The Event | Episode 3 – The Dissolution of London

London, originally built by the Romans at that famous encircling bend in the Thames, had gradually migrated over the millennia until the heart of the modern city stood some fifteen kilometers almost due west from the Meridian Building as the crow flies.

Just east of the Prime Meridian Line, the observation deck had provided an incredible panorama of the London skyline from the Millennium Dome on the right to the odd pickle shaped building oft referred to as “the gherkin” on the left.  And in the center, dead on at the end of Greenwich Park, was the grand Queen’s House that we have already established could be seen as missing from the position at Seven Points.

At the moment of inception of the event, London remained initially unscathed, according to several witnesses who had been on the observation deck.  Rather, the Vanishing (in the popular vernacular) emanated from the Prime Meridian Line just west of the Dome, “disappearing” all man made artifacts right to left as it went, covering the distance across all of London in just under one minute.

A common element among those few first-hand accounts is the inability of the interviewees to find words to describe the degree of their shock as they followed the progress of the line of dissolution sweeping toward the urban center.

One moment there were skyscrapers, multi-deck cruise ships on the Thames, and traffic rolling down the streets and highways.  The next moment there were hundreds of people falling from the sky, sightseers plunging into the river, and car-less drivers and passengers skidding across the road beds before rolling to a stop, limp and lifeless.

The onlookers, for the most part, remained frozen in stunned silence as the plane of disruption moved inexorably across the land, though those who had family and friends in the Old Smoke began to scream and weep, and many fell to the cobblestones that remained beneath their shoes.

Toward the right, in a delayed reaction, two geysers erupted from the river just above the Blackwall Tunnels when the earth, no longer supported by the vanished lining, collapsed.

That, coupled with the rising wails of those who had been on the bad side of the line or had loved ones in the old city drew the rest of those on the fortunate side back into awareness, and the chaos then unfolded as has already been described from the perspectives of Subject Zero and those around him.

As horrific as it was, this eye witness experience did provide the first hard bit of data about the event: it was not something that had happened over a fixed area like the radius of a bomb blast, but something that was still happening: a process with a speed and a direction.  It was, in fact, hardly more than one minute from inception until the leading edge of disruption had completely crossed the Old Town and disappeared over the horizon.

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