On a Clear Day

Chapter One:

Along the way

They came for her on a Tuesday. She was twelve years, three months, and five days old. She was going to Germany; one of the chosen few to attend the international academy.

She was a prodigy. Her parents had been proud of her, though it was nothing they had done, directly. They were average folks, John and Maggie MacKay. Good people, struggling to survive. She remembered them fondly, along with her three sisters. It seemed likely she’d never see any of them again. She would be a long way from the rural village she had been born in. Culloden, Virginia was a tiny mountain community in North America’s United States.

Her parents had done the best they could with her, but the school had to report her. The government came and tested her when she was eight years old. Her parents cried when the results came in. They knew she would be taken. A child with an I.Q. of 175 would be useful to them.

They were the new world government, The United Council of Nations. They were the best, the oldest, the wisest, the most intelligent group of people left on Earth, working together to try to help everyone through this difficult time in history. The goal was to save the world – or at least humanity and whatever else they could manage.

It was a sacrifice. She made it, her parents made it, her friends and relatives, all. Her brain was a gift to the world and not to use it would have been a crime against humanity. Still, it made her sad. She would miss her family. They had thrown her an awesome birthday party on the 10th of April. She would remember it, always, even if a little wistfully.

Kiara’s teachers had gone beyond the basics with her. She was a sponge for information, and even considering the hapless condition of the planet, the human condition was still pretty much the same, though remarkably less abundant in places. They still had a plethora of information technology available. Culloden, Virginia was nothing more than a rural outpost near Richmond, but for the most part phone lines and satellites were still in place and operable. All-in-all, her education hadn’t suffered terribly. Kiara wondered what sort of place the Foundation for the Earth’s Revival would be.

Maggie, her Mum, had been born Margaret Isobel O’Brien, and raised Irish-Catholic in New York City. She met John Angus MacKay on her senior trip to Virginia Beach. They fell in love and were married that August. Maggie was already pregnant with her.

They settled in Culloden, and since Maggie’s Da was gone and her Mum was alone in New York, her Mum moved down to Virginia to be near the happy couple, and of course, the grandchildren. The rest would have been history except that was the year everything changed forever.

Someone in the Middle East finally lost their patience with a neighbor and let loose a bomb, which started a volley of enough nuclear bombs to turn most of the desert into glass. What price, Babylon?

Other countries had been trying to force peace for years upon the ungrateful citizens of third-world countries. Faced with incomprehensible hatred that the allied policing forces could not have matched if they had wanted to, they finally left the ingrates to themselves.

It did not take long for them to declare war upon one another. Nearly every country east of the Mediterranean and Red Seas in the Middle East were involved, along with a few other contributors. It has been estimated that 100 nuclear bombs were detonated, using TNT blasting power between 15 and 20 kilotons each.

She leaned her forehead against the cool glass with echoes of Sunday school ringing in her head …Matthew 24:6-7, and you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.

7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.

‘Not yet’, indeed. Humanity would just have to muddle through somehow. There wasn’t much left of Israel to be restored at the moment, though she never really thought of it in terms of a physical location, more of a metaphorical nation, but that was just the way she rolled. She liked the Bible. She thought it was special, but having read other books on similar subjects like Judaism’s Torah, and Islam’s Qur’an, the Vedas of Hinduism, as well as a bit on Buddhism and Taoism with some Scientology thrown in for good measure, she had developed her own point of view. Regardless of how well meaning they were, or perhaps were not, all of the holy books were in the end written by man.

Poor stupid mortals, she sighed, accepting the irony that she was one herself. It would be easier to leave it all up to the gods. She gave Christianity’s Holy Bible special consideration because her parents were among the faithful. In a way, she envied them their perceptivity on the matter. For them, as for her sisters Anna-Maria, Katherine Margaret, and Patricia Rose, there was no doubt.

Her parents had given her something that she could take with her anywhere, her name: Kiara Isobel O’Brien MacKay. It was different, at least; hers alone to remind her of her heritage, but they always called her KK for short. She even knew the history behind it. She was named after an Irish Saint; Saint Ciara. Ciar is a Celtic word that simply means dark or dusky. The lady must have been named for the dark clothing she wore, because nuns don’t go about with their hair showing, but then maybe her skin was dusky, like the Spanish. No one really knows. She was not one of those saints who was a martyr or had preformed any miracles. She was canonized locally before Rome decided to make up all of the rules of sainthood that now apply. Her claim to fame was simply that she had established a monastery at Kilkeary, Ireland in the seventh century. She was also the abbess of a monastery at Tehelly, Ireland. She even has her own feast day: January 5th, if anyone wants to know. She was born in Tipperary, and died there of natural causes in 670 A.D.

Kiara’s hair was dark; it was black, even, like a raven’s wing Papa would say. Mama said that her Papa used to tell her that the O’Brien family, among other great persons, claimed the nun as one of their own. Well, maybe she was, and that thought made her smile. The simple fact that she could smile without her family gave her hope.

For Kiara, the C was changed to a K to incorporate the harsher k sound into the English translation, like Keltic. Other variations of the name are Ciar, Cior, Cyra, or Ceara, but her name is pronounced Key-R-ah, and her parents did not want her called Seeair-A. Like most Celtic words/names, which start with c, it naturally carries the k sound instead of the see that you usually hear it with in English. Changing it to a K was maybe a little like giving in, but the Gaelic languages, though playing a large part in beautifying and enhancing the English language, has been swallowed up pretty well by it.

There are those who cling to it and do the best they can to keep it alive, but they all speak English, too. Gaels are all over the world. They are every kind of people, and the Gaelic bloodlines will go on as long as humanity does, because they know how to adapt. Unfortunately, that means accepting change, even when it means compromising your heritage by changing a c to a k to be better understood by others. It’s better than becoming extinct, like the Mayans.

Janice was lost in her own thoughts when she heard Kiara say Mum knew the answers to silly questions like that.

What questions are those, Dear? asked Janice. The little girl looked surprised. She must not have realized she had said that out loud, as she had a very expressive face. She decided to answer, after a moment’s hesitation.

Oh, well it’s just that back home, everyone called me KK, and I was wondering if you can tell people your nickname or if they have to give you one, like I got mine to start with, only a new one. What do you think?

Kiara fixed her chaperone with a wide blue-eyed look of trust and innocence that made the poor young woman feel utterly unworthy of the responsibility she faced, but she took a deep breath and went with what she thought her own mother would have said: Of course you can give your nickname! If that is the name you feel most comfortable being called, you should, otherwise it would be like being called by a stranger’s name and you wouldn’t even realize you were being addressed!

Kiara said Thanks, and turned back to the window. Since her answer seemed to please the little girl, she let out the breath she had been holding.

Janice was a UCN agent, assigned to protect this child. She desperately wanted to do a good job, and she honestly believed that in order to do that, KK had to like her. She thought the world of her new little charge, and she planned to do everything she could to help her on her journey. At the UCN Academy, they were taught to tutor, mentor, and defend their assigned ‘Gifts.’

Little KK had no idea how valuable she was to the government, or of the care they had taken in preparing guardians for her and others like her. Janice was twenty-five years old. She had been around the world, and had seen what it was like out there. KK and her family, the people of this area, did not realize how fortunate they were. Many places had much worse situations. Many were starving, and even though the people here managed to feed themselves, they could not feed the world. Janice was young, strong, and reasonably intelligent; she could protect KK from most things, but she needed KK to save her, too.

She looked over at the little girl. She could not even imagine what sort of thoughts might go through the mind of a child with such an incredibly sharp intellect. Janice knew many people whom she admired and respected, with PhDs and lesser degrees, who had worked frantically over the last decade to try to solve the world’s problems; those same people were now looking towards KK and her kind for answers. They called them the gifted ones, but they were the gift, and Janice McGowan knew it. So did the UCN.

Whomever it was that decided to start the war, it was quite in evidence that they hadn’t thought things through. A ‘nuclear autumn’ occurred. There was no corner of the globe left unaffected. If ever there were a time to be called Armageddon, surely this was it. There had been no shortage of famine, disease, or war and rumors of war.

The ‘TTAPS’ team of the 1980s had coined the phrase ‘nuclear winter’. They predicted that with the release of X amount of nuclear bombs being detonated over Y amount of cities (causing urban firestorms) in Z period of time, so much smoke and debris would be drawn up into the upper stratosphere it would block out the sun and cause another Ice Age. These men had done their homework. They knew what they were talking about, and their theory was tested and retested into the early 2000s. The results would vary, and some would say that it would not be quite that bad, as in merely a nuclear ‘autumn,’ while other reports revealed that it might be worse, due to ozone depletion. Any way you looked at it, the idea that -Nuclear war was a bad thing - remained a constant theme.

Fortunately, to err is human. Men of science though they were, all of their theories were flawed, for the most crucial variable was never considered: God. Fine; for unbelievers in a higher power, consider Cosmic Consciousness or for the scientific doubting Thomas’, consider the variability of electrons as proven in quantum mechanics by Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment, when applied to the interference of single electrons. Electrons ‘decided’ to behave differently when they were observed.

Enter ‘Naive Realism.’ What is it that makes human beings think that they are the only intelligent forms of life? If an electron can make a decision to behave one way for one occasion and differently for another, does that not prove other intelligence?

At any rate, things did not happen quite as predicted by science. In the end, due to various influences such as a westerly wind in the stratosphere, the fact that the available building materials were largely inflammable in the targeted areas, an unusually rainy season in the sub-tropics, and other coincidental factors, things were not as bad as they could have been.

Still, the repetition of mushrooming clouds spouted enough debris into the upper stratosphere to cause significant problems all over the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth for the last decade and then some.

The trouble with the stratosphere is that it doesn’t rain. Therefore, the smoke and debris clouds can not be washed away. Most of the chlorofluorocarbons that threatened to destroy the ozone layer miraculously made their way through the existing hole at Antarctica without enlarging it too terribly. There were a lot of problems with skin cancer and retinal degeneration that caused people to go blind at first; it was thought to be purely due to the depletion of ozone. Suddenly everyone was taking anti-radiation nutritional supplements that had previously been ignored on the shelves of health food stores. The manufacturers couldn’t keep up with the demand. Still, it was more that customary to keep one’s skin and eyes protected from the sun as much as possible; discretion being the greater part of valor.

The worst-case scenario would have been the Nuclear Winter, of course, and in some places it did seem to be more winter than autumn, but because of the prevailing westerly winds at the time, it took a while for the debris to make it around to North America and to Western Europe. Since the smoke and debris clouds were not as thick as expected, the global distribution thinned them out enough to make it possible for the sun to continue to do its job. Most of the food-producing regions were still able to produce. The temperatures dropped, but not enough to destroy vegetation entirely. She had been told that the first few years were the worst, epically for Asia and Eurasia. The Northern Hemisphere suffered more than did the Southern, but they had their problems, too. Oddly enough, though Asia was severely damaged, areas of South Africa were now capable of agriculture that once had been too hot and dry. That was now.

During and immediately following the war in the Middle East, the Earth reacted to the bombings with fault line quakes that caused tsunami waves, which caused atmospheric disturbances that churned up tornados and hurricanes worldwide. The natural disasters were nearly as destructive as the bombs had been. Millions died worldwide.

It was nearly genocide in the Middle East and over much of Asia, but the whole world took losses in population that well exceeded the death toll of WWII. Those who lived in mountainous regions faired the best, though that is not to say they had it easy.

It was during this period of time that Kiara had been born. In America, her parents had been proud members of the ‘Me’ generation. Humans are surprisingly adaptable creatures. Everyone said that they would never make it if they had to live without technology.

Well, technology did not die, but it became unavailable for a while, what with everything all torn up as it was. Most people rose to the challenge of helping survivors and rebuilding critical structures. They re-established the severed lines of communication across the globe and had a serious heart-to-heart with all of their neighbors, once the smoke cleared. That was an old expression. The smoke never really did clear entirely. That was the main problem. Those who could produce food were hard pressed to grow enough to feed the world, and much of the world was hungry, if not starving.

After a five-year struggle to keep the remaining inhabitants of the Earth fed, the United Council of Nations appointed a task team to develop better ways to produce food en masse, one to find cleaner fuels, and one to clean up the stratosphere and repair the hole in the ozone layer. This task force was strained due to lack of available and qualified participants.

Researchers could recite what the problems were with their eyes closed, but what to do about them left them grasping. Every aspect of humanity had been cut in number, including doctors and research scientists. Those that were available were, or had been primarily, educators. The educators decided to do what they do best, and to try to glean some knowledge from the new generation. These teachers began to search the world for children who were not only intelligent, but exceptional; those who might be capable of such innovative sciences. What they found surprised them.

There were many born the years surrounding The Storm, as the war in the Middle East had come to be called. They did not know if some sort of nuclear radiation exposure was the cause, some even thought they might be alien changelings, but whatever the reason, many of these children had been born with extraordinarily gifted minds. Some died; some were born mentally retarded, or became savants, gifted in only one area, otherwise incapable. Some were autistic, and still others were deprived of basic nutrition in their formative years, and failed to develop to their full potential. Those children who had managed to survive and go to school began to show signs of extreme intelligence. These were the ones they wanted, and Kiara was among them.

Kiara was one of two hundred students selected worldwide to train her mind for the challenges facing her world. It was really quite an honor. The school was based in Munich, Germany. This was due to the fact that Germany graciously donated the use of Nymphenburg Palace and all of her many resources in the pursuit of knowledge to Professor Barnard Danvers. Dr. Danvers was the chair of the international task force.

Kiara wondered what sort of man Professor Danvers would be, and if she would ever even meet him. She looked over at Janice and realized that she was comfortable with the woman, as if she was an aunt or a cousin. They must have selected the woman carefully from many possible mentors to create such a compatible match. A wise man; she concluded.

Chapter Two:

The Majestic

Florida was pretty much gone as a result of the earthquakes and tsunamis. While the waters had receded for the most part, the damage was irreparable, or at least not worth the effort just yet. The nearest sea port was at Wilmington, North Carolina. None of the Virginia ports were really ever set up to handle ocean liners and Wilmington, which was rather inland, managed to survive more or less intact.

Automobiles were generally outlawed; however, trains and ships were still in use. The horse and buggy were making a major comeback while scientists worked on eco-friendly vehicles, so as not to further damage the already defunct environment.

Culloden was in the mountains just outside of Richmond, Virginia. Wilmington was pretty much a straight shot south by south-east 250 miles, give or take. They ditched the horse and buggy in Richmond and caught a train. She had never been on a train before. The only trains in use were the old coal engines, to avoid using petroleum fuels as much as possible. The farmers used pure ethanol in their tractors, and some of the wealthier folks had solar/electric automobiles, but most of the modern cars were too complicated to convert. Tractors were pretty simple, and with minor modifications they chugged along happily on their new fuel supply.

The train car was long, with an aisle down the middle with bench seats all facing the same direction on one side, and the other side had seats facing each other with a small table in the middle. Janice led her to one of the bench seats. After a short wait and a refreshing drink, the train started to chug to life like some great prehistoric beast.

She got a little thrill down her spine when the whistle blew. This was really happening! Her bags all had little tags on them and were left on the dock. A man would put them in the luggage car and get them out again once they arrived in Wilmington. Her luggage didn’t amount to much. She had packed everything she owned. In her big suitcase she had her winter clothing. Winters were longer and colder than they used to be, so most everyone had high-tech thermals to wear under everything else. They did a good job, but a person still needed a hat, gloves, scarf, and a coat. She was reminded that winters were even longer in Europe than in North America. Her parents sent her with mostly new clothing; they even allowed her to choose her own ‘style.’ Style was a bit of a foreign concept in a rural area where day-to-day survival takes precedence over such whims, but they had saved as much as they could to provide her with what she would need for her upcoming trip.

The Foundation would provide for her needs afterwards, and her sisters said they didn’t mind, they would get all of her old stuff and they wanted her to look nice out there in the world. Her parents had taken her into Richmond to shop. She’d only been there once before, and was impressed by the size of the city and the number of people that were there. Culloden was a small community. Every family farmed during the growing season, and most of the men worked at the power plant. They were harvesting solar, water and wind power. Culloden was run by it, and there was even enough to send some of the power to Richmond, but mostly they tested new and safer forms of providing electricity, and were able to sell solar panels manufactured there to other cities. That was pretty much what kept Culloden and her inhabitants alive.

There was a grocery store and a department store with clothing for the whole family. There were other shops and services in town, as well. Some families ran small restaurants, and there was a bank, a pharmacy, a doctor, and a dentist. Most everything a person might need could be found somewhere in town, but Richmond was only thirty-five miles away, and they had everything else.

It was June 15, 2025, and the weather was warm for this time of year. By the time they had reached Richmond, it was nearly 70 degrees. Papa said it was always warmer in the city. Temperatures in North America had not been drastically affected by the nuclear war in the Middle East. She had learned that most places only saw a 5 – 10 degree drop from what used to be considered normal. Kiara never knew anything different though. Late July and early August still saw days in the high 80’s. Mum said that the summer she met Da there was a heat wave and Virginia Beach had three days of temperatures above 105! She remembered the auld folks saying that it had not been so high since the 50’s (the 1950’s). Kiara remembered thinking, ‘Wow! That was forever ago!’ She tried to imagine air hotter than her body. The only thing she could compare it to was of being close to a fire, but the fire would be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The smaller suitcase had her summer stuff and personal effects. She had a shoulder bag, too, but that was it. How much stuff can a twelve-year-old have anyway? All-in-all, it took about five hours to get to Wilmington. The train naturally moved so much faster than the horse and buggy that it did not take much more time to get from Richmond to Wilmington than it had to get from Culloden to Richmond. The world whizzed by at speeds she was quite unused to traveling. She saw a few abandoned homes and automobiles left to rust and crumble along the highways and byways. Homelier sights of farmers out working in their fields dotted the countryside, some with tractors, but many with mules or horses and plows. Traffic mostly consisted of people riding horses or driving a team in front of a wagon, or a single horse and cart. She saw some wildlife, a few deer, some squirrels, rabbits, and their predators. There were eagles and hawks above, foxes and coyote or dogs below. She even saw a snake sunning itself on a rock.

When Wilmington came into view, it was very sudden. The city was not any larger than Richmond, but everyone was in a much bigger hurry. When she stepped off of the train she was nearly trampled by a stampede of people attempting to board! ‘That was not very well organized,’ she thought. Janice directed her to a staging area where they were to wait for her luggage.

Once