, the blood flowing from the rock had frozen: dark blood mixed with coal and rock dust, slick in the LED lantern light. Doug had bled out in agony. It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be real. Getting up, he gripped the cold stone with his bare, injured hand. It didn’t hurt. It felt funny. Looking closely, Alex realized his exposed injured hand was frostbitten. Badly frostbitten. He didn’t give a shit.
Cradling his injured hand, Alex got up, put his bloody mitten back on, and took a deep, calming breath. He held it for a second and then, not forgetting to duck and hit his head on the shaft ceiling, scurried back to the inner box like a wounded burrowing animal.
Outside the inner box, he shook off his mining garb. Unsnapping and unzipping clothes with a frozen hand is difficult, but he managed it. He even neatly hung up his mining garb before crawling around the box in his base layers. The shock wore off; he had only one thing to do before crawling into the box. Start the generator attached to the 100-pound tank.
There were two valves to open: one on top of the big propane tank and another outside the plywood generator box. He opened both. Kneeling, he pulled back the box lid and pressed the start button. Of course, it didn’t start.
“Goddamnit, Goddamnit”
Sometimes, the generator starter batteries got too cold. This wasn’t a new problem. A power bar connected a jumper plug to the tent powerpacks. He flipped it on and punched start again. This time, the generator started. Replacing the lid on the generator box, he knelt on the inner box’s yoga mat porch and peeled back the Velcro seals on the door. The -50 Celsius mineshaft cold numbed his good bare hand and bit through his damp socks. Pulling the little door open, he crawled in and turned on the lantern near the door. Turning around to pull the door shut, he banged his frozen hand on the box wall, leaving a blood stain. Grasping the door handle rope, he pulled in the door, wrestled it into its slot, and sealed its Velcro edges.
Bleeding on the yoga mat floor, he crawled to the tent and fetched the first aid kit hanging over it. It had never been opened. Inside the kit, he found a pair of scissors, which he immediately used to cut off his bloody mitten. The puncture wound wasn’t too bad. The frostbite was. Unzipping his astrograph backpack, which they had repurposed to hold their Walmart medical supplies, he unscrewed and bit open a plastic bottle of medical alcohol and poured it on a towel hanging by the stove. Inhaling alcohol fumes, he pressed the towel against his hand.
Now what? He had no idea how to treat puncture wounds or frostbite. Maybe he should have read his survival medicine book.
“Well, can’t do it now. I can’t turn the pages.”
Grimacing with pain, he flipped on the ceramic heater hanging in the gap between the tunnel tent and the box ceiling. Being the biggest powerpack drain, they only used the heater when a generator ran. The little heater hummed up and started blowing warm air. The box had cooled down from the morning stove fire but remained well above freezing. It wouldn’t take long to warm up. With one last push, he opened a large water thermos and poured a liter of water into a pan. His medical supplies included stores of painkillers. He swallowed five extra-strength Aleve pills, screw the daily recommended dose.
Leaning against the box wall, Alex fell asleep. Waking a few hours later, he briefly called for Doug. Then, remembering, he started crying again. Alex wouldn’t leave Doug exposed and pinned like an insect in a display case. After eating and drinking some freeze-dried food, Alex squeezed out of the box, put on his cold-weather mining gear, and returned to the seam. Doug’s body remained trapped under the massive slab. Alex tried several times to move the rock with levers but couldn’t. He would have to leave Doug’s body trapped or shatter the rock around him and hope he could pull him out without more cave-ins.
Breaking the rock was necessary to get to the coal seam behind the rock. Alex considered both options and decided to bury Doug where he had fallen and give up mining. Without Doug, he had eight months of food, much longer than he wanted to live without him.
For the next two days, Alex washed waste rock. When washed, the rock above and below the coal seam turned light grey. Alex chose to bury his son’s body under clean stones. It took a few days and many thermoses of clean water to wash enough rocks to completely bury Doug. Doug wouldn’t have approved of wasting so much water, but it wasn’t a waste. Alex had to honor his beloved son. In the LED lantern light, the light gray pile of washed stones stood out from the dirty black shaft. Alex placed a small wooden plaque he had made from siding salvaged from Grampa’s shack on the clean rocks. Cut into the wood with a power drill, the plaque read, Doug Beloved Son.
“I’ll visit you every day. Promise. I don’t have much time left, but I’ll come every day. You won’t miss anything.”
Alex only left the inner box to visit Doug or melt ice. Every morning, he would crawl out of the box, get into his cold-weather mining gear, and walk back to Doug’s memorial. He told Doug the news.
“Still no radio contacts, big fella. Your old dad may be the last human on Earth.”
Having given up mining, Alex kept the generator attached to the 100-pound tank running around the clock. It burned through precious propane, but he didn’t care. The 100-pound generator tank was about half full before Doug’s death. He had another full 100-pound tank and four full 30-pound tanks. More than two-thirds of the propane was gone. Well, it had lasted more than two years. Until the accident, they had maintained rigorous propane discipline, only using the irreplaceable gas to charge powerpacks and run power tools.
Perversely, Doug enjoyed the destruction of his daily routine. He didn’t miss melting ice, filtering water, working on the seam, breaking coal chunks, or emptying shit pails. Staying in the box and feeling the warm heater air felt good. His punctured and frozen hand had swollen to three times its normal size. Inflamed, infected, and oozing pus from the puncture wound, there wasn’t much he could do other than keep it clean, spray it with antiseptics, and take pain pills. If the infection didn’t clear up, he would be forced to either attempt self-amputation or accept death.
It didn’t clear up.
His badly infected hand had not cleared up three weeks after the cave-in. The inflammation had abated, but dark gangrenous patches surrounded the oozing entry wound. It smelled worse than shit. Alex figured the nerves in parts of his hand must be dying because it wasn’t too painful. His survival medicine guide didn’t cheer him up. Untreated gangrene resulted in death, and self-amputation didn’t sound encouraging. Many bled out or were reinfected and died anyway. With such grim prognoses, he couldn’t build a case for enduring the agony of dismemberment. It would have been a hard sell, even with excellent chances of recovery, but for Alex, there was no chance of recovery. If he survived cutting off his hand, the cold would soon finish him anyway. Time was up.
Sitting by Doug’s memorial, Alex told him. “We’ve gone as far as we can. We knew we wouldn’t get out of this. Before I go, I want to thank you for coming with me and for being my son. You were the best thing in my life. I miss you terribly.”
During his last week, Alex abandoned restraint. He ran both generators; they produced plenty of power, enough to run the ceramic heater and all three electric blankets. He started carrying the ceramic heater from one box to another; the stoves alone could not heat the boxes to comfortable temperatures. He dragged the remaining 30-pound propane tanks into the boxes and set up the stoves for propane burning. Over a year ago, Doug removed the burners from their camping stoves so they could burn propane in the stoves during emergencies. Well, this is an emergency. With a propane flame burning brightly in the front box stove, Alex resumed melting ice and filtering water. While water dripped through the purification filter, he brought a big basting pan of water to a boil, stripped down, and had his first rubdown bath in months. He stood in a filthy tub of water before he finished. Melting more ice, he gave himself a second rubdown followed by a third.
Clean, for the first time in years, he dressed in his cleanest base layers and gorged on his remaining freeze-dried foods. During the last two years, they had mainly lived on beans and rice. There were still uneaten bean bags in the shaft.
“Beans, beans, the magical fruit; the more you eat, the more you toot.” Doug wasn’t kidding about his bean farts.
It took three more days to eat all his freeze-dried camping food. He took so many painkillers his pee looked dark. His injured hand dangled uselessly, and he struggled to put on his outerwear for the last time and open the outer mine shaft door.
The cold penetrated. Despite being buried in Doug’s nylon comforter, his oversized parka, the graphene jacket, his thick ski pants, his boots within boots, his mittens in oversized work gloves wrapped in blankets, his facemask wrapped under two thick scarves, his ski mask, a full face toque, a second toque, and a parka hood all draped over by an electric blanket running at the highest setting; the -143 degree Celsius cold still hit.
The Sun, a brilliant golf ball in the sky, appeared tiny and bright. Still beautiful. Alex spread the second electric blanket he carried on the snow and unfolded his chair. The same chair he had sat in watching the occultation near the Owyhees years ago. Fetching the running ceramic heater, he dragged it and its extension cord and put it under the chair. Lowering himself into the chair. He wrapped the electric blanket around his prone body. It felt nice to be outside. He was tired, so tired; he’d taken more painkillers and enough allergy syrup to help him fall asleep.
The blankets and heater and his thick outerwear felt warm enough. His pain vanished. As he fell asleep, an image of his baby son, Doug, looking over his mother’s shoulder made him smile.
gonggong gone
Earth continued cooling a century after it crossed Gonggong’s orbit. As it approached Oort Dusk, some 700 astronomical units out, the oceans had frozen from pole to pole. In some spots, the ice was kilometers thick, but even now, some creatures clustered around volcanic vents on the ocean floor were oblivious to the frozen planet around them. On the surface, temperatures dropped below the freezing point of Carbon Dioxide and Methane. A wispy dry ice and Methane snow fell worldwide, dusting great ice sheets. There were no streams, ponds, rivers, or lakes, just vast glaciers. The atmosphere, still composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen gas but verging on the liquefaction of Oxygen was extremely dry and clear. Night skies were darker than ever, and the distant pinpoint Sun, as bright as an old full Moon, cast knife-edge shadows over a white, silent, dead, windless world.
Some survived for decades after runaway — the longest enduring huddled in geothermal regions and long highway and rail tunnels. In Europe and Asia, trains pulled disassembled naval nuclear reactors and hundreds of rail coal cars into the tunnels. With the resources of desperate governments, they could seal off, defend, heat, and even produce some food in hastily constructed tunnel greenhouses. But long-term stability was out of reach. The technology supporting the underground habitats could not be maintained. One by one, the habitats failed until only one remained, a geothermal tunnel complex excavated under a glacier that a century before was called Lake Yellowstone. The Yellowstone tunnel complex held on until a large earthquake, always a possibility in Yellowstone, inflicted a fatal wound.
The last humans, choosing death in the open, emerged as Earth reached Oort Dusk. They didn’t live long enough to realize solar gravity had mysteriously switched back on. For millennia afterward, they stood as frozen statues gazing at a glorious galaxy-banded dark sky.
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 