SHADOWS & SMOKE

I do not know if I am truly the last scientist or not.  That title no longer has any real meaning.  As one of that lost breed, I am one of only a few remaining sources of the old knowledge.  Scientific reason has given way to a new science, the science of Magic.  Now I am a wizard, someone feared and respected.  Still, the scientist part of me knows it is best to write all this down.  All in an effort to have an accurate record of where this all began and what came after.

Back when scientific reason was my calling, I was a weapons scientist at Los Alamos, in what was New Mexico.  Sometime after the New Millennium, the sun started to have increased sunspot activity.  As a scientist, I found this of passing interest.  This was not my field of study.  However, according to others who did study the sun, it was entering a more active life-cycle.  With this extremely active period many of our electrical and electronic devices began to malfunction.  In a relatively short time, most communication devices were no longer working.  This was all due to a new form of radiation bombarding the planet.

Even the experts were caught off-guard when the sun erupted and spat forth its hellish breath.  Most of our scientific instruments were burned out by the flare.  With the loss of the modern conveniences which we as a planet had become so dependent on, society collapsed.  Nations were soon plunged into disorder and chaos.  Those devices that did survive the magnetic pulse were soon destroyed by the religious fanatics.  This new group saw the sun’s blast as God’s wrath on a wicked world.

Scientist who had before the blast held positions of authority and respect were now seen as the cause of the worldwide calamity.  This situation offered the common people a ready made target for their fear and frustration.  Most of those with any scientific education were seized by the mobs and killed.  Most died quickly, but others were subjected to the worst kinds of torture.  Certain clergy whom had been viewed as wackos and self-deluded finally had a chance to take their vengeance.  They whipped up first their congregations, then the general public.  In tent revivals, they worked the common man into a frenzy.  Then like a pack of maddened dogs, the people went out and slaughtered every educated person they could find.  These religious zealots seized power by giving their followers a target to hate.  It allowed them to wrest control from the democratically elected officials.  Then while mobs ran amok, those officials were quietly killed.

As a result, the new religious conclave declared themselves the ruling elite.  Something they could never have hoped for in the normal scheme of things.  No.  It took a worldwide cataclysm to bring them to power.  And once they had that power, they had no intention of ever giving it up.  In their minds, they were to be the saviors of the new world.

With their new positions as rulers, they condemned anyone with a college education as heretics.  Those like myself who were educated, were held up as the cause of mankind’s calamity.  Teachers, doctors, professionals of every type, no one was spared.  Anyone deemed a threat was to be hunted down and brought before a tribunal of religious justice.  Their crime, possessing forbidden knowledge.  It did not matter what that knowledge might be.  If there was ever a time when knowing too much was life threatening, this was that time.

Anyone who fought back, was summarily executed.  Those who were captured were beaten into submission and confessions extracted.  Many of the methods used came right out of the Spanish Inquisition, with certain horrible refinements.  When they were condemned, as they always were, they were dragged through the street to a pyre where they were burned alive.  Their execution was seen as a living penance for their blasphemy of being educated.

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