Throwback

David Rheinbrücke has been different for all of his twenty-five years on this Earth. Even at birth, He was an FLK. That's medical slang for funny looking kid, used when they know something just not right. As he grew, he continued to look different. A throwback, people said many times, especially when they didn't think he could hear them. Even as a young child, he had a thick barrel chest and coarse thick hair. His brows were bushy and his forehead stuck out over his eyes. He was a throwback, a caveman, a Neanderthal. To make his life really difficult, he also had an extra opposable thumb on each hand where his little finger should have been. Growing up, he had been called all those names as well as 'brows' and 'Kong'. He needed to know why he looked like this, but the world was not so easy now. A new ice age had taken the earth in its grip and was squeezing, hard.

The new ice age had been identified and acknowledged differently by different groups through out history; the scientific community more than three hundred years ago, the public and politicians about two hundred years ago, but it actually began five hundred or more years ago during the industrial revolution. The tipping point, however, occurred just over three hundred years ago in the middle of the twenty-first century, due to changes in the ocean's salinity and subsequent alteration of the global conveyor thermohaline currents. Incredible snows in the north, little or no summer melting, and a drop in the average world temperature of 4.5 degree, allowed an ice sheet to overrun northern Europe and northern America. In the struggle for survival that followed, progressive mass migrations of billions of people to the southern regions eventually resulted in brutal wars. Over a period of less than a hundred years, seventy-five percent of the Earth's population, over nine billion, died of war, starvation, or the cold.