Call me Methuselah. Or simply Meth User; you see, I am a methionine-enriched longevity algae user, the formula for lengthened--some might say perpetual--life, which has allowed me to persist while the Short-Lives have been dying off for nearly a thousand years.

I was there, saw it all, knew Thorp well, and Hal, and the exquisite Nalysia, and all the rest. I was there before Civilization crashed and burned. And froze. I am the only living soul who once drove a car, plugged in an appliance, witnessed all four seasons, watched TV for God's sake, back when there were such things.

And I sit here today, on my small strand of sandy beach, still breathing, still kicking as it were, still pondering; although these days I mostly ponder the small clump of cells incubating back at the New Pierce Institute of Revelatory Climatology, rapidly growing into who we once knew as, and hopefully will again, Thorp Grimsson.

Before the Perturbation, before the Ice, Thorp was my friend, my mentor, and Chief Scientist at PIRC and was responsible for much of what we had achieved. Our gifts to the planet: the mass hysteria, worldwide violence, the collapse of civilization, and the near extinction of the Human Race, that occurred as the result of his work. But that was over a thousand years ago and the world is now different.

Very different. Frozen solid, for the most part, except for small outposts, such as my lovely and much adored Guam, of which I was the sole resident for quite awhile--a few hundred years--until a very few remaining survivors, like myself, discovered this tiny paradise in our frozen world.

Though they were my benefactors and providers, and ultimately my betrayers, indeed the betrayers of all humanity, I remain beholden to Thorp, the Old PIRC, and its founder, Hal Pierce.  As the sole remaining Certified Climatologist and Evolutionary Ecologist on the planet, and founder of this tiny community of souls residing at the New PIRC facility, I owe my longevity and livelihood, if it could be called that, to their now long forgotten Old Institute, despite my now millennium-long knowledge of the foolhardiness of their philosophy and methods.

Indeed, we all owe a great deal to Thorp in particular, because it is Thorp and Thorp alone, ironically, that is the last best hope for Mankind and Planet Earth, Thorp as we knew him, and will again soon, or else all hope is lost.

But I am getting ahead of my story. It is best to start at the beginning or what we once thought was the end, if you will…