Coping Noodles

Coping Noodles is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi short story written by Andrew Kristi Edgars in 2022.

Coping Noodles follows the last spoken word of Mr. Gates, Coping, through to his last thought, Noodles.

In the story Mr. Gates is dying from a hole torn through his chest by an errant piece that called a slat that has fallen off of a passing hover vehicle. He is being tended by two medics, but due to current legislation called the legacy laws they aren't allowed to resuscitate him. Their duty is to drill wires into his brain to take a record of his memories.

In Mr. Gates memories he takes us through his life and the large events that caused the planet turmoil, starting with the Great Disappearance that took half the worlds population. There was a world war on at the time and the worlds resources went into fighting the war instead of rebuilding. It is only eluded to and then confirmable by doing the math with the date presented at the end of the story to deduce that the world war at the time of the Great Disappearance, later called The Split, was actually WWII. That same math and Mr. Gates reference to "after that bomb damned the world," will enlighten the reader to the exact event that triggered the Great Disappearance/The Split was the explosion of the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9th, 1945.

The Fat Man bomb caused the planet to be duplicated with half the population deposited on one side or the other of The Split. For the first ten years after the event the populations of both sides of The Split believed that half the worlds population had simply disappeared. On Mr. Gates side, WWII continued until all the armies either starved to death or abandoned their posts. While on the other side of The Split they saw no point in continuing to fight and rebuilt their world.

On the tenth anniversary of the Great Disappearance everyone that was alive when the bombing of Nagasaki happened switched the side of the split they were on. To those born within the last ten years it was as if everyone they ever knew disappeared and they were left with a whole new population of teenager to adults. The energy created by the bombing of Nagasaki was detected to be growing over time and at a certain level would expel triggering a shift of all those alive when the bomb went off. Less energy was expelled each time and shifts were triggered more often.

The first shift was on Split +10, proceeded in the story by Split +19, Split +27, Split +34, Split +40, Split +45, Split +49. After the story shifts were expected to continue on Split +52, Split +54, and Split +55, what happened after that will have to wait for the next installment in this story.

In Split +32 it was discovered that some sort of disaster had thrown the other side into some kind of ice age. The Split of +40 brought with it those that had been born on the other side, but mutated by the disaster that had befallen their world. They were years ahead of the people on Mr. Gates side and easily enslaved them. Mr. Gates then spent the next 5 years a slave, 4 of which he was working on a nickel mining crew in the asteroid belt on an asteroid known as Eunomia.

In Split +47 WWIII broke out over a border skirmish in Alaska.