The Day the Mountains Were Small
Magical Realism
~The Day the Mountains were Small~
By S. C. Durbois
Pieces of the world started falling off in sharp juts.
The talking heads on the news didn’t know what to make of it. There were no earthquakes. No flashes of light. No meteorites. Just here one day, and then… a long way down. Like one of those cubist paintings.
Conspiracy theorists had a field day. They came out in droves. It was the aliens. It was the government. It was time travel. Global warming. Judgment day. Evolution. The normal shifts in a planet about to give birth.
But they kept cropping up, these random geographical reshufflings. Geologists and geographers alike were flummoxed. Then someone got the bright idea to ask AI. It wasn’t the most beautifully formulated question. Just:
“What’s up with the freaky land stuff?”
But apparently, even AI had been paying attention to the news because she came back with an answer relatively quick:
“The land is falling into the heart of the sea.”
Not sure where she got that one, maybe ancient poetic literature, but it turned out she was right. Scientists sent probes and, several thousand feet down, there was water. It wasn’t fresh, obviously. The probes brought samples back and tested them. Filled with minerals, they found, and phosphorus. There was a definite sulfuric bite.
A few months passed, and the cracks didn’t leave. The theories continued, but eventually, it was common, another natural disaster: tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, fires, and now this. The media played with titles: “The Great Cracking.” Unfortunately, that sounded like a social comment, and there was already too much evidence for that, so it was a little on the nose. At the same time, “The Sinkhole Phenomenon” didn’t quite encapsulate the depth and breadth of the problem. One day, there was a forest, or a great plane, or desert, and the next, instant canyon that went on and on. Thousands of feet down.
Preppers emerged as the new TikTok trend. They started podcasts like “100 ways to cook canned food gourmet.”
The massive geographical shifts reminded some of the Grand Canyon. One geologist hypothesized that the rock formation was left over from a previous incident of Spontaneous Geological Reconstruction. (That was the term they landed on: SGR.) Expeditions flocked to Arizona as every scientist lived out his or her dreams of becoming Indiana Jones.
Spelunking gained a cult following, and rock climbers reached a level of fame akin to the astronauts during the race for space. NPR did a whole series on this contrast: “Looking up when we should have been looking down.” Yet, despite all the words people threw around, pondering what it meant and what to do about it now, nobody was quite sure why it was happening. Someone finally went back to AI:
“Why is this happening?”
Her response, once again, was startlingly quick:
“To make space.”
When followed up with the inevitable, “Space for what?” there was no reply.
Then the land, the rocks, started climbing upwards. Their growth was akin to fungus: not there one day, enormous the next.
Satellite images took pictures over deserts. Where previously it had been flat Sahara, suddenly a pillar, but not straight up. No, it was an organic build, like some sort of messy staircase. Very similar to the side of a cliff, with no smooth edges but plenty of ledges. Then more of them appeared.
It totally screwed with flight paths. Airline scheduling became an inventive endeavor. A route was clear and then, overnight, a giant rock formation birthed from the earth below, breaking through the atmosphere.
These pillars, un-gangly geological staircases, often sprouted by the newly formed cracks in the earth’s surface, but not always. A redistribution of organic matter, it seemed. Many were found (through more satellite images) popping up in the oceans, which played havoc with nautical routes. They were different from icebergs, not as wide around. The general width you saw above the water was what you saw below.
With increasing frequency, they began cropping up in cities. One sprouted up in Paris next to the Eiffel Tower. One in downtown LA, a few in Chicago, Dubai, and Shanghai. They did damage, but once they were there, moving the topography around them to accommodate, they were just there, like natural outgrowths of the buildings around them.
This was the day the climbers had been training for all their lives. Most municipalities tried to keep people away from the pillars. People had already died from falling off them, but reports indicated those incidents involved alcohol consumption. In Chicago, the police gave up, heeding the very valid point that around the world, other people were climbing these spontaneous turrets, and the United States didn’t want to fall behind in that, did they? So, it was a “climb at your own risk” situation. Events were held. Helicopters flew between them, news stations broadcasting the journeys of each small human.
The rocks were so large and wide that seasoned climbers complained there was no real challenge. They used ropes to secure themselves to the rocks on the off chance they tripped or a strong breeze knocked them from their elevated position. But what was really required for that climb was a head for heights. Could you climb for hours, look down, and not lose your lunch?
An unspoken wall was reached. Most climbers wouldn’t go past the height of a standard skyscraper, around 600 meters. In cities where the rocks grew next to an actual skyscraper, climbers would stop just above, because why go further? They had made their point.
More images came in from NASA, Musk, and private satellites. The rocks had grown up through the different layers of atmosphere, past the oxygen barrier. These rocks went into spaces. This was the strange part: satellite images revealed the rocks in the troposphere (with all our lovely breathable oxygen) were exactly the same as the rocks breaking through the stratosphere, even into the mesosphere, where they topped out. There was no frost, though (as the scientists explained) the mesosphere was the coldest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere. Not only that, but there was moss.
MOSS.
Living organic matter grew on the rocks at the top just like it did at the bottom. Moss, in the mesosphere. That gave everyone pause.
There had already been so many doomsday iterations in the news cycle that the public had grown bored with it. People stopped looking at their screens and started looking up. A global quiet took hold. A beat as everyone grappled with what this meant. Finally, someone started climbing. She brought all the necessary equipment, the shoes, ropes, hooks, food, water, and layers. They called her a narcissist, a brave explorer, the Amelia Earhart of her generation, a fool, the next messiah, the anti-Christ. Privately, to friends and family who asked her why, she called herself curious.
A team came with her, like-minded climbers with the same question burning in their guts that AI couldn’t answer.
Drones followed them up, and when the signals gave out, the satellites took over. They kept in contact via radio. Were they cold? No. Well, yes, but a normal cold. Not organ freezing cold, and, most important, the air was not too thin. They passed the 8,849-meter benchmark — the height of Everest — days ago. The world held its breath as they climbed from 20 km to 30 km, through the Ozone layer. Their radio comms were breathless from the climb, but they wore no masks.
Estranged relatives called each other from out of the blue, starting with that universal ice breaker; “Have you been watching—yes, me too… What does it mean?” and ending with, “I love you.”
The politicians had no answers, and nobody would have believed them if they said they did. They had passed through some sort of test. Some phase of developmental progression in the life of civilization and ecosystem. Everything was different now.
Through the layers, the climbers reported the gravity lessening until finally they reached the top, where rocks floated gently off. Their leader, the curious one, stood at the edge and looked out. For days, they had climbed, not sure why, except to find out. She stopped and stared, and took in the stars.
She unhooked the line from her harness, her last link to the blue below. Then she stepped off. It was more of a hop, really, one stone to the next like a child crossing a stream on a sunny summer day.
A trail of climbers followed behind her. They reached the top, measured the distance, and then they leapt off.
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The for the new story - made very interesting reading