The door to the Greenbrier sub-basement hissed shut behind them, steel on steel. For a long moment, the air was filled only with the dull hum of filtered circulation, the faint clicking of electrical panels, and the high-pitched whine of emergency monitors. Then came silence—dense, waiting.
Cynthia exhaled. It was shaky.
“Is this place really going to hold?” she asked, her voice low, eyes scanning the thick concrete walls reinforced by Cold War paranoia and recent modifications from Manny’s private funding.
David didn’t answer right away. He checked the instruments again—the backup power status, oxygen levels, and seismic sensors that were already twitching. The tension in the earth was growing.
“It will hold,” he said, finally. “This place was designed to survive a nuclear exchange. What’s coming is… different. But structurally, this is one of the safest spots on the continent.”
Cynthia crossed her arms and paced. Her boots echoed on the steel floor. “Different how? I still don’t understand. You two keep using words like ‘discharge’ and ‘polar alignment’—what does that even mean?”
Manny, who had been quietly unrolling a cot near the far wall, paused. He looked up at his daughter. “It means we’re inside a battery. And the sky is about to close the circuit.”
David stepped closer, his voice calm, soothing. “You remember when I laughed off your dad’s theories? I was wrong, Cynthia. There’s something happening between Earth and that planet—an exchange of electricity on a scale we’ve never seen.”
She sat slowly on a metal bench, still processing. “So it’s not an impact?”
“No. It’s worse. There’s no collision—but the electrical potential between the two bodies has been building for weeks. The rogue planet is positively charged. Earth’s ionosphere is negatively charged. When the gap closes enough—”
“Arcs of electricity,” Manny finished. “Plasma filaments, discharge events. The kind that leave canyons, not craters.”
Cynthia blinked at him. “That’s what carved the Grand Canyon? Not water?”
Manny nodded. “Not water alone. That was a scar left by a sky-born scalpel.”
A sudden vibration rattled the floor beneath them. The overhead lights flickered. David moved quickly to the seismic screen.
“It’s starting.”
Above them, through tons of earth and rock, came the muffled groan of tortured atmosphere—low, pulsing, like the earth was moaning in dread. Then came the sound like distant thunder—but sharper. Rhythmic. Mechanical.
“What is that?” Cynthia stood. “It sounds like a machine.”
David checked his watch, as if time itself had something to do with survival. “Electric discharge machining. Just like in a lab. But on a planetary scale.”
“You’re serious?”
“Think of it like cosmic lightning. But it doesn’t strike once and vanish. It drags across the surface. Tunnels. Scours. Burns everything it touches.”
Outside, the air had turned hostile. High-altitude winds shrieked and snarled in a dissonant chorus.
Somewhere far above, glowing curtains of aurora were dancing not just at the poles—but everywhere. The entire magnetosphere was on fire.
Cynthia pressed her hands to her ears. “It’s so loud.”
“It’s the charge,” Manny said. “The very air is ionized. Every molecule is screaming.”
A sudden impact above—massive, metallic, deep—shook the entire bunker. The lights went red. David pulled Cynthia toward a recessed alcove and pushed her down.
“Get low.”
A blast wave rolled through the earth like a wave crashing on stone. Dust sifted from the ceiling. The steel doors groaned under pressure but held.
They waited, breathless, as the world above was peeled like fruit.
“Do you remember the Sumerian tablets?” Manny asked quietly, as if delivering a bedtime story through a warzone. “They spoke of a god whose thunderbolts carved rivers. Not myths. Memories. They recorded this. Someone lived through it before.”
Cynthia looked at him, horrified. “But how? How could anyone survive?”
“You’re surviving it now,” David said. “Because someone remembered. And someone prepared.”
They sat in silence again as the discharges intensified—circular, rotating arcs that spiraled across the sky, leaving molten trenches and lifting mountains like foam. The atmosphere itself seemed to tear, replaced with fire. For a time, it was hard to tell what was sky and what was earth.
Then, for a moment—utter stillness.
The silence was louder than the storm. Cynthia whispered, “Is it over?”
Manny closed his eyes. “Not yet. That was the switch. The dark current phase is over. Now comes the glow discharge. And then the arc.”
Just as he spoke, a faint blue radiance bloomed on the far wall—the result of plasma fields forming outside, invisible to the naked eye but powerful enough to light up the subterranean monitors.
David stood. “We’ll make it. The walls will hold. And after this… the world will be new.”
Cynthia buried her face in his chest. “I don’t want a new world. I want the old one back.”
David held her tighter. “I know. But that one’s gone.”
Above, another series of impacts crashed in staggered succession—rapid-fire discharges that carved the land like sculptor’s tools. The rogue planet loomed in the skies, then slowly began to recede, its electric fire diminishing, its purpose fulfilled.
And somewhere within the steel-encased cavern, the three of them endured.
