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he’d get killed in an ambush.
    But he was blind, pigheaded drunk and wouldn’t listen. Hadn’t he been a professional racing driver before going into films, he challenged, waving his whiskey glass. And didn’t he have one of the newest, fastest, best armed grav-cars on the market? Hell, he’d whip any man in the place. Racing through the Los Angeles Sinks was a piece of cake.

6
    The Crash
    In some ways the Sinks epitomized all the tragedies of the previous centuries. The new millennium had not been kind to humanity. The ecological destruction of the last half of the twentieth century came back to haunt the earth with a vengeance as monster storms, floods, and droughts swept across the planet.
    Even the earth itself seemed to rebel as massive quakes and volcanic eruptions shook the world. The quakes had been gathering momentum for years as a brown dwarf star that had been hiding in the far reaches of the solar system swept in unannounced beneath the plane of the ecliptic and crossed the orbits of the inner planets. They called her Nibiru, and as she approached, her enormous gravitational drag raked across the earth, setting off volcanos and worldwide earthquakes that killed millions and changed ancient geographies overnight.
    Panic-stricken nations went to war, fighting over dwindling resources, and millions more died in the aftermath of radiation poisoning and man-made genetic plagues that swept across the world. Civil society broke down as individuals gathered in gangs and tribes, fighting over the ruins of their once great cities.
    It was as if the apocalypse predicted for the start of the new millennium had finally arrived. People looked to their bibles to give a name to their sufferings, and they found it in the “Tribulations” of the latter days. But as disaster piled on disaster, even Tribulations couldn’t cover it and, at last, it became known simply as the Crash.
    In California the long awaited “big one” hit early on in the beginning of the Tribulations, and the state shattered like a dropped jigsaw puzzle. The quakes hit in a haphazard, almost capricious fashion. In some places the land rose, while in othershuge sections of the state sank into the sea. Some places were even left relatively unscathed.
    When the quakes finally abated, San Francisco was gone, along with a big chunk of the northern coast that collapsed back almost into the middle of the state where the sea now pounded against the Sacramento Palisades, a line of high, jagged, cliffs guarding a shattered interior.
    A long chain of volcanic islands started in what had been San Francisco bay and hooked southeast into a deep sea trench that had once been the San Joaquin Valley. The Trench extended all the way east to the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas that had been pushed up thousands of feet and now had foothills of their own. Cold, deep sea currents flowed up the Trench from the Mexican Break all the way past the Sacramento Palisades.
    South of San Francisco, the coastal range sank into a long chain of tropical archipelagos that extended almost all the way down to what had once been Santa Barbara. From there they spread out into a tight, jumbled labyrinth of rubble choked channels, junkyard reefs, and tens of thousands of small, overgrown islands that became known collectively as the Skeleton Keys. The Keys flowed southward and gradually merged into the sunken ruins of Los Angeles.
    The city had been luckier than most of the rest of the state. The same capricious forces that pulled San Francisco and the northern coast into the ocean pushed the Los Angeles Basin more than fifteen hundred feet into the air. It was almost as if a compassionate Gaia had lifted it up out of the way of the enormous tsunamis that swept in from across the Pacific with the collapse of the Japanese islands and the Indonesian Archipelago.
    As the earth changes gradually subsided over the next fifty years, the city slowly sank back into the ocean. It did not happen all