On board was Mark Stafford, Studio One anchor. He was not an engineer he was little more than a news anchor. Down below was the blue oceans and green vegetation and white clouds of Earth, but it was deathly silent now. Platform One kept its orbit, round and round for days and weeks and months.
After a few days Mark Stafford began shutting down non-essential systems. Turning off monitors and computers that had made broadcasting from space something cool and workable. Now that there was no audience much of this was little more than junk.
The cities had long since burned. Nobody fought the forest fires anymore either. Mark watched for planes duping red fire retardant, but there was nothing. If any broadcast was picked up below the computers would alert Mark, but there had been nothing more.
Over the days and days he noted that some lights were automatic. Street and traffic lights that were solar powered, but even these failed. Maybe a wire shorted out, maybe animals gnawed on them, maybe the batteries no longer held a charge. Even these winked out one by one. No one was fixing them, that was for sure.
Mark might not be a scientist or an engineer or a real astronaut but he knew that something was waiting down there. He had been too frightened to use the escape pod to go back to Earth, afraid the madness or virus or cloud would turn him crazy too. He needed to be able to hear a human voice again before he would get in that capsule for a one-way trip.
Whatever had happened, he knew the human race had been nearly wiped out. There would be signs of civilization, towns with people would have lights wouldn't they?
Solar panels on Platform One failed here and there, or space debris punched right through them. For whatever reasons, even his orbiting bunker was destined to become silent. He had already covered all the major things in plastic sheets and tarps because of a water leak. Water dripped from the center outward, from the life support and other systems downward toward the end of the “arm” where his escape capsule was docked.
A tarp at the bottom was holding back the water but it was now as deep as a decent swimming pool. Condensation made it rain inside the habitats, even after he had closed the hatches, the seals gave out after a while and leaked anyway. Even over just a matter of months technology failed, even something as important as the seals on supposedly airtight hatches.
Mark wondered. Maybe somewhere down there a small collection of sane humans was going to rebuild civilization from scratch. Where? Someone down there needed to broadcast something, the satellites he had links to would alert him. He didn't have a long time to wait, he needed to hear that “go signal”, time was not his friend.
Mark also knew that Platform One's orbit was decaying. That last collision with space debris had made the decay worse. It was only a matter of if the life support or the orbit would last longer.
Still he waited. He needed a sign that humanity still existed and that the madness virus or whatever it had been had died out.
He listened. The spectrum of radio broadcast was so quiet the satellites might detect something as faint and unlikely as a CB radio. Mark did not know if CB radio waves would even pass the high atmosphere, or if the station was low enough to make that question moot.
He would have to go soon. He would have no real control over where he landed, he would have to am in the general direction he wanted to go and just see where it took him.A madness had descended upon the human race. 2+2 no longer equalled four. A person could be a boy or girl, depending on how they felt that particular day. Nothing was anything, and everything was nothing. There was no right or wrong or right and left. Even “Righty tighty, lefty loosey” was a heresy to the madness of nothing. How dare right be tight and left be loose. It didn't matter what was true, only what people wanted it to be.
Who is to say that beating up a clerk and stealing boxes of cigars was wrong? Who is to say that punching and beating up a cop was wrong? Only self-defense was wrong, and we'll kill you to make it so.
It only seemed sudden at the end but with months alone, Mark realized that the signs had been there for years and years. Only a third of the people even knew what the branches of government were, only a quarter had known there were 3, and a third didn't know any of them. A simple math question such as 15-7 was now taught as a ten-step process, ensuring that no kid learned anything useful. Smart kids who could answer it in their heads were giving bad grades, the system was now punishing them and rewarding the stupid.
Oh yes, this was coming for decades. Little by little at first, dismissed as outliers and exceptions to the rule and then more and more and hands thrown in the air, it was a fait accompli.
Had they been zombies, in the end? Mark wondered, thinking about Jim Naland cutting up his own hands to get to the meat inside the can. Shoving the bloody meat into his mouth while growling like an animal. He hopes that people didn't suffer too much.
He remembered the helicopter footage of a man pulled out of his car by a group of young black men, they beat him mercilessly, kicked him, and finally threw a cinder-block down on his head. This had all been shown on live television. Months later none of the networks dared mention that the attackers got off Scot-free. “He was in our neighborhood and whites ain't welcome here” had been a convincing argument to the judge in the case.
Even at the time a much younger Mark Stafford had wondered where the outrage was. Where was the shame? A lesbian couple had beaten, tortured and starved a small boy to death. One of those women went to the execution chamber crowing about her achievement “I finished strong!”
No outrage. A small story if it was covered at all. Maybe people just didn't hear about it, he had decided. Then he went on the internet, people had seen the story and very few cared to leave a comment or even a thumbs up or down. No outrage. Oh sure, here and there people said “That is horrible” and “What is the world coming to?”. Then it was on to the next cute kitten video, the horror forgotten.
Had the human race slowly become zombified? The lack of shame, decency and outrage seemed to become more and more pronounced. There were even movements to promote “pride” in the most indecent of things. The most vile acts were given prizes as “entertainment”. Had humans really been entertained? Or had they been conditioned to think they were?
Mark Stafford spent his time listening and thinking. He wondered which dystopian novels and movies had come closest to the truth. He envisioned a distant future bringing the dead directors and actors back to life just long enough to be given the prizes. Alarms sounded, the lights blinked off, flooding him to almost complete darkness before the red emergency lights flared up.
Mark saw the monitor notifying him of a radio beacon coming online. He touched it and set the escape capsules' navigation computer towards it. If it worked.
Meanwhile, it was time to get out of Dodge. He ran down the habitat toward the escape capsule dock but opening the hatch he saw the water was deeper than he remembered. He had his little knife in his palm when he dived and swam to the bottom. He used the knife to cut the tarp, water and him flooded to the hatch door on the other side. He opened the hatch and then began opening the capsule hatch as water flooded in through both.
He had no idea what all the water would do to the capsule, of course. He closed it as fast as he could and then punched the button. The arm of Platform One was swinging him towards Earth when the capsule was ejected, as designed this gave him an extra boost toward the surface.
Occasionally he saw the shrinking outline of Platform One and the habitats of Studio One out of the little porthole window above him. Mostly he saw nothing before it glowed red as re-entry began. He hoped the weight of the water sloshing around his knees didn't bring them in too steep, causing them to burn up completely. Maybe even explode like meteorites often do.
Soon the bumpy, red hot re-entry was over. He was still alive and falling toward Earth. How long before the parachutes were deployed, he began to wonder. He was getting more and more worried before he heard noises and felt the shudder and gravity of the parachutes slowing down the capsule.
He was feeling real gravity for the first time in more than a year since he launched the “news from above” in Studio One. He could not see where he was going to land, might it be the ocean or desert? Would it be anywhere near the radio beacon he was aiming for?
He hadn't had time to examine the signal. What if it turned out to be automated and had been turned on by some accident. What if there were no humans at all? Come to think of it, what if he was landing where no English was spoken? He shook his head, he had definitely seen North America in all the confusion, he was almost certain. Almost.