At the time that I first noticed these trends, there were about ten thousand million active internal combustion engines world wide. The petroleum versions on average produced three pounds of carbon dioxide per pound of petrol, and many used twenty or more gallons in a day. The commercial jets would use thousands of pounds of fuel per trip; and each pound would burn into three pounds of carbon dioxide. The extra weight came from the air through where the vehicles travelled; and they were monsters for consuming oxygen. A lot of greenhouse water vapour was produced as well. All of this went into the air, as well as sulphur, nitrogen and the odd halogen compounds; a noxious mix from air that was once clean and clear. The people of the world hadn’t really noticed two thousand million deaths by bee stings; or had absorbed it on an abstract and intellectual level; or hadn’t quite seen how it related to themselves. This was because of the absolute and complete nature of the bee attacks; where the blue bumblebees had operated they had left very few people alive, and people immediately outside the areas of attack were understandably reticent about entering the plague areas. People; normal people, don’t really care for situations of life-threatening danger; and people also don’t really believe that anything could upset the accepted status quo; as long as their comfort is not unduly impacted. They also don’t really believe in fairy tales; and a billion blue bumblebees glowing in the dark had that fatuous ring about it that they could not take in. Petrol; hydrocarbons; and the focused atomic resonance that broke the hydrocarbons down into hydrogen gas and diamond dust; this was something else; a deeply disturbing something else that had an immediate and devastating economic impact over the six weeks when this distressing phenomenon changed the face of the world forever. It was, I suppose, time for a drastic change. The seeds of change had been planted during the three centuries when man was learning about all the mistakes he needed to make to become extinct; and was applying them with a fortitude and resolution surprising for a creature that had named himself Sapient; or wise. What does wise; in this context; mean? That a person take the shortest and most destructive path to extinction that he can devise, with his formidable intelligence and capacity to learn? A brief review of thirty thousand years of history seems to suggest this. Of all the creatures of brute creation, the humans had the swiftest run to total extinction; and most of the devastation was by their own hand. Their dependence on fossil fuels was one of the major weaknesses of society; and their short and careless foray into atomic folly was another. It doesn’t seem possible that so many scientists were universally wrong about so many details of their chosen specialities, but this proved to be the case. It was another folly as was religion. The Dogma of Science was just as devastating and damaging to society as was the Dogma of Religion and the dogmatic attitude of “I don’t want to know,” or “I don’t care.” Being right because it is science was the major folly of the last three centuries; and it is saddening; yet slightly amusing; to see how scientific facts were adjusted to fit in with commercial interests. The people who could see the damage being done; how the convoy of life was speeding down a tunnel that had been blocked by greed and commercial interests; how these people were shut out and ignored by the people who were just trying to survive. It was an era where the rich people had arranged things so that their slaves worked and paid for their own imprisonment; how poor people had to pay four times as much for a major investment as a rich person. The slaves of the modern era paid – through their noses – for their own upkeep, with no hope of breaking their bonds and advancing towards a tangible goal. The Carbon Atomic Reset, a huge uphill jump in terms of energy coming into the system, brought nearly all of this to an end in one long, painful swoop. The first recorded incident to which my attention was drawn was quite spectacular in its way, but it was soon swamped in myriad other similar events. It caught my attention because it was streamed live from the person’s spectacle camera. It was brief in its retailing, but lacked none of its poignancy for being the template of a million other stories. A man climbed into his automobile in his garage, attempted to start the vehicle, to be informed that the petrol tank was dry. He had filled the tank the previous evening in anticipation of a long journey, so naturally he was annoyed by this. He cautiously checked under the vehicle, expecting a pool of petrol. He was cautious about this as he was smoking a cigarette at the time. There was not even a drop of oil on the floor. He should have noticed this, as there had been quite a pool of oil on the floor when he had parked the automobile. But he was just annoyed, wondering out loud if some nefarious character could had entered the garage and siphoned off the tank while he hadn’t been paying attention. This was possible but not likely; and wasn’t the explanation. Finally he opened the petrol tank cap. Finally; because this was the very last thing he ever did. A gust of pure hydrogen gas exploded in his face, ignited by his cigarette; and he knew no more. There is a lot of quasi- scientific lucubration about the hydrocarbon reset, mainly suggesting that the hydrocarbons were exposed to a specific atomic resonance that shook the carbon loose from the hydrogen and caused it to coagulate into solid crystalline masses; diamonds; but there is very little science and clear understanding behind the waffle, because nobody, especially not the specialist, knew exactly what happened; and nobody had seen it coming. The atomic resonance theory, such as it was, faced a serious uphill battle, most of which was posed by the laws of thermodynamics; which did not allow such an enormous energy transfer to occur without at least some outward show. A chap, the laws stated, could not fill his petrol tank with hydrogen and diamonds, made from magically decaying octane, without fire and heat and pressure and who knew what else. But exactly this is what happened; not only once, but so many times that by the time the six week show was over, no internal combustion engine was in an operational state the world over. It had all the hallmarks of an inexplicable, inscrutable event; as if some huge force had taken a hand, and showed the world very precisely where hydrocarbons got off. It was also a very concise and focused programme. Sugar, for instance, although very similar to octane, was not effected at all, nor were other, more complex hydrocarbonic compounds such as proteins, amino acid complexes, most alcohols and a range of long chain fatty acids. It was precisely focused on hydrocarbons of less than twenty carbon atoms, diesel and biofuels, aviation spirit, and natural and not so natural gas. Coal was also effected, although the coal conversion was not so dramatic as the lighter and more volatile carbon relatives. It also effected plastics, but there the effect was much slower and a lot more subtle. The blue bumblebees had apparently come first by a matter of two weeks or so, and their attacks, spectacular at first, gradually wound down as time passed by. I name them attacks; though without due cause other than this feeling that something; a large and ugly something; was hastening the downfall of man and the end of the era of electronic technology. Each attack seemed precise and calculated; they became more common, as if the wielder of this new weapon was becoming more confident with his tools; and the scale of the attacks increased, both in size and spread. Soon it was not uncommon to find an entire city or region paralysed by the lack of fuel; vehicles and electricity generation both down due to this lack. I suppose that these attacks might have started much earlier in the Middle East; already devastated by the Faria bees, as there was nobody to moan and complain about their automobiles no longer working. Certainly the flow of oil from that oleaginous area had ceased; and at first a person could be forgiven for thinking that the oil well and refinery workers were all dead; and a chap simply had to send in a new crew to take over the work. This, of course, was difficult in the face of the hydrocarbon attacks, as no massive tankers were operational, but when people eventually came in using electric vehicles and sailing vessels, the stark truth was soon known. Most of the oil wells were devastated, a lot of them had huge fountains of superhot hydrogen flame gushing up into the air; many of the oil fields had been utterly destroyed by massive hydrogen explosions. The one truly remarkable outcome from the hydrogen flames was that the huge clouds of steam gusting up from the pyroclasms, clothes the Sahara Desert in thick, black clouds; and for the first time in written history rain fell; copious and continuous rain fell onto the dry and dusty sands of one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. In response to this, and other hydrogen storm clouds weeping over the devastated face of the Earth, plants from dry and dusty seeds hastened from their hibernation, eager for life now that the bottleneck of their existence was broken. In literally days since the rain began to fall, the desert blushed green; in weeks the dunes were covered with new growth; it was as if the life of the desert, so long husbanded in miserly amounts, was bursting out in fulsome plenty. Not only did the oil and gas field fires bring rain, not surprising in the face of the quantity of hydrogen being burnt, but the wind patterns, faced with huge upwelling of furiously hot air, changed and diversified even more so than from the relatively mild impact of the wind farms and the gentle warming that had gone before. Hydrogen fires, burning huge quantities of that most reactive gas, are no small feature. The temperature of the flames was well over eight thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and the columns of fire were huge. A person could not approach closer than ten miles to each column of flame, and all the metalwork around each pyroclasm was quickly reduced silver rivers, writhing and glowing in the sands, turning into glass by the fury of the flames. People kept away from the fires while they were active, desert, Arctic or ocean alike; then they kept away from the worksites of the oil fields; a sheet of dark glass stained with metal, feet thick, has no attraction to lost souls seeking to repossess things of value. “Things of value” was a phrase that underwent a massive transition at this time. It had one alluded to meaningless things like gold and diamonds; but diamonds, representing the closure of the octane and diesel fuel period as they did, lost most of their value. Diamonds were as common as sand on the beach; and while a few ignorant souls hoarded huge quantities of the hard little pebbles, their was no retail and virtually no commercial demand for them anymore. Certainly, gold and diamonds had no survival value; and surviving was the first thing on most people’s minds at the time. Most of industry is to do with food and transport and machines to mine and build; and a huge segment is to do with the manufacture and protection of financial services. Overnight, money had lost its meaning, as there was suddenly very little to buy; and the sellers were not really interested in exchanging their goods for a commodity; money; that had lost its backing and its meaning entirely. Also, there is little point in manufacturing millions of pairs of socks if you cannot move them out of the factory to where they will do you some good. A lot of industry, nevertheless carried on; out of simple inertia if nothing else, but when their raw materials finished and finished goods choked the exits, the factories sort of ground to a halt. A lot of industries could not demonstrate even that much stubbornness, in the face of overwhelming futility, as they had no electrical supply and their generators didn’t work. It was about then that their labourers, faced with nothing to do and a bleak future without pay cheques, kind of lost the plot. Many of them sat at home watching the blank screen of their television, drinking empty cups of cold coffee; and brooded on the meaninglessness of it all. Other, more enterprising spirits, left their homes in search of adventure, usually in the local shops and malls, locked and dark in the dousing of the retail flame. However, locked doors and windows were futile against the energy of the more intrepid souls, and the age of Viking was reborn, rival gangs looting and pillaging, with shop owners and the police quickly overwhelmed in the flood. Some of the shop owners had scented trouble brewing, and not really caring for the integrity of rented premises, had done what they could with barrows and trolleys; but most of them seemed to have a sublime, but misplaced, faith in the rule of law. Faith and blind obedience in the face of the harshest logical contradictions and cold reason had long been the downfall of man; the one place where one most doubted the ‘ Sapiens’ bit of homo sapiens. There is no benefit in blind faith but for the institution in which the blind faith is – unwisely – lodged. Man has lied, and his institutions have lied, blatantly, for eons. Yet man still believed; the louder the lies, the more he believed. And this led straight to the downfall of man; his capacity for lies, and his ability to believe those lies and statements in the face of bitter logic that demonstrated time and again that the lies could not possibly be true. He believed in chiliad different fairy tales; and they all let him down, time and again out of mind. Carbon, on the other hand, was pure and complex fact, and one of the inescapable facts about carbon was that it was not a common element. The other fact was that when carbon was in its crystal allotropic form, it actually wasn’t much use. Carbon as a native element; carbon black or activated carbon, was essential for life. The chemistry of carbon seemed to be without end, there were more than twenty thousand different molecule types that had carbon in some form in their structures, and all of those compounds had a definite role to play in the mystery of life. Organic chemistry and biochemistry are all about carbon and how it interacts in all living creatures. So, when so many tonnes of carbon became inert, locked into its crystalline form, a few people became concerned about the loss and its implications for the cycle of life. Some went so far as to break down such diamonds as they could manage; no easy task. Carbon does not react well, whatever it’s form; it is enormously stable. And as a diamond, it is nearly impossible to make it react at all. It is impervious to heat and cold in moderate amounts; most acids and alkalies leave it untouched; diamond can only really be broken down by intense heat; over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, in an oxygen rich atmosphere. Not many people can manage this; and very few people have it in them to deliberately destroy a diamond, so those martyrs and their desire to reintroduce carbon into the life cycle, had a very short period of activity, and there was less than a tonne of diamonds that were roasted back into carbon dioxide. Fortunately, their failure did not amount to much; at the time, as there was far too much carbon dioxide in the air as things stood, but their efforts were noted, and recorded, by me at least. Diamond, however, had lost its glitter; as had certain other gemstones, formed by the tonne around the bases of the huge hydrogen flames gusting into the air. Chromium, Ferrum, Vanadium; all were available from the pipes and fittings of the oil wells and refineries; these merged with the sands of the desert to form huge slabs of ruby and sapphire; and some new variations of the older stones. But the gemologists and jewellers were simply not interested. Getting to the sites of the hydrogen flames was just too hard and far too dangerous while the flames were active, and once the glass had cooled; and glass was essentially what it was; the crowded southern shores of the Mediterranean sea was one of the least hospitable places on Earth. When there is no petrol; at all; most vehicles lose their value. Other kinds of vehicle existed, and were to be at a premium for a while, though trips to the oil fields were simply not on the agenda while the flames burnt. Once the flames had died other, much more serious problems had appeared; and glass in the desert, even such a rainy and wet desert, by the ruins of oil wells dry of oil, just wasn’t sufficiently interesting for the people who owned those vehicles to commit to the journey. There was blackness; a sense of darkness that fell during those huge hydrogen fires; and no small surprise about that. Some of the flames had reached the tropopause, and the smoke, mostly pure water vapour, although there was a lot else burning at the foot of the flames. The clouds were miles thick, spreading into the wind from the fires; most of them toward the equator, where the additional heat was distinctly not welcome, although the water fell in huge quantities. And it was a downward transfer of hydrogen, out of the carbon cycle and back into the water cycle. It would be taken up by the plants in the new, cooler but by no means cold savannah of the Sahara region; but in the mean time, the area had to get used to the sudden storms, where literally yards of water fell over a seven week period. It was an injection of massive heat into the atmosphere; heat that could not be channeled away from the sources fast enough to avoid huge wind and storm development. Air pressure dropped in some places to seven hundred and ninety millibars; and the wind speeds were well into the two hundred and fifty miles an hour range. The winds and storms blasted over the face of the globe, leaving huge trails of destruction; but also quieting down the blue bumblebees; during the storms, the Faria bees were nowhere to be found. However, there were other deadly forces; that even then were coming into play.