The Dead Sun

When it happened, everyone knew at the same time.

The scientists received no warning, they found out when the rest of us did: when everything went dark and everyone felt that first premonitory chill.

Talking heads on the TV told us that the sun had frozen. They provided no further explanation: it had just turned off. They could still see it, if they used the right kind of telescope, but it was dead. Static. No heat or light emanated from its still, smooth surface. The sun was declared to be—as it remains to this day—an immense marble, providing us with our gravitational centrepoint and nothing more.

That old god which gave us life had finally died of old age.

The first major reaction was rioting. People desperate to escape their terror smashed windows and stole all the creature comforts and technological luxuries they could never afford in their pre-apocalypse lifetimes, attempting to smother their fear with consumption. Cruel Darwinism killed them off when the first snap of frozen wind ripped across England three days into the darkness, flash-freezing almost everyone outside in a matter of minutes.

By the end of the first week, global temperatures had dropped by thirty degrees, and deadly minus-twenty winds haunted city streets like vengeful wraiths desperate to add numbers to their ranks.

By the end of the first month, temperatures had dropped fifty degrees globally.

The electricity, telephone, and TV infrastructure, to everyone's surprise, maintained itself. So, we said goodbye to friends and family we knew we would never see again, while the TV and the radio told us everything would be ok.

The water pipes, on the other hand, froze almost instantly. Legions died of dehydration.

My pathology preserved me: suffering since childhood from severe obsessive compulsive disorder, I have a pathological fear of drinking unfiltered tap-water, and I would purchase bottled water in bulk five or six times a year—rationed properly, my stockpile could have easily lasted me six months. Still, when the sun went out, I decided to fill my bathtub just in case.

Unfortunately, many with the forethought to fill their bathtubs still died: their homes just weren't well insulated enough for them to survive the perpetually dropping temperatures. Even those of us with well insulated houses struggled to keep our bedrooms above freezing—we spent those weeks and months following the sun’s death huddled in corners, wrapped blue-lipped in blankets, burning our skins with the surrogate sunlight of cheap halogen-bulb electric-fireplaces which had been sitting unused in our attics for years.

In their desperation, some started small fires in their own homes for warmth, and many of those fires raged out of control and burned down the houses of their masters. I sometimes wonder how many chose to die gloriously in the searing pain of their reckless infernos, and how many attempted to escape the fires only to die a protracted, shivering death on the streets outside.

Eventually, the army started going door-to-door, collecting those who weren’t yet dead.

Survivors were taken to local military compounds and then transferred to one of the many underground bases secretly dug-out beneath the country at the behest of people who we now thank for their paranoia.

Long whispered about in conspiracy-theory circles, these subterranean labyrinths—Deep Underground Military Base (or D.U.M.B.) units—were designed as vast, cavernous life-support machines for the human race. Self-sufficient, multileveled underground cities for a pocket of survivors to live, die, and reproduce in—forever, if need be.

Nobody rescued was ever denied entry to one of these subterranean arks. The end of the world was not a temporary situation that could be exploited by the wealthy and powerful. It was a racial rescue mission. Humanity itself was at stake.

Despite the openness of the admissions, the D.U.M.B.s made no further attempts at radical egalitarianism.

In each D.U.M.B. there were luxury suites on the lower floors, with boxier, more brutalist—though far from uncomfortable—mass-housing on top. It was more psychological than cynical—the D.U.M.B.’s design team believed that a slight inequality would improve the stability of the compound in the long run. Even a bleak parody of traditional society, they reasoned, was a better long-term plan than social experimentation or militaristic rule. A slight social stratification was thus designed and built into the D.U.M.B.s; haves and have-lesses, but no have-nots.

In the end, so few of us made it into the bunkers that this concern was rendered irrelevant.

In total, 548 of us made it to our bunker by the time rescue missions were abandoned, accompanied by 67 military staff.

Designed with a capacity of 1600 each, England’s 138 bunkers were intended to preserve a collective 0.5% of the total English population in a very worst case apocalypse scenario.

It's clear now that we were over-optimistic about how many of us would make it past the end of the world.

Despite our small numbers, life in the D.U.M.B. has been comfortable and many of us have found our niches as cleaners, babysitters, therapists, researchers, teachers, and agriculturists.

Much of this is unnecessary. The bunker, designed to be operable by just one man, could do most of our more physical work automatically, and even much of our intellectual work could be outsourced to computers. But we do it ourselves anyway.

It’s not that we need to keep ourselves busy. We just don’t want to relinquish our passions to machines.

If life has not been truly perfect at the end of the world, it’s only due to the D.U.M.B.’s stifling tropical humidity.

This sole uncomfortable aspect of our underground sanctuary, we are told, is unfortunately also one of the most vital aspects of our life-support system: the damp air traps and circulates excess thermal pollution produced by the two small nuclear reactors that power the base—our compound’s twin hearts—staving off the freezing outside cold like veins pumping warm blood through an immense stone body. Nothing goes to waste.

A year to the day of the sun going out, the immense crashes began.

Each explosive earthquake caused the bunker to shake for hours, and the walls would pulse with a low, ominous droning long after the shaking had stopped. The rhythmic vibrations made the warm, wet stone of the tunnel walls feel like the inside of a great intestine.

After a few days, the scientists called us in to explain: without our nearby star, the atmosphere itself was freezing and crashing to the planet's surface as immense shards of frozen glass. Upon impact, these city-sized shards of crystallised nitrogen would ring like tuning forks for hours, and those vibrations would pass down into the Earth, agitating our refuge.

An older scientist had requisitioned one of the many snow-globes from the D.U.M.B.’s Cultural Preservation Archive, and he carefully placed it on the table while his younger colleague explained this to us, only to take off his shoe and dramatically smash the ornament’s brittle plastic dome as the younger scientist reached his explanatory crescendo.

The visual aid struck everyone watching as strange at the time, but it seems quaint in retrospect.

My own personal tunnel-psychosis was minor.

My obsessive compulsive disorder found a home in the sterile stone and steel hallways of the D.U.M.B., and I spent most of my evenings indulging my compulsive desire for orderliness by decorating empty luxury rooms with reproduction old-world artefacts from the Cultural Preservation Archive.

Despite its name, the Archive preserves no originals. It’s an immense fraud's-library of perfect fakes—a treasure trove of copycat cultural artefacts bookended at one end by a dozen hand-painted reproductions of Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise,’ and a dozen reproduction Shrouds of Turin at the other.

I would shop for objects in that supermarket of simulacra and spend weeks arranging them around a room until I reached perfect object harmony. At which point, I would lock the door, break the lock, requisition a new room, and start fresh.

Others fell deeper into the comfort of madness.

Deep in the D.U.M.B.'s hydroponic jungles a group of women—nurses on the surface—hunt and forage in isolation, following a throwback tree-worshipping matriarchal paganism. A cult of pseudo-religious gynaecologists and cultist midwives, they have risen to become the only doctors most of the base’s female population will speak to. Many women in the tunnels now wear the small heart shaped lockets that signal their allegiance to the sect, even if they are not full-blooded members themselves.

The forest nurses are just one of many. The D.U.M.B.’s less-visited spaces all have their mysterious worshippers. Religion is flourishing at the end of the world.

Today I asked to go outside, mostly out of curiosity.

Apparently, in the two years since arriving, I’m the only inhabitant of the D.U.M.B. to have ever asked. For the civilians, the D.U.M.B. is now the only world they can conceive of. The scientists have no desire to experience the world outside beyond the numbers and graphs on their computer screens.

A few hours after asking, I’m met by a twitchy, abrupt biologist who explains, only once, the mechanics of the airlock, and helps me into what looks like a barely updated Victorian diving suit.

Wrapped in the rubber and metal exoskeleton, feeling like a giant bug, I unseal the airlock’s outer door and leave the hive.

Outside, an immense shard of opaque white ice looms over the landscape, its sharpest point curls over from miles away, pointing almost directly down onto the D.U.M.B.’s entrance like a mountain-sized icicle. This atmospheric fragment obscures the sky completely, and is illuminated from below by the D.U.M.B.'s Surface Light system—twenty-thousand upward facing spotlights designed to be visible as a massive sheet of light, from both the Soviet and Euro-American space-stations.

The piece of dead sky is awe inspiring, if only for its sheer magnitude, but I’ve looked up at that pre-apocalypse sky my whole life and I want to see beyond it.

As I walk away from the D.U.M.B., petrified white grass crunches underfoot. The little photoluminescent watch-face on the back of my hand says I have six hours of oxygen left. The shard is only a few miles long. I can probably clear it.

Eventually, I see a sliver of the sky beyond the shard. It’s everything I could have hoped for: Swirling galaxies bleed around the edges of the frozen atmosphere, distant stars blink morse-code messages as galaxy-wide clouds of space-dust pass in front of them. But I need more than a sliver. I want to see all of it—the entire, unblemished beyond.

I check my oxygen levels: just over three hours. It’s taking longer than I thought. Continuing now would take me past the point of no return.

Above me, heaven is blacker than black, punctuated by slashes of liquid colour—oil on a wet road but stretched out forever—pinpointed by billions of scintillating little shards of diamond.

Between the Pollock splashes painted across distant nebulae, glowing satellites rotate slowly through the emptiness and unnamed comets shoot by at impossible speeds. And things in groups buzz about around one another in little dancing spirals, flashing and dancing schizophrenic rhythms like little alien fireflies made of broken neon signs and slow-motion lightning. I want to watch them, but I can’t. I keep looking around the colours and movements rather than at them. I’m pulled to the sky’s blackest spaces.

The sky is littered with dozens of black squares of dead, empty space. It seems our star was not the only one to die. Millions of stars must have gone cold to leave such huge black stamps of darkness. But not just darkness: total emptiness. True and utter void. Vacuum as a chasm. It’s impossible to describe, but it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s looking down at me and asking me to crawl inside it; wrap myself up in it. Cold and pure and I can never leave. It’s a canvas as a work of art, the space between the sublime.

I think to myself, half-mad: It was worth the world ending just to see this bright new sky.