Hartan Expanding

Hartan Expanding

Copyright February 2024 by Fit529 Dotcom (started 2019)

== Disclaimers ==

All names have been randomized to protect those idiots who think they are secretly living other lives in random multiverse shards and having lots more sex than they normally do here. Even if you randomly have the same name as someone here, NO, it's not you, get over yourself.

All persons engaging in or exposed to any sexual situations are over age 18.

If you like this work, feel free to: (upvote, follow-author, favorite-work, add to list, see author's profile/bio page, write a review, add a comment with your thoughts/inspirations, etc.)

== Chapter: In Case You Don't Remember ==

I was only 3 years old when three impregnable Hartan spaceships arrived, paving lumbering paths of devastation.

Two ships landed in rural China and one in Siberia, but once down, they followed independent paths, slowly and inexorably clearing and mostly-leveling one 110 km square of land before moving to the next.

Each Hartan ship was cubical, 400 meters on a side (about two city blocks) and hung about 300 meters in the air, deploying energies both vast and unceasing. They had shields impregnable and elastic to projectile weapons, their black surfaces absorbing particle beams and lasers without any effect. Nothing we did could hurt them.

The ships weren't entirely passive.

Once energy beam weapons had been tried, the ships started shining a 'spotlight' on the surrounding countryside of ultra-high energy lasers (at many frequencies up through gamma and x-rays) as well as various charged-particle beams of electron-positron pairs.

These counterattacks bathed the areas around them in flaming death. At least for the most part, they limited themselves to ground targets within about 10 km, though airborne targets were hit from farther away.

Their most damaging attack was what they did to the land itself. Some kind of beam was projected downwards at least 5 meters into the earth, inducing violent vibrations and turning the surface from rock to mixed but thick gravel. Lakes were boiled and had their bottoms shaken, and soil was left boiled and steaming.

The beam also induced a low-level radioactivity which effectively sterilized the soil and gravel it left behind.

When it cooled, soil and gravel remained, a coarse, sterile, mildly radioactive dust.

No messages emerged from these ships -- no signals or communication of any kind. They just moved inexorably onward, only going about 2 kph, about walking speed. It was slow, but sometimes the squares they cleared were connected at the corners and they advanced towards some big cities faster than anticipated.

Even with slow movement, people often fled in the wrong direction, only to burn up trying to walk across the radioactive land, or got piled up trying to cross bridges and failed to escape in other ways.

Millions died, and then it was billions.

No countermeasures we tried worked.

Nuclear blasts above, below, even simultaneously around them, did nothing and the ships moved forward unperturbed. Oh-so-slowly, inexorably onward they marched, back and forth, wiping out everything, systematically erasing everything.

Within a few months after their arrival, we discovered that grasses again grew where they had passed, and soon after, trees and bushes sprouted. The sterilization wasn't complete, or seeds deeply buried were shaken close enough to sprout.

That, or the wind carried seeds and those sprouted. Initially, it was a small ray of hope - a Very, Very, Very small ray. Humanity had few options. Desperate things had to happen.

Eventually, we found some vegetation that was significantly more tolerant of the ionizing radiation. To control the radioactive dust and prevent erosion, we sent in drones to 'bomb' the afflicted areas with seeds, a process that had to be timed for rainfall and many other factors.

Animals - vital to recreating an ecosystem - couldn't survive returning. Complex DNA degraded quickly in the face of that much ionization.

Birds were felled by the radiation, as were mice, foxes, deer -- most got a fatal dose within days. Bees and insects could survive, on the edges, since they were radiation-tolerant, but in the areas initially burned and churned, they had nothing to eat either.

The replanted grasses, bushes, and trees gave the insects a place to go and things to eat, sure, but this took a long time and the radiation was pretty intense even for them.

The concrete, wood, and steel structures of man were first turned to soot from a distance, and then as the ship passed overhead or immediately nearby, they were ground into a dust indistinguishable from any other thing they had passed over.

Only the largest building foundations were over 5 meters deep, and only some survived at that depth. Solid surface rock became gravel, gravel became stone dust, and reinforced concrete became stone dust with flakes of steel in it.

All concrete structures disappeared, melting and blowing away in any ambient wind.

Analysis of the radiation showed it was from an isotope with a 3-year half-life that emitted low levels of gamma radiation. The soil would be mostly safe to grow food in after about 75 years, scientists said, but despite being able to move small amounts of dirt to clear a non-radioactive place, the massive amount of earthmoving required to displace soil 5 meters deep was absolutely impractical. Further, the dust would blow and any cleared land would be covered in it soon enough. The poisoned lands were no longer useful to us.

Some people tried moving buildings from doomed areas to already-poisoned ones, just to have a place to live. This worked only in very short timeframes, since dust blew in and gave horrible radiation illnesses to those who tried it.

Those not killed by radiation exposure were frequently made sterile.

Moving any amount of humanity's works out of the way was impractical and deadly since it delayed actual effective evacuation.

People tried to dig shelters deep underground to hide. These were mostly doomed, their entrances shaken to bits and the survivors unable to dig themselves out, effectively being buried alive.

The net effect was vast destruction of most of China and eastern Asia, and the deaths of many, if not the majority, of those living there.

Humankind responded as best we could.

One of the ships was in the north and going over uninhabited sections of Siberia, doing little immediate harm, but the energy beams and boil-off of water from the soil set massive devastating peat-bog fires in the melted and churned up permafrost.

Every bit of methane released by that permafrost, plus the smoke and CO2 from the fires, greatly enhanced global warming beyond even what we had formerly been suffering.

All the varied human societies initially responded in their own ways.

Whole industries became irrelevant; our species was threatened with annihilation. Professional sports, fast cars, and expensive luxuries disappeared. Every available factory was converted to building the Important Things and try every crazy idea we had to bring them down.

At first, wealthy nations tried to reject the floods of refugees overwhelming their borders and filling their streets. The racism and isolationism grew to all-in levels with mass shootings and public tortures in many countries, but this reaction inevitably collapsed.

Racial prejudice and animus could not survive as food supplies dwindled and intensive stoop-labor agriculture of food gardens started requiring those same people to do the essential work. Further, every industry needed workers fast to spool up production.

The governments of the world had their own ideas about what to do - digging underground shelters, mining-refining-smelting-forging, shipbuilding, etc. All this was very disorganized and haphazard, because that's what desperate people will initially do.

Shortages of everything disrupted lines of communication and transport and caused epically stupid short-sighted decisions that killed a lot of people all over the world.

These decisions came to light and populations demanded strong central governments, the start of working together to actually do useful, helpful things.

The United Nations created the UNCHC, United Nations Central Hartan Command. Admittedly somewhat American-centric as it started, governments worldwide fell into line and deferred to its edicts. There was relief of having an organized response force both of military might and utterly practical, clear rules set down by experts.

Yes, some of those experts were sometimes wrong, sometimes barely competent or worse, but at least they were trying and working together instead of fighting over scraps.

All this I learned from history classes, though the echoing after-effects of this global societal reorganization filtered through even into my young semi-awareness. My parents explained and described things and how they were different, though the world was changing around us and quickly.

I had been 3 years old when they came, so I grew up in a world where Hartans were always a reality.

My parents told me stories of The Before. These were sometimes farfetched and a bit disconnected from reality. The ideas in them presumed so much that was different it was hard to fathom thinking that way.

It's like watching an old movie. I'd seen these. They frequently had plots that depended on everyone not having a personal Device to voice/text/video call quickly. Or, they wouldn't know vital info because they only had hardcopy books. Or, the main characters would just 'suffer' with boredom (or worse, doing stupid things) because they had 'free time' and no one to tell them what the next important step was.

As If!!!

I've seen some movies, but mostly I've been submerged in school.

Our family moved from place to place, but like all families, we've been utterly dedicated to the proposition that to survive, we had to get off of Earth. There were no safe places, as far as we understood. Once the land was sterile, we had to wonder if the seas would be next.

There was no pattern to the Hartan movements, other than completing the squares into ever larger squares or rectangular patterns.

In the first fifteen years, they'd shown no priority for action, either. Sterilizing the Sahara was useless. Siberia was mostly uninhabited.

That said, China, SE Asia, and the Kazakh plains were scenes of tragedies vast and unceasing.

The pace might have seemed slow but the devastation was total, and we knew the days of humans were numbered.

== Chapter: School Life ==

In The Before, according to history books, kids went to school only some of the year, only a few days a week during the daytime, for just a few hours.

In The Before, there were equal numbers of boys and girls in classes, equal numbers of men and women in the cities, living unhurried lives watching videos for fun all day long.

In The Before, people could go to cafeterias called 'restaurants', ask for and get specific dishes made just for them, sometimes including big slabs of meat.

In The Before, the limit on how much ice cream and chocolate cake you ate was self-imposed, so you didn't get fat.

I have seen videos of this happening. I know it was real. My parents described it.

My idle speculation was that I could someday tell my grandchildren about these videos, about these wonders of the before-life.

Of course, that was a huge delusion.

The very idea of surviving long enough to be a grandparent was one of those things you dream in fairyland childish pretend, or when you've banged your head really hard, or when you have a bad fever and the doctors give you some strange medicine that makes your brain go wonky (I had that once when I was 7).

But, since I'm trying to tell a personal history here, and describe the things I've seen as best I can tell them, well, I'll do just that. I'll parrot what the history books tell us happened, even though I didn't witness all of it because I was too young.

In the months after the Hartan ships landed, my country's leader, President Santander 'Sandy' Williams, kept announcing projects and changes, so we could fight the Hartans. He said they had better tech than we did, so the only way we could defeat them was to get better tech ourselves. Better tech, he said, meant educating as many scientists and engineers as we could, as fast as we could.

We could NOT win this by brute force, he said. No force worked. We had to win by being smarter. That meant everyone, not just the rich kids, not just kids in our country, everyone, worldwide, had to study hard, invent, innovate, try, test, experiment -- and beat the Hartans with brains and not brawn.

President Williams, and the Congress of the USA where I lived, made a lot of changes, huge changes, and rolled out ever-more every month. First, he had Congress nationalize all schools, enhancing the curriculum and modernizing teaching methods according to the latest research on how people learned best.

The UNCHC got a lot of their funding and talent from the USA.

The ideas the USA had, President Williams' ideas, gradually went (despite the vast worldwide societal disruption and dislocation) from just USA things, to being WORLDWIDE things.

Williams - a wiser man I didn't know - directed us and guided us, but mostly he INSPIRED us, with words that took hold in panicked people and helped them sort it all out.

The energies of the Earth were to be poured into important projects -- saving lives, tunneling, mining, building better, and the one that affected my life the most, the LME Project.

LME was 'Learn and Master Everything' (though it's pronounced 'LEM'). LME programs meant we took as many classes as possible, did tutoring and study groups to help each other, attended special project seminars, and basically devoted our entire being into Leveling Up.

Of course, at first there weren't enough classrooms for all of us kids, plus we had lots of new kids from all over the world come to the USA to be students.

Students were described in a lot of speeches as 'future researchers', 'future warriors in the R&D battle', etc. Some of the political stuff from early on was over the top and stupid-sounding to my ears, but dad said it made sense given how racist and murderous people were due to shortages and starvation and disruptions of all kinds.

By the time I started school, when I was 4 or 5, we were on what people called the LME 'New Schedule'. That meant we'd get our 8 hours of sleep, but the other 16 hours were clearly defined.

For 14 hours a day, every day, we were at school - minus getting Sunday mornings off.

Schools were open 24-hours. LME divided us into two shifts, overlapping some time at school to cooperate on long-running experiments or projects, and to give the parents a chance to be without kids for a little bit of the day.

Most of my life I've been assigned the 'afternoon' schedule, starting at 1 pm and going until 3 am. I've had lots of chances to switch, but once you get used to something it's hard to change. Initially, when we lived in Kansas, most of my friends were on afternoons, so of course I didn't want to switch. After we moved, the 'friends' thing didn't matter so much, and eventually when we settled in Colorado, I just stuck with afternoons because changing would have seemed weird.

No matter where I was, I felt lucky because we always had lots of good food to eat at school, lots more than at home. The ration cards mom had for a while meant she could make meals at home, like Sunday Morning Breakfast, but since she was a minister and worked on Sunday Mornings, it was always harder for her to do that and get where we needed to go on time.

LME meant our classes always had several teachers, wandering around the classroom. We would read - mostly on our devices but sometimes we'd have old-time hardcopy textbooks - and then video lectures organizing the info. Then we'd do assigned problems, either on paper, on our devices, or on tablets or the classroom e-desks.

If we didn't understand something or had a question (sometimes material was nebulous or conflicted with our preconceptions), we could ask the teacher. Most of the time, they'd know what we weren't getting and have just the right set of things to say.

Our teachers weren't perfect. Sometimes they were even counterproductive - better to ignore them and read the material yourself. It was an every-once-in-a-while thing when I had a question that the teacher didn't know, but then the other teacher in the room almost always knew.

Each month of school was called a cycle, 12 cycles a year, with one day off between cycles. We couldn't advance to the next class until we mastered the previous material, so it was normal to take, say, 3 to 5 geometry-1 cycles (depending on how fast you sucked up the material) before moving on to trigonometry. Since advancing was obvious during the class, signing up for the next cycle's classes implied half-automatic and half-optional topics, depending.

We could choose what we were interested in, but the base classes were pretty much set, since STEM was everyone's primary focus. There had to be other classes, too - history, the arts, athletics, music, logic, ethics, etc., since these fed into and supported things. Those subjects 'cross-pollinated', as President Williams said.

I could see the point. The way astronomy developed would make no sense if I didn't know how the religious leaders promoted or suppressing specific ideas.

Generally, we always had 2 fitness classes, a math or two, a hard science like geology or oceanography, a soft science like psych or archeology, literature, english grammar and writing, a practical skill like welding or plumbing (both memorizing building codes and doing the work), a life-skill like interpersonal conflict resolution or peace studies, a game class like board-games or chance games or shoot-em-up games, a music class like chorus, band, or art, and then a couple of electives, anything we wanted to do, like hydroponics, robot repair, programming, cold weather survival, archery, stuff like that.

We all knew -- absolutely every single kid -- what the stakes were. If every single one of us didn't do EVERYTHING we could and maybe more, as fast as we could? Well, then we would be the last humans, Ever.

We policed each other. We also helped each other. The enemy wasn't in the room with us. The enemy was never 'us', other students, or faculty. The enemy was Getting Stuff Done, in time - in time to save ourselves and absolutely everyone around us.

Basically, the end of everything was coming.

We COULD stop it - MAYBE. But it would take working as hard as we possibly could every waking hour, above and beyond and over the top with excellence and clarity. Working together was a focus, too - we all knew, my God we knew, we couldn't be the only thing, it would be a group effort, each person supporting each other to get ourselves and the group as far as we could.

We helped each other in classes because if I helped someone one day, maybe the next they'd help me in a different class. Everyone moved at different rates in different subjects.

Every grown-up was fighting, too -- learning, building, getting by with as little as they could, trying new things and either succeeding or falling down. President Williams said, get busy and try hard, and if you don't fall down, you're not running fast enough.

This set of lessons, thrown at me from an early age, came along with video tracks of what was REALLY happening in the world. The videos showed it ALL - people dying and everything that meant.

We HAD to watch them. It wasn't optional.

Cameras carefully shielded from the energy weapons were able to broadcast until the last minute, sent pictures of the areas where the Hartan ships were plowing through, burning people, making flat every single thing in their paths -- hills collapsed, buildings melted, everything was utterly flattened to gravel and dust.