All the trapped greenhouse gasses in the Arctic have been released, and the resulting warming has caused the end of the world. Rain, a spunky bicycle messenger from Boston, and Quentin, an emaciated computer dweeb are traveling through the wastelands on bicycle trying to make sense of it all. That is the general premise behind Heavy Future, an online serial novel that someone (I can’t seem to figure out who) has been writing for a while now.

I can’t know for sure, but the best information Google could find, showed that something “broke” around Christmas, something that would take a very long time to fix. North of the Canadian shield, deep under the now ice free Arctic Ocean was a time bomb that had finally gone off.

For eons the bodies of anything that died in the Arctic had been sinking to the ocean floor. This “marine snow” was made up of microscopic plants and animals, as well as every whale turd, and fish scale that managed not to be eaten on its way down. A hundred thousand years of corpses, all entombed in ice at the bottom of the ocean.

This great bio matter landfill did what any landfill did, it produced methane. Because of the great pressures, and cold temperatures the methane got stuck in little crystal cages called clathrates. A giant lattice storage network of what is in essence natural gas. I am sure if we could have figured out a way to burn it we would have.

Wikipedia informed me that methane is 21 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and for millennium this stuff had been building up in giant quantities. It could have been fresh water from Greenland’s melting ice cap that fucked up some vital current. It could have been the Russians submersibles planting their stupid little flag to secure oil drilling rights for the motherland. Hell, maybe it was the vengeful spirits of all those dead polar bears. But just as the Christian world was celebrating the birthday of baby Jesus, tiny bubbles started to appear around the North Pole.

Something had happened at the bottom of the sea that caused the first of these crystal prisons to break. Methane molecules started to spill out and rise. Imagine if the pyramids of Giza were made of sugar cubes, each delicate structure relying on the one next to it for strength and support. Now imagine taking a fire hose to the thing. What started as a trickle of bubbles was soon a torrent.

The ocean appeared to boil, satellite pictures showed vast swaths of the Arctic frothing with activity. Some jerk on FARK had the brilliant idea to photoshop the Goatse guys asshole into the picture. One more thing to get excited about on Digg. CNN ran stories, but no one really did anything about it. What could they do?

Meanwhile gigatons of methane poured into the air in a matter of weeks. As much carbon was released into the atmosphere in a couple of days as was released in the last 50 years of burning coal, oil, and gas. Al Gore couldn’t save us now.

I stumbled upon it this morning and I have to say, wow! It is dark, creepy, full of ecological messages, chocked full of science (and science fiction), and is getting pretty exciting. Because it is a serial novel you have to wait for each chapter to come out, and judging by the comments, the author doesn’t post very often, but when he/she/they do it is pretty good stuff. The other thing I like is that either though careful thought, or lucky guessing the novel seems to be mirroring current events pretty closely.

It’s hard to see the forest through the trees; it’s even harder to see that forest when you’re a microbe living on the root of one of those trees. That was the problem, the world was so big, and we were so small. We tried, we really did. Scientists, when they could get the funding, studied the skies, the oceans, the earth. It was like taking microscopic pictures of a whale, take enough and you might understand what you are looking at, but it is going to take some time. Time we didn’t have.

We had the basic ideas down. Global warming, ocean acidification, the hole in the ozone. We could see the wounds, we even had a general idea of the weapons that caused them. Our SUV’s, our coal power plants, our sparkling lights, our fields full of genetically modified food. All the things that made our lives wonderful, happy, and free.

Before the news went off for the last time I got to see how it started. The dollar had been falling for weeks, as oil prices climbed skyward. For the first time in my life, one Canadian dollar was worth one US greenback. We joked that the Looney had suddenly become “real money.” Here in America we were busy pouring our tax dollars and sons into the black hole that was Iraq. The sub-prime mortgage debacle had banks on edge, and the markets went up and down hundreds of points a day for no apparent reason. I remember it was in the mid 90’s in the last week of September. I couldn’t remember a time is had been so hot so late in the year.

The scene was set for a great performance. None of us were disappointed. Saudi Arabia decided to switch to the Euro, throwing the world oil markets into a whirlwind. The rest of OPEC quickly followed. Ironically the markets in the US went up that day, it was the calm before the storm. When the markets opened the next day the stock market plummeted over 85%, dragging most of the worlds markets down with it. There was no real reason for any of it, people just got spooked. No one would lend anyone money, banks closed their doors to prevent runs. They even hauled Alan Greenspan out of retirement to try and calm people down. Nothing worked. It was chaos.

Trillions of dollars were suddenly gone. People’s 401ks, there nest eggs, their vision of a happy suburban future, vanished in a cloud of monetary magic. A handful of traders threw themselves out of windows, 1920’s style, but the most popular form of stock broker suicide was a loaded gun in the private corner office. We had become that kind of society. So isolated from each other, by the internet, email, cable TV, suburbs, that even in our final moments we didn’t want to be around others.

I am not sure I have ever seen anything like this before. Serial online novel with an science fiction and ecological bent. Good job to whoever is putting this together, keep up the good work. And ohh by the way, KEEP WRITING CHAPTERS! I simply must know what happens to Rain, Quentin and all the other characters!

My only complaint would be that their is not enough of it! I really want to see how it ends. Will they figure out how to stop the run away global warming, is the earth doomed. Go get hooked on this great read.