Ragnarok

Ragnarok

It’s been six weeks since we last picked up a signal from outside the dome, five months since we got anything other than automatic distress beacon. Not sure just how well the others are taking it all: the suicides have stopped, and one of the Doc’s tells me we’re expecting a couple of new additions in the months ahead.
Even in the face of death, life finds a way.

We’ll never know what started the war; who fired the fist missile that burned almost every corner of the Earth. Not that it matters: no one won, everyone lost. There may be a few survivors out there huddled in underground bunkers, waiting for their supplies to run out. We’re lucky in that the hydroponics can sustains us almost indefinably, and some of the others are talking about going outside to hunt before the dust cloud finally reaches us.

The dome was built to simulate a potential colony on Mars, but it looks like being the last holdout for the entire human race. A little over two hundred scientist, engineers and technicians, crammed into an artificial cave dug under the Antarctic ice. Layers of insulation keep the cold out and stop the ice from melting, providing enough protection that we won’t have to worry about radiation when the dust cloud arrives.

Sometimes, back before the missiles started flying like rice at a wedding, I used to go up onto the ice and watch the Aurora Australis, the Southern Lights. Colours, un-named by man, danced from horizon to horizon in utter silence.

Those that have been topside since the war have said that the aurora’s strange, messed up.

One of the engineers, a Norwegian named Thorlief, said that it was Ragnarok, the end of the world. One night, while drunk on one of the strange brews that have been concocted to help people deal with what has happened, he told me the myth:

Ragnarok will be preceded by the Fimbulwinter, the winter of winters. Three successive winters will follow each other with no summer in between. As a result, conflicts and feuds will break out, and all morality will disappear.

The wolf Skoll and his brother Hati will finally devour Sol and her brother Mani respectively, after a perpetual chase. The stars will vanish from the sky, plunging the earth into darkness.

The earth will shudder, so violently that trees will be uprooted, and mountains will fall, and every bond and fetter will snap and sever, freeing Loki and his son Fenrir. This terrible wolf\'s slavering mouth will gape wide open, so wide that his lower jaw scrapes against the ground and his upper jaw presses against the sky. He will gape even more widely if there is room. Flames will dance in his eye and leap from his nostrils.

I’ve never been religious, but that sounds a lot like what’s happened to me: one last, mad war, plunging the entire world into years of winter. The sun, hidden by a veil of dust and ash, as good as eaten by a wolf.

Suffice to say that my Norwegian drinking friend is in a very philosophical mood, doing his best to drink himself into oblivion. He hasn’t been the same since he went up to the observation deck during an ice storm. He came down, hours later, babbling on that he heard the howl of a wolf on the wind.

I could use a smoke, but I’ve only got a few packs left, and they’re like gold dust. Every cigarette I have is irreplaceable, so I’m saving them. Word on the grapevine is that some people are going to extraordinary lengths to get cigarettes. One story is that some of the guys in the genetics department are trying to re-create a tobacco plant from a cigar.

Not the craziest story I’ve heard, but it’s worrying that this is the best some of the greatest minds the world has ever known are so in need of a nicotine fix that this is how they choose to spend their time.

Don’t have much to do myself: not a lot of call for the head of communications when there is no one to communicate with outside the dome. I helped set up an internal radio station, but beyond the odd bit of work needed to keep that running, I spend most of my time with Thorlief.

Not that I can keep up with him, drink for drink: I’ve never seen anyone consume so much alcohol in such a short space of time.

Lot of time down here to think; too much, you might say. Unlike a lot of people, I didn’t lose any real family: my mother died when I was young, and my father was career military until cancer got him a few years back. No brothers or sister, no other close relatives. Never married, no kids, no real social life outside my studies, and then later, work.

That’s probably why I agreed to this gig: I didn’t have anything to lose by agreeing to spend two years under a layer of ice. Most women in their late twenties would go stir-crazy in a place like this, but it feels more like home to me than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.

The social scene here is somewhat lacking, but improving since we converted an unused storage room into a bar, complete with dance floor and sound system. There’s not a lot of music to pick from, but some of the guys in admin are talking about setting up a library system, with people being asked to donate their private collections.

Tomorrow should prove interesting: I managed to talk Thorlief into signing up for a run out to another arctic research base in one of the snow-cats. Spending two days in close coffins with someone with a body like Thorlief’s would be some women’s idea of heaven, but I’m trying to get him to go a day or two without drinking.
He’s one hell of a gifted engineer, when he’s sober, and we need people like him at the moment.

Not sure how I feel about going over the ruins of other bases: as far as we knew, there’s no one else left alive out there, which makes this akin to grave robbing. If not for the fact that there are so many things we’re going to need and have no other way of procuring, I’d never have agreed to this. But as someone who has a lot of time on my hands, and who knows how to drive a snow-cat, it’s expected of me.

My heads thumping: a reminder of last nights drinking session with Thorlief. Wish I could take something, but all medication is strictly rationed. We have the ability to reproduce some drugs, but most require resources we have no access to. That’s another reason I agreed to go on the trip tomorrow: we are desperately short of things like insulin, and there are people here who need stuff like that.

I need to sleep. Proper sleep, not passing out drunk again like most nights. But the beds here are uncomfortable, and they’ve turned the heating down to minimum to try and conserve energy. We run on geothermal, so we’re not going to run out for a very long time, but replacement parts are going to become harder to jury-rig as time goes by.

Yet more things added to the phonebook sized list of things that Thorlief and I have to look for.

Wish I could sleep, but there’s something wrong with the ventilation system. Must be some sort of problem in the pipes, as it’s making the most god-awful noises, driving everyone nuts. The tech boys say they’ve gone over the entire system, and can’t find anything wrong.

I don’t know, maybe I’m going as crazy as Thorlief, but it almost sounds like the howling of a wolf…

The End