Red Sky—Black Sky. The inhabitants of Planet Millennium have not always lived under skies that change color every six millenni-hours. Prior to the cataclysmic collision of the Extractor Meteor in the millenni-year 1 A.E. (After Extractors), the Millennium skies remained blue as the rotating planet made her journey around the two stars within her solar system.
When the disastrous Extractor Meteor struck the center of Millennium, it created a colossal hole in her surface—the Crater of Chaos. But the meteor left more than a crater. Upon impact, the massive meteor from the Evil Star caused several chain reactions of unimaginable magnitude. As the Extractor Meteor crashed into Millennium’s surface, its kinetic energy, equal to a million hydrogen bombs, was transferred to the ground as a gigantic shock wave. The wave moved outward and downward, compressing the planet’s porous rock strata. At the point of impact the mantle rock was intensely fractured and vaporized by the shock metamorphism. The initial compression wave was followed immediately by a rarefaction wave—rebounding violently in the opposite direction.
The resulting catastrophe ejected millions of millenni-tons of hot rock and subterranean debris into the atmosphere as ballistic trajectories. Due to the porosity of Millennium’s mantle, the majority of the shattered debris became space dust—extremely fine powder—finer than sand.
In the form of a monstrous mushroom cloud, the space dust ascended into Planet Millennium’s clear blue sky. At the speed of sound, the mushroom cloud rocketed through the atmosphere’s lower layers, then rose over 1000 millenni-miles through the magnetosphere (Millennium’s protective shield against the ceaseless bombardment of solar winds). Below the cloud, a crippled planet.
The Extractor Meteor’s impact completely interrupted Millennium’s rotation on her axis by disrupting the planet’s magnetic field. Prior to the collision, the stabilizing magnetic field of Millennium was dipolar (similar to a bar magnet) with two magnetic poles at the planet’s north and south axis points. After the collision, while the wounded planet’s bar magnet drifted around and reversed direction (a normal occurrence every few hundred thousand millenni-years), the space dust cloud above the atmosphere formed two spectacular rings that moved in opposite directions. This resulted in a radical magnetic drift encompassing the globe. The two sky rings, one comprised of positive-charged (+) red space dust and the other made of negative-charged (-) black space dust, formed a two-ring gyroscope around Planet Millennium.
The gyroscopic force of the two space dust rings spinning around the planet (at more than 1000 m.p.h.) was so powerful that by the time the magnetic poles reversed and corrected themselves, the gyroscopic spinning rings prevented Millennium from rotating on her axis. The spinless planet became a gigantic gyroscope rocketing through space—a gyro-planet.
The meteorite catastrophe left everlasting scars in its wake: the incredible Crater of Chaos, the bizarre red and black gyroscopic rings spinning around Millennium, the annihilation of untold plantanimal species, the release of the sinister Extractor Virus.
Red Sky—Black Sky. The skies over Planet Millennium are, indeed, a sight to behold.
The Octilogy: Part IV - Chapter II
