There were riots on Bubble Day across the planet, but the worst of the violence took place where people had seen the event with their own eyes—and that depended on a combination of longitude and weather. Night stretched from the western Pacific to Brazil, but cloud covered much of the Americas. There were clear skies over Peru, Colombia, Mexico and southern California—so Lima, Bogota, Mexico City and Los Angeles suffered accordingly. In New York, at eleven past three in the morning, it was bitterly cold and overcast—and the city was all but spared. Brasilia and Sao Paulo were saved by the light of dawn.
Disturbances in this country were minor; even on the east coast, sunset came too late, and apparently most Australians sat glued to their TVs all night, watching other people do the looting and burning. The End of the World was far too important to be happening anywhere but overseas. There were fewer deaths in Sydney than on the previous New Year’s Eve.
In my memory, there is no gap at all between the event itself and the announcement of an explanation (of sorts). Analysis of the timing of the occultations had revealed, almost at once, the
The Bubble is a perfect sphere, twelve billion kilometres in radius (about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto), and centred on the sun. It came into being as a whole, in an instant—but because the Earth was eight light-minutes from its centre, the time-lag before the last starlight reached us varied across the sky, giving rise to the growing circle of darkness. Stars vanished first from the direction in which The Bubble was closest, and last where it was furthest away—precisely behind the sun.
The Bubble presents an immaterial surface which behaves, in many ways, like a concave version of a black hole’s event horizon. It absorbs sunlight perfectly, and emits nothing but a featureless trickle of thermal radiation (far colder than the cosmic microwave background, which no longer reaches us). Probes which approach the surface undergo red shift and time dilation—but experience no measurable gravitational force to explain these effects. Those on orbits which intersect the sphere appear to crawl to an asymptotic halt and fade to black; most physicists believe that in the probe’s local time, it swiftly passes through The Bubble, unimpeded—but they’re equally sure that it does so in our infinitely distant future. Whether or not there are further barriers beyond is unknown—and even if there are not, whether an astronaut who took the one-way voyage would find the universe outside unaged, or would emerge just in time to witness the moment of its extinction, remains an open question.
Upon hearing reports containing only a single familiar phrase, the media (who’d been fobbed off for six months with theories even wilder than the truth) promptly declared that the solar system had ‘fallen into’ a large black hole, triggering a resurgence of global panic before the story could be set straight. The event horizon surrounded us, therefore we had to be
Although a handful of theoreticians valiantly struggled to concoct a model for The Bubble as a spontaneous natural phenomenon, there was always really only one plausible explanation: a vastly superior alien race had constructed a barrier to isolate the solar system from the rest of the universe.
The question was: why?
If the aim was to discourage us from charging out and conquering the galaxy, they needn’t have bothered. In 2034, no human had travelled further than Mars. The US base on the moon had been shut down six years before, after eighteen months’ occupation. The only spacecraft to have left the solar system were probes sent to the outer planets in the late twentieth century, crawling away from the sun along their now purposeless trajectories. Plans to launch an unmanned mission to Alpha Centauri in 20S0 had just been rescheduled to 2069, in the hope that the Apollo XI centenary would make fundraising easier.
Of course, a space-faring alien civilization might have taken a long-term view. The thousand years or so before humans were likely to embark on anything remotely like interstellar conquest might have seemed no more to them than a judicious safety margin. Nevertheless, the idea that a culture able to engineer space-time in ways we could scarcely comprehend could
Maybe the Bubble Makers were our benefactors, saving us from a fate infinitely worse than being confined to a region of space where we could—with care—prosper for hundreds of millions of years. Maybe the galactic core was exploding, and The Bubble was the only possible shield against the radiation. Maybe other, hostile aliens were running amok in the region, and The Bubble was the only way to keep them at bay. Less dramatic variations on this theme abounded. Maybe The Bubble was there to protect our fragile, primitive culture from the harsh realities of interstellar commerce. Maybe the solar system had been declared a Galactic Heritage Zone.
A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorphic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows.
At the other extreme, most religious sects had no trouble plucking glib answers from their own ludicrous mythology. Fundamentalists of several faiths refused to acknowledge that The Bubble even existed; all proclaimed that the vanished stars were a sign of divine disfavour, foretold—with varying degrees of prophetic licence—in their own sacred writings.
My parents were resolute atheists, my education was secular, my childhood friends were either irreligious, or the marginally Buddhist grandchildren of Indochinese refugees—but the English-language media, worldwide, was swamped with the views of Christian fundamentalists, so theirs was the lunacy I grew up knowing the best, and despising the most.
It was Judgement Day rewritten by some Bible Belt Chamber of Commerce. TV still worked, and nobody needed the mark of the beast to buy and sell, let alone to give and receive tax-deductible donations. Mainstream churches issued cautious statements which said, in so many words, that the scientists were probably right, but their pews emptied, and the salvation-for-money trade boomed.
Apart from post-Bubble splinter groups of established religions, thousands of brand-new cults appeared— most of them organized on the sound commercial lines pioneered by twentieth-century religious entrepreneurs. But while the opportunists prospered, the real psychotics were festering. It took twenty years for the Children of the Abyss to make themselves known, but then, being born
It was bad enough when they blew up buildings at random, because ‘this is the Age of Mayhem’, but since Duprey and seventeen other Children have been in prison, many of his followers have come to see his release as their ultimate purpose—and with a tangible (if unattainable) goal to focus their efforts, everything has escalated. It makes no difference what I think, but some nights the question spins in my head for hours. I don’t wish they’d set him free. I do wish they’d never caught him.
Mental illness wasn’t confined to the millenarians; for the secular, there was Bubble Fever, an hysterical, disabling, ‘claustrophobic’ reaction to the thought of being ‘trapped’ in a volume eight trillion times that of the Earth. These days, it seems almost laughable—as quaint as some spurious nineteenth-century upper-class affliction—but millions of people succumbed in the first year. It struck in almost every country, and health officials predicted it would cost the world economy more than AIDS. Within five years, though, the number of cases had plummeted.
Wars and revolutions around the globe have been blamed on The Bubble—although I wonder how anyone can claim to be able to untangle its destabilizing effects from those of poverty, debt, climate change, famine and pollution—and the religious fanaticism that would have been present, regardless. I’ve read that in the early days,
