Out of the Mist

by Ken Staley

“G’day mate,” Archie said, his voice as clear as any Darrell heard over the last month. Surprisingly clear considering the impossible transmissions of the last week. “How are things in the land of the giant PX?”

“About the same, Arch,” Darrell replied. “How’re things down under?”

“No change here,” Archie replied. “We’d like to know when you first started noticing the haze.”

“Haze?” It took Darrell a moment. “Oh . . . we call it ‘the mist’ here. Dunno, we’re trying to track it down now using old television weather reports. First thing anyone noticed here was some rather spectacular sunsets on a few evenings just over a month ago. Sunsets got brilliant every night now for the last two weeks, as near as we can determine. Lately, it just gets dark earlier—no real sunset to speak of.”

“Too right! About the same as we have here then,” Arch nodded in agreement, looking off screen. “As near as we can tell, about two weeks ago someone here asked if there was a late season fire. We get some of the same bloody sunsets when the fires in the south kick up every summer. At least we can measure that bloody smoke! With this—nothing.”

“Sounds about right,” Darrell nodded. “What else do you hear?”

“I just did manage to talk to Wu in Shanghai just yesterday,” Archie said. “Same story there, although he isn’t sure the mist is the problem. He claims it came from his northwest. No one here is willing to stick his neck out that far.”

“As much crap as they keep dumping into the air it’s a wonder they can see anything. No one here is willing to commit to the origin, either,” Darrell said.

“We can’t get any sort of reading on the composition,” Arch nodded, then his image started to shatter on the screen like a jig saw puzzle. “Looks like our five minutes are about up, mate.” His voice faded in and out like an old transistor radio too far away from the music source. “Try again later today. If not see ya tomorrow, with luck!”

“G’day Arch,” Darrell felt his voice raise involuntarily as though his yelling would compensate for failing electronics.

He disconnected from Skype and scanned the data that danced across several screens. As far as he could tell, they were still getting real time data from the local weather source, from NOAA and from NASA. While the data seemed fresh, Darrell felt his frustration rise to new levels every time he matched what was on the screen with what was happening outside. Peering through his office window was like looking at a blank monitor—nothing—solid grey. Not fog; water vapor could be measured with some accuracy. This was nothing else they could finger either—yet.

Like most meteorologists, initially he dismissed the gathering mist as nothing more than particulates tossed into the upper atmosphere by a forest fire or perhaps a large local fire. Only later, when news carried no such reports of large fires, did his curiosity begin pricking at the back of his mind. Finally, when it didn’t dissipate—or even seem to thin much—Darrell started probing.

Several calls later, some colleagues more frustrated than him and more than a few completely crazy, he found no clearer picture. Whatever the mist was, it settled on land and sea and, as far as he could discover, now covered the globe. He had contacts through various institutions and universities across the world. Mumbai, Karachi, Nepal, Kenya, Tokyo, even Greenland and reports from the Ross Ice Shelf reported the same thing—a lowering ceiling and fading visibility.

Everything had mass. Every substance he knew. Certainly fog—water vapor—had mass, and weight, and density. Freon, ozone, natural gas, smoke, even hydrogen and light carried measurable particulate. But this—mist—defied everything. It simply was. He leaned back against his chair, closed his eyes, and let his mind float. Such mental wanderings occasionally provided clarity in amazing ways.

Al Davis cleared his throat noisily as he sauntered up to Darrell’s desk.

“Well?” Darrell asked without opening his eyes.

“Well, you can try to call Aunt Louise in Atlanta, but you’re just as likely to get Argentina,” Al said. “Cell phones are spotty at best and have been deteriorating all day. Land lines are no better. Place a call to NOAA and you could get Nome, Alaska. Text messages will end up in who knows where, and good luck trying to read the gibberish that comes out the other end.”

“I just talked to Archie in Sydney. We had a good five minutes before musical pixels begin. What else?” Darrell asked as he swiftly pulled himself back together.

“Looks like email and Internet connections are as tricky as anything else, then. I talked to Admiral Blake at NOAA. His people are clueless and want answers from us. Not that we can supply them with much, given the connection problems—that is, even if we had very much. I saw one of their mass requests for information and it looks like they’re trying every other lab and palm reader they can get in touch with.”

“NASA?”

“Another mystery,” Al said. “Their last pictures from space so far are nil.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that whatever this mist is cannot be seen from space on any spectrum you choose,” he said.

“That’s impossible.”

“So we told them, but the images they took from space show otherwise,” Al sighed. “They had a live feed from the space station for almost 10 minutes. Given the strange things happening with communication, it’s remotely possible that those images came in altered, but who's to say? Oh yeah, they are no longer able to contact the Space Station. Haven’t been for most of the morning now.”

“Let me see if I get this right,” Darrell said as he leaned forward. He slid his glasses off and put his forehead in his hand. “That suggests that some sort of intelligence—working through a medium that so far does not exist and we not only can’t duplicate, but can’t identify. This media can actually manipulate any type of image taken for identification purposes so that the results are simply—what—invalid? Nil?”

“Homeland Security declared a high-priority emergency ten minutes ago,” Al said. “All except military and emergency air flight is grounded. So far they’re keeping the lid on it all, but it won’t take long before that gets out. I gotta tell you, it’d take real stones to go off the ground in this, even if it’s just a commuter hop to Boston.”

Darrell swiveled in his chair and stared out the window. As he watched, the mist seemed to ebb and flow, like a tidal surge, back and forth in front of him. He’d lived in the city all his life. He knew—or thought he knew—the area between his apartment and the lab intimately. Each shop, each alley, each pot hole—where friendly faces greeted him—where a taciturn news stand vendor hunkered every morning—where to avoid walking after dark. On fresh spring mornings, on crisp fall mornings, he enjoyed the 30 minute stroll from his office home, often stopping to chat with this store owner or purchase a cup of coffee.

His brisk walk today turned into a nightmarish slow-motion shuffle. Each parking meter suddenly threatened to intercept him. Shop doors remained closed; those customers who dared to venture out clustered in small groups at the windows, straining to peer through. His half-hour stroll became a two-hour, heart-stopping lurch. At times Darrell understood how a pinball felt in an arcade game.

Overnight, the gentle, sunset-staining haze settled to ground level, thickening as it came. A complete anomaly that piqued Darrell again and again. It wasn’t mist, though. No dampness, no measurable water vapor—nothing measurable.

“Did you recalibrate?” He asked as he scanned the results Al handed him, knowing the answer before Al spoke.

“Each time,” Al said. “Even changed machines after the third test and calibrated that one, too. There just isn’t anything to measure.”

“Even the cleanest air in the world carries a modicum of measurable water vapor. Most carry measurable particulate,” Darrell said aloud shaking his head, vocalizing the unnecessary. “Remember the ‘Heidi Tests’?”

Several years ago, colleagues from several European labs climbed some of the highest peaks in the world, packing half their labs, just to see what the air quality atop these crags would be. Darrell and Al smiled. They easily predicted the results without getting cold, relying on sherpas or suffering oxygen deficiency.

Al understood the science well enough to teach most environmental science classes, from basic chemistry to advanced molecular biology. Any freshman in his beginning classes knew how to conduct these basic tests—it really was freshman lab level stuff. He put on his glasses and stared down the columns of numbers of Al’s latest results. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared in the written results, nothing they wouldn’t have found on any other normal day.

“One hundred samples gathered from one hundred different sites around this globe will clearly show something. Where did you take these?”

“We’re kind of limited here,” Al said. “Nobody, including me, wanted to venture too far out into this ooze until we get some kind of reading. We took the first half dozen from the roof garden. Then we hung the probe out the lab window for the next six. Those last six came from the parking lot. We got reports from Singapore, from London, from Madrid, from Sao Palo, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Moscow—more than 100. As closely as we can tell from scanning just the preliminary data, everyone who measured found nothing—not one damned thing. Looks like most of them are just like us though, caught off guard and taking samples nearby rather than roaming too far afield.”

From his seventh floor window, he watched as the world disappeared. Looking up offered no sky, only light grey.

“Growing denser,” Al noted. “Even ten minutes ago you could see at least half a mile. Now it’s down to less than a quarter mile.”

“When did you take the last measurement?” Darrell asked.

“Half an hour ago,” Al shrugged. “Maybe a bit more.”

“We’ve got bigger trouble brewing,” Darrell confided. “Remember the imaging package we sent to the Pentagon?”

Al nodded.

“They’re reporting system wide failure, and they want answers,” Darrell said. “Seems that they can’t see a damned thing, either. Problem is, they’re closer to it and less able to deal with it on a rational basis.”

Carol Walker poked her head in, and Darrell chopped off Al’s reply. Some projects they still kept close to the vest, and she wasn’t privy to the DoD contracts.

“I’m leaving now. I want to get home while I still can,” she said, “before the trains and cabs stop running altogether.”

“A bit early in the day isn’t it?” Darrell asked. “We could use your help here.”

“Oh, I can’t add anything to this,” she waved him away. “I suspect nothing you or anyone else in the world can do will identify this, much less change it.”

She set down her things on an empty chair and walked closer to the window, reaching out as though she might touch the mist through the glass. A short woman, she jingled as she walked; a series of thin gold bracelets marched up and down both arms. A fear of a more primal nature seeped into the room—fear that no one was willing to vocalize or even recognize aloud.

“You have an idea?” Darrell asked lightly as he raised an eyebrow to Al. Carol was the resident high priestess of nature, constantly armed with doom and gloom pamphlets from one crackpot environmental group or another. If she wasn’t one of the leading environmental chemists in the world, he’d have canned her long ago. Recently, she’d worked far too close to radical fringe elements for his comfort, and he wondered if she hadn’t slipped her moorings a bit.

“A theory you’d care to share?”

“None,” she said. She stood staring the window. Her copper-red hair looked to Darrell like someone ran a crayon through a pencil sharpener. “None necessary. Mother is simply calling a halt.”

“Come again? Calling a halt to what?”

“Everything, of course,” she replied without turning from the window. “It really is quite lovely.”

“Who is calling a halt to what?”

“Mother Nature,” she said without embarrassment. “C’mon, Darrell, you’ve been at this for what? Twenty years? More?”

Somewhere down below sirens rose from the street, their harsh wails muffled by the mist. Even the powerful strobes from emergency vehicles didn’t penetrate.

“You know the science better than almost anyone alive,” she continued. “You’ve tried to convince our government for the last decade that its environmental policies were nothing more than a really feeble joke. What drove you?”

“You’re serious?” Darrell asked. “What drove me?” What drives us all?”

“This really shouldn’t come as any surprise to you,” she sounded reproving, accusatory almost, as though he knew the answer but was afraid to vocalize it. “You told the United Nations conference not long ago that the planet wouldn’t sit still for our abuses much longer. They laughed at you. Do you remember the newspapers? The editorials? I think this mist is the planet answering.” She waved a sweeping arm at the window, as though to reach out and embrace all of the mist.

“Think about it. I know you’ve considered the possibilities before this, but how many naturally occurring phenomena do you know—in the last 3,000 years—that encompass the entire globe like this?”

“Volcano,” Al said without hesitation. “St. Helens.”

“Northern hemisphere,” she dismissed his reply just as quickly. “And limited at that.”

“Krakatoa—ash circled the entire globe. Dropped temperatures around the world by measurable amounts even for those times. The blast could be heard for thousands of miles,” Al said again. “1816, Mt. Tambora eruption—year without a summer.”

Carol shook her head, evidently feeling any comment was beneath her.

“Looks like mother is ringing down the final curtain,” Carol said.

“You can’t be serious,” Darrell wanted to wave away her nonsense as clearly a delusional theory of one of her out-there groups. Somehow, deep inside, he couldn’t dismiss Carol completely. She was too intelligent to fall for any real fable.

“Explain it away then,” Carol said as she crossed to the chair and gathered her stuff.

“You’ll try, I know you. Just don’t get trapped here. Within a few days, going outside for anything is going to be very difficult.” She nodded toward the window as a fresh series of sirens broke the hushed quiet the mist imposed.

“Light rail is suspended,” Al said as he hung up his cell phone. “Too many people using the tracks as a guide marker. Local police report over 200 traffic collisions in the last hour. The mayor wants to shut down the city.”

“He might save his breath,” Carol said from the door. “Mother is taking care of that.”

“How long you figure?” Al asked.

“As long as it takes Mother to recover,” Carol said. “A year? Five? A decade?”

“But…”

“Everything will stop,” Carol predicted. “Transportation, shipping—all of it—just stop. Anything that pollutes. Mother needs a rest, a break from the tortures of mankind.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Darrell said from his desk. “Where the need is greatest, mankind has always found a way to adapt and survive. The indomitable spirit of mankind will not be denied. Life will not be denied.”

“Until now,” Carol said as she turned to leave. “Just remember, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Darrell, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' I’d get home as soon as I could,” she called. “You’re much more likely to survive there. Just don’t forget to say good night to your Mother tonight.”

They stared at the door when she left, the merry jingle of her bangles fading, the mist growing thicker behind them.