Disclaimer: THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT CONDONE ANY SEXUAL ACTIVITY INVOLVING PERSONS UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE.
Part One
The big rock rolled slowly, it’s motion having never stopped since its birth in the malestrom of the infinite; shaped like a large potatoe, it’s journey has taken unimaginable time and now it’s end was only minutes away. A streak appeared, sparked by heat of the yellow giant, a trail of gas signaled the path of the rock, it’s forward spin altered slighty as it passed the gray dusty satellite and finally it’s fate was revealed. The planet was unique in all the universe, no other had allowed life to grow, in both plant and animal, microbic and cellular. In the long age of the universe by comparision, this blue planet was still an infant and what would pass in the next few moments would change the world over many, many times and destroy one species now and other more dominant, millions of years later.
The rock heated quickly under the eye of the sun. Ice and gas expanded, opening cracks and as it hit the atmosphere of the blue planet, it broke apart. A small piece skipped across the outer limits, like a flat stone across a lake, it’s journey would take it far, far away. It would pass through the unexplainable and unknown, a destiny still not written. It’s larger part now fell to the ground at more than twenty thousand miles per hour. The air infront of the rock became super heated, burning oxygen at more than three thousand degree’s. The rock itself was primarily nickel and iron, it’s size roughly six miles in diameter and ten miles long and weighed in at more than thirty million tons. An instant before striking what is now the Yucatan Pennisula, billions of gallons of ocean water were evaporated and this was an Extinction Level Event.
The rock struck with an impact comparable to a billion atomic bombs, only a supernova could compare to the incredible release of power. The shockwave’s expanding pressure felled every tree and exploded every living creature within a thousand miles in every direction within the first full second, 10 billions pounds of ejecta was blown in the troposphere removing the sunlight. A tidal wave a thousand feet high moving at a thousand miles per hour raced outward and anything alive both planet and animal incinerated as force released set the lower oxygen and nitrogen rich atmospere of fire. The reign of the dinosaurs ended within a minute of impact.
It was commonly called “Riddler’s Curse”, the disease plaguing the Earth. Named after the astronomer Geoff Riddler of the British Astronomical Society, who first spotted the incoming body. An asteriod, no bigger than your average couch smashed into Norway, it’s fiery path caught and uploaded on You Tube for millions to see. An asteriod who visited Earth sixty million years prior before being tossed off into space had returned and like its brother; it too carried the end of the world. It was April 19th, 2017.
Riddler’s journey through space had taken it the farthest reach of the our universe, it it were able to speak, could it describe the gamma rays passing through it, the quasars manuervering it? Could it explain the event horizon of NGC 1600, the largest know black hole as it passed by? It was a journey of 60 million years, beyond the unexplainable only to return in the shrould of death.
Riddler’s impact was felt within hours. All along the path of the falling asteroid fell ill, followed by death. With the first 48 hours almost no one was alive within a hundred miles of impact. The World Health Organization was overwhelmed as panic insued and thirty million people evacuated Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. By the end of the first week thirty bio level Four labs worldwide had samples of the contagion and they were baffled. Outside living tissue Riddler was a crystalline but once in contact with living tissue the crystal mutated. Like a snowflake melting on your skin Riddler absorbed into tissue, what baffled the scientists was they couldn’t determine between bacterial infection or viral. They couldn’t crack the code and the world paid dearly.
Within the first ninety days of Riddler’s return, twenty percent of the world’s population was dead. War and fear killed another billion, when China decided North Korea was going to be a problem, North Korea decided to take South Korea with it and as many Chinese as they could kill. China decided not leave Russia alone and Russia replied in kind. For the first time since WWII, nuclear weapons were used on human populations. It would 70 years before anyone heard or saw a living human from Asia. Men took the biggest hit, mortality hit as high as 70% among the male population, again no factors could be found why or how it affected the male population.
Now nature’s diseases added to the butcher’s bill, there was no way to bury the dead fast enough. Cholera, Typhoid, Influenza and just for the fun of it, a healthy dose of Ebola brought the human race to the brink. Starvation helped but humanity hung on. By the time the year 2035 came, the population of planet Earth was less than one hundred million by best estimates. The whole world fell back two centuries. Only a few cities had electricity, they became the new population centers. Communication was available between Paris, Cardiff, and Prague; in the United States it was Hamilton, Montana, home of the Rocky Mountain Bio Level 4 Laboratory.
As humanity hung on by it’s fingernails, Riddler’s final curse was revealed. Sterility. Anyone still alive had survived by still unknown immunities. There was strong theory this was a weapon of mass destruction sent by a yet unannounced alien lifeform but in any event the clock was indeed now ticking. Without reproduction, within at most a hundred years, humanity would be wiped free of Earth.
Yet there was a glimmer of hope, faint and whispered. It was discovered some men had survived completly untouched. Sterility effected women differently, young women, girls were capable of concieving but only to age of seventeen, or twenty, the lastest. Sperm motility testing took months at Rocky Mountain and the other communicating cities but of the sixty thousand men tested in Hamilton, twenty six were selected. Hamilton and the surrounding area had at least four hundred thousand women, compared to the men, it was now a woman's world. Like monks on pilgrimage they, the "Breeders" would be sent out in pairs to impregnate all they could. The repopulation of the Earth would be left to these men, these lucky men.