No Legacy so Rich: An Account of the Final Calamity

By W. Thomas Jones

A mysterious catastrophe has doomed humankind to extinction within a century. Thirty years later, the frightened, dying remnants of humanity face a new upheaval when a million alien spacecraft land all over the world. But another threat lurks—by far the most serious, yet if it can be overcome, Earth might enter an era vastly different from anything it's ever known.

"A thrilling and well-paced science fiction novel." — IndieReader

"A very compelling story, well-written and very intricate. . . . I would definitely recommend 'No Legacy so Rich' by W. Thomas Jones to science fiction fans. It is one that will be worth the journey. What stands out above all else is the complex plot and the thoughts it will bring to mind. Are there others out there? Could something like this happen in our world? And finally, would it be a good or a bad thing to the overall picture of Earth as we know it?" — Kathy Stickles, Reader Views

"Loved the ideas that created the plot in this book." "Super fun and chock full of surprises." "A wild ride." "A great moral." — Writer's Digest

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. Thomas Jones
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223511632

W. Thomas Jones

W. Thomas Jones is a retired journalist and musician, married to a journalist and teacher, with whom he raised three perfect children despite living in North Carolina. He holds master’s degrees in music and religion from Yale, and has lived also in Chicago, Indiana, Florida and England.

Book preview

No Legacy so Rich

I

The Spheres

1

AS THE WORLD FOR THE thirtieth time marked the grim anniversary of the Final Calamity, spheres appeared in the skies around the globe. Their whitish hue gave a first impression of weather balloons, but their descent revealed their enormous size, an eerie unison movement, and a subtle sparkling you couldn’t quite be sure you were seeing. Silent but for the swish of the air, they slowed gradually until they all touched down together, more or less, a little after fifteen hundred Greenwich Mean Time. Then the sparkling ceased, leaving the huge orbs flat white and featureless.

There had been no warning. The handful of radar installations still operating hadn’t detected the spheres. Optical asteroid warning systems might have picked them up, but nobody had looked at those for years. It wouldn’t have made much difference anyway: The spheres didn’t descend in an arc, like returning spacecraft used to, they came straight down out of space, their paths plumb regardless of the weather they came through, and they’d landed before anyone could have done anything.

Most were on level ground. Those that weren’t didn’t roll, they just sat there as if glued in place. Most parks, parking lots and fields had at least one sphere, and most stadiums had one. Of course the stadiums weren’t used for much else nowadays. Most military bases were still active, though, and their commanders scrambled the meager forces they had to surround the spheres now occupying their once-busy airfields and overgrown parade grounds. But no shots were fired—governments had been quick to order their armed forces not to provoke the spheres.

In the United States, police and, where it still existed, the National Guard cordoned off as many landing sites as they could. But there were far too many for the anemic forces of the day. Quite a few spheres got no guards at all. Most that did got only one or two. In some places citizen militias stepped forward to strut their resolve, taking up firing positions behind pickup trucks, trees and banks, training their assault rifles and shotguns on the spheres, and holding them there until their arms got tired.

In Washington, tanks rushed to surround the twenty-six spheres on the National Mall and two on the Ellipse. None was on the White House lawn, or across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Square, but the Secret Service wouldn’t risk exposing President Thorpe, so Vice President Greely was whisked away to secret Continuity of Operations facilities to separate the President and Vice President in case of attack. Meanwhile the White House compiled as much information as it could as quickly as it could, and twenty-five minutes after the spheres had landed, Thorpe went on the air.

My fellow Americans and friends around the globe, she said calmly from her desk in the emergency underground office, "today devices of apparently extraterrestrial origin have landed all over the world. Most of you have seen them and know that they’re huge, on the order of three hundred feet in diameter. And they’re numerous: Preliminary estimates are a million of them worldwide, some forty thousand of which are in the United States.

"We believe these devices to be probes sent by an alien civilization to study life on other planets. They bear no markings, they have no windows, and close examination of their exteriors, underway with telephoto lenses from a safe distance, has revealed smooth hulls without seams where doors or panels could open. Thus they appear to be uncrewed and fully automated, in that respect like the probes we’ve sent to other planets in our own solar system.

"We believe they’ve come to Earth specifically to study humankind. This is because their distribution closely correlates with population density. In the United States, for example, nearly twelve hundred spheres landed in the New York area. Central Park alone has sixty-three. All of Wyoming, on the other hand, has about seventy. We also believe that the size and number of these probes indicate that they’re a fleet on a mission to study many worlds, and that when they’ve gathered enough information here, they’ll leave just as they came.

"While they’re with us, however, we urge the greatest possible caution. Though intimidating, the giant spheres show no indications of hostility, and we’ve detected no immediate threat, such as radiation. But we don’t know their programming or capabilities—they might intend to collect human specimens, for example. We also don’t know what they might regard as interference, and how they might react to it. So we implore everyone everywhere to keep well away from the spheres and take no action whatsoever with regard to them. This is not only for your personal safety, but possibly for the safety of the entire world. We ask instead for your patience as scientists worldwide study the spheres.

My friends, as we confront this latest challenge to humanity, world leaders are in constant communication and carefully considering all possible options. We will keep you informed as to any and all developments. Please stay safe, and please help the world to stay safe. Thank you, and good morning.

ON A PLANET THAT LONG ago had lost all hope, the spheres were sauce for a miserable goose. Whatever the intent behind them, they’d come to a post-apocalyptic world, one made all the more wretched by the apocalypse having been not only more terrible than anyone could have imagined, but utterly bewildering. Thirty years later, with the population at forty percent of what it once had been, most of the middle-age, elderly and dying people left were too numb to worry about space aliens. What else did Earth have to lose? What could extraterrestrials possibly do that would be worse than the past thirty years? Annihilation? Get on with it.

Yet the spheres did serve a constructive purpose: The obvious questions they raised—What were they? Where had they come from? Who had sent them? What would they do?—offered humankind the first common focus it had had in decades. Commentators noted that while the spheres’ distribution could mean they’d come to study humanity, as President Thorpe had said, it could mean just as well that they’d come to finish humanity off. Suspicions quickly arose in some countries that they were a new American invention, created possibly to gather intelligence, possibly for something more sinister. But then some people still blamed the United States for the Final Calamity. The foremost question on everyone’s mind, however, was whether the spheres were a brand new development, or related somehow to the events of thirty years ago.

I need hardly remind anyone of today’s date, Reggie Hargrove said on his daily TV program. The network cut to Hargrove & Hamilton right after President Thorpe’s broadcast. Coverage of the spheres had pre-empted everything, but regularly scheduled news shows were incorporated.

February twenty-first, co-host Margie Hamilton said, not only the very day, but the thirty-year anniversary.

Hamilton had been a high school teacher. When there weren’t any high schools anymore, her friend Hargrove had invited her to co-host the news program he was developing.

Which may well be irrelevant, said Ronald Sims, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. As soon as the spheres had landed, Hargrove had canceled his scheduled guest and booked Sims, a frequent guest. The program was produced not far from his home in Hyde Park. He sat in his usual spot between the hosts before a light blue background. Mugs occupied the coffee table before them. We mustn’t underestimate the power of coincidence, he continued. It’s bedeviled humankind for millennia.

Well, coincidence or not, Hamilton said, do you think whoever sent these spheres could do anything to help us?

That’s awfully difficult to predict, Sims said. Despite President Thorpe’s assurances, we don’t really know anything about the spheres. And even if whoever sent them wanted to help, what could they possibly do now? The youngest women are all but past their childbearing years.

Yes, Hargrove said, even Angelo Morhouse, I believe, is thirty-seven.

Morhouse is thirty-seven, Sims said, the youngest member of the Last Generation.

Hargrove chuckled. Time was you’d be famous for being the oldest person on Earth, not the youngest!

Oh, you still are, Hamilton said. It’s getting where anybody who dies anymore is a news story. Life on Earth has been a deathwatch for thirty years.

What can we tell from the spheres themselves? Hargrove said.

Well, Sims said, as the President said, they’re obviously uncrewed, but I’m not so sure they’re probes. That’s Morgan Paget’s idea, at Ohio State University. I suspect the President’s picked up on it mainly because she wants to keep everybody calm. But Paget’s a biologist, not an astronomer.

Why don’t you think they’re probes? Hamilton said.

I just can’t imagine that advanced alien technology would be so bulky. The spheres are enormous, and there are an awful damn lot of them. It’s also not clear why anyone would send probes out in a fleet. If you had a million probes, it would seem more efficient to send them all to different planets.

What other possibilities are there? Hargrove said.

Sims sniffed. Well, this is sheer speculation, but to my mind, the most intriguing idea is that they’re eggs.

Eggs! Hamilton said.

But they were pulsing with power as they came down, Hargrove said.

Some kind of power, yes, Sims said, but we don’t know what alien biology might have evolved.

The director cut to looping video of the spheres descending and landing around the world. Living things on Earth generate electricity, Sims continued over the video. We ourselves work by electrical impulses. If the spheres are eggs, maybe they’re produced by some space-borne creature, then they migrate to a planet to incubate, and they naturally produce some sort of field that lets them descend safely.

God only knows what might be hatching on this planet! Hamilton said.

Let’s hope it takes immediately back to space! Hargrove said.

The video stopped, and Hargrove, Hamilton and Sims again appeared on the screen.

Why do you think the spheres are clustered in populated areas? Hargrove said.

Oh, God, Hamilton said, so their young will have something to feed on!

Sims chuckled. Not necessarily. Populated areas are the most habitable. They might have thought we’d all be gone by now anyway.

Gone! Hargrove said. You mean they were behind the Final Calamity?

It could have been an attempt to sterilize the planet for use as an incubator, Sims said. "It didn’t quite succeed, but maybe it succeeded well enough. At any rate the incubation appears to be going forward—if that’s what all of this is. I’m just speculating. It’s a mistake to assume anything at this point. All of this is unprecedented. We don’t have nearly enough information to draw conclusions."

Hamilton quipped, That’s probably how the Native Americans felt when they first saw Columbus’s ships!

Hargrove smiled. Are you suggesting we should always expect the worst, Margie?

No, just that those who do are never disappointed.

Sims chuckled. If whoever built these spheres wanted to get rid of us, I imagine they could do so a lot more efficiently than this. It would be ironic, though, after we spent all those years fearing we’d get rid of ourselves!

Maybe we did! Hargrove said. "That idea has always been out there, Ronald—that somehow we brought about these crises. We’ve been debating it for thirty years while we anticipate our demise."

Yes, Sims said, presumably the first species ever capable of doing so—of contemplating its own extinction. The first species on Earth at least. But conspiracy theories aside, it’s hard to see how we could be to blame for any of this. If we caused the Great Infertility Crisis, we haven’t been able to figure out how despite thirty years of research. We could never have engineered the Final Calamity, and nobody can seriously claim that we built these spheres.

But could we really have gone through all that we went through thirty years ago, Hamilton said, "and now, as if to mark not only the thirty-year anniversary but the very day, this happens?"

Sims shrugged. As I said, coincidence pops up in the most inauspicious places. For what it’s worth, nobody saw anything like these spheres thirty years ago. As far as I know they don’t even match any UFO reports we’ve ever had, not that I put any stock in any of that.

But still, Hargrove said, thirty years to the day after humanity’s doom was apparently sealed, we finally learn for sure that we’re not alone in the universe. Even the Final Calamity wasn’t proof of that.

No, it wasn’t, Sims said. But I never thought we could be alone. The universe is just too vast.

But there’s no doubt about it now, Hargrove said. "There are others, somewhere, of some description. The spheres prove it! Nobody can deny it any longer."

No, they certainly can’t, Sims said. As we wait for the spheres to reveal their purpose, that might be the one thing we can all be sure of.

IN THE SITUATION ROOM beneath the West Wing, President Thorpe turned away from the TV. Eggs! she scoffed. That Sims is going to set off a worldwide panic!

I don’t think that will happen, Secretary of State Angie Wadsworth said, at least not yet. Everybody’s still too intrigued with the spheres. And you made a convincing case that they’re probes—benign, maybe even friendly.

Let’s just hope there’s some chance it’s true, Thorpe said. There’s little enough evidence for it.

There’s no evidence for anything sinister, either.

Is there a refugee problem?

Not really. The spheres are everywhere. There’s no place for refugees to go. A few people have left their homes, but not many.

Madam President, National Security Advisor Jesse Wiggins said, I thought you’d decided against revealing that the spheres’ distribution correlates with world population.

"I decided people should hear that from us," Thorpe said, both to dilute its implications, and to increase confidence that the government’s on top of things. It was a gamble, but I thought we should get ahead of it.

"But what if they are eggs?" Wiggins said.

We’re watching them, said General Harvey Chetland, Thorpe’s Secretary of Defense. We’ve got ground personnel and cameras, satellites, drones and manned aircraft patching blind spots, and our cruise missiles are ready, along with drones and fighters. If they’re eggs and they hatch, we’ll scramble them!

"If they’re eggs, if they hatch, and if there’s a reason to ‘scramble them,’ " Thorpe said sharply.

Of course, Chetland said. But Professor Sims is an expert.

An expert in astrophysics who thinks the spheres are eggs! Thorpe said. "And Paget’s an expert in biology who thinks the spheres are probes! Two experts, and each is confident that the spheres fall under the other’s area of expertise! Can’t we all just agree that we don’t know what the damn things are? Now, what else can we do to keep our people safe?"

First time I’ve ever seen her rattled, thought Jerry Wichard, Thorpe’s Chief of Staff and usually at her side. Other than their appearing, he offered, the spheres have done nothing to disrupt life. None landed on any buildings, bridges, fences or other structures, no power lines were fouled, no crops were damaged, no animals were harmed, and except for relatively small patches of grass and weeds, no plants were crushed.

That makes sense if they’re probes, Wadsworth said. They’d do as little as possible to disturb the environment they’ve come to study.

They also haven’t affected communications or other technology, Wiggins said. And as you told the nation, there’s no detectable radiation.

They might just have better shielding than we do, Chetland said. "They could also be intended just to get rid of us, and not do too much damage to the planet. Then they could just bring in some cosmic bulldozers and plow everything under, and they’d have a whole new world ready for occupation!"

If it’s the planet they want, Wichard said, they could have just waited a few decades.

Thorpe turned back to the TV. Such a momentous occasion! she said. Maybe the most significant event in history! And all we have left to greet it with is fear!

THORPE CONFERRED WITH world leaders again before eating a quick lunch and returning to the Situation Room. Midafternoon she met with Vera Dickensen, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and Paul Nolend, Majority Leader of the United States Senate—and the current favorite, come fall, to succeed Thorpe and wrest the White House away from her party.

We’ll never be able to keep people away from the spheres, Dickensen said. You should consider declaring martial law.

Oh no you don’t! Nolend said.

Relax, Paul, the President said. You’ll get your shot at the White House—if we still have a White House in November.

Good! Nolend said. We think it’s a pretty good shot, too. Marcus Greely makes a fine Vice President—and that tells you everything you need to know about him.

This is no time to discuss politics, Thorpe said.

Vera brought it up.

I brought up martial law, Dickensen said.

Which could mean suspending elections, Nolend said.

The elections are almost nine months away, Thorpe said, and I’m not about to declare martial law.

Then what do we do? Dickensen said. Just wait and see what happens next?

No, Thorpe said, we just wait until we know what we think we’re doing.

THE PRESIDENT’S ADMONITION to keep away from the spheres fell on many a deaf ear. Unguarded or poorly guarded spheres drew the curious, the reckless and the religious the world over. Simply touching or knocking on the spheres brought no reaction, and tools had no effect except to damage the tools. One man hit a sphere with a sledgehammer and somehow broke his own shoulder. Even graffiti failed—spray paint just ran off. Finally, after the spheres had been on the ground about three hours, a man outside Johannesburg took a shot at one. Reportedly his rifle backfired. He was taken to a hospital in critical condition.

Other responses, too, were less rational than those voiced at the White House and on Hargrove & Hamilton.

Beloved, thirty years ago, the Lord visited a terrible retribution upon us, a pastor told the small, trembling crowd gathered for the prayer service he’d organized hastily that afternoon at his church in New Brunswick. Some in fact felt at that time that God had abandoned His people. And now, it seems even more certain that He intends to extinguish us. He’s taken our children, He won’t let us have any more, and now He’s sent among us these frightening white spheres! Do we not find this compelling? And yet, beloved, does a father really abandon his children?

Quite a few used to, Melvin Franklin muttered. Lola gave him a gentle elbow.

The elderly couple were in a back pew, well away from the worshipers huddled at the front. They’d never been in this church before. They’d wandered in on their daily walk, looking for a warm place to sit for a few minutes on the cold New Jersey afternoon.

We know that God loves us— the pastor went on.

Speak for yourself, Melvin said.

"—and that He alone is perfect. So it’s equally clear that we are to blame for the calamities that have befallen us! The spheres that now cover the Earth apprise us that our great wickedness has not abated, that it’s the same now as it was in Noah’s day, when mankind provoked Him to deluge the Earth in the Great Flood. And down the centuries, it’s brought about so many calamities, culminating thirty years ago in what many today call the Final Calamity. And now, this new menace—these giant white spheres! Do they warn us that at last our iniquity has grown so vast that the Almighty has finally had enough?"

I thought he told Noah he wouldn’t wipe us out again, Melvin said, and that’s why he started putting up rainbows. Which I guess means raindrops didn’t refract light until the Flood.

Indeed, the pastor said, "it’s clear that you, that I, that all of us have vastly underestimated our sinfulness. What else can these colossal orbs mean? A million of them worldwide, people are saying! What else can they be but divine instruments of our destruction? They’ve been sent to cleanse the Earth, to cleanse God’s Creation—to cleanse it of us, the very people He made it for! Truly we’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting! And now we stand before God’s firing squad, looking down the barrels of a million huge, spherical guns!"

Oh, for fuck’s sake! Melvin said. Lola gave him another elbow, this one not so gentle.

"Beloved, our only comfort is our faith. Our only salvation is through Jesus Christ. And our only consolation is our sure and certain knowledge that somehow, these giant white spheres, too, are part of God’s plan. Perhaps they don’t ordain the End of the World, perhaps they’re just a final warning. The Bible tells us the Lord works in mysterious ways. We can’t grasp those ways, but that’s okay because that’s not what we’re called upon to do. No, beloved, second-guessing the Lord is never what we’re called upon to do. What we’re called upon to do is pray."

Are you ready to leave? Melvin said. I can’t listen to this imbecile any longer.

Lola nodded, and they left. Outside, they drew their coats close against the cold.

Don’t think, don’t act, don’t wonder, don’t do any God-damn thing about anything, just pray! Melvin said. "People of faith! The only faith they have is in whatever they feel the least threatened by! They only believe anything at all because they’re afraid not to! The only thing they don’t feel threatened by is killing people who don’t share their faith! Because that’s what they feel the most threatened by!"

Calm yourself, dear, Lola said, squeezing his arm. She’d been afraid for more than a year that he’d have another heart attack.

They replace ‘fear’ with ‘faith,’ but all they do is change is the word! That idiot automatically assumes the spheres are here to destroy us. Anybody who could build these spheres could have destroyed us a lot easier than this! He grew bitter. They should have destroyed us thirty years ago. Why make us wait? His voice and gait began to falter. Thirty years with no hope. Thirty fucking years.

Lola steadied him. "Now you’re the one assuming the spheres are related to the Final Calamity."

I know. We don’t know whether they are or not.

It’s not as bad as it was, Lola said. Thirty years ago, you couldn’t get away from it no matter where you went.

I remember—the Calamitous Spirituality Surge.

Lola smiled. He’d just made that up.

It never goes away, Melvin said. No matter what happens that doesn’t fit into their beliefs, no matter what they predict that doesn’t come true, they won’t look at anything in any way except through their religion.

They can’t, Lola said. Their beliefs are too central in their lives. Their identities are all wound up in them.

For that moron, the spheres and the Final Calamity have to be related just so he can lump it all together under ‘God’s plan’!

"Well, on the other hand, maybe they are related, Lola said. These incredible things happening on the very same date exactly thirty years apart—"

Yeah, and Earth looks flat, too, until you get off it and get a good look at it! Unless you’re a flat-Earther, of course. Everybody’s a God-damn lunatic!

They came to Buccleuch Park and, as always, went to the children’s playground. Today the view was dominated by the spheres that had landed in the seventy-eight-acre park. Lola and Melvin sat on their usual bench and held gloved hands as they looked out over what had once been a lively and happy place. For a decade they’d brought their children here several days a week, first one, then two, then all three. But for thirty years the playground had sat unused, the equipment cracking, breaking and rusting, and the ground cover growing up with weeds.

You know, Melvin said, Aidan would be forty-three.

Of course I know, Lola said. The girls would be thirty-nine and thirty-six.

They might have families of their own. We might be bringing our grandchildren here today.

I wonder sometimes why we always come here, Lola said. No matter what route we take, we always come here on our way home. Why isn’t it too painful?

"It is too painful, Melvin said. But it’s one of the few things we can do to be a hair closer to them."

They were silent for a while, then Melvin said, I could never have survived these years without you.

Lola smiled. He’d said it a thousand times. Nor I, you, she responded, as she always did.

We loved them.

Of course we loved them. And they knew we loved them.

That’s what matters, Melvin said. That’s the important thing. Whatever happened to them, however long they lived, or if they yet live . . . somewhere . . . they knew that at least for a time, they were loved and cherished like they deserved to be.

Lola squeezed his hand. I’m glad I can be here with you today.

Me, too.

2

THE SPHERES’ ARRIVAL was the world’s third upheaval in recent decades. The first had begun thirty-one years earlier, and about the same time of year, when healthy couples found themselves unable to conceive. Quickly the problem proved widespread, and humanity realized it had a serious fertility crisis on its hands. Eggs were fine, and sperm counts weren’t low, but fertilization would no longer occur, either in uteri or in vitro. Further confusing matters, other animals kept breeding like normal.

Aspiring parents didn’t easily give up their hopes of having children. Healthcare systems were overwhelmed as people looked to medicine for help. Corporations stepped up with new products they marketed as fertility-enhancing, and these flew off the shelves. New diets were promoted with the same promises, and old dietary supplements were relabeled as aiding procreation. Meanwhile, charlatans peddled cures they called proven. Of course they were nothing of the kind, but they did as much good as anything else.

Religious sects lost no time in proclaiming the infertility divine retribution: The God who’d once commanded humankind to be fruitful and multiply had now withdrawn the privilege. And the reason was obvious—it just varied from sect to sect.

While many would-be parents turned to prayer, others tried magic. Ancient fertility rites became the rage. Suddenly everybody was doing it—those who desperately wanted to conceive and hoped to hit on just the right combination of egg and sperm, and those who no longer feared unwanted pregnancy and reveled in the freedom to take on any partners they wanted. Soon the human penchant for throwing caution to the winds was in full swing—and sexually transmitted infections surged, further straining healthcare systems.

Public and private sectors alike spared no expense in frantic and relentless assaults on the crisis. Security branches investigated the infertility as bioterrorism. Biologists looked for viruses and bacteria that could be to blame. Nutritionists examined every substance that people consumed for any possibility, however remote, that it might inhibit conception, either alone or in concert with other substances. Many discoveries were made, and progress against disease was unprecedented. But nothing shed light on the infertility.

Other scientists searched for an environmental cause—perhaps some toxin had developed in water supplies, a pollutant had reached a critical level, a new form of radiation had struck Earth, or a meteor had exploded and contaminated the atmosphere. One loan-wolf anthropologist suggested that humanity had hit some sort of natural population limit, and that no more children could be conceived until enough older folks had died off—adding to authorities’ worries by raising concerns about security for the elderly.

But humanity placed its greatest hopes in the children it already had. Perhaps the problem would be solved, or at least would have gone away, by the time they came of age. And happily, no harm came to pregnancies already underway. Quite the contrary: Not a single child born anywhere that year had any problems at all, each was entirely healthy. Trouble diagnosed in the womb cleared up miraculously regardless of its severity. Even expected miscarriages transitioned over a matter of days to perfect health. Nor were there any delivery complications. Further shocking obstetricians, no child born that year ever got sick.

Scientists seized on this as a clue: Maybe whatever was preventing conception was also endowing developing fetuses with incredible health. Time, money and effort were poured into the search for some agent that might do both, and like so many endeavors, this offered hope for a time to a frightened populace. But also like the rest, that was all it did. Births wound down that November, and after that, there were no more.

THE GREAT INFERTILITY CRISIS was heartbreaking, ominous and perplexing, but it was at least comprehensible: Something was preventing human conception, the only question was what. What happened a year later, however, not only wasn’t comprehensible, it shattered any rational concept of the universe and humanity’s place in it, and presented a formidable challenge even for irrational concepts.

The first reports came in from New Zealand and the Russian Far East: Parents, guardians and other caregivers awoke that February twenty-first to find all of the children in their care gone, from every home, hospital, hotel, dormitory, campsite, vehicle or anywhere else they’d been. Westerners at first dismissed it as another terrorist child abduction scheme, albeit on an unprecedented scale. But as the progressing dawn revealed children missing across eastern Russia and into Australia, it became clear that something far more dreadful than terrorism was unfolding. Finally, with the western Pacific islands devoid of children and the phenomenon sweeping through a confused and helpless China, it became clear that humanity was experiencing a mysterious and unprecedented catastrophe.

The hours people had left with their kids were filled with panic. From Asia westward around the globe to Hawaii, parents locked doors, barricaded homes, and built hasty wood, concrete, brick and cinderblock walls. They also armed themselves as fully as they could. Gun enthusiasts who’d spent years amassing arsenals to protect their families from their governments now mustered with confidence to protect their children from something nobody understood. Many armed the children. Some caged and shackled them. Many took them into their own beds, clutching them tightly or lying on top of them. Others sat by their kids’ beds with loaded shotguns. Those who could took their families to places they hoped would be secure—secret locations, family or community bomb shelters, even caves.

In the United States, those with the right connections took their families to the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, or secret Continuity of Operations facilities. Most military families sheltered at home on their bases, which were on high alert. Some families who could afford it, and some who couldn’t, boarded private planes and fled west, hoping to outrun the phenomenon. A few fled east, hoping to pass through the phenomenon too quickly for their children to be affected.

States activated the National Guard to help police patrol residential areas. County and municipal officials argued about whether to herd children together to make them easier to guard, or keep them separated to make them harder to abduct. Different communities put different measures in place. Hospitals increased security as fully as they could. The Army and Marines were deployed to the national borders, the Navy and Coast Guard patrolled the shores, and the Air Force watched the skies, even though nothing unusual or suspicious had been reported.

None of it made any difference. That February twenty-first, all of humankind’s children vanished. As dusk gave way to night successively around the world, everyone in the vicinity of children slept, even those who never slept at night. And as night gave way to dawn, adults and teenagers awoke to find the children’s rooms, beds, cots, couches, sleeping bags, nurseries and cribs empty. Orphanages and pediatric wards held only teenagers. (Obstetrics wards were already deserted—there hadn’t been any births for months, nor any sick infants for a year.)

There was no discrimination: Children of all races, religions, social and economic classes, as well as all levels of physical and mental health and ability, were gone, including those suffering from debilitating conditions or injuries. Children who’d already been kidnapped had vanished, too, baffling and outraging the kidnappers or terrorists who’d been holding them.

Nothing else had changed—doors and windows remained locked, barricades remained in place, fallout shelters remained sealed. And not only had no one seen anything, but all devices that could have recorded what happened—satellites, security cameras, video and audio recorders that parents set up in homes—had gone out, effectively falling asleep at the same time as any potential witnesses. Those patrolling affected areas on foot had just had time to lie on the ground as they fell asleep. Those patrolling in vehicles reported that their vehicles had shut down and stopped just before they, too, had fallen asleep. Unable to raise the officers, dispatchers had sent backup, but as the backup officers had approached, their vehicles, too, had shut down, and they’d fallen asleep.

In areas without children, anyone intentionally staying awake had had no trouble doing so. Aboard vehicles that carried no children, passengers didn’t even know anything had happened until they learned about it later. But aboard vehicles carrying children, everyone had slept, as had most people in the areas the vehicles were passing through. Drivers awoke to find their cars, buses and trucks on roadsides or in parking lots, their planes safely on the ground at the nearest airports, their trains on the nearest sidings, and their boats securely at anchor. And all of the children who’d been aboard were gone. Investigators interviewed drivers and passengers, along with radar operators, air traffic controllers and railroad dispatchers, and they reviewed radar logs, ships’ logs, and flight and locomotive data recorders. They learned nothing.

THE CHILDREN WEREN’T all that were missing. Cellphones remained wherever the kids had left them, but other electronics, stuffed animals, clothing, dolls, toys, games, books and art supplies were gone, as were many family pets. Some parents found cold comfort in this: Perhaps whoever or whatever was behind it all had some regard for their kids’ happiness and welfare. Parents of handicapped children in particular hoped it meant their kids had gone on to the proverbial better place. Others dismissed it as the securing of provisions to keep the children pacified while they awaited whatever fate was in store for them. Some parents felt that someone had tried to erase their families, but photographs, home video, social media profiles, and family and public records hadn’t been affected. Whatever it meant, for many families, it was twisting the knife: Not only were their kids gone, but beloved pets were gone as well, along with many items that should have been precious mementos.

Second-guessing, finger-pointing and conspiracy theorizing began immediately, even though everybody knew that whatever had happened had been too quick even to make sense of, let alone to prevent. Also beginning immediately was debate over whether the children’s disappearance was related to the Great Infertility Crisis, or the two were just a devastating coincidence. But it didn’t really matter: Related or not, they were a one-two punch that apparently condemned the human race to extinction in less than a century.

Someone has destroyed us, President Sutherlan concluded. We may never know who, how, or why.

3

THE WORLD COLLAPSED into madness and despair. For a year humanity had struggled to maintain hope that the infertility would be solved, only to awaken now to find itself suffering from a new and even more grievous wound: The children it had had were gone. The youngest people left, teenagers and a few preteens, were probably exactly what they soon came to be called: the Last Generation.

There were millions of suicides—parents who didn’t want to go on with life, and nonparents too shocked to do so. Millions more felt paralyzed; they sat in their homes doing nothing and staring at nothing. Wailing became a common background din.

Purely human problems now took center stage. People’s worst tendencies at first showed through, then grew prominent, and finally came to dominate interactions. Tempers were short as individuals gave in to any irritation they felt, increasingly seeing their fellow creatures as nothing but objects for taking out their frustrations. Chauvinism—racist, sexist, ageist, political, religious, cultural—became almost expected. Numerous marriages failed. Many had already been strained by the Great Infertility Crisis. Others had seemed stable until the partners discovered that their kids were all they’d had in common.

Restless teenagers and twentysomethings turned to abandon, and nightlife around the world became nightly riots that killed hundreds each month and left a fortune in property damage. Meanwhile, activists who’d always been peaceful turned militant, while those who’d already been militant turned brazen. All now literally fought for their causes, and all accomplished the same thing: additional bloodshed and destruction. Gangs took over large areas, and didn’t hesitate to take out any thugs who encroached. Occasionally thugs took out gang members. After a few weeks, police gave up searching for the children, leaving that to other agencies so they could get back to keeping order. If they didn’t, they feared, humanity would die out even more quickly than it now appeared destined to.

But departments found their ranks reduced: Officers struggling with the disappearance of their own kids ignored superiors’ pleas to return to work. There was little choice but to adopt a triage approach to crime. Most robberies came to be ignored, few rapes were investigated, domestic violence got little attention, and even some murders were allowed to slip through the cracks. Certainly nobody cared any longer whether anybody littered, smoked, or picked up dog shit, except for busybodies, and some of them were beaten, stabbed or shot just for being annoying. Police brutality increased, too, as impatience overtook discipline.

Most scientific research was abandoned and projects were shelved as all possible funding was diverted to the infertility. Ten days after the children vanished, the last space station crew came down, and no one went into space again. Specialists pleaded that research under weightless conditions might prove invaluable, but nobody listened, and after six months, the abandoned station ran out of fuel for orbital control. A year and a half later, most of it burned up in the atmosphere; the rest fell into the ocean.

Scammers, ever alert to new opportunities, offered comfort. Mediums stopped claiming they could talk to the dead, and joined psychics in claiming they were in touch with the missing children. Distraught parents happily swallowed tales ranging from a heaven where angels attended to their kids as they basked in the presence of a loving God, to a hell where the kids were continually punished—nibbled on by demons, or hunted relentlessly by sexual predators—as they collected the wages of their and/or their parents’ sins.

People sought escape now more than ever, and substance abuse skyrocketed. World views had suffered an unimaginable blow, and many people no longer cared what they ate, drank, smoked or injected. Drug overdoses became the leading cause of death. Cigarette makers found demand for their products surging. Alcoholism was rife, and drinkers began entering liquor stores and grabbing bottles, or entire cases, and simply walking out with them. Once that got started, the stores were emptied quickly, and many closed permanently. That left the brutal new market to those who could handle it: organized crime.

Food shortages developed as distribution systems broke down. Eventually many supermarkets reopened, but scaled down significantly from what they had been, both in quality and in variety. Meanwhile, regulatory enforcement crumbled. Food ingredient and nutrition labels became vague, then disingenuous, and finally, dishonest.

The fact that nobody’s children had been spared did nothing to stop governments and other groups from blaming the disappearance on their traditional enemies. New conflicts were ignited, old conflicts were reignited, and current conflicts were escalated.

Because the disappearances had reached North America last, quite a few people blamed the United States—even some Americans thought that kidnapping all the world’s children could have been their own government’s latest boneheaded idea—and for months, terrorists struck American embassies around the world, along with favorite tourist spots, even though no tourists were there.

In reality, the disappearance was thoroughly humiliating for all of the world’s security forces, and in the United States, the sense of violation cut particularly deep: The nation’s children had been plucked effortlessly not only out of Americans’ homes, but out of the nation’s most secure facilities. Among Washington’s many suicides, scores took place in government buildings, and a good dozen of them were in the Pentagon.

WITH FEW PEOPLE WORKING and shopping, financial systems collapsed. Stock markets fell in a steady plunge that one observer likened to seeing the North Tower of the World Trade Center come down in 2001. Economies that relied on child labor were, of course, dead in the water, but by autumn, unemployment worldwide surpassed fifty percent, and governments feared that society would break down entirely. Some rushed public works programs into operation. But people weren’t out of work because there weren’t any jobs, they were out of work because they no longer cared. What difference does it make? a Florida bar patron said. We’ll all be gone in a few decades.

We’re goin’ the way of the dinosaurs! a drinking companion said.

Hey, maybe this is what happened to them! another said. Maybe all their young-uns just up ’n’ vanished, too!

A number of companies went bankrupt almost as abruptly as the children had disappeared. The children’s products industry enjoyed a peculiar surge as parents rushed to replace items that had vanished along with their kids, so they might at least have second-hand mementos. But that bubble burst quickly, and too many investors had had the foresight to dump their stocks as soon as the disappearances began. The industry never stood a chance.

Children’s organizations shut down immediately. Elementary schools were no longer needed. A few years later, middle schools closed, and a few years after that, high schools. Higher education hung on for a while, but sooner or later many colleges closed, while those that survived shrank, continuing in a much-reduced fashion with the adult students that colleges always have, and eating into their endowments. Melvin Franklin was able to keep his professorship at Rutgers University for a decade before he was forced to retire at fifty-five. By then, while the medical school in Newark remained, Rutgers’s satellite campuses had been closed for years.

As more and more buildings became empty, arson grew popular—for looting, for profit, for striking at enemies, or just for fun. All too soon, this spread to buildings that weren’t empty. With fire departments as short-staffed as police departments, smoke seemed always to be in the air, and every block seemed to have at least one burning or burned-out building. Homelessness rose dramatically, partly from buildings being burned, partly from marriages failing, partly from businesses failing, and partly just from people’s losing their minds. Within a year, the poverty rate nearly doubled, hitting almost eighty-three percent worldwide. In the United States, more than a third of the population were among the poor.

Military enlistment increased as teenagers sought order or responded to piqued aggressive tendencies, and the concurrent increase in conflicts cost many young lives. But after a decade, few teenagers were left to enlist, and forces began to shrink. Some nations tried to fill out the ranks by compelling twenty- and thirty-year-olds into their services. But the tide had definitely turned, and soon the militaries were top-heavy with officers. They’d been using drones and other technology more and more anyway, so they simply accelerated that pace. Thus waging war got a lot cheaper, and again, conflicts swelled.

There was little outcry. Much of the concern for world peace had disappeared with the children. Also gone was most of the incentive to build a better world, so pollution jumped. Garbage piles on city streets became a crass gauge of people’s apathy. After fifteen years, even leaded gasoline and paint were sold again. With no one left to inherit the planet, people felt, they might as well trash it. Even those who hated to see Earth further ruined could no longer argue that future generations’ wellbeing was at stake. Anyway how could people be expected to worry about plants and animals, or even their own health, when their children were gone? Who cared about the damn planet?

AND FOR THAT MATTER, who cared about its inhabitants? As the population declined and the citizenry threw up its hands, politics suffered profoundly. Voter turnout plunged, and organizing grew nearly impossible. For once, candidates were hard to find. A future seen as finite should have favored those most interested in the moment, but that turned out to be fewer people than anyone had supposed. Apathy was now the order of the day, and after a few election cycles, the United States House of Representatives could no longer sustain four hundred and thirty-five members. Several reapportionments followed, and by the time the spheres arrived, membership was fewer than three hundred. The declines were even greater in state legislatures and on county and municipal boards.

Around the world, the political disarray created numerous power vacuums. There were dozens of organized coups, and occasionally, restive populations toppled governments on their own. Even nations that had been stable saw opportunists crawl out of the woodwork to become strongman leaders or dictators. Conditions worsened in those nations, but others paid little attention. They had their hands full with their own problems.

In the United States, the power-grabs were less grandiose but more insidious. The political parties put into motion events that eventually ended primary elections, as well as a daring scheme to make all elected offices partisan. Ten years after the children vanished, all partisan candidates were chosen at nominating conventions, as they had been in the nineteenth century.

Congress also streamlined the process for getting—and keeping—itself elected. Deadlines were consolidated: All party nominations were due sixty days before the November elections, and all candidates had to file by the preceding June first. Candidates could still run as independents: they had only to file on time, pay their fees, and present the required number of signatures. But that number was inflated to an unrealistic ten percent of registered voters. For independent presidential tickets, it was ten percent from each state, and the totals had to equal or exceed ten percent of the national electorate. In an effort ostensibly to combat election fraud, Congress also required voters to register by the preceding June first—five months ahead—or sit out the November election.

State lawmakers mandated similar requirements not only for state offices but also at the county and municipal levels. Numerous smaller measures were put in place, too, and American democracy began dying a death by a thousand cuts. Five years before the spheres arrived, Congress, dominated by Paul Nolend’s party, passed the Campaign Finance Privacy Act, making all campaign financing information private. President Thorpe vetoed it, but was barely overridden in the House and soundly overridden in the Senate. Her party regained the House in the next election, but with the Senate still in Nolend’s hands, there was no hope of repeal.

The nation’s divisions had been stark even before the children vanished. Now, partisanship ensured that they would stay that way.

AND YET, EVEN AS THE bedlam spread, some people began picking up the pieces. The human landscape had been violently altered, ramifications would come to light for decades, and the pain, if it ever subsided, would never go away. But after a few months, the shock had begun to wear off, and people found themselves craving normalcy. Mostly they began returning as best they could to their previous activities. In part, they sought the comfort of the routine. In part, they didn’t know what else to do. Many looked for solidarity with others, and prized what they found.

Eventually, enough people went back to work for the economy to limp forward. Governments stumbled ahead, the rich went back to hoarding money, and religionists went back to forcing everything into their belief systems. As a raw new normal began to emerge, even garbage collection resumed. People had begun to realize that all they could do anymore was age, and while forever heartbroken, they were tiring of despair, and even developing interest in wrestling with their plight. Without children, at least, they didn’t have to worry as much about the future, they could live more in the moment. Long-term concerns shifted to the dotage of the Last Generation: How would they manage when they were frail, and there were no younger people anymore to help them? The enterprising began working on robots and other technology for use when the time came.

There were other salutary developments as well. One was a mammoth increase in record-keeping. Anticipating the demise of the species, historians went to tremendous lengths to assemble thorough, accurate accounts of humanity, in hard copies as well as digital, in every known format and language, plus specially devised mathematical languages, stored with keys in climate-controlled vaults around the world, all in case one day visitors came from another planet (if they hadn’t already), or after tens of millions of years, a new intelligent species arose on Earth.

For scholars, the crises were fascinating. Sociologists were intrigued by the sheer array of reactions. Shock and heartbreak, of course, were rampant. Parents and others who’d loved their children, like Lola and Melvin Franklin, were devastated. Both blamed Melvin’s subsequent heart problems on their kids’ disappearance. At the other end of the spectrum were parents who hadn’t wanted their children and had dared even to wish they’d never had them. Now they were riddled with guilt and a merciless sense of loss. Many of them, too, committed suicide, and many who didn’t refrained only so they could be around if, per chance, their kids ever reappeared. Longing for that reunion became the centerpiece of many lives.

Psychologists were surprised by the number of people who couldn’t accept that humankind might not be the pinnacle of evolution after all. Many of these people, too, committed suicide. But any sense of humanity’s prominence, wellbeing or security was gone. No one could dispute any longer that the universe, or at least the Earth, contained something beyond human acuity. Maybe it wasn’t even sentient. Maybe the kids had been removed like fish grabbed out of the ocean by pelicans of which the fish otherwise have no awareness.

For believers, it was a foregone conclusion that the crises were divine—such mystifying events couldn’t be anything else. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, they chanted. No, it isn’t, nonbelievers agreed. It isn’t evidence of anything.

Fundamentalists flocked to the notion that the kids had been Raptured—proving not only the validity of that doctrine, but once and for all, the existence of God.

At last the Great Tribulation has begun! televangelist Bartholomew Terry announced on his fledgling TV, radio and online show The Truth Shall Set You Free. At last we know when Jesus is coming back: Seven Februaries hence, He will begin His thousand-year reign on Earth before the Last Judgment! And after that, all who love Him will be united for eternity in His glorious presence! The twenty-nine-year-old firebrand would ride the crises to national stardom.

But no conception of the Rapture had only children being taken up; some didn’t include children at all. Moreover the disappearance hadn’t been preceded by the signs promised in the Bible—the Lord’s descending from heaven with a shout, the voice of the archangel or the trump of God. Nor had the dead in Christ arisen. These matters Terry lumped somehow into the Great Infertility Crisis. This is how He’s decided to end the world: stop us from having any more children to fall into the sin and degradation that our waywardness has perpetrated on Earth, and then take our innocent children on to heaven to get them away from that very sin and degradation! And leave us here—not to despair, but to continue to serve Him while we look forward to that joyful day when all who love Him will be forever with Him!

Other clerics could only scour their holy books for guidance. Preachers tried comparing the children’s disappearance to the Tenth Plague of Egypt, the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, and King Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents. But even the most faithful found these associations forced and unsatisfying. That left pastors little choice but to adapt, so they began repurposing scripture: A New Testament exchange about taxes was reinterpreted as a metaphor for life, with Jesus’s words, Then the children are free, prophesying the disappearance. And the Savior’s well-known admonition, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God, became an advisory that when the time came, God would take the children first.

Other believers put the disappearance down to some vague plan that Satan had put in place long ago, and that sinfulness had made impossible to evade.

A number of the faithful were badly disillusioned and turned against God: He, She or It had either taken their children or allowed them to be taken, so now they disavowed the godly life, along with any stewardship of Creation. Some took out their frustrations on animals. Others littered, girdled trees or marred nature in other ways. Some vandalized houses of worship, or joined secular vandals in overturning gravestones.

But the children’s disappearance also brought many people to God, anxious to join in prayer with those whose faith had remained steadfast. Usually they were welcomed. Occasionally they were denounced as hypocrites, possibly the very sinners who’d invited the Lord’s wrath to begin with. Still, no one was discouraged from prayer, and among the many who prayed, some closed themselves off for weeks, emerging only to eat or to use the bathroom. Some didn’t emerge even for that.

Religion also contributed casualties: Some believers felt that humanity had no business inquiring into the infertility and disappearance, and that trying to counter them, or even just to understand them, was sinful. Several researchers were killed, and several search parties were massacred.

Outside religion, the only parallel to the disappearance that anyone could think of was the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and the mediæval legends behind that tale were thoroughly re-examined for clues. But humanity hadn’t hired some entity to get rid of a pestilence, refused to pay it, then had its children taken away as a penalty. No other ideas made much sense, either, and nobody had any evidence for or against any of them. That left little but speculation.

Most people felt sure that the disappearance had been some kind of abduction, and space aliens were the general favorite culprit: An advanced civilization had taken humanity’s children. How? Who knew? As for why, ideas were borrowed from science fiction: repopulating their dying world, or perhaps something akin to human beings’ taste for veal. Whatever it was, apparently newborns needed to be in perfect health. But why stop humankind from having any more children?

Armchair scientists noticed that the abductions had come to light as February twenty-first dawned around the world. Perhaps the infertility, too, had begun at dawn on the previous February twenty-first. If so, might the sun be to blame? Might it have developed some new form of radiation that first had caused mass infertility, and the next year—with Earth at the same point in its orbit—had vaporized those without sufficient estrogen or testosterone in their bodies? But surely that would have left residue of some sort, and it wouldn’t explain why human beings were the only animals (apart from pets) that had been affected, or what had happened to the children’s belongings.

Another idea was that the kids had been transported through time—to the future, presumably, since there were no accounts of one-point-seven billion children suddenly appearing in the past. Maybe the children were needed in the future, or maybe they’d been taken there to protect them from something in the present. Or maybe they’d fallen through some kind of dimensional rift that for some reason wasn’t open to teenagers and adults.

Maybe they’d slipped into an invisible realm or a parallel universe. Maybe they’d gone to a hidden land, like Shambhala, if not in the Himalayas, then on some island or even continent that, despite humanity’s ransacking of the planet, had somehow remained undiscovered. Or maybe they’d vanished into the Earth. Skeptics scoffed, but didn’t hesitate to support new expeditions to search all of the world’s caves. At least a good deal of speleological knowledge was obtained; Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, for example, was finally fully mapped. Lava tubes, too, were thoroughly explored. But no sign of the children was ever found.

THE EVENTS REMAINED as perplexing as they were devastating. But whatever had happened, extinction was now on the horizon, and the disappearance was reckoned the worst calamity to befall humanity since the Black Death killed half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century. And it came to be called the Final Calamity, in part because it seemed to portend the end of the human race, and in part because nobody could imagine that anything, in the little time humankind had left, could be worse.

The Final Calamity was instantly the most fraught occurrence in history. Yet thirty years later—when those who’d been in their teens, twenties and thirties were in their forties, fifties and sixties, the chaos had settled into a volatile rut, and a million giant alien spheres came out of space and landed all over the world—people were no closer to understanding it, or the Great Infertility Crisis that had preceded it, than they ever had been. Three slim clues were the best anyone could do:

The first was the simultaneous disappearance of family pets and the children’s belongings.

The second was the way parents and other caregivers had fallen asleep that fateful night: They’d felt induced, and they’d slept unusually deeply, with dreams that were unusually vivid, though no different in nature than their usual dreams. And though they’d awakened in hell, they’d felt wonderfully refreshed. But even this was just anecdotal. There was no evidence—no radiation, or anything suspicious in people’s blood, the water or the air.

The final clue was that a few teenagers had vanished, too, while a few younger children remained. It didn’t take long to figure out that the missing teenagers were those who hadn’t yet entered puberty, while the younger children who remained were already in its throes—those with early-onset puberty, the precocious ones. And they, too, were unable to conceive.

4

THE YOUNGEST CHILD left was Angelo Morhouse.

Morry suffered from an extraordinary case of early-onset puberty: He was shaving at seven, and felt like a freak. He hated the ridicule he got from other children and fervently wished he could wipe them out. And he rejoiced when they were gone, though he was sorry his baby brother was gone along with them. But if the other kids’ ridicule had been difficult, his own father’s derision had been unbearable. Fortunately that changed when Morry was identified as the youngest person left: Suddenly Hank Morhouse recognized his son’s destiny. That’s why Morry has early puberty! he thought. God has destined him to be the last man on Earth!

Immediately he began educating Morry about the role God intended him