The Thousand-Year Rain

Year 0 — Year 1200

The Thousand-
Year Rain

A hard-SF prequel to Waterworld

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

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.

Why the valve opens

Depot operations · ground side
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
The depot’s view of Year 1000. Every value is in specification.

Why this exists

I 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.

— Richard Raab
Read the premiseThe short version, and the physics

The Rise

A thousand years in one scroll

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.

Cross-section from the Bay of Bengal to the Tibetan Plateau with the sea at 8,150 meters. Only the top of Everest stands above the water.

Year1200

Sea level+8,150 m

Era VII · After the Rain

  1. Y5+8 mBengal, the Nile delta, the Mekong, most Pacific islands
  2. Y22+33 mFlorida, the Netherlands, Shanghai, London, New York
  3. Y55+225 mThe Amazon basin becomes an inland sea; the North European Plain
  4. Y75+445 mThe original shelves go dark; new shallows now drown too fast to colonize
  5. Y182+1,610 mDenver
  6. Y222+2,050 mMost of the Alps below the peaks; the Colorado Plateau
  7. Y240+2,240 mMexico City
  8. Y277+2,640 mBogotá
  9. Y296+2,850 mQuito
  10. Y370+3,650 mLhasa
  11. Y447+4,500 mThe Tibetan Plateau, all of it
  12. Y567+5,640 mElbrus
  13. Y602+5,900 mKilimanjaro
  14. Y642+6,190 mDenali
  15. Y747+6,960 mAconcagua. Only the Himalaya and Karakoram remain.
  16. Y962+8,000 mFourteen islands left on Earth
  17. Y1000+8,150 mThe rain stops. Eight summits remain; Everest stands 699 m out.
  18. 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

  1. How to Drown a World Year 0 Where the water comes from, why it does not boil the planet, and why the valve was set at 76 km.
  2. The Thousand Years Years 0–1200 Seven eras, from the Quiet Years to After the Rain, and the ladder of what drowns when.
  3. The Drowned World Year 1200 A salty sea, an empty sky, people without fire, eight rocks, and one fixed star.
  4. The Line Years ~20–1190 The novella. One family, seven leavings and returns, and one sheet of paper that ends as a map.
  5. The Ledger Open items Where the premise strains, flagged honestly so nobody has to rediscover it.