When combined, calcium hypochlorite and polyethylene glycol will create first a spark and then a dazzling red and fiercely burning flame that, depending on the amounts of each chemical used, will ignite and then dissipate rather quickly, leaving behind nothing more than a smoldering burn mark on the ground.
But if larger amounts of these chemicals — typically found in granular chlorine pool cleaners and standard automotive brake fluid — are added together in significant quantities, the delay to ignition and subsequent time to burn up is exponentially increased. A teaspoon of this mix will ignite quickly, whereas a gallon may take up to half an hour or longer before the anticipated chemical reaction is reached.
In other words, the bigger the mass, the bigger the mess, but the longer it takes for the mass to make the mess.
Similarly, when a single black hole anomaly originally appeared randomly somewhere on Earth, while the impact on the area of origin was sudden and dramatic, the destructive power of larger black holes with a more substantial and denser gravitational pull was considerably more significant.
And now, with the earth entirely swallowed by several individual black holes that had on their own spanned large swathes of land but had now combined into a single perfectly rounded sphere of black mass and nothingness, the remaining black hole seemed to stop its further destruction into the further reaches of the universe. It now spun so slowly as to have a nearly imperceptible rotation despite encompassing the entire troposphere surrounding where the globe had just been.
At that exact moment, in the thermosphere layer two atmospheric layers above the earth where thousands of satellites rotated in orbit around the globe, the final payloads from just over one hundred nuclear and non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons completed their final detonation cycles. They flooded first the mesosphere, then the stratosphere, and finally back down to the troposphere itself, smashing through it with invisible radiation containing the forceful galactic equivalent of going all in during a no-holds-barred poker game. Nothing was held back.
The combined force of the electromagnetic radiation showered down in an unseen and seemingly unending wave, finally reaching the outermost edge of the black hole that had now swallowed the earth. Additionally, in areas where Russia once existed, gamma and neutron radiation slammed into the black hole and was absorbed into the mass as if nothing more than water into a dry sponge.
Following the initial blast and the first waves of radiation on one side of the globe and the pounding burst of electromagnetic pulses on the other, the black hole, so huge as to seem still and motionless in space, came to a rolling and stuttered stop. The residual radiation continued to flare high above, expanding out and downward, directed into the mass.
Looking down from space at that moment, it would be impossible to know that a planet had ever existed in the area now occupied by the black hole if not for the out-of-place moon, which hovered solitarily and now had no planet around which to orbit.
As wave after wave of radiation reached its surface, the black hole seemed at first to do nothing but absorb the impact like a raindrop landing on the surface of a lake or like gallons of brake fluid being poured over gallons of chlorine. Over where Russia and China once were, gamma and neutron radiation were quickly sucked into the black hole.
However, as the first waves of radiation washed over somewhere near where the city of Chicago once existed, the point of radiation impact struck against the outer edge of the black hole. It caused it to tremble more severely than in any other spot where the earth once rotated.
It was at this spot that ENH first broke ground in the 1970s as a simple laboratory built upon a labyrinthian network of navigable tunnels beneath suburban Chicago streets. In the early 1980s, with an influx of significant government funding, the ENH Initiative dramatically evolved its facilities and initiated the development of what would eventually lead to North America’s first fully functioning large hadron collider.
That collider reached its total capacity when Dr. Becca Watts was sixty-nine years old. At that time, she initiated a protocol that opened a secondary black hole that, combined with the first man-made black hole ever created, expanded and exploited a wormhole in time and space. It was that spot in time and from that particular location that Becca ricocheted the world’s populace back to 1986. Yet somehow, that exact point imperceptibly kept a foothold in the future, and the wormhole would almost inexplicably continue to exist in that same fixed origin spot.
Like the multitude of black holes that would eventually join into a single massive entity, that origin point wormhole, which connected the past to the present and the future to the past, was tied to every other fixed point in time and, by extension, every person who ever existed at any other point in time.
And as the radiation of a hundred detonated weapons now pummeled that exact spot — which seemed at first to be unaffected — the spot instead enlarged, widening as it had when Dr. Becca Watts had created that second black hole, and which opened up the space in time where the wormhole still existed.
As the magnitude of each satellite’s EMP payload reached the earth, one by one by one, the intensity escalating with each propulsion, the wormhole opened wider like a gaping and gluttonous mouth that got larger the more it was fed, and which sucked in not only the radiation that would typically destroy all humanity but it drew in the world-destroying black hole, which now seemed to turn inward upon itself, like a strange black doughnut with the wormhole in the center.
As the last waves of radiation were absorbed into the remaining vestiges of the black hole before it, the final anomaly rolled backward upon itself one last time, like giant black lips being pulled apart. It disappeared completely, then, revealing the earth once more in its wake — or some semblance of it. The planet came forth from where the wormhole had been like a child from the womb, a shining, spinning blue marble hovering amidst the stars, back in orbit and time and space.
