Clear Skies

"Pretend it's a snowstorm," my father said. "The sky is white because the sky is heavy with snow, and when you wake up the world will -- a foot of snow." He choked a bit on the last sentence. On the lie. "We're inside," he said. "It'll be okay."

It would not be okay.

Everything started in Antarctica. My father was a geologist who had been spending alternating years there since I was born -- a year at the pole, a year teaching at the university, and repeat. He loved talking about the ice cores that told stories of ancient climates, the pre-prehistoric footsteps miles beneath the ice that record stories of days before humanity.

It was April when the storm came. All but one person at my father's research station had to be sent home, declared no longer mentally fit for the job. No one was quite sure how to describe them yet -- there had been two more since; another in Antarctica -- this one in July -- and one up in Canada, twelve miles east of the north pole. Neither happened anywhere near their respective summer solstices. There was no explaining the storms away with white nights, especially not when they only lasted a couple hours. It was like the reverse of a solar eclipse, but instead of brief minutes of total darkness, it was short hours of whiteness so bright it burnt out a researcher's eyes.

"Dr. Aubert, can you please explain what happened during the, er, 'storm' at the Charles Research Station in Antarctica?"

"I've told you. I told the papers and I told the trustees and I told the talk shows and I don't see how this is any different. The sky went white. It was near midnight -- ten thirty, maybe? It gets darker than dark down there. You live in New York, you can't even imagine how dark it gets. It was that dark, and then it wasn't, and I'll swear on my life -- on my daughter's life -- that the light felt hungry."

"You mean to say that it was... alive?"

"It was hungry. You don't have to be alive to be hungry. Viruses. Zombies. You know. Books and shows, they all talk about a creeping, hungry dark, but this brightness was worse than any of that could ever be --"

"Was it a full moon? I've heard that in totally rural areas, the moon is bright enough to see by -- and reflecting off the snow, maybe --"

"Were you listening? The sky was white, it was bright white like a blizzard or a bleached tablecloth. And it was so dark out, just a minute before -- we all knew it was coming for us."

"I've heard your colleagues speak, Dr. Aubert, and many of them said similar things to you -- that the light had no discernible source, that it made you all feel uneasy. But some of them said that the light came from outer space, which I thought was, frankly, outlandish. However, I wasn't there, and you were, so I've got to ask -- do you think the light came from something beyond our comprehension?"

"I certainly don't understand where it came from. No one does! I'm not going to grab my tinfoil hat and say the E.T.s did it, but it obviously wasn't humans. And it couldn't have been natural either."

"There was one researcher who didn't suffer the same exposure to the storm that the rest of you -- wait a second. I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can you repeat that -- there's another storm happening? Right now? In Antarctica? Same spot, or -- can we see it from the satellites? Is --"

"It's back? It -- no, it -- it can't come back, it'll come for us again -- I can't. I can't."

"Dr. Aubert? Are you -- sorry, one second. Sir? Sir? You're shaking, here, let me help you backstage. Cut the cameras!"

[there are ten seconds of dead air before the backstage technician can switch the live broadcast to the first file they can pull up -- coverage of the Iditarod in Alaska, where it is a blissfully ordinary day.]

The second storm was, in many respects, worse than the first. It lasted longer -- nearly the whole night. The white seemed to be brighter, according to testimony, but no one was there for both and there was no way to measure it. On the other hand, this time around the researchers knew to shelter the second the sky went white, and they closed their eyes and hurried indoors at the first hint of it. My father's group had as well, of course, but some of them stopped to marvel at it -- none of the researchers at the Santos Research Station did that. Only ten of the thirty winter researchers had to be taken off the assignment.

Of those ten, half had to go into immediate psychiatric care for their ramblings and shaking and unpredictable panic attacks. This storm was hungrier than the first, by all measurements -- not that any of them were worth much salt, since all of them relied on witness testimony. And they would only get worse, my dad said, once he got home from his interview and calmed down a bit.

We lived in Massachusetts, outside of Boston. No one in their right mind would have said we lived anywhere near the poles. We weren't even that close to Canada. But the sky was white all the same -- not pure, bright white, like my father described from Antarctica, but a muddy sort of white, dampened by the evening sky. It looked rather like snow a week after a blizzard, when it's all piled up at the edges of parking lots turning grey.

My father's comparison to clouds the night before a snowstorm was apt, and if it weren't for the radio and television downstairs blaring alerts to stay inside and my parents discussing in something in hushed tones (my mother) and frantic hyperventilating (my father) and the fact that there were no snowstorms predicted for the next two weeks, maybe I would have believed him. Unable to take his lie as the comfort it was meant to be, I laid in bed with my eyes squeezed shut, trying my hardest not to look out the curtains.

It wasn't even close to bedtime. It was nine o'clock. But staying up would have meant worrying together, which was worse than worrying alone. It would have meant watching my father get increasingly fragile with fear. It would have meant staring out the window, unable to tear my eyes away. So I said goodnight to my parents and locked my bedroom door without showering or brushing my teeth, and I pulled my blinds as tight as they'd go then taped them to the windowsill for extra measure, and I laid down on top of my covers, still in my clothes, and pretended to try to fall asleep.

"You might remember Dr. Aubert from our conversation back in July, which unfortunately took place right at the same time as the second white storm down in Antarctica. He is a professor of geology who was researching ice cores at the Charles Station when the very first white storm hit. He is here now to speak with us about the third storm, the first to take place in the northern hemisphere. Why do you think that is, Dr. Aubert?"

"Why do you keep inviting me back to do these things?"

"I might remind you we are on live television."

"Why do I keep agreeing to do these things -- Christ. I'm a geologist, not a meteorologist. Not a science fiction writer. I don't know what is happening with the storms. I don't know why. If I had to guess, they've moved north because it's almost summer in Antarctica now. Maybe they like the darkness, because they stand out from it."

"Could you elaborate on that?"

"I think it's rather self-explanatory, isn't it? The storms turn the sky white. They seem to be turning the air itself white, if the newest testimonies are to be believed. In summer at the poles, the sun shines all night long, and perhaps whatever is causing the storms needs the dark of nighttime -- to hide in (well, that kind of makes no sense) or to feed on or to distract us."

"Feed on? Last time, you said it wanted to feed on you, if I remember correctly."

"It's all assumptions. I don't know why you expect me to be an expert who can answer all your questions when I just happen to be one of the first survivors."

"Speaking of survivors -- the area that this storm hit was largely unpopulated, but there were a few scattered research bases and villages that were affected. This storm seemed to be much larger in scope than the previous two, which were primarily centered around one or two small bases. It's a very isolated area, and many of the people who lived in the affected area were not caught up with the news of these storms, and thus had no sense of how to prepare themselves. Aside from a not-small number of cases of the madness that seems to now be common, there were two fatalities. Do you have any idea how the storm could have killed these people?"

"Again. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why you think I know, but there is no possible way that I could know. It isn't my fault, and I know you keep bringing me back because I'm the best at this press stuff out of everyone who came back, because I'm not as mad as the rest -- but just find someone who has been actually researching the storms or, even better, find a cosmic horror author and dress them up in a lab coat because I am sure they will love answering these questions. I'm done with these interviews."

"Dr. Aubert, wait--!"

The storm that hit next managed to pull away from the top of the world for a reason no one could fathom. When I woke up the next morning, we discovered that its epicenter had been in the very top of Quebec, on the coast of Hudson Bay, significantly further from the poles than any storm had made it before. To say nothing of how far-flung it had been, how wide its reach. Why was the sky a fuzzy sort of light gray here, in Massachusetts? The weathermen discussed it on the TV downstairs, their carefully measured voices a backing track to my parents' increasingly frantic ones.

A knock on my door, and then my father was pushing it open slowly. He didn't say anything at first, because what was he supposed to say? "Are you all right"? We'd both seen the effect of these storms firsthand -- him more than me, but I'd seen the way he shook when anyone brought up Antarctica. The university only let him teach a section of Intro to Geology and a generic Environmental Science course this semester, so he spent a lot of time at home, painting all our walls bright colors, even the ceiling, till there wasn't a single drop of white paint in our century-old house. He'd tried to throw out the nice china plates when my mom took them out for Thanksgiving, so we'd eaten off of our standard ones -- a set of twelve, each different colors and none of them white. When thunderstorms struck, each flash of lightning illuminated an expression I couldn't quite name on his face.

I should be the one comforting him, I thought for a second. He had every right to be more scared than I was, but as my parent, he had to help me first. I sat up, slowly, and turned on the light. I should have left it on all along, I realized belatedly. It made the sky look slightly darker.

"Pretend it's a snowstorm," said my father. "The sky is white because the sky is heavy with snow, and when you wake up the world will -- a foot of snow." He choked a bit on the last sentence. On the lie. "We're inside," he said. "It'll be okay."

Neither of us believed this.

"Why is it here?" I said, even though I knew he hated being asked about the storms.

He took a deep breath, probably shoving down an "I don't know," and maybe a "shut up." Moving a pile of clothes off my desk chair and sitting down, my father peeked through the curtains and squeezed his eyes shut, just for a moment. "No one knows," he said. "But what we need to do is close our eyes and maybe hide in the basement, and sleep through the night as though nothing is wrong. So far, it's only hurt people who were caught outside. It'll be gone by sunup. All we can do is just stay inside and not look at it -- you've done a great job with the curtains there -- and don't let it get to you. Don't let it know how scared you are. And be thankful that it isn't right above us."

Later, my father told me more about the first storm. I'd watched all his interviews, of course, read the publicized accounts from the other survivors. And been through storms myself, of course. But none of that was the same as hearing it from his mouth itself, words from one of the first people to ever see the white storms. When I read about it, I felt jealous, thinking about how he and his fellow researchers had seen something totally new. When he told me the story himself, his fear seemed to settle in the air like fog, moving from his words into my bones.

We scurried into the basement like mice hiding under a stove. My mother clutching three photo albums and her wallet as if the storm would vaporize our house, my father empty-handed, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. I couldn't decide whether I should take anything -- even though I knew it would be over in the morning, something about our procession felt like an evacuation. I held my water bottle and a cat stuffie from my childhood.

It reminded me of that time when I was eight, when one of the only tornadoes to ever touch down in eastern Mass swept through our neighborhood. We'd gathered in the basement then, too, and I'd only brought down a blanket and a battered thrift-store copy of Coraline. Which I'd been enjoying at first, but the thought of it being the only book I'd own if the tornado took our house was a bit too much for me. I'd ended up falling asleep in the basement, and when I woke up, everything was all right again.

This would be just like that, I told myself.

"Can you tell me again?"

"You know I don't like talking about it."

"Just so I remember. I'll record it too, so you never have to tell me again."

"Don't -- don't record this."

"What if we all die and the alien archaeologists that land here are trying to figure out what wiped us out and they find my phone and somehow they turn it on and this recording is the only clue?"

"I think there will be other clues." [pause] "You know the whole story anyway." [another pause] "All right. Fine." [another pause] "It was April. Summer had faded fast, and everyone but the winter researchers was packing up or had already left. I was outside looking at the stars -- ten winters there and they haven't got old yet. You've got to get down there, Allie, when this is all over, if we all make it through, and go see the stars. They're like nothing else. And there was a flash. Like a strike of lightning, like a red light camera, like the white flash of a nuclear bomb, but it didn't fade. Sudden brightness, worse than full sun the morning after a blizzard, worse than a light shining into your eyes.

"I made it back to the station, stumbling as quickly as I could. I could barely see, it hurt so bad. I left my snow goggles inside because it was nighttime, how was I supposed to know I'd need them? and I regretted it so badly for all fifty feet of that walk. I'd been out there with Dr. Cai -- you know him, he came to a dinner party here a few years back when he'd just got his doctorate -- but I forgot to check if he was following. Maybe all those zombie shows are right, and when you're worried about survival, suddenly other people don't matter so much.

"When I made it back, hammering on the door, the people inside seemed afraid to let me in. I found my key card eventually, but it's tough with the thick gloves you've got to wear -- no dexterity at all, but it's so bitterly cold that if you don't wear them your fingers will fall off. My eyes were squeezed shut against the light, now that I knew where I was, and I pushed through the door when it finally unlocked. Someone had drawn all the blinds inside but they weren't doing much. Someone else handed me a pair of goggles and I put them on, which helped a bit, but my vision stayed spotty for -- god, it feels like the whole day after. Sam -- Dr. Cai -- showed up a couple minutes or maybe an hour later, I don't know, kind of like I did, but he was shaking as he fell through the door, hands over his eyes, muttering that it was all wrong.

"I don't remember if I fell asleep or if I stayed there curled on the floor until the light faded and the sun came up. It was burning, sparkling bright against the snow, same as always, but that usually-painful whiteness felt like a dark forest or a candlelit room compared to the white storm. Sam still was mumbling and my hands wouldn't stop shaking and we weren't the only ones. Dr. Gonzales -- you haven't met her, she's a full-timer down there, lived in Antarctica since before you were born I think -- was probably the only one of us at full form, and she picked up the sat phone and called in an emergency. They had a plane to take us to Buenos Aires down there in a couple of hours. And then I came back and they made me do a thousand interviews and then the second storm hit and now -- now we're here."

I didn't want to fall asleep. I most certainly did not want to fall asleep. If I fell asleep, I probably wouldn't wake up. My father's hands were shaking again and my mother was flipping through her photo albums as if memories of better days would fix everything. And I sat there on the carpeted floor, looking at dusty shelves of Christmas decorations and pointedly not looking at the tiny windows near the ceiling, and I fell asleep.

"We are so honored that today's guest agreed to our request to interview him for the Modern Science Podcast. He's been a hot figure in the science world this past year, but notoriously hard to get ahold of -- but now you've witnessed two of the fabled White Storms, as people have begun calling them, making you even more fascinating. Welcome, Dr. Tim Aubert!"

"Thank you."

"Just a recap, in case any of our listeners live under a rock or in a light-tight room or just at the Equator -- over the past year, four mysterious storms of sudden painful brightness in the dead of night have shocked the science world, with the first two happening in Antarctica -- in the middle of Antarctic winter, mind you, and the third happening up near the North Pole in Canada. The fourth one was centered in Canada as well, but bits of its light were seen as far south as New York and Chicago. No one knows the cause of these storms or why they've appeared so suddenly, but everyone who's had the misfortune to be at the center of one has said the same thing: they feel hungry. I wouldn't believe this statement on an ordinary day, but on the fateful night of the fourth storm, I was visiting my parents outside of Ottawa -- not by any means close to the epicenter, but I felt that hunger all the same. So I come to you with full belief, Dr. Aubert, in everything you've said about the storms."

"Well, it's relieving to hear that someone agrees with us. It feels as though all kinds of people think they can give their opinion on what the storms feel like -- especially after the first one -- when none of them had even seen one. They can't exactly be caught on video, after all. And I want to remind the audience of two things -- first of all, I was caught outside during the start of the first storm, which was centered close to right above our research station, and second of all, I'm not the only person who's witnessed two of these storms. There's all the other scientists who returned home to college towns in the Northeast or in Canada, not to mention that about half the witnesses of the third storm were subject to this one as well."

"Thank you for that reminder, Dr. Aubert. Now -- how did the second storm feel in comparison to the first?"

"I found it vastly preferable to the first one. After all, this time I was much further from its epicenter, and I stayed inside the entire time. I was absolutely terrified throughout its entire duration -- look, my left pinky still shakes a bit from that panic attack, haha -- but I'd take a storm like that -- just based off my experiences of it -- over the first one any day." [pause] "But of course, the paper records tell a very different story --"

"Well, yes. This storm had a radius of about fifteen hundred miles, to start. I believe there were some sightings reported in Iceland. And then of course, there's the physical touch it left on this world. If none of you listeners could tell, we're recording this over a Zoom call and editing it together -- isn't it a twisted sort of great, how the pandemic prepared us so well for this? Which reminds me, here's a message from today's sponsor --"

"I wouldn't call it exactly great the way that we can't go outside anymore because all the metal that the light touched has turned into a miniature Sun."

I woke up the next morning to broken Internet and my parents frantically covering each and every window in the house with heavy blankets. The Internet righted itself after not too long. The things I saw when I peeked out the window did not.

"We haven't developed a scale for rating these 'white storms' yet, but regardless, it's clear to me that the latest was the worst of the batch. Don't you agree, Andy?"

"Absolutely, Olivia. It's clear as day -- bright as the sun -- to me that the effects of this storm will be felt far more widely as well as far stronger than any of the ones before."

"Haha, was that pun intentional? All I can say, Andy, is that I'm glad I'm here in sunny California and far, far away from whatever's going on up in the Northeast."

"I couldn't agree more."

bisexualphilipjfry it's got to be aliens.

jaxolantern I don't know how to explain to you that aliens CANNOT do this.

bisexualphilipjfry literally what else could it be

jaxolantern No one knows. But all the aliens close enough to have reached us are probably in early stages of their evolution. We can't even begin to comprehend this. They can't either.

muldersdick How do we know that there aren't aliens from further away who have developed the technology to reach us.......we shouldn't base all of our expectations on human standards

jaxolantern Right user "muldersdick." I am going to take the things you say about aliens seriously.

muldersdick Dude Im getting my masters in astronomy AS WE SPEAK. don't bring the fictional middle aged men I like into this.

bisexualphilipjfry muldersdick do you think the aliens will be hot

"It's not aliens," said my father for the thousandth time into another Zoom interview. He'd started doing them again because there was nothing better to do while we waited. At some point we woud run out of food and we'd have to go shopping -- that point would come rather soon -- but for now he kept himself occupied by fighting with podcasters and journalists. My mother had spent the past three days looking for the eclipse glasses from 2017 that she swore she hadn't thrown out. I scrolled online and watched bad movies and read my mom's old books. Anything to keep me from looking out the window.

"Okay, sure. I don't know what it is. But you don't either. I don't think it's aliens, just like I told the Messiah News I don't think it's the Rapture. I don't have evidence for either, but you don't have any evidence for it being aliens."

"Sure. Do you want me to agree and say it's a cosmic punishment the likes of which we'll never understand? I will. What are they punishing us for? Global warming? Maybe it's a chemical reaction due to the gases in the atmosphere or something stupid we launched into space -- that car. Isn't there a car in space? Didn't some rich guy do that? It's because of that. Does it make you feel better to have a culprit now? I only answered your emails because I'm locked inside because of this storm and -- ugh. I'm so sorry. I've got nothing better to do, so I take it out on you guys. I should just make an anonymous social media account and do it behind a blank profile like the rest of us, huh?"

"Thank you for your time. I'm sorry about the aliens."

The tape holding one of the blankets peeled off the wall and the blanket curled up like a new poster. My father thought the light was destroying it at a molecular level. I didn't particularly care what was happening as long as I could pretend that it wasn't there. Light burst through the open corner, shining from the neighbor's driveway. My father turned away with a grimace and I set to looking for more duct tape.

News reports out of Boston, out of Chicago, out of Toronto, out of Montreal, all said the same thing. The light had arrived. It was making its claim. It was no longer a strange story from the poles, something that drove researchers and tiny fishing villages mad; it was everyone's problem. Every tiny Sun it had created, in every yard in every street in every city in every state. Most of North America had seen it, after all -- from night skies that were grey rather than black in Florida, to an evening that looked more like hazy daytime in D.C., to the white sky we saw in Massachusetts, to the blinding light that flooded skies above Quebec and Nunavut. And come morning, we opened our curtains to something brighter than the morning after a blizzard, brighter than staring into the Sun.

Cars crashed. People caught outside were blinded. Dead birds littered the streets. Reporters clad in multiple pairs of sunglasses shielded their eyes as they spoke into radio microphones -- photography and video was not exactly ideal under current conditions, though the bright-white photographs covering my social media feeds said otherwise. It made me a little sick to scroll through them.

What could we do about it besides simply adapt?

Either one day the light would fade, or it wouldn't. Maybe the bright white light would fill every piece of the Earth until there was nowhere left to hide. We had adapted a thousand times before, and we would adapt now -- there was no other choice.