DAY 1
Bikekid Madrid@mateo: Hey, Zoe, I bunny-hopped a pothole today. Only the size of a plate but it could’ve thrown me
Poetess1987@Zoe: Hi, Mateo. Where?
@mateo: Ave Albufeira on Madrid outskirts
@Zoe: Report on that app Fillthatpothole
@mateo: Si. Reparar el bache I’ll go tomorrow and take a photo. Measure it, too
DAY 2
@mateo: Hola, Zoe. See photo. This hole is twice the size it was before. It’s 40 cm. I’ve sent it off. See what they say. Meet tonight at Ocho y Medio
@Zoe: Right but if I’m gonna go all Goth for it so are you. BTW how deep is that hole?
@mateo: I cannot tell, it’s black
DAY 3
@mateo: great night. Hope your landlady wasn’t mad
@Zoe: She’s threatening to phone dad all the way in New Jersey. How’s your hole?
@mateo: Escape your lecture. Come see it with me now
Zoe saw Mateo’s red mountain bike leaning against an ancient, gnarled tree. She parked her own cycle on its kickstand and admired the view. A stark blue sky contrasted with the maquis vegetation of dotted scrub in ochre soil. The landscape appeared flat although on closer scrutiny the horizon undulated. Looking back at Madrid, the modern spaceship-puncturing of the atmosphere by the Quattro Torres was balanced by the traditional curved roof and bell towers of the Almudena Cathedral. She’d better pay attention to Mateo’s discovery even though it was not likely to be signi—what on Earth?
She shook her head sending black curls into a dance. She crouched down to finger the edge of the perfect circle. “It’s nearly a metre across, and you’re right about it being black.” She snatched back her hand when tingling tickled her fingers. She frowned, but pressed on. “I’m dropping this stone in.”
Mateo, nineteen-years of tall and lanky, leaned over the abyss. “Just a minute while I set my stopwatch app. What’s the formula? A metre a second?”
“About five metres in the first second. Twenty after two seconds. Roughly five times the square of the seconds.”
“Always the clever one with physics, Zoe.”
She flashed a grin at him. “That’s why you want me, isn’t it?”
His teeth revealed a gap between his front teeth through which he worked chewing gum. “What are you going to drop?”
“It’s just a fragment of road. This lane is a disgrace, good job no one uses it, except—”
“Fearless cyclists like me?”
She stood and held out her arm, noting the absence of static, or whatever at that height. “Three, two, one, go!”
They both stared at the stopwatch app on his phone, their mouths opening wider with every ten seconds without hearing the stone land. She dared not speak in case they missed the telltale sound.
Zoe spoke first. “That’s a minute. It’s now over fifteen kilometres down. We’d not hear it anyway.”
Mateo laughed at her. “Si? Not that it’s just a sink hole and it’s fallen into soft sand a few metres down?”
She smiled, her plump lips curling as she collected more sensible answers. “Maybe there are old mineral workings in the area, or there could be subsidence from a broken sewer or even a geological fault line."
Mateo agreed. "You could check out the latest tremor on that Did-the-earth-move-for-you site."
She tapped at her phone like a bird pecking at crumbs. "Did you know this road was lottery-funded to lead to an observatory up there?"
"Earthquake?"
"They didn’t finish it. Shame. Okay, okay...maybe a tremor a few days ago. Hey, I felt one then!"
Withered brown leaves drifted down from the tree. A green lizard scampered between Mateo's feet. He'd never seen a reptile’s legs blur like an egg-beater before. He knelt down at the hole. The edge was remarkably smooth and...”Yes, the hole is widening. I can feel it, tremoring? Is that a word in English?”
She flicked the metal tape measure across the hole. “Trembling. Eighty-five centimetres. Better find a board to put over it to stop other cyclists falling into it.”
He scrabbled around in the road edge and pulled out a battered No-Entry sign. “That’s double yesterday’s size.”
He placed the circular metal over the hole. “Should we be putting a no-entry notice into this entrance? Oops, too small, hey look at it go!”
The sign must have been just a millimetre smaller than the circular hole and vibrated as it slowly dropped down. “Look, Zoe, it’s hovering. No, it’s disintegrating.”
She leaned over watching the crumbling sign rock a dance as it tried to resist falling. She daringly put her hand to the edge. “Air pressure, you can feel the displaced air coming up as the sign goes down. We should’ve stuck a LED light on it. Ow!” She snatched her hand back examining it for burn marks., finding none.
Mateo leapt up, ran to his bike and rushed back. He turned on a thumb-sized bike light and used his chewing gum as an adhesive. Before Zoe could stop him he reached over and dropped the light in the middle of the no-go sign. “No, don’t tilt! Ah, it’s all right, down it goes.”
His fingers probed the edge as he watched his experiment oscillate downwards. He jumped back and shook himself. They exchanged knowing glances.
“I’m surprised at you, Mateo,” Zoe said, stroking his back as if her were her cat. “You’ve sacrificed your only front light in the cause of science. Is it speeding up its descent?”
“Think so. I should’ve put your phone on it instead with the line-of-sight app running with mine.”
Zoe checked her fluorescent green watch. “Ten seconds and we can still see not only the light but the circular hole. It’s like a well.”
“Maybe it is a well.”
“As in maybe it was a well and this road just happened to be built across it? Possible I sup—hey, the edge is vibrating, moving. I’ve never heard of wells that expand. Mateo, you did report this?”
They cycled two kilometres before finding a board big enough to cover the hole. It was white with the blue square and ring of European Union stars, declaring the funding for the observatory and road. It took Mateo three bangs with a rock to de-nail the board from its wooden posts. He muttered about “greater need” as they carried the board back up the lane to the hole.
They threw it over the hole, which took a big chunk out of it as if it was a giant worm eating a biscuit.
Zoe rubbed grit off her hands. “Should have realized it’d do that. Well, I really must go to uni tomorrow, Spanish and Probability Theory then work at the Bistro at the weekend. I can’t get back here for three days.”
“Same here, re-sitting Construction and Italian.”
“Just what we need, more Roman aqueducts. Here, Monday?”
DAY 6 (3 DAYS LATER)
“It’s gone!” croaked Mateo, when shock abated for any kind of speech.
Zoe played with the metal tape measure, pulling it out and letting it snap back in. “It’s now the width of the road. Um, I want to be exact, take the end of the measure.”
He sidestepped off the hot tarmac onto the baked soil sprinkled with a living salad of herbs and chickweeds. Zoe saw him stretching up and over to peer into the hole.
She called out, “Three metres twenty. You said it was ten centimetres six days ago, right?”
“Right, so...”
“It’s doubled in diameter every day. Hey the hole is eating the tape.”
Mateo let go the tape, which started its rapid journey back into Zoe’s hand. An experience that caused pain the first time so she threw it away from the hole so the retraction caused the metal holder to spin. She watched it while Mateo snorted a laugh in embarrassment.
“Sorry, Zoe, just fooling and we don’t know it actually doubled daily, the road might have subsided two metres just before we arrived today.”
She looked up to the nearest lamppost, intending to glue a camera in place. Dismissed it because if she was right, that post would be gone by tomorrow. As her brain rattled through possibilities, a gust of wind blew sand across the tarmac and vanished into the hole.
As if he’d read her mind, Mateo strode to the next nearest pole. “I brought a spare cam-phone, if I give you a leg up, tape it, will you?”
“Okay, but afterwards, I’m phoning the Guardia Civil. It’s dangerous and if I’m right about the doubling, we’ll have to move house soon.”
Mateo’s eyebrows danced in disbelief. “I live five kilometres away! The Guardia won’t even come out here until someone falls down the hole. Ah, that’s what you’re going to tell them. Sneaky. I like it.”
She shook her head sending a forgotten hairgrip in a parabolic flight up then into the hole, never to be seen again. “I don’t like having to say that, but this is too darn dangerous to be left up to us. Just suppose it doesn’t stop doubling in diameter every day?”
Mateo looked up in the air as if looking for evidence of the vertical extension of the hole into the blue. A passing cloud could be eaten. Meanwhile, Zoe used a spreadsheet on her phone to calculate.
“Right, the hole would swallow both our Madrid homes by Friday after next, seventeen days after you first saw it. Six kilometres. The whole of Madrid the day after.”
“What?” He kicked a stone in the hole as if to slow it down.
“Exponential growth, Mateo, like population growth was thought to be by Malthus in 1798, although—”
“What about the whole of Spain? We are in the centre, Si?”
“Oh, the borders of Spain will be fine until another week passes. Day twenty-four, give or take twelve hours. Two weeks and five days from now.”
Mateo pulled at his own black hair. “You’re assuming it grows at a constant rate.”
“No, doubling daily. Yes, that’s an assumption. It could slow down, stop—”
“Or, speed up?”
Mateo picked up a discarded coke can, probably one of his, peered into it then jerked his head back as a scorpion escaped. Both can and insect fell onto the hot, tacky tarmac. “It’s all right for you, Zoe, your relatives are in America, whereas mine...” He waved his arms in the northerly direction of Madrid. Heat haze befuddled details but life went on as if a hole wasn’t creeping towards them.
She peered at the city too. “Mateo, how much flight money can you get your hands on? Hopefully, the hole will wear itself out or some clever scientist will figure and plug it before—let’s see—twenty-two days from now, when the whole planet will be gone.”
“It’s just a sinkhole that hasn’t finished sinking. I can afford only a bus to Barcelona. What, if there are more holes? Won’t that make a paella out of your calculations?”
“Yes.” She frowned at her phone with her thumbs a blur. “Checking news. Ah, must look at our antipodal. Meantime Mateo, book a trip quick. Use your phone to book a flight to JFK. I’ll do mine. We’ll go tomorrow in case there’s panic. I shouldn’t have told the Guardia Civil to come straight away. I can’t hear them, can you?”
They both looked up from their phones, shook heads and continued.
Mateo laughed like a horse. “Seven hundred euros! Impossible for me.”
“I’ll pay, you dolt. Or my dad will—eventually. There’s an Iberia flight at 0905. Tell you what, I’ll buy two seats now, fill in the details tonight for online check-in. Just carry-on luggage. Meanwhile...”
“What details and what’s antipedalling?” He was bent over, phone in one hand and a stick in the other, upturning stones in front of the scorpion. “I can’t take your money, though I’d pay it back...assuming the hole doesn’t get me first.”
“Yes, there is something going on at the antipodal point from us!” She showed him her phone—Google map of New Zealand. “Not sure what’s happening there. No big city, just a village called Weber.”
He pointed at her phone. “Is there a tall thin hill down there, the opposite of this hole?”
“It’s the local sheep farmer who sent a photo of their hole to the online newspaper. She’s worried the sinkhole will take her barn. By now it’s probably gone. Picture’s poor, too pixellated.” She took the phone back and looked at her own snaps of their hole. They too were fuzzy, as if while their eyes and brain interpolated missing detail the camera couldn’t.
A tremor sent them to the ground. Zoe grazed her knees, but at least her yellow Lycra cycling shorts hadn’t torn. She looked through a haze of dancing motes at the city. Still there, for now.
Mateo was the first to leap to his feet. “Quizás we should get farther from the hole.” He kicked the scorpion’s can at the hole. Instead of falling in like the stones and road sign, it disappeared in a puff of dust. “Whoa, that tremor’s changed the hole.”
They both threw stones, which all vanished when passing the edge. “It’s a kind of event horizon,” Zoe said, “It’s a hole that’s black, but not a black hole. If this was a real event horizon and that a real black hole, its gravity would pull us, our bikes and Madrid into it, and our time would be really slow.”
“Suppose it is slow for someone else looking at us, but it can’t be because our phones still work at the right speed. By the way, I can’t go to America.”
Zoe threw a stone in the air over the hole. It didn’t fall down, it vanished. If only the rain in Spain really did fall on the plain, then they’d have clouds to look for the hole extension. “Can I see a black spot in the blue up there? Looking straight across the hole we can see the landscape clearly–it’s not like a black column going up, so photons can pass through it. Odd. She took several steps back, crushing and releasing wild Thyme aromas and threw another stone making sure it went higher than three metres. It landed in the field on the other side, sending up dust. Hey, the hole is growing upwards at the same height as it is wide. Why not to the States? You have a crime record?”
He reached for his bike. “No passport. My identity card is enough for anywhere in mainland Europe.”
Zoe checked her bike over and pulled leaves out of the spokes. “You watched me pay for both our tickets!” She stamped a foot and glared at him.
“Lo siento. I’ll pay you back, eventually. You go home. I should tell my family and friends to get away too.”
“We’re in this together, Mateo. Where’s Europe’s farthest east airport?”
“Could be Estonia, Latvia, but if we go to Romania and have lots of money, we could speed across the Black Sea to Georgia.”
Both cycling but slowly, meandering on the road to Madrid, Zoe used her phone one-handed. “I’ve cancelled JFK, got some back. If we get to Georgia, the hole will catch us in twenty days, whereas if we’d gone to Japan it would have given us another day.”
“Assuming the world would still be in one piece, though a ring doughnut.” He laughed, this time more like a dog. He did a wheelie to lighten his mood. “It’s all a joke though, isn’t it? Just a mine or sewer collapse. A sinkhole.”
“Yes, a torus. Ring doughnut is a good description. With an equal hole growing at its antipodal point? And the puffing into nothing of anything over... hey, we’d better tell the airport. Suppose an airplane—”
His brakes screamed as he stopped. “Si! We should warn them, if they’ll take notice, but shouldn’t we fly to Bucharest first?”
“Today. I’ll book flights for both of us. Flying to America might have taken us over the hole, or at least one wing.” She tapped for a minute or so. “Tomorrow evening, seven o’clock flight via Blue Air. See you at check-in at five thirty. Bring chargers, money, ID, et cetera. I suppose you’ll need to tell your folks something?”
“They might try and stop me. I’ll phone them from Georgia, if we find somewhere to land with no passport for me.”
DAY 7
“Mateo, I thought you’d be packing this morning.”
He grinned, was about to lean his bike against the olive tree, but the hole was frighteningly close. The hole was twice as wide, eating into sandy dirt. “Packed my bag last night and like you I needed to see if it really was expanding.”
“Obvs it is, but tricky to measure now the hole is spreading upwards. Can you smell ozone?”
“Ah, I’ve brought Papá’s laser measure. I aim it from the edge here to over there. Six thirty, no, six twenty-eight. No, six thirty-five, four, six. About that.”
“Yeah, good to have precision. Whatever, it’s doubled from yesterday. We do right to escape this evening.”
Mateo continued pointing his measurer at the hole. “Si, but it’s hard with family. I told my mother but she assumes I’m in dreamland.”
She hugged him. “All we’re doing is buying a few days—two at most, in the hope it either stops or some genius saves the planet. I know it’s selfish but best not to tell too many people in case they can’t handle it.”
“You’ve told the Guardia Civil, or did you retract your statement?”
They both looked down the lane towards Madrid. “I guess they were just too busy and waiting for another report before doing anything. Did you bring your webcam?”
He grinned. “I installed it at my aunt’s top-floor apartment. It’s five kilometres away. I could see the end of the lane and it should pick up the hole in time.”
“Is it good enough?”
“Seven twenty p HD. Got it for my birthday last month. Latest. I can zoom with an app on my phone.” They put a pole across the road and leant a different red stop sign against it at the town outskirts.
DAY 8
Their holiday apartment in the ancient port town of Kamakura smelled of lemons, a pleasant change to the musty taxi that brought them there from the station after the twenty-hour flight to Tokyo. Zoe had to pay for a three-day minimum stay, but at three-hundred euros it was a bargain as they basked on a setting sun balcony.
“I can’t believe you kidnapped me,” moaned Mateo, sipping his bottle of Kirin beer. “Making me a fugitive, criminal.”
Zoe was on her second bottle. “It was the logical thing to do.” She had made contact with an acquaintance of a cousin of a friend. Only three degrees of separation to the underworld. Tricky job was to persuade him to accept her American Express card and find an acceptable photograph of Mateo online. She suspected his Spanish ID card might not dunk the doughnut at the Japan Airlines check-in.
Gradually, the yeasty aroma of the local ale swamped the limonene of the apartment. “I’ve checked my webcam and even with zooming in the edge of the hole isn’t showing, yet.”
“Well, no, it will only be fifty or so metres. It will take another week of doubling before it is over three kilometres and visible in that lane view.”
Mateo looked at her as if she’d trumped. “Then why have we rushed away so quick? Ah, in case the authorities finally take notice, or an airplane has a wing sliced off—over Madrid or New Zealand. I’ll send Marcello to have a look for it. I’ve already told him and while he’s not seen it he’s convinced it will be a collapsed Roman sewer. He read about one such in Kyushu.”
Zoe had tilted her white plastic chair dangerously far back. “Didn’t know the Romans were in Japan.”
“Over twenty metres in diameter, that one, so ours could still be—”
“If that’s what it is and the New Zealand one is a coincidence, then we can enjoy a holiday while we’re here. Did you pick up that card for take away veggie soba?”
DAY 11 (THREE DAYS LATER)
The sun startled Zoe into waking, not being sure where she was. Ah, not far from Tokyo. She looked over at Mateo’s bed. He’d graciously insisted she luxuriated in the king size, while he occupied the single. He won out because the sun couldn’t find him.
She brewed cups of tea while checking the webcam. Nope. News sites. Nope.
At the table, Mateo thumbed through his fake passport. “I am astonished,” Mateo spluttered as jam and pastry flakes decorated his face. “Little Senorita Perfect dips under the legal horizon. Cool, in a nefarious way.”
“We gain a day, don’t we?”
Three baking-sun hours later they found a local taxi and guide to take them to find another accommodation partway up Mount Fuji. They wanted a vantage point for the end. The driver’s mass of grey hair held up a too-small worn baseball cap that announced the wearer’s ardour for NYC. His olive-coloured face had more furrows than a ploughed field and the ends of his white moustache could have been tied in a bow under his chin if he needed to be tidy. His eyes were the more salient feature. Typical epicanthic fold but unusually green and laughing. Probably amused at these two probable teenage runaways.
Zoe leaned towards Mateo. To their surprise their fingers touched by accident but they didn’t let go. “Is he smiling, imagining how much dough he’s going to make when he dumps our bodies in a ravine?”
Mateo squeezed her hand. “No, he’s laughing at the ransom note he’s composing in his head.”
“He doesn’t need us alive for that. Ah, look, his interpreter.”
A teen girl with a Taylor Swift T-shirt disembarked from the ancient Toyota taxi. She looked innocent enough. Slim and smiley. She pointed at the opened boot.
“Rucksacks?”
The Sea of Japan shimmered turquoise on their left as they meandered up through foothills of terraced fertile volcanic soil growing soybean and almonds. Bright-red berries on roadside bushes exuded wafts of nearly-burnt cinnamon. They might have been on another planet, it was so different from her native America or Europe. Yet it was part of patchwork Earth that continued to rotate in defiance or ignorance.
Zoe leaned forward to speak to the driver. “It’s so serene, beautiful, Mister erm Katsuro.”
He grunted agreement then, “I am Cap.”
Zoe’s eyebrows arched as she turned to the girl, who had opened a cool box and handed out opened bottles of something beer-like. No labels. Her winsome smile belied her words. “Don’t trust him, you Americans, he’s called Cap because your souls will go under his hat.” She laughed at Zoe’s frown then she leered at Mateo, who’d raised a protesting finger.
“Spanish. I’m from Madrid.”
Cap roared with laughter yet threaded with a shout of disapproval at the girl. “Granddaughter—Yasu. No respect for elders.”
Zoe didn’t want Mateo to be lured by the girl, so held his hand, warm and firm.
He asked Yasu, “Will we be there for lunch?”
Zoe dug him in the ribs as the two Japanese laughed. She whispered to him about the hundred kilometres to go.
His Spanish natural tanned face, reddened as their lips inadvertently brushed. She liked it.
“Well, that’s only two hours at fifty kilometres per hour. Si, si, winding road, dangers. Ah, I have a text from Marcello. ‘Mat, hole is bigger. I might start believing you.’ He doesn’t say how big.”
“It should be over a hundred metres. Still won’t see it on your webcam. Check it though in case there’s activity from police.”
ZOE EXPECTED TO BE DEPOSITED at a Holiday Inn, Japanese style. She must have nodded off because she awoke to sunlight strobing her face through the taxi’s quirky venetian blinds, followed by a lurch that tested her seatbelt.
Mateo stirred. “Zoe, I hear people, laughing. Has he sold us out?”
She checked her watch—two PM—fingered apart the blinds and saw they’d stopped in a hill village.
Curious, she stepped out keeping a lookout for CCTV. She couldn’t see Cap, but Yasu’s face was lit by the glow of a smartphone.
“Hi, Yasu, are we here?”
“Hey, Zoe. This is destination. Get your bags. Cap finds you a place.”
Zoe straightened up a little. “The mountain is kilometres away. I suppose this is the nearest hotel. Right?”
“He do you good deal...you know?” She winked though it could’ve been a trick of the varying light as the sun flickered through clouds.
She urged Mateo to grab his rucksack. He’d grown a three-day beard, which could have looked fashionable except it was more like a moth-eaten carpet.
Ten minutes and a steep lane later, they shook hands with Whistler’s Mother, right down to the floor-length black dress, white bonnet and fragrance of lavender, though the aroma existed only in Zoe’s mind when she saw that portrait. The woman, Maria Desestret, recoiled in horror at dollars, but bizarrely smiled at Mateo’s euros.
“Yasu,” Zoe whispered, “She’s European.”
“You not have Europe people in America?”
Mateo coughed. “Spain.”
The top floor room surprised Zoe with its light spaciousness, decorated neatly in Wedgewood blue, a long navy sofa and such a heap of pillows and red cushions she couldn’t see the bed resting beneath. A whiff of cabbage, rice and mustard escaped a bead-curtained kitchen area.
She dove on top of the cushions, trusting to logic the existence of a bed beneath. “What news of our hole?”
Mateo thumbed his phone with one hand while pushing buttons on the side of the aging flat-screen TV. “No sign of it on the webcam.”
“What about your local—”
“Si! El Pais reports the hole. Sinkhole, keep away–that kind of thing. Oh, a report of a small plane crash. Cause unknown.”
She used her own phone to find New Zealand news. “The NZ Herald reports the disappearance of the farm buildings near Weber, North Island. They’re assuming it’s volcanic, maybe a collapsed lava tunnel. Grief, they’re hoping it will attract tourists!”
“Nothing from Marcello. You don’t suppose they’re right? Perhaps the hole—all right, holes—have stopped growing?”
“Well then, let’s enjoy our holiday. There must be a café for meals. Let’s go explore.”
She guessed that in spite of the probable apocalypse to come, and ensuing angst being away from family, this was the most exuberant time of her life. Plus a feller to explore. She wondered if he saw her in that way. The butterflies rampaging in her stomach came from the need for a late lunch, the incipient danger and relatively inexperienced romance.
DAY 16 (FIVE DAYS LATER)
“Well,” Zoe said, “That woke them up.”
Finally, Mateo’s webcam showed the arc of a black shape creeping towards his Aunt’s building.
He became excited and reached for a beer from a crate under the kitchen table. “I’m sure I can see it moving. I saw a few days ago a no-fly zone alert in the area, but no reason given.”
Zoe had been working her phone’s calculator. “It should be spreading at four centimetres a second, increasing all the time.
They’d both emerged from their bed, which had been tested as had their bodies during the last five days. Jokes about being with the last person in the world went through various flavours even though the global population had continued increasing. So far.
Mateo pulled on a new T-shirt all black and red with the Ukrainian girl pop-singer, Elka, blazoned on the front followed by two fingers up the back. “Shall we then?”
She frowned. “I’m sore—ah, YouTube. Yes, upload the doc we made with the latest. Links to all those sites we found. Oddity Central, etc. Reuters, AP, Xinhua and New Zealand.”
Her T-shirt, one she’d brought from Texas declared, ‘Gustav Mahler lives’ with only grass stains on the back.
She fetched up her spreadsheet. “Three kilometres three hundred metres by the middle of today. Finally, it’s in the suburbs. We’ll lose your Aunt’s building and the cam by early morning. Have you spoken to her?”
“Si, but she’s only going to my parents in the east of the city. I can’t get an answer on their phones. I left messages to fly to the far east or west. I’m really worried, Zoe.”
She hugged him. “They might not be able to escape. Roads, trains and airports will be so congested.”
They sat in silence, silent tears rolling.
Zoe was the first to snap. “Hell, come on. It will still be over a week before the hole reaches here. Maybe it will stop. Or whoever’s doing it will get bored.”
Mateo wiped his eyes with Elka. “Who? You mean God?”
“Worse, a kid.”
“No, this isn’t a computer game. It’d have to be running for over four billion years.”
“Only in our perception. Really, I’ve no idea what it could be. I’m still in awe that a bigger fuss isn’t being made anywhere.”
“I’m not,” Mateo said, while he pulled on jeans and sneakers before they go for a walk before supper. “There hasn’t been a whole town eaten up, nothing affecting America, or any other large country. Planes have already been diverted and perhaps none flew over that bit of New Zealand anyway.”
The simmering summer heat of the day rapidly passed into the cool of the early evening. The distant sea was truly black except for the odd twinkle of fishing boats, and the mirrored brilliance of a sedate cruise ship.
Zoe shrugged-on a newly acquired second-hand knitted coat. She’d have bought a new one but there were no clothes shops in the village. Locals bought online, but the hole would reach them before a new coat.
“Where shall we dine?” she asked.
He pretended to think. “Let’s see, how about the Setsunai, same as all our meals every day. Chicken rice for me and tofu for you.”
DAY 17
Zoe woke Mateo up. “Madrid is being evacuated now a third of it has gone. Two million people homeless and another four million on the move. No reports of deaths though there are hundreds of persons classified as missing.”
Mateo, still in bed, angrily waved his phone. “Our YouTube files!”
“Gone viral?”
“Gone.”
“What?” Zoe flicked at her own phone. “Not only have our vids gone, but we only know about Madrid’s evacuation from our own contacts. Surely, Madrid’s too big. There must be loads of people on buses now texting their departures to people all over the planet.”
Mateo’s eyes welled up. “I’ve not heard anything from my family nor Marcello since last night. It’s a cover up, but how? I can’t imagine they’ve confiscated all the phones in Madrid.”
“Sorry to say this but the police are able to shut down land and cell phones. They could jam them like the Boston police were accused of in 2013, with or without the connivance of the phone companies. The question is why? Is it just to stop wide-scale panic? Or, they jam the public comms so they can use their own. Oh no. Mateo, we might be on the FBI’s most wanted list. Our photos might be on television and newspapers.”
“Why? Ah, we were the first to see it and put the video up.”
“Exactly. Good thing we’re in a remote place. Keep growing your beard, Mateo.”
He rubbed his scraggy growth. “What reason then for the hole, Zoe? Maybe the hole is of human design, or error. Is there a collider we don’t know about in Madrid?”
She paced their room, thinking it was about time they disposed of the boxes of bottles. At least there were no pizza boxes. No junk food in their village. “I’ve been thinking that maybe a maverick physicist pressed the wrong button somewhere, or a mathematician has solved the mass gap problem with this as a consequence. Or...”
“Mass gap? And how could a mathematician thinking of a solution to one problem create a physical effect like this?”
“Like what? Interesting in that is it easier to create an absence of mass than a presence of more mass? Mass gap is part of a yet unsolved Math problem. As for thought creating a physical effect. Some say in quantum mechanics it’s possible for a physical effect to be changed by a set of theoretical situations such as entanglement, but admittedly on a microscopic scale.”
Mateo, now dressed, rubbed his stomach to stop it grumbling for breakfast. He was beginning to enjoy the spiced poached eggs dropped in rice the village café offered. “Zoe, the hole could have started as a point.”
“True. You know about neutrinos, right?”
“Microscopic things that zap through the Earth and us? Harmless.”
“Subatomic particles with hardly any mass, but suppose an antineutrino met with a neutrino just as it was passing your road and it went rogue. Starting as a point, like you said, but all the way through the planet.”
He was holding the door open when Zoe realized she was still dressed only in a Madonna T-shirt for bed. “Wonder if it was coincidental it happened near a site of an observatory? Have you been up to the top?”
He pointed at his mouth. “Rapido, Zoe, comida. I have been to the top a few years ago. A partly completed building. You know how we do it in the Mediterranean. Floor, ceilings, walls then wait. Ah, you’re thinking perhaps they finished it after all and something happened.”
“The mathematical mass gap button was pressed.”
DAY 20 (3 DAYS LATER)
Whistler’s Mother might as well had been their mother the way she brought them home-baked treats, did their washing and recently, tidied their room although maybe she didn’t want vermin invading.
The authorities might have been able to jam Madrid’s networks, tamper with social media and more but at fifty-two kilometres wide, the hole had been seen by weather satellites and airplanes not under the displaced Spanish government’s jurisdiction, or the UN or whoever.
“Zoe, I uploaded our original videos yesterday and they’ve stayed up this time, but just look at this amazing sight from North Island. A third of it has gone but unlike Spain, half the hole is in the ocean.”
Both of them watched with mouths open at the semicircular cliff of water. Not like Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls because the water didn’t fall. The water molecules must have vaporised on contact with the hole.
“Have you heard from your family, yet, Mateo?”
“The authorities’ jamming has ended. Just received a text from Marcello who says they were bussed to Toledo because the authorities didn’t believe the doubling every day bit. So, they’re being moved again to Valencia. How long will they have?”
“Four days at the most. The whole of Spain in four days. Us here, three days after that.”
They sat on the recently-made bed, thinking, while Whistler’s Mother, who didn’t admit to knowing English, continued disturbing spiders with a fluffy tickle stick.
Mateo’s phone buzzed. “It’s Marcello. He says check CNN. A link. It’s us! Terrorists on the run.”
She didn’t know whether to be seriously worried. By the time anyone local recognised them, the future would be here before the law. She hoped. “You’d better grow your beard even faster.”
Mateo stood. “Let’s walk up the hill. Take some bottles. Cheated it’s not Fuji proper but still high up for views.”
Zoe nodded at their landlady and said to Mateo, “What about her and the other local friends we’ve made? Do we tell them their world will end within a week?”
“What good would it do? Although it is not for us to make those judgements so—”
Zoe’s phone took a turn to ring, a rarity. “Hi, dad. Yes, I’m fine. How are—well yes it was us who first—yes, we left Spain some time ago... Fuji, not the deli near— Yes, there is an airport, but no we’re not coming to you, much as I’d love to be with you and mom. What? Yes, I have a ‘young man’. Yes, of course we take prec—” She winked at Mateo as if to say, ‘what’s the point? The world is gone in a week.’ “Dad, stop going to the office. Take mom to the lake. Yes, quality time. Nothing too rash in case it stops. Hoarding? Dad, here there are no stores as such. No panic buying. What? Oh, you be careful. Guns, no we don’t...you be very careful. Sun tan lotion? We’ll get some from the nearest town. Hello? Line dead. Strange he didn’t mention our photos and names on the television. More control freakery by the CIA. Could be the hole has wiped out their satellite television.”
Mateo grinned though while shuffling his feet. “Young man. Haha.”
She knew his humour was to hide anxiety about his own folks. “Suntan lotion, eh? Actually, he has a point.”
“Ours ran out. We’re really going down to panic-buy suntan lotion among other things?”
“No, but everyone needs more. The weather will change, might already be.”
“The hole is sucking in air? But I thought it didn’t suck anything just make it vanish on contact.”
“Yes, Mateo, but we know the hole goes all the way through the planet, and so it has gone through the inner core, removing it. Another day and the inner solid core will have gone along with a column of nothing above and below it. The magnetic field is generated by the dynamo effect of the liquid outer core rotating around the inner. No inner, no magnetism, so no protective magnetosphere in the outer atmosphere. Eventually, if the world ring doughnut survived, solar winds would strip our air. Other things would happen too, such as gravity would be significantly less.”
“Theoretical, of course since the hole will wipe all away. Let’s go for that walk up the hill.”
DAY 25 (5 DAYS LATER)
“Spain’s gone, Mateo, so sorry.” They sat at a rustic table in Café Setsunai. Apparently, it used to sport modern plastic furniture but locals were so upset, they made and donated tables and chairs hewn from local pine.
Mateo had not heard from his family for days. Sometimes he braved it out with humour but it would always hurt. “So you think it might be the satellites being disappeared when they pass through the hole?”
Zoe looked up as if she could see a moving spot. “If the height of the hole is the same as its width, most of the polar orbiting satellites are within the hole’s reach.”
“When again for the hole to reach us? Assuming blah blah.”
“Three days. We’ll be able to see it approach if we go up the hill for the last Sunday, last day…” They let the thought hover between them before she continued. “By then the edge will be travelling at around four hundred kilometres per hour. The Earth will have gone by the end of the twenty-seventh day after you bunny hopped over that hole.”
Mateo coughed a laugh as if it was all his fault.
She sobbed more at the thought of her family’s imminent demise than at her own.
“Ah, sorry, Zoe.”
“Don’t be. It’ll be interesting, won’t it?”
“And all from a meddling quantum error with the solving of a mass gap problem.”
“Maybe.”
DAY 26 AND A HALF
On the summit of a crag near Mount Fuji. They sat on a thick rug, quilted with all the colours of the rainbow and some. They ate sandwiches made from the local black bread, which they’d just about got used to with lashings of pickle washed down with local sake.
Zoe stabbed at her phone after last night’s tearful round of goodbyes to her parents. “The horizon is seventy kilometres away. We should see the black hole coming in an hour but look to the west and the sky already looks darker.”
“And to the east. The sea’s farther away in that direction but we could hardly have found a better spot to see the hole coming in both directions.”
In spite of the world in turmoil and the mighty angst of its people, the planet, or its remnant ring, kept on rotating as if nothing unusual was happening.
Zoe stood and found herself more buoyant because of the reduced gravity. “I can see stars in the darker sky above the horizon. The atmosphere has disappeared over the holes and must be thinning here.” She sat again to be with Mateo, holding each other. She’d hardly slept the night before, their last night. She couldn’t remember falling asleep, just the many awakenings.
“You know, Mateo, even if the holes stopped spreading this instant, we’d have no atmosphere pretty soon, and freezing. It would be a ringworld like in the scifi books.” They gulped back tears, trying to think of the amazing experience rather than the lost lives and absence of future.
A noise made them turn to see a grey dog watching them. It pawed the ground. Mateo looked around for a stone, but chose the half-empty wine bottle as a weapon.
“No,” Zoe said, “Japan’s wolves are extinct. Must be a stray mutt. She’s hungry. I’ll give her my bread.”
She gently tossed one of her sandwiches to a halfway point. Slowly, the wolf-dog walked forward then ate the meal in two gulps. She sat down, resting her head on her paws as if to wait the end.
“Ironic, Mateo, that some say the word Fuji means never-ending.”
They saw the ink on the ocean horizon on both sides.
Zoe laughed—an emotional noise like a duckling. “Mateo, your bunny jump? That’s some hell of a hole.”
Just before it reached them they stood and held hands. The wolf whimpered.
DAY 43
Poetess1987@Zoe: Hi Mateo. Is that you?
Bikekid Madrid@Mateo: Hola Zoe. Are we alive?
@Zoe: Don’t know
@Mateo: Where are we?
@Zoe: Don’t know
@Mateo: How are we doing this?
@Zoe: Don’t know. What can you see?
@Mateo: Nothing. Some motes perhaps like when you squeeze your eyes shut. Could be stars but without the twinkling
@Zoe: Okay, but how are you reading this?
@Mateo: Don’t know
@Zoe: Can you actually see this?
@Mateo: Don’t know. It’s kind of in my head
@Zoe: Ditto. Have you tried talking to anyone else like Marcello?
@Mateo: I dare not try in case I lose you
@Zoe: Me too
@Mateo: Are we the only ones left?
@Zoe: Don’t know. Maybe we are because we were the first with the hole? Don’t laugh but maybe it has an affinity with us
@Mateo: I don’t know how to laugh. Still think we’re in a game?
@Zoe: Don’t know
@Mateo: why have we found awareness now?
@Zoe: It’s day 43. Sun’s gone out. Must be significant
@Mateo: That’s why it’s dark. What’s next?
@Zoe: Hole will reach the nearest planetary system, Proxima Centauri, by day 61
@Mateo: We’ll be all right, right?
@Zoe: Don’t know. You know the universe is finite even if expanding, right?
@Mateo: The hole won’t... will it?
@Zoe: Day 95 it will be gone. Maybe see you in the next one?
@Mateo: Don’t know. Hope so.