Sofia took the copy of a scientist’s journal from her bookshelf. She got it from the library two days earlier, and had finally gotten to reading it.


I remember when everything began to change in the spring of 1951. Maybe it started before then, and that’s only when people started to notice the Rearrangement, as people call it. Starting from the middle of the Atlantic and spreading out from there, people started turning into anthropomorphic animals all over the world, and it appeared to be happening at random. It wasn’t long before real magic began to appear, too. Then people began to disappear. People tend to panic when things get rough, but that tendency was elevated to the greatest mass hysteria in history thanks to the global breakdown that set in when the table got kicked from under the gameboard of reality. It wasn’t too long - I’d say the spring of 1953 when it started - before the world order started breaking down.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Earth’s spin started slowing down dramatically. The earliest report that the public - and therefore I - saw was published in October 1955. Almost exactly ten years after that started, the Earth stopped spinning entirely. It isn’t even tidally locked like many bodies of our solar system, there is truly zero rotation now. Not even my geologist colleagues can explain how the oceans and the atmosphere didn’t migrate towards the poles in the process, or how the Earth lost its equatorial bulge without some sort of geological cataclysm. But everyone was too busy at the time with another problem to worry about it.

I’ve been an astronomer for my entire adult life, but it was obvious to me how bad the political situation was getting when ethnic tensions in United States exploded, and the nation tore itself apart and dissolved by 1972. The alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization fell apart not long afterward. And then the Warsaw Pact capitalized on the chaos in central and western Europe with a westward blitz. The only good news out of that is that despite the “reunification” of Germany that the blitz entailed, this invasion force only just made it to the western side of the Rhine before Moscow fell into anarchy, and that spelled the doom of the Warsaw Pact as that alliance fell apart, and even some former Soviet states broke away before order could be restored.

I’m writing this twenty-four years after the world as I knew it began to end. I still find myself, and perhaps it will happen for the rest of my life, struggling to explain seasons and twenty-four-hour days to the children of a world that’s known only six months of light and heat, and six months of darkness and cold. I don’t intend for this to be any official account of the disaster, simply one man’s ramblings about what I witnessed in those awful decades. The only good thing that came out of all that, if it can be called good after everything, was that war has pretty much stopped since then.