The sky is still mostly dark after two years. Every now and again there’s a gap in the dust cloud so a thin beam of light will make its way down to earth.

Recently I managed to catch one and felt a real ray of sun on my skin for the first time since it happened. Prior to that we’d been using tanning beds and UV lamps that were commandeered by citizens and makeshift governments.

For us here in what was, or perhaps still is northern Italy, it was a citizen led effort.

We have lost 80 percent of the global population of humans so far but things are beginning to have some semblance of normality.

We have electricity stations where you can go and charge a radio. So we do have basic services and are able to communicate, but the infrastructure that allowed most digital services was globally interconnected with some software dependencies living in data centres that lost their power supplies before the event.

Though most of our new and old governments do still have computing capabilities daily services for ordinary people are gone. Most ordinary people are also gone.

Many weren’t even taken by the asteroid or its hellish aftermath.

Civil order in most places collapsed immediately when we were told that it was approaching too fast to try and do anything to deflect it. Blowing it up would merely cause Little Iris to split into multiple, apocalyptically large pieces.

————————

5 days before Little Iris hit we were informed in a simultaneous global newscast by NASA along with various other national and transnational space agencies.

They said that we always tracked and knew the whereabouts of 90 percent of space debris over 1km in size, but they’d missed this one due to its strange elliptical orbit. A mere oversight.

As she hurtled in, Jupiter’s gravity swung her in earth’s direction. 13 kilometres wide, travelling at 12 kilometres per second. Big enough and fast enough to punch straight through the atmosphere without any loss of size or speed.

Once Little Iris made impact with the ground, we all felt shockwaves. The impact was 10,000 times more powerful than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated. Little Iris smashed 30km all the way through the Earth’s crust, almost to the mantle, leaving a crater 100 km wide on the Brazilian coast. People on land as far away as 1000 km were left with sunburn from the brightness of the vaporising flash.

A tsunami made its way out across the Atlantic, as far as the Indian Ocean and the Norwegian Sea.

While Asia was spared the tsunami, it bore the brunt of hot debris as the earth rotated. When the asteroid was vaporised its molten corpse exploded into the sky with a good portion of the earth’s crust, falling back down as millions of red hot meteorites.

————————

And here we are. The survivors who have witnessed untold horrors.

Horrors which have now passed into our collective memories as we try to move on.

But it won’t be so easy. To wipe our minds of what we are willing to do to one another when the thin veneer of civilisation collapses into a desperate scramble for survival.

Broken glass, crashing cars and days and nights filled with a backing track of screams. People crying out in vain for rescuers who would never come.

The primal screams of those committing what would have been crimes, and the shrill terrified screams of their victims. Gratuitously violent acts of looting, robbery, rape and sadistic murder, in every town and city across the globe. Skylines around the world glowing orange with man made fires.

————————

After the violence. After the destruction that came by sky and by sea we witnessed a period of dark cooperative stillness as the remaining governments tried to restore order in places where significant numbers of people had survived.

Many of us were starving and living among the ruins of our towns and cities. In the places where there was little destruction like here in Locarno we were living a strange existence, surrounded by the lifeless trappings of modern living. Cookers, microwaves and mobile phones that were useless bulky artefacts without the electricity and gas that would bring them to life. objects without a soul, they were like corpses, resembling the chaos in every street where dead bodies lay, or hung.

They were either emaciated from starvation, or ripped to pieces in the early days, perhaps impaled and always bloody. I will never forget the sight of bodies with mouths gaping open and stiff with rigor mortis before they went soft again with decay.

The aura and smell of death filled the air. People had been relieving themselves everywhere, in full sight of others. This was the return of waterborne diseases as filth flowed into the wells, rivers and lakes. Typhoid and Cholera induced diarrhoea took a further one billion people after the big impact.

To think of how we complained about our technology before this. Before we were so unceremoniously hauled back into the past. Perhaps we’d have been more thankful had we had to experience a world of chaos, lacking convenience and overrun with long forgotten diseases. A world without running water.

————————

Afterward - Margaret Mead on civilisation

“The first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed…..in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.”