[ IP ] The Aftermath

Officially, the device was known as a Dartmouth Generator, after the leader of the team that built it. 
 
 We all just called it The Box. 
 
 The Box was 10 meters tall and 10 meters wide. The top and bottom were funnels, and round the lip of each of these was a series of shallow indentations. Each funnel attached to a column which ran through the center of the Generator. Inside The Box was a mass of wiring, tubes, and pipes of coolant, all of which ran around the column from top to bottom. On the outside there were three massive triangular energy output ports, and a few feet above the floor there was a computer console which was to be used to regulate The Box's functions. 
 
 The Box was not the first Dartmouth Generator, but it was by far the biggest. Dr. Jacob Dartmouth was a brilliant man who discovered one day that if you made a ball of plasma oscillate up and down in a tube constructed of Pulse-Resonance Crystal ( PRC, another one of Dartmouth's discoveries ), an enormous amount of useable electricity was created, directly proportionate to the speed of the oscillations. The funnels on either end of the tube were capped off and used to help control oscillation speed through electromagnetic attraction and repulsion patterns. The phenomenon, strangely, seemed to create more energy than it used -- the only energy required to start a Dartmouth Generator is the energy used to power up the electrical coiling for the first time, and the energy used to create the plasma. After that it would power itself and produce excess energy in the process. Theories ran wild. Dark energy, dark matter, tearing in space and time that somehow produced energy, like breaking bonds in a combustion reaction. But even Dartmouth knew fuckall about how the thing worked. 
 
 The problem with The Box was a problem of scale. Dartmouth's fatal flaw was also his greatest gift: Unbridled joy and curiosity over the unknown. The Generator was a brand new machine that broke natural laws in ways that baffled even its own inventor. Naturally, his peers, despite their excitement, and his, urged caution. The first Generator was a third of a meter wide and tall, and yet it produced enough energy to power entire cities quite comfortably. When the creator of the world's latest and greatest energy source announced his intention to create a version thirty times the size of the original, the scientific community collectively lost their minds. The were angry at him, thought he was reckless. Dartmouth did n't care. He built The Box, with the help of myself and 5 others, trusted associates who would n't try to hinder his work. But if anyone but Dartmouth had asked us why we were helping him, we all would've said the same thing: `` I want to see if this will go as horribly wrong as people think it will. And if it does, I'd like a front row seat''. 
 
 The bitter humor of that statement occurs to me now, as I write this. 
 
 It turned out that the power output of a Dartmouth Generator increased logarithmically, not linearly or inversely or any other number of much safer mathematical relationships, with the size. The Box, now held under government protection under some mountain, supplied more than enough power for the whole planet. Energy relay stations made wireless transfer of power possible, and the whole world received free electricity. 
 
 Dr. Jacob Dartmouth was one of seven men permitted in the same room as The Box. Six of them decided to celebrate, took their share of the award money, rented out a spacecraft for a week, and floated in a high orbit around the earth. Which brings me two days ago. 
 
 Sometime early in the morning, June 19th, 2173, Dartmouth decided he wanted to know what would happen if he turned the oscillation speed all the way up. He entered the password known only to the 7 men who built the box ( it was daedalus2173. Not that it matters anymore ), and accessed its controls. Slowly, he ramped up the oscillation speed towards the maximum. At this point the ball of plasma was a stretched-out streak of blinding blue light, traveling up and down the tube hundreds of thousands of times per second. 
 
 And then something new happened. Dartmouth discovered that he'd made a mistake. 
 
 No one is sure what happened, exactly, but as a physicist who worked closely with Dartmouth, I have my theory. 
 
 The cap on top of The Box broke. The plasma escaped, shot through the ceiling, into the sky. The massive amounts of energy, previously flowing out from The Box into homes all over the world, suddenly were sucked back inwards, back into the wires around the tube. Dartmouth would've been incinerated at that moment. There was a huge bang as the energy trapped in the coils of wire escaped out into the tube and turned it into a cannon. Burning hot plasma and light and radiation fired out the top like a searchlight, igniting the air around The Box and cutting straight through the mountainside. 
 
 What we did see happen, from our spacecraft, was beautiful. It was the death of a planet, our planet, but it was beautiful all the same. Where that beam of plasma contacted the upper atmosphere, a blue patina started to form and spread. It was the color of the sea, but it glowed like a star. Tongues of flame shot out like auroras in the northern sky, and the patina spread further across the planet. Eventually our vision was completely obscured by the glow. Arcs of plasma shot out of the surface like solar flares. The earth began to sigh a fiery dying breath, as jets of burning hot gas and energy spewed out of the poles. The planet was dying, and it was beautiful. 
 
 That was two days ago. When I woke up this morning, the glow had died down, and I could see the surface of the Earth again. Immediately I realized that was n't a good thing. 
 
 The oceans were gone. All the trees and deserts and mountains. Everything gone. 
 
 The Earth had been reduced to a roughly uniform sphere. Red. Everything red. Burned. The whole thing glowed dimly, still incredibly hot. The shambles of the atmosphere, largely replaced by dim clouds of cooled plasma and smoke, would likely never support life again. 
 
 I'm sitting on what may be the last surviving human vessel in the solar system, surveying the aftermath. There's not much to see. It's still a shock. We could be in orbit over Mars, if I did n't know better. 
 
 My peers are all still in bed. They do n't want to face the reality of what's below us. As I write this I'm headed to the control room. There I will set the transmitters to broadcast this account until their circuits wear out. 
 
 I do n't know what my peers will do, but I will be taking one of the 8 escape capsules back to Earth. I do n't want to starve to death. 
 
 I'm going home.
