A hard-SF prequel to Waterworld Year 0 — Year 1200
The Thousand-
Year Rain
One family, forty-eight generations, from the depot operator who could have stopped the rain to the girl set adrift with the map on her back.
A novella in progress
by Richard Raab
Illustration: a clear night over open water. A thin line of stalled cargo arcs across the sky, and one bright point on it, the depot, stays fixed.
Why this exists
Read the premiseThe short version, and the physicsI did some nerding out on this once when I considered writing a Waterworld prequel fanfic for fun. Yes, I know how that sounds. This is the best I could come up with without turning Earth into a sterilized steam ball.
Nothing in the system ever malfunctioned.
Every component did exactly what it was designed to do.
A pre-deluge civilization mined and moved material across the solar system — asteroids, moons, dwarf planets — mostly by automation, because you cannot staff an operation spread across that many bodies. Earth was not the customer. Earth was the depot: inbound ice and ore arrived, were caught, braked, processed and purified, then shipped back out.
A plague collapsed the civilization. The mines kept running and the freight kept arriving, but the shipping network died and nobody was left to tell the depot to stop accepting deliveries. Processed water piled up in orbit. The depot could keep stacking it there until the stockpile became dangerous, or it could get rid of it safely. It did the safe thing: its emergency overflow procedure vents processed water, already slowed, into the atmosphere below.
The overflow was a temporary measure, meant to run until a human supervisor fixed the problem. There were no supervisors left. It was a safe, tested, boring procedure, and nobody had ever left it running for a thousand years.
- Procedure
- Emergency overflow
- State
- Active
- Running
- 1,000 yr
- Inbound
- Accepted
- Outbound
- No carrier
- Orbital storage
- Above safe limit
- Orbital energy
- Rejected to space
- Release phase
- Solid ice, 100 K
- Release altitude
- 76 km · setpoint held
- Discharge
- Matched to receiving body
- Faults
- 0
- Supervisor review
- Pending
A thousand years in one scroll
The Rise
A section from the Bay of Bengal to the Tibetan Plateau, through Everest. Scroll, and the years go by at a steady pace. The water does not.
Year1200
Sea level+8,150 m
Era VII · After the Rain
- Y5+8 mBengal, the Nile delta, the Mekong, most Pacific islands
- Y22+33 mFlorida, the Netherlands, Shanghai, London, New York
- Y55+225 mThe Amazon basin becomes an inland sea; the North European Plain
- Y75+445 mThe original shelves go dark; new shallows now drown too fast to colonize
- Y182+1,610 mDenver
- Y222+2,050 mMost of the Alps below the peaks; the Colorado Plateau
- Y240+2,240 mMexico City
- Y277+2,640 mBogotá
- Y296+2,850 mQuito
- Y370+3,650 mLhasa
- Y447+4,500 mThe Tibetan Plateau, all of it
- Y567+5,640 mElbrus
- Y602+5,900 mKilimanjaro
- Y642+6,190 mDenali
- Y747+6,960 mAconcagua. Only the Himalaya and Karakoram remain.
- Y962+8,000 mFourteen islands left on Earth
- Y1000+8,150 mThe rain stops. Eight summits remain; Everest stands 699 m out.
- Y1200+8,150 mThe film opens.
Stylized section · vertical scale exaggerated about 45 times · the log lists what drowns elsewhere in the world
The rest of it
- Year 0 How to Drown a World Where the water comes from, why it does not boil the planet, and why the valve was set at 76 km.
- Years 0–1200 The Thousand Years Seven eras, from the Quiet Years to After the Rain, and the ladder of what drowns when.
- Year 1200 The Drowned World A salty sea, an empty sky, people without fire, eight rocks, and one fixed star.
- Years ~20–1190 The Line The novella. One family, seven leavings and returns, and one sheet of paper that ends as a map.
- Open items The Ledger Where the premise strains, flagged honestly so nobody has to rediscover it.