Water Memory

And that's the funny thing about the end of the world, they never tell you how long it's going to take. Too bad they couldn't be more specific.

It’s the end of the world, and Hertell Daggett's new job is to save it.  Well not save it so much, as just… Remember it.  The earth’s magnetic poles reversed, and people are starting to forget things. 

The poles have switched many times over the last few billion years, and it never made much difference to the blue-green algae and trilobites and dinosaurs that were running around eating each other all day back then.  But the last reversal happened almost a million years ago, before civilization and culture, and alphabets and numbers, and money and God, and atom bombs and X-Box.  So this time it’s different. 

Civilization has just had its clock reset to the great cosmic flashing 12:00am from almost a million years ago, and humanity, and everybody in it, is pretty much forgetting everything it learned since the last time.

Everybody that is, except Hertell Daggett, who remembers pretty much everything because he’d once been shot in the head in a celebratory New Year’s Eve accident.  The doctors got the bullet out but missed a few tiny specks of copper that stayed behind, floating inside his brain, connecting him to all those things that everybody else on earth seems to be forgetting.  

And it falls on Hertell Daggett to start civilization all over again, and maybe even help get it right this time.