Ballard-1

(Also referred to as “The Drowned World”)

Current Year: 1952

Classifications: Hell World

''“For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under Heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die.” ''

-Genesis 6:17

Ballard-1 is a world that has been utterly devastated by global flooding.

Beginning in 1908, an alteration to the sun’s output of energy caused the solar radiation to interact differently with Earth’s concentration of magnetic energy at the poles. The nature of this change and what caused it is still being studied and is not fully understood yet, but the end result was a fundamental change in the way solar radiation interacted with ice at the Earth’s poles as they rapidly began to heat and melt at an exponentially increasing rate.

By 1915 the global average ocean-line had risen 2 feet. It took until 1922 for global powers to realize the nature of what was happening and that it wasn’t a natural byproduct of increased atmospheric precipitation for several years in a row. By 1926, several major coastal cities were being flooded and evacuated, including New York, Miami, Tampa, Zhanjiang, Shenzhen, Mumbai, Khulna, Abidjan, Grande Victoria and Nagoya. Cities including Palembang, Saigon, Guangzhou and New Orleans were rendered completely uninhabitable in less than a year after flooding initially started.

With hundreds of thousands of people being displaced an incredible amount of strain was placed on any and all habitable areas near flooded zones as they received countless refugees. Increased population density and an increased strain on existing medical resources creates a situation where the Spanish Flu Pandemic never recedes as it did in 1920 as it did in our universe and instead continues as a virulent series of outbreaks on throughout the 1920’s. By 1927, roughly 200 million people had been killed by the various viral strains that developed, which is nearly twice the death-toll as seen from the event in our universe and nearly 10% of the entire planet’s population at the time. Flashpoints of localized warfare begin in China in 1928 when the government declares there will be an expulsion of all existing refugees from India and Japan. Border disputes and civil wars inevitably follow in other locations, including France, Germany, Britain, America and Russia among many others, rapidly increasing the death-toll even higher than it already was as the entire planet devolves into chaos as civilization breaks down. The excessive amount of liquid water on the planet completely alters the natural atmospheric flow of weather, permanently destroying the Earth’s meteorological balance as waves of pouring rain from bloated tropical depressions become the only identifiable form of weather. Entire cities are left as polluted swamps and fetid, lukewarm lagoons, completely uninhabitable by man and with only select tall structures stretching over top of the tepid, filthy floodwaters. Aside from the obvious flourishing of many fish and other sea-dwelling species, the total collapse of Earth’s ecosystems become inevitable with the extinction of so many land-dwellers, totally crashing the Earth’s biosphere.

The history of Ballard-1 and its societal collapse are difficult to research at this point, so little is known about the ultimate fate of humanity in this disastrous parallel. The possibility of communities of surviving humans forming in places like the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Andes, the Karakoram, the Ural Mountains, the Appalachians and the Hindu Kush Mountains remains a distinct possibility and is currently being investigated. There is also scant but existent evidence of emergency government projects taking place in the final years of this world’s civilization that were designed to preserve a small number of elite members of the political, scientific and economic circles after the flood-waters became inescapable. Rumors abound of town-sized super-freighters or massive floating arcologies, designed to function as permanently sustainable communes, carrying communities of survivors on the surface of the now global ocean in the hopes that they can one day reestablish humanity.