Some of us are having a tough time adapting to the new paradigm. Five thousand years of human thought, scientific innovation, and hard-fought intellectual progress and it turns out the god blessed religious fundamentalists were right all along. It was the Chinese that finally figured it out. Free of most religious dogma and not trusting the American and Soviet claims about space travel, Dongshan-1 crashed into what we now know is the Firmament at something like 15 times the speed of sound. At first, those of us in the scientific community at large were deeply flummoxed by this. But as the story spread around the world and things started unraveling, the moon landing hoaxers and flat earthers started crowing, and the public started to demand answers.
NASA was a hoax all along. As was the now-defunct Soviet equivalent, they were both mass propaganda arms determined to win the Space Race for their countries. They might have started out with good intentions, but documents released through FOIA show they found out about the snowglobe shape of our world pretty quickly and everything after that was worked up in a sound stage. The astronauts weren’t even in on it, they just sent Buzz Aldrin on the world’s most expensive Disneyland ride. Made it more believable if they thought they were really there.
I still can’t quite bring myself to believe it. The level of collusion, the number of people involved, the sheer brazen-ness of the lie. There were cracks in it, now it’s plain to see, but we laughed at the people pointing them out. People holding rulers up to the horizon, taking levels on planes. Well, they’re laughing now. Has any group of people been proven so laughably wrong on such a deep level before? The humiliation we are feeling is deep and strange, and it shows on each of us in different ways.
A lot of us committed suicide pretty quickly. Neil DeGrasse Tyson live-streamed his, which I thought was a little much, even for a an attention seeker of his caliber. The vast majority of the population, scientists and engineers included, seemed to have just shrugged and changed the color of their jerseys. And they’re right to - our ways of thinking were clearly, demonstrably, irrevocably wrong. Call it pride, call it hubris, call it pure pig-headed stubbornness but I can’t do that. I’m watching a 21st century global civilization revert to a 1950s theocratic nightmare, and I’m provably on the losing side. God is up there, somewhere, between the stars and the dome of ice that seals our world like a pill in a blister pack.
Dongshan-1 didn’t break through the ice blanketing the world, but it did leave some major cracks. We know it’s not impervious. We figure a few more impacts with some thermonuclear oomph behind them might actually open a hole to whatever realm exists beyond. All of our air might leak out. God might flood the world again. Maybe that’s how Leviathan gets in and Satan rules us all for ten thousand years of darkness. They worried about similar things when they lit the fuse on the first atomic bomb, but they went through with it anyway. We are all praying to Saint Oppenheimer tonight.
Re-examining our assumptions about the universe, we trained some of the ground-based telescopes we had access to on new locations. The Bible, now a literal document, states where God’s pavilion sits, if you read between the lines. The view is fuzzy through that much ice, but God must like his drinks done up nicely because it’s clearer than anything a Japanese bartender ever worked with. With time and a little luck, we found something floating out there, where we thought near-earth orbit used to be. It’s hard to say what it is, exactly, since space and gravity don’t exist the way we thought. To my eyes it looks like a city, sitting on a plate, with a vast counterweight hanging below it. We will find out soon enough, though.
I keep saying “we”. I’m not alone. There’s a few of us, call us radicals, terrorists, partisans, jihadis, whatever, and we’ve got a plan. Using the abandoned NASA communications systems, we’ve quietly organized and made an inventory of our skills and accesses. A few of us, like me, were fairly highly placed in the old hierarchies and have a lot of keys on our key rings. I’m writing this, looking down over 14 stories of Minuteman-2 buried under North Dakota somewhere. This will be the first launch against the firmament, the first strike, the sounding horn of our war in Heaven.
I don’t know what will happen after we execute our plan. I’m afraid we are living through the end of history and so I am leaving this as a note to explain what happened, maybe. I’m not sure we will succeed, or even if we can. But we know where he lives. And we are going to kill Him or die trying. We are going to kill God.