Chapter 1

The meteoroids arrived on February 22, 2043, and they pounded us for ten days.

We knew their arrival meant the release of a lethal virus that would kill close to ninety-five percent of Earth’s population. The small pockets of humanity that survived would be surrounded by the detritus of our society’s technology.

We knew the national electrical grid would fail. Since most of our technology required electricity, it would not be usable. The survivors would scrounge what food remained, but they would have to start growing their own food or starve. They would have to defend themselves from the feral humans and animals that surrounded them. Our former society would be dead and it would never be restored.

We also knew there is always hope for the future.

The Ark Foundation was founded in 2026. The Foundation spent the next seventeen years preparing the Ark to cope with the aftermath of the meteoroids. Clara, I, and our friends who made up the Ark Foundation’s leaders did not fully understand Bob and Sharna’s capabilities when we started work on the Ark. We were afraid the US Government would intervene and take the Ark away from us. We knew that if that happened, the government bureaucracy would at least double the length of time required to complete all of the necessary preparations. We also knew there was just barely enough time for us to do everything that needed doing, and that assumed the US Government did not interfere.

We decided to create a cover story that would give the rest of the world an explanation of what we were doing and at the same time make them think we were a bunch of conspiracy theorists who were off our rockers. The cover story worked perfectly and it was mostly true.

People’s acceptance of the story gradually evolved over the next seventeen years. Almost two years before the arrival of the meteoroids, we notified the government of where to look in our sky to see the approaching meteoroids. What their people observed became public knowledge. The public no longer believed us to be conspiracy theorists who were off their rockers.

Eventually the meteoroids arrived and to the misfortune of the world’s population, everything we knew, believed, and predicted came true. The meteoroid strikes destroyed our civilization’s infrastructure and released a deadly virus into the atmosphere. The effects of the virus became apparent three days into the bombardment. Over the next two days the flu-like illness became a deadly epidemic. It took ten days for the meteoroid shower to pass Earth, and by the time the meteoroids left us behind, the majority of Earth’s population was dead.

That ten-day period of bombardment has been referred to in the Ark by many names. The Week of the Meteoroids was the most common. Clara and Sharna liked that name, so it became the official name of the disaster. I personally preferred Ten Days of Hell, but I eventually accepted the name Clara, Sharna, and the majority of our people preferred.

Several weeks before the meteoroids arrived, we finished moving about one million people into the Ark, which brought our total population up to one point four million people. When the meteoroids started pounding the surface, I had over a million scared people to deal with. They had a choice: stay in the Ark or go out onto the surface where the meteoroids were landing. No one wanted to go outside.

The really scared people hid in their rooms and the rest gathered in their level’s park to comfort each other. Thank God, only a few people really flipped out to the extent they had to be physically restrained and sedated. After surviving a half-day of meteoroid strikes, almost everyone calmed down. Once people calmed down, we could reason with them.

In one sense, we were lucky. The meteoroid shower had sped toward Earth with a circular front that was over seven hundred thousand miles in diameter according to our astronomers, and the distance from the front of the meteoroid shower to its rear must have been at least forty million miles. Earth’s diameter is less than eight thousand miles, so the majority of the meteoroids missed Earth. It was only a very small percentage of the meteoroids that pounded our planet and the other planets in our solar system.

I said we were hit by the smaller meteoroids, but smaller is misleading. The effect of a collision between one of the meteoroids and Earth was a function of the meteoroid’s mass and velocity. Our scientists measured the approach speed of the meteoroid shower at about thirty-seven miles per second. Only a few of the meteoroids that burnt their way through our atmosphere were projectiles an eighth of a mile or more in height, width, or depth. When one of those small meteoroids hit the Earth, it left a very large crater in the ground or seabed. Bob and Sharna had managed to shift all of the really large meteoroids that were a half-mile or more in height, width, or depth so they would miss Earth. Those were the planet killers, and if one of those immense monstrosities had hit Earth at that velocity, the Earth would have been shattered and would have become an asteroid belt.

During the first day and a half of the bombardment, the majority of the world’s television and radio stations continued to broadcast their scheduled shows, but a few stations were knocked off the air by equipment damage. Most of the stations continued their broadcast; however, most of the regular TV shows were constantly being interrupted by the stations’ Breaking News flashes.

We sat in our rooms in the Ark staring at our TV sets mesmerized by the news reports coming to us from other parts of the world. They were being hit as badly as we were. In a few places, the impacts were worse than those in our local area.

After a while, it was clear the reporters fell back into their old habits for each new Breaking News flash seemed like a rehash of the preceding Breaking News flashes. We got tired of listening to the reporters trying to find a new way of saying the same thing they already said. If the situation wasn’t so serious, I would say the Breaking News flashes were just a joke.

The television and radio reports gradually came to a halt over the first three days of impacts as the stations’ broadcast equipment was destroyed or people stopped showing up for work. At some point, it must have become evident to the reporters and other employees that their stations would shortly be out of business and they would not be picking up a paycheck for putting their lives at risk to provide articles and video footage of the meteoroids destroying our civilization. The last of our local TV stations signed off the air by the end of the second day of the bombardment. A few of the satellite news broadcasts lasted another day, but then they were gone also. In many instances, the stations signed off before the broadcast satellite they used was hit by a meteoroid.

I’m undecided as to why the remaining stations went off the air during the third day. It may have been because of equipment damage, but that was also the time the virus started to make our people sick. Perhaps all of the stations’ employees quit or called in sick or perhaps their satellites had been hit by meteoroids. Surprisingly, a few of the satellites survived the meteoroid storm. These satellites might be useful to us until their orbits decay and they burn up reentering the atmosphere.

For those of us who weren’t interested in the news, there were our Silos’ long-range surveillance cameras. For the most part, you couldn’t see much detail as the cameras scanned back and forth over Sacramento, and its surrounding areas. But, you did get a general idea of what it must have been like to be outside of the Ark.

On occasion, there would be an immense flare of light as a meteoroid struck the surface and then the impact site would glow until the fires ran out of fuel. Somehow it seemed ghoulish or macabre to watch, ooh, and aah over the spectacular impacts that were vaporizing people.

We started inoculating people during the morning of the third day of the meteoroid bombardment, February 24, 2043, which was the second full day of the bombardment. The people inoculated were just the initial cases of people displaying the virus’s symptoms, which was later just called The Crud. We would have inoculated everyone before then, but Bob and Sharna’s vaccine was not effective until after you contracted the virus. That and the vaccine’s very short shelf life were the primary reasons why hospitals had no vaccine to inoculate the general population.

Heading to an inoculation station was the first thing a resident was supposed to do when they started feeling the effects of the virus. Our care workers went to our sickie’s rooms and they were supposed to confirm that a sick person had received the vaccine during their initial visit to a new patient’s room. I always suspected mistakes were made in the process, especially after the second or third day of caring for the increasing number of very sick people. I suspect those oversights resulted in a number of our residents dying needlessly.

Our volunteer caretakers had done their best in a very difficult situation, so I didn’t mention my suspicions to anyone other than Clara. On the morning of the fourth day of the epidemic, my Advisory Council, I, and all of our family members were part of the group caring for our sick residents; although a few of us were already sick and had received their inoculation, but they were still able to function.

The level of fear increased dramatically over the first four days of the epidemic; which was the third through the sixth day of the bombardment. I would say beyond reason, but being afraid of something that can kill you is a very reasonable fear. Our sickies were consumed by the thought of not surviving and what made their situation worse was, they had no control over the outcome and nothing to distract their thoughts. Our sickies allowing fear to control their actions was a problem I didn’t have to deal with – Thank God. No matter how scared they became, our sickies were too weak to get out of bed. All we could do was remind them that regardless of how bad they felt, they had received the vaccine and they would recover. For the most part that was a true statement, but we did have over eighty thousand deaths.

After the fourth day of the epidemic, about a third of our caretakers were in bed with the virus, so those of us who were able to move around the Ark focused our efforts on keeping everyone hydrated. We mixed the powdered sugar-electrolyte that Mary’s people had stocked for when things got really bad with water. We fed this flavored solution to everyone who was sick by having them slowly sip it. Those who drank it too fast heaved it up almost as soon as it hit their stomachs. We didn’t worry about giving anyone solid food for that came right back up as soon as it hit their stomachs. You can last for months without food, so we didn’t bother trying to feed the sickies who were too ill to feed themselves. Besides, food didn’t become a priority with our sickies until the last few days of their illness, and by then, they could get to a cafeteria and feed themselves.

By the fifth day of the sick period, more than half of our residents and caretakers were sick with The Crud. That is the day that Clara, I, and most of our senior people got sick. Before the meteoroids arrived, I asked Bob to impose a compulsion on everyone for them to go to the clinic and be vaccinated as soon as they felt the effects of the virus. Bob told me he would make sure Clara and I received an extra strong compulsion. It was as strong as he said it would be.

Moments after I realized I had The Crud, I was on my way to the clinic to be vaccinated. I didn’t even think about not going, I just finished helping the sickie I was with and headed for the clinic. When I linked with Clara to let her know I was now one of the sickies, I found out she would be joining me in the vaccination line shortly. When I saw her at the end of the line, I went to join her, so we could talk while waiting for our turn at being vaccinated. Thank God Bob added remain calm to everyone’s compulsion.

By the sixth day, about eighty percent of our population was sick including most of our caretakers. That was the start of the really bad period of the epidemic. Those of us capable of helping, even though we were still sick, cared for those who weren’t able to move. That included people who weren’t initially caretakers; almost everyone who was able to volunteer did so if they could move around. But, we did have a few self-centered individuals who failed to step forward. With the exception of two people, all of the Congressmen were among that group. Things got really bad when the number of mobile caretakers dropped below the number needed to properly care for those of us who were too sick to move. That was when we had to prioritize our approach to aiding our sickies.

Our patients were still having frequent attacks of both diarrhea and vomiting and they were too weak to get out of bed. We had come to the realization that cleaning up a patient was a time-consuming, labor-intensive task. Since the patient dirtied themself again with five or ten minutes, it was also a meaningless waste of our time and energy. Keeping our patients clean was an impossible task, so we quit trying to do so.

Those of us who had recovered enough to be barely mobile were very weak. We had to conserve our energy and limit the time we spent with each patient. It was all we could do to just verify they were still alive and get some of the sugar-electrolyte solution into them. We had learned that our sickies would vomit, piss, or shit in their beds by the time we got to our next patient. It wasn’t pleasant for anyone. We knew hunger and lying in your own shit, urine, and vomit for a few days wouldn’t kill you. We knew dehydration would kill you, so we focused our limited amount of time and energy on keeping everyone hydrated. Yeah, leaving our patients filthy bothered me then and it still does, so I guess that is why I’m so defensive about it.

By the seventh day of the illness, I was as sick as the rest of our people. What that meant was, I was too weak to get to the bathroom and too weak to clean myself up. I learned from personal experience that lying in a bed with urine, puke, and shit isn’t pleasant. My Bond Mates who still had the strength to move around took extra care to keep everyone in our household as clean as possible to the best of their ability; but keeping us clean was impossible.

By the evening of day nine, which was the fourth day of Clara and me being ill, we were able to get out of bed and drag ourselves into work; although we had to constantly remain close to a toilet. We were extremely weak, sick as dogs, and weren’t up to moving around and helping those who were still too sick to care for themselves. However, from our offices on Level 16, we were able to help coordinate the efforts of our caretakers and the efforts of those who were still strong enough to move the remains of those who died of the virus to our temporary morgue.

Clara, I, and our Bond Mates had gotten sick, but we were not as sick as the average resident and we shook off the effects faster than many did. Clara and I decided our quick recovery must have been a result of the enhancements Bob and Sharna had made to our bodies back when we first met. The same was true of our Bond Mates and children who had also been enhanced. Bob and Sharna validated that belief when we discussed it with them.

I’m not sure enhanced is the proper word for our kids. Bob told me, he and Sharna only had to make a few minor changes to the kids. He said most of the enhancements they made to me and my Bond Mates had been at the genetic level. That is why they had inhibited our fertility while making the changes and why it took several years to complete the enhancement. Since our enhancement was at the genetic level, most of the traits we had been given were inherited by our kids.

By the end of day twelve of the sick period, the meteoroid shower had passed Earth and most of us had recovered from the worst of the virus’s symptoms. We were too weak to bury the bodies of our deceased. But, we were in lockdown, so we wouldn’t be able to do that until after we returned to the surface.

Before we went into lockdown, we all knew that some of us would die of the virus. Clara and I asked Bob and Sharna to create a huge room at the Transit Station end of each Silo’s tunnel that could be used as a morgue. During the period of the illness, those of us who were strong enough moved the physical remains of our deceased to the morgue. Bob and Sharna would absorb the heat energy from the room several times a day, which turned the entire morgue into one huge freezer. Once again, Mary’s people had done their job for we had and needed the body bags, gloves, gas masks and other protective supplies they had stocked for the purpose of handling bodies. Unfortunately, we ran out of body bags before we were ready to open the outer tunnel doors.

In retrospect, I still view the meteoroid bombardment as ten days of hell. The two weeks of caring for ill people was no joy either, and I hope I never have to live through something like the bombardment and illness again. We couldn’t stop the bombardment, but fortunately, the vaccine and our plan for vaccinating people displaying signs of the virus worked. Bob’s mass compulsion forced anyone displaying the symptoms to immediately and calmly go to our clinics to be vaccinated, and to then go home and go to bed. That compulsion was one of the things that saved us from an overwhelming riot. If Bob’s compulsion had not caused the residents to remain calm and voluntarily isolate themselves from others, we might have been faced with a mob demanding that they be allowed to leave the Ark. A second thing that saved us from a riot was most of the people in the Ark were just too sick to create a problem and those of us who weren’t sick as dogs were too busy caring for those of us who were.

The virus’s official death toll within the Ark was eighty-eight thousand three hundred and twelve people. That number was arrived at by subtracting the number of people alive at the end of the illness from the number alive prior to its start. The number is close enough, but I know a few of those deaths were due to other reasons and there were a number of births during that period that weren’t considered.

Two of the things that kept our death toll that low were: first, everyone didn’t get sick at the same time, and second, we received the vaccine and stayed hydrated. The net effect of our planning was, there was always someone around with the necessary equipment and supplies to provide at least a minimum of help to the sick. One unusual aspect of the virus was that those who got sick the earliest seemed to be the ones who were sick the longest. Maybe they were just more susceptible to the virus and were thus more severely affected; but, that is just my unsupported opinion.

The people who kept our utilities going were the real heroes. When people first started getting sick from the virus, the utility workers set up beds in their work areas. No matter how sick they got, there was always a few who somehow managed to keep our electrical, air conditioning, and water purification systems working. If any of those systems had gone down, I don’t think any of us would have survived.

During the ten days of the meteoroid bombardment and the weeks that followed, a number of noteworthy items occurred.

Someone suggested that we mark the start of our creating a new civilization by restarting our calendar. Clara, I, and our Advisory Council thought the suggestion was a good idea. February 23, 2043 AD (Anno Domini) was the first full day of the bombardment, so we restarted the calendar on that date and February 23, 2043 became February 23, 0001 AF (After the Fall).

The Ark Foundation’s lead lawyer, Harry Farrell was the only member of my Advisory Council that still had only one Bond Mate. He kept telling us that he was just old fashioned and Belinda, Clara’s mother, was more than adequate for him. One day the two of them were on caretaker duty at one of the residences that was filled with sick, single ladies. That was when Harry and Belinda met Amy Gray and that was the end of Harry being old-fashioned.

Like Harry, Amy had been a lawyer before the meteoroids, but both of them claimed their shared profession was not the attraction for them. According to Harry the attraction was instantaneous. He claims that when his and Amy’ eyes met, they were both frozen in place and speechless. Later, they both said it was an instantaneous, gut-level attraction between the two of them; he wanted her as his woman and she wanted him as her man. Harry and Belinda took Amy back to their residence and held their Joining Ceremony several weeks later. Lawyers are generally thought of as heartless people, so two lawyers in love proved that lawyers weren’t heartless; they just walled-off their feelings from the rest of us while practicing their profession.

Our Finance Department’s Vice President was one of The Crud’s fatalities. I had appointed him on Harry’s recommendation when Harry resigned to take over the Public Relations Department, which he later turned over to George Lyle. I didn’t know the man personally at the time I appointed him, and as I got to know him, I didn’t like him. I don’t know why, but he just rubbed me the wrong way. However from what I could tell, he was very good at his job and I was more than satisfied with his performance. I was at a loss for a replacement, but Clara suggested that we give Mike’s Bond Mate, Betty, a shot at the job. I didn’t know it until then, but Betty had a Master’s Degree in Finance; although I did know she was a part-time CPA before the meteoroids.

Without a news source to tell us how bad the bombardment was, we were left with counting the shockwaves of the meteoroid impacts and watching the surveillance cameras.

Some enterprising individual created a shockwave measurement system. He glued five identical bowls to the floor. Four of the bowls had a line painted on the inside surfaces. The bowls were labeled from ‘2’ to ‘6’. Bowl 2, the bowl with no line, was filled to the rim with water. Bowl 3’s line was a quarter of an inch below the rim, and he filled that bowl with water up to the line. The water level was reduced by a quarter of an inch in each of the three remaining bowls; Bowl 6’s line was a full inch below the rim.

If the meteoroid strike created a shockwave and no water was spilled from Bowl 2, then the shockwave’s strength was recorded as a Level 1 shock. With a Level 2 shock, water was spilled from only Bowl 2. If the shock spilled water from Bowls 2, 3, 4, and 5, then it was recorded as a Level 5 shock. We only had a few shockwaves that spilled water from Bowl 6, a Level 6 shock. We suspected those impacts were big meteoroids that hit close to us. For those who helped record the shocks, the time immediately after a strong shockwave was filled with stopping the water from sloshing around in the bowls and refilling the bowls to their appropriate level with water. The system worked well, except for the times when two or more meteoroids hit at almost the same time. I think the shockwave monitors just ignored shocks that happened before they were able to refill the bowls with water.

Our camera watchers provided an indication of just how bad things were on the outside. Someone in the Angels Camp Silo called the Security Guards in their Control Center and reported what appeared to be movement off to the west. The Security Guards could see something on their monitors, so they passed the report on to the other three Control Rooms. The Control Rooms switched the cameras to manual mode and pointed them off to the west. They used the cameras at maximum zoom to scan the western horizon for movement. By tweaking the focus, the Angels Camp and Drytown silos were able to identify the movement as a tall wall of what appeared to be debris that was moving due east toward their Freight Yards. It took a while before the Auburn Control Room could make out the debris wall, and when we did, it seemed to be heading northeast toward Sacramento and our Freight Yard. The Chico Control Room never saw the wall of debris on its camera.

At first, it made no sense. Debris doesn’t move of its own volition, and it would not be moving in different directions. The debris was approaching Angels Camp from the west and it was approaching us from the southwest. The closer the wall of debris came to our three Freight Yards the shorter the wall seemed to be, which also made no sense. The Angels Camp and Drytown silos reconfirmed the movement was still directly to the East, while Auburn still saw it moving to the northeast.

The wall of debris broke up when it hit the buildings on the outskirts of Sacramento. As debris and water splashed into the air, we could tell that the debris wall was actually a fast moving wave of water that was slowly collapsing on itself as its energy was expended. When we realized it was a wave, tsunami was the first thing that we thought of. That made sense and fit what we had observed. The wave must have been huge when it hit the coastline and passed over San Francisco and Oakland. Only an immense wave could pass over the hills to the east of Oakland and still reach Sacramento.

After watching the water recede on its way back to the ocean, I checked our local topographical maps. The hills to the north and east of Oakland were about a thousand feet high. For a tsunami wave to get over those hills and spread as far as it did, it had to be at least three thousand feet high, or possibly more, when it crossed the coastline. That was when I realized we would find no survivors in the coastal cities that were within ten miles or so of California’s coastline. If we wanted to restart the fishing fleet, then we would have to build our own boats; I doubt many boats survived.

We had known the effects of the meteoroids on our world’s surface would be bad, but it was actually worse than we expected in California. Clara and I asked Bob and Sharna to reconnoiter California and tell us what they saw, especially in the area around our location. They went out twice in the ten days the meteoroids pounded the Earth’s surface, and they made more special purpose trips after all the meteoroids had passed our planet.

Using the information they gathered in their first three trips, Clara, I, and our advisors started to piece together a picture of what Bob and Sharna had seen, and we interpreted that information to determine how we and our plans for returning to the surface should be changed.

The task of getting everyone into the Ark and settled in their rooms had not allowed us to engage with our new residents on a personal level. It had been like controlling a herd of cattle even though we had done what we could to interact with those we met as individuals.

The demonstrators had coined the term Arkian as a derisive term for those of us who lived in the Ark. After we went into lockdown, some of us adopted Arkian as a symbol of our solidarity with each other. The virus and our caring for each other completed the process of solidifying us into a group. It also resulted in us treating each other as individuals and started a number of new friendships. Clara, I, and our Advisors wanted to reinforce that solidarity by using Arkian instead of Resident when referencing those of us living in the Ark and we wanted to promote personal relationships between the Arkians and us as individuals.

We had also detected the start of an Us against Them attitude among our newer Arkians. We wanted everyone working together, not fighting each other. We had to find a way to get everyone to cooperate. We quickly created a means for how to do that. We decided that our Arkians should be closely involved in the creation of our new society, which meant they needed more information about what was happening in the Ark and an opportunity to contribute.

My Bond Mates Linda and May had set up a TV station on Level 16 of the Aurora Silo before we went into lockdown. At the time, Clara, I, and our Advisors, believed it would be a useful addition for documenting the history of our new civilization. We hadn’t appreciated how useful it might become in communicating information to our fellow Arkians.

The Week of the Meteoroids had ended about two weeks before everyone had recovered from the effects of The Crud. During the weeks prior to the arrival of the meteoroids, Linda had filmed me making a few brief announcements and then released them as Public Announcements using the TV network.

Now, I was standing in front of their TV camera and it was time for me, as the Owner and Co-President of the Ark Foundation, to inform my fellow Arkians of our current situation. I was nervous for it was my first live, Ark-wide presentation. My advisors were calling it my State of the Ark presentation after the speech the President used to give to Congress about the nation. Explaining what everyone had already seen, heard, and experienced was not important, but explaining what those things would mean to us in the future was very important. Our Arkians needed to know where our Ark Society was headed, if we expected them to help us reach our goal.