Drystorm

THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENT WAS ASSEMBLED FROM CLASSIFIED REPORTS BY VARIOUS HUMAN GOVERNMENTS, FUTILE WELL-WISHING NOTES TO PROGENY, AND RECORDS LEFT DEEP UNDERGROUND BY THE MICROBES THAT SURVIVED THE CATASTROPHE. PLEASE DIRECT ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS TO THE PACIFIC BACTERIAL EMBASSY.

All of a sudden it started raining backwards. At first it was raining forwards, but then it was as if the sky was an hourglass turned upside-down, or a god was spitting and they sucked the loogie back in at the last moment because the water stopped falling and shot back up into the clouds. Puddles emptied upwards. Rivers became vertical. The ocean turned into a torrent rushing up to the sky and gave up one or two fish in the process.

“We have to stop this backwards rain,” said the news anchors. “We need water to live. If the sky takes all our water, we’ll die.” [1]

But the backwards rain would not stop. Water kept pouring out of lakes and the soil and shooting out of the roots of plants.

The news anchors brought a special guest on air. He was a self-proclaimed expert on backwards rain, the only one in the whole world, in fact. “We have to stop the backwards rain,” he said, “because humans are 60% water and if we don’t do something fast, we’ll start raining backwards, too.”

The news anchors cast sideways glances at each other when he said this. For one, it hadn’t been part of the script they had rehearsed beforehand. For two, they had no way to fact-check this bit of information and no way to control the public’s reaction to it. But if it was true, they didn’t want any other station to announce it before them. So they let it run.

As soon as the expert’s advice was televised, reports started coming in from all over the world. People complained that they felt their blood squirming around in all the wrong ways, that it was trying to move upward, as if their insides and nothing else were responding to a sudden reverse in gravity. And, still, it rained.

To counteract any hysteria that might have come out of the last program, they brought a politician onto the news. The politician said not to worry, that this was normal, that backwards rain occurred in regular intervals once every five thousand years or so. She cited an ancient Mesopotamian text that in some translations described an event something like backwards rain [2]. Her ratings were generally favorable, and she’d recently signed a bill during a time of public prosperity—right before the backwards rain had struck—so people took her word for it. 

As soon as it was prudent to do so, the politician slunk back under the radar. Most people forgot she existed. There were bigger things to worry about. The natural environment was shriveling up and it was starting to take a toll on human civilization. The forests were dying, and the oceans were disappearing, and the forest creatures and the water creatures were dying with their habitats. Access to fresh water was increasingly limited, and bottled water prices skyrocketed while some towns had to shut off their water completely as their sources dried up. The wind toppled power lines until electricity and Internet service were as precious as water itself. The roads were too dangerous to drive, so many people resorted to sending messages attached to the legs of trained birds. And it was dark. There was not a spot of sky not taken up by cloud, so the Sun couldn’t shine through at all. Under the cover of nights devoid of stars and streetlights, some people took it into their own hands to get the resources they needed.

A child in Berlin became the first person to die from backwards rain. His family was brought on to a radio station to describe what had happened. They said that he’d been complaining of vertigo for several days, but he’d always had an overactive imagination, so they didn’t take him too seriously. Then, while the family was sitting around the dining table eating breakfast, the child sat straight up—like he was being stretched by an invisible hand—and began to shake. His face turned red, then black. Blood came out of his eyes and nose. The family fled the house in terror. When they returned the boy was on the floor with a halo of blood drifting over his head. The family cried, and their tears floated up to the ceiling of the radio station.

Then the door to the station opened, and a philanthropist walked in. They knew who he was because he was openly one of the richest people on the planet. “Surprise!” said the radio hosts. 

The philanthropist hugged each of the family members. “I’m going to compensate you several times over for your lost child,” he said. “You’ll never have to worry about going hungry again.”

The family was a bit confused, as the two statements seemed to have nothing to do with each other, and they would much rather just have their child back, but the philanthropist seemed to be doing the best he could, and they didn’t want to appear ungrateful, so they said thank you.

“Not only that,” he said, now addressing the audience, “but I’m going to pay for the hospital bills of 2,000 individuals who contract this wayward blood disease. Hopefully we won’t reach that many cases, but in case we do, I am willing to take on this burden in the service of society.” The philanthropist paused as everyone in the room cheered. Meanwhile, a fleet of private airplanes lifted his ninth estate and moved it closer to the receding shoreline.

The name stuck: the child’s condition became known as “Wayward Blood Disease.” The philanthropist paid for the first 2,000 people who applied for his program, and another 8,000 after that. But even after that people were sick, and the number of WBD cases kept growing, and most of the people who were hospitalized died no matter how much money they had, because there was no known cure [3].

Between the drought and the pandemic, the global population was falling fast, and the rate at which it fell was constantly increasing. However, resources were becoming scarce faster than human life was. At dawn, exactly a week into the backwards rain, the Water Wars began. Tensions had already been running high, and rival factions had rapidly formed all over the world. The messenger albatross belonging to the Louisiana Blood Eaters was intercepted by Dew Nostalgia’s prize seagull. A fight ensued between the birds, and the albatross won, which caused resentment on Dew Nostalgia’s side. They sent each other homemade bombs disguised as water parcels and sent infiltrators to pierce their water towers. This was how the wars began, but they quickly spread globally and devolved further into outright violence over water and supplies. Fights broke out in streets and now-empty sewers. People would hang the severed head of their rival’s bird over their door to cast bad fortune on their rival’s water supply. Some of the more academic-minded of them investigated using WBD as a bioweapon, to no avail.

The wars resulted in more avian deaths than human. However, the sheer exertion that the wars worked on people’s bodies meant a net loss of hydration and no significant gain for any party involved.

The ruckus outside did, however, catch the attention of some global elites. They heard grim phrases on the news like riots and violent protest that made them nervous. They called each other and agreed that it was time to step in. 

Eventually all the world leaders got together for an emergency meeting. They met at the top of a secret tower.

“Something really has to be done about this backwards rain,” said one of the leaders, staring out the window at the massive amounts of water rushing by.

There was a series of graphs projected on the walls of the room. The graphs showed a real-time count of global deaths. They examined the deaths by nationality, age, gender, race, religion, and political sway. No matter how it was looked at, the data was alarming.

“Maybe we should divide up the population on the basis of value. The most crucial people can all join together and we’ll allocate resources to them. That way we can ensure that our best efforts are put toward the preservation of humanity.”

“That’s fascism,” said one leader, but another interjected, “Who can even think about labels in a time like this?” and there was a widespread murmur of agreement. This was a time for direct action, not for sitting around slinging insults.

The CEO of a space exploration company said, “My team has been doing some intense research and we hypothesize that the backwards rain may be a test by some extraterrestrial species. We are currently building a superweapon to protect Earth from outside influence.” [4]

Then something peculiar happened. Everyone in the room seized up at the same time. They gasped, sat upright, and put their hands to their throats. They tried to speak but couldn’t. Their faces turned various shades of red and black. Then the blood from all their bodies poured out and accumulated on the ceiling in a roiling, upside-down sea. There was a vent in the ceiling that the blood drained out of. It found its way out of the building and dissipated into the rain until the red could no longer be seen.

The graphs on the walls continued their counts. The storm raged outside, the room was cold and dry, and the numbers ticked up and up. 

Now, the Prime Minister of New Zealand didn’t know this, but she had been born with a rare genetic condition that caused her blood to mix with an element in the atmosphere, something unspeakable from the bottom of the ocean, and a dash of anonymous mucus and create a new form of life that had no body. Its consciousness was limited, but it moved the air in ways it would not have moved otherwise. This creature was not the first of its kind, nor was its kind rare. In the days when humans populated the earth, they called these beings ghosts. If given a more nitrogen-rich atmosphere, it could have survived long enough to produce new generations, which could have evolved sufficient intelligence to recreate human society on Earth [5]. 

Hypotheticals such as this are useless if no one is around to ponder them. Many things could have happened, and that hypothetical did not happen. The creature came into existence, then promptly suffocated. Being bodiless, it left no trace.

As if prompted by the creatures’ fleeting life and death (and no scientist was around to prove that it wasn’t) the clouds broke. Every last bit of moisture had finally been extracted from the planet, and all the water was one great slab of ocean sandwiched between layers of the atmosphere. It rained bullets down on the dry, parched earth. Some hardy plant seeds thirstily absorbed the rain and began to grow. Water sloshed down and refilled the oceans, the rivers, the lakes, the reservoirs. But there was no one around to drink it [6].

[1] The individual human lifespan at this point in their history was 75 years. Experts suggest that dying so young limited the amount of wisdom that could be passed down between generations when compared to some of their contemporaries, such as sponges, jellyfish, and trees.

[2]  While not a regular occurrence on the planet Earth, cyclical drystorms have been recorded on planets in the Backward Galaxy.

[3] The cure for Wayward Blood Disease or, as we call it, common anti-gravity syndrome, is of course a dose of juni berry extract followed by 20 hours of rest.

[4] So far, no civilization has come forward to claim responsibility. Even if said society chose to stay quiet, historians have researched this claim and found no evidence of extraplanetary interference that could have triggered the drystorm.

[5] This description of a bodiless life form, dubbed PM-N-WORM, closely resembles some of our earliest ancestors. If the timeless portal to Earth is ever unsealed, some Florgian scientists have plans to capture this creature and have a conversation with it.

[6] In the year SS10^60F, a party from the planet Tessene traveled to Earth to drink from its post-drystorm ocean. They were fined 60 zels for defacing a universal monument.