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Back Extinction Game Save as PDF
Chapters (33)
  1. Title page
  2. CONTENTS
  3. ONE
  4. TWO
  5. THREE
  6. FOUR
  7. FIVE
  8. SIX
  9. SEVEN
  10. EIGHT
  11. NINE
  12. TEN
  13. ELEVEN
  14. TWELVE
  15. THIRTEEN
  16. FOURTEEN
  17. FIFTEEN
  18. SIXTEEN
  19. SEVENTEEN
  20. EIGHTEEN
  21. NINETEEN
  22. TWENTY
  23. TWENTY-ONE
  24. TWENTY-TWO
  25. TWENTY-THREE
  26. TWENTY-FOUR
  27. TWENTY-FIVE
  28. TWENTY-SIX
  29. TWENTY-SEVEN
  30. TWENTY-EIGHT
  31. Acknowledgements
  32. By Gary Gibson
  33. Copyright page

‘Then I’ll say yes,’ I replied. ‘Assuming somebody around here can tell me exactly what the hell it is you want me to do.’

FOUR

Barely a month later, and a few short hours before I found myself trapped in a subterranean cavern, in imminent danger of being swallowed up in a lake of fire, I found myself standing on the edge of a vast precipice.

Nadia was with me. At our feet, an enormous shaft at least a mile across had been dug deep into the Icelandic coast. The only light came from the stars above, and from Hekla, a volcano seventy miles distant that was undergoing one of its periodic eruptions. Its summit burned red, the fiery glow clearly visible on the horizon.

I was on yet another post-apocalyptic alternate. I had, as yet, seen no other kind of parallel, and yet I knew that by its very nature the multiverse must contain an enormous variety of timelines where there had been no extinction event within living memory. The Authority’s peculiar obsession with dying or dead worlds was something for which I still had no explanation.

Integrated circuitry in the visor of my spacesuit compensated for the lack of light, so that I could see where a road had been cut into the walls of the shaft. It spiralled down until it finally vanished into stygian depths, where not even my suit’s circuitry could compensate. On the far side of the shaft lay the war-ravaged ruins of Reykjavik, where the Icelanders had made their last stand against invading European and American forces.

According to the readout on my helmet’s display, it was a chilly 268 degrees below zero, cold enough that the snow lying all around us was composed not of crystallized water, but of frozen air. As their world spiralled out of its former orbit, moving farther and farther away from the life-giving sun, the atmosphere had grown sufficiently cold that it had frozen into a thin layer clinging to the ground. Beyond my visor lay only hard vacuum, and certain death were I to remove my helmet.

Without an atmosphere to scatter the light and make them twinkle, the stars were bright and unblinking. Nadia had earlier, for my benefit, pointed towards the horizon and indicated the rough location of the sun. I saw nothing except a star a little brighter than the rest, surrounded by unending darkness.

‘What is that?’ I asked, seeing a dot of red light flash in one corner of my visor. A faint beeping accompanied it. The air inside the suit tasted dry and rubbery, and my throat rasped every time I swallowed. There were other readouts, projected onto the interior curve of my spacesuit’s helmet, many of them as yet indecipherable to me. Part of the reason we had come to this alternate was so I could learn how to manoeuvre inside such suits as this.