The Omega Point

12:04 AM EST, DECEMBER 21, 2012 TV STATION WBUL, BUFFALO, NEW YORK

Marty Breslin sat at the desk watching the cameras watch him, waiting for his nightly few minutes of local fame. “How’s the remote?” he asked Ginger Harper. They had dropped a number of feeds lately, although not on him, because weathermen normally don’t do feeds. But he was horrified at the idea of being left under the lights with nothing to say. Even when he had something to say, he had nothing to say, so a dead teleprompter was a terrifying thought. “Ginger, come back, please. We do have that feed ready to go?”

“We’re good down the line.”

“Anything unusual actually happening? Anywhere?” There were New Agers out in force around the world, on hilltops, crowding places like Sedona, and swarming by the thousands in Yucatan and Guatemala. Fourteen of them had been iced during a blizzard yesterday on Mount Everest. Even the stock market had gotten quiet today, waiting to see if anything might happen over the weekend. “Hello? Ginger?”

“I was just looking. CNN, quiet. BBC, they’re still on the Himalayas story, nothing fresh on the AP. Joke stories.”

Across on the news desk, Callie and Fred tossed real stories back and forth. They hit the Himalayas, but the big one tonight was a gang riding the highways disguised as state police officers, soliciting bribes in lieu of tickets. “Sounds like a good business,” he said into his mike.

“That it does,” Ginger replied.

He’d tried her a couple of times. No-go. Apparently her marriage was real. Well, it was her loss.

His lights came up. “Thirty seconds,” she said.

“What’re they doing out on the feed?”

“Chanting.”

Fred Gathers said, “And now for the latest on the end of the world, let’s go to Marty. What’s a weatherman doing reporting on a subject like this, Marty?”

And he was on. Magic time. Famous in Buffalo, folks all said hi along the Chippewa Strip. It wasn’t Manhattan, but they had the lake. The teleprompter began to roll. “Our thought was, if the New Agers were right and the world ended, it would be a weather story. As in, none. Obviously, weather post the apocalypse is gonna be kind of quiet.”

“Okay, so it’s after midnight on December 21, 2012. Why are we still here, Marty?”

“Good question, Fred. Tim Burris is on the scene at the Love and Light New Age Spiritual Center in Grover’s Mills, New Jersey. Tim, has anybody been beamed up yet?”

“Over to you, Tim,” Ginger said.

On the monitor, Burris appeared standing in a pool of light surrounded by figures in flowing white robes. Many of them were female, young, and, from what Marty could see, well worth the time. “Man, I wonder if he’s gettin’ any of that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ginger said.

“This is Tim Burris in Grover’s Mills, here at the Love and Light New Age Spiritual Center, where I have the Reverend Carlton Gaylord to explain why we’re all still here.”

He thrust the mike into the face of a tall, cadaverous man whose white robe had a gold choke collar. “We are celebrating the moment that the earth crosses the center of the galactic plane for the first time in twenty-six thousand years,” he said. “Nobody said anything about the end of the world.”

But that wasn’t true! He’d said it, and on camera. That was the whole point of sending Tim all the way to Joisey. “Hey! We got that clip!”

Tim waited. Nothing happened. He blinked, then continued. “But isn’t this the end of everything?”

Marty said into his mike, “Run the clip, Ginger!”

“It’s not in the system.”

“Aw, fer crap’s sake, find it!”

Burris tried to pull the clip out of the guy. “But you said, uh—we have a clip—” Oh, so lame. There was a reason he worked in this joke station.

“Ginger!”

“It’s gone!”

“Tell him, he’s dyin’ out there!”

When she imparted the wonderful news, Mary saw his face fall, then set with determination. He tried again. “You’ve been quoted as saying that the world would end tonight at twelve oh one.”

“I said that the Mayan prophecy would come true.”

Crap! Crap! Crap!

“But the world didn’t end! We’re all still here.”

“The end of the world was media hype. You people. All the Mayan prophecy said was that we’d cross the centerline of the galaxy, and we did.” He pulled up his sleeve and glanced at his Rolex. “Exactly four minutes and twenty seconds ago.”

“This is so poor, Ginger, he is eating us for frigging lunch!”

Ginger, her voice tight, said, “Go to the scientist clip, then we’re back in with the forecast.”

They ran the talking head from the university, who explained that astronomers had no idea whether we were crossing the centerline of the galaxy or not, because it was hidden behind dust clouds.

“And we’re out,” Ginger said. “Two minutes on the break, Marty.”

His lights went down. His camera turned off. He tried to control the red-hot rage that was building in him. “That was shitty as hell,” he said, forcing himself not to scream. “I mean, we had that guy nailed down, that’s why we bought el Timothy a ticket all the way to New Joisey, Ginger, hey!”

Ginger was silent.

He knew that there was no point in commenting further, but he could not shut up. “I mean, have you got your professional screwup certificate, Gin, or are you still an advanced amateur?”

“I found the clip!”

He wanted to tell her to stuff it up her ass, but that would be harassment of some damn kind. “How nice,” he said. “Wrap it up for me and I can smoke it after the show.”

“To you in five, four, three, two, one.”

“And the big story tonight is that lake-effect snow, folks, you got that right, we’re gonna get a heavy dose tonight.” And so it went, down to the bottom of the hour, and they were out. When he walked off the darkened set, Gin was already gone. Far, no doubt. But where else were they gonna get somebody who could run a board for her money?

Later that night, he was hanging on a bar sucking beer and wishing some kind of dealer, any kind, would show up. Then a citizen came in, saw him, and said, “Hey, Marty. No snow!”

That was Marty Breslin. Batting a thousand.

6:36 PM, DECEMBER 22, 2012 JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

Dr. Deborah Wilson pointed to a faintly blinking readout from the Advanced Composition Explorer. “What’s that spike, Sam?”

Her graduate assistant thought perhaps this was some sort of quiz. He tapped the screen, and the ACE II detailed readout appeared. What he saw confused him. It was ordinary for the ion flux from the sun to vary, sometimes by a lot, but not by this much, never. “Let me run the circuits.” What this would do was to determine whether or not there were overloads anywhere on the satellite, or tripped circuit breakers. From there, they could pinpoint the source of the anomaly.

“I’ve done that,” Dr. Wilson said. She was clipped, careful, and very uncompromising. But she had also just told him that this tremendous spike in ions was some sort of real phenomenon, not an artifact.

He pulled up the Solar and Heliospheric readouts. The solar wind speed was 431.5 km per second, the proton density was thirteen. There was a coronal hole at midlatitude, and two small sunspots on the near side. “So this isn’t coming from the sun,” he said.

“Apparently not.”

Energy from deep space, then. It had first been detected in the late nineties of the last century by Russian astrophysicists, but it wasn’t considered a significant factor by their American counterparts.

As he spoke, his voice rose an octave, which he just hated. “But this can’t be.” He cleared his throat.

“Except that it is.”

And there it was, entering the solar system right now, the sudden increase in intensity unmistakable. And his instructor was waiting. “I think it’s a wave of energy from some sort of extrasolar event, perhaps an archaic supernova.”

“Why archaic?”

“Well, obviously, there’s a lot here compared to the normal range of solar output, but I’d think that a close supernova—that would be, um, even more energetic.”

“Unless we’ve been in the distant corona since 1997, and this is the leading edge of the real stuff.”

There was something in her voice that he didn’t like. He looked up, met her eyes. “You’re scared.”

“Supernovas happen.”

“But—my God.” If this was the leading edge of a supernova wave, it could end life on earth. “This isn’t possible!”

She reached across his cluttered desk and did something that she had never done before, and, in fact, was probably not appropriate conduct. She touched his hand. She started to speak, then stopped, and her silence said everything.

It was possible. It was quite possible.

However, when their findings eventually became a press release, it didn’t exactly cause people to go rushing into churches begging God for deliverance. In fact, the story appeared in The New Scientist as a single paragraph. It showed up on Space.com for a couple of days. Various scientific blogs commented on it, more or less in passing.

Still, though, the energy level in the solar system quietly began to increase, and it kept increasing. Nobody noticed that the ion flux had begun to rise at exactly one nanosecond after midnight on December 21.

Nobody would ever notice that, but the story of what was happening to our solar system would grow and grow, until it became the most important of all stories, the greatest story, and, in a sense, the last story.