4.
The
meteors changed everything.
That might seem like a stupidly
obvious thing to say, but most human infrastructure was not built to deal with
the scenario that the universe starts hucking a non-stop barrage of rocks at
us.
Before the meteors, there were legions
of satellites orbiting the planet, enabling our entire data-driven culture.
GPS, TV, telecom, weather forecasting, military intelligence, astronomy, cartography,
disaster relief – all built on a robust, highly redundant system of orbital machinery
that punctured, cracked, and collapsed entirely in a matter of weeks. The
airline industry collapsed. The shipping industry collapsed. Solar energy,
which had been thisclose to becoming a viable worldwide savior, was suddenly a
complete boondoggle, with thousands of flat, brittle acres of solar panel
becoming so much high-tech swiss cheese.
There was a rush on oil, a rush on
coal, a rush on cash, rushes on food, on water, on medicine. There were riots.
Panic. Cults. Mass suicides. Mass murders. Societal and economic collapses and
rebounds and recollapses. And this was all in the first three months.
But then, somehow, equilibrium. Starting
with, of course, the British.
As the rest of the world panicked,
the Brits went to the print shop. They reclaimed a piece of their history from
the garbage bin of pop culture.
KEEP
CALM
and
CARRY
ON
Those red posters popped up
everywhere. Not ironically, not as a meme, not to sell vodka, but as an honest
to god bridge back to the past, a reminder that for the Brits, death from above
was just another day at the office.
The French could hardly let the
British out-poise them. And the Germans couldn’t let the French show more resolve.
World War II nostalgia swept the continent, and Europe collectively dusted
itself off, stood up, and sneered skyward.
Russia opened a bottle and shrugged
forward, cynicism intact. China rallied gloriously, Japan started working the
problem. These were the struts that helped prop the rest of the world to its
feet.
The Americans took a different
approach.
Within days of the first meteor
impacts on US soil, Congress called for an immediate and dramatic increase in
defense spending. The goal: to create a national umbrella that would detect,
intercept, and eliminate all incoming space debris and make America safe again,
by God.
NASA was quickly absorbed into the
effort, all funding and personnel placed under the discretion of the Department
of Defense, and the country’s top minds and biggest guns set to work creating
completely insane, unbelievably expensive systems to try to stop a literally
unending barrage of rocky debris travelling toward Earth at around seventy
times the speed of sound. Most of the plans involved lasers.
While the government assured the
American people that a space defense system was just around the corner, the people
themselves took matter into their own hands, mostly through prayer and social
media. Millions of people changed their Facebook picture to Bruce Willis,
specifically to his character from Armageddon,
as a sign that they would not be intimidated by a bunch of lousy space boulders.
Prayer groups formed nationwide, sincerely requesting that God take a break
from hucking rocks at them.
While the rest of the world
adjusted, and adapted, America clung firmly to the idea that This Should Not Be
Happening.
But it was happening, and it did
happen. Dust was the norm; people got up in the morning and cleared the grit
from their cars before driving into work. And as the months stretched on, more
and more people were claimed by chunks, which
were loosely defined as fist-sized rocks. An entire vocabulary was evolving
around what had essentially become a new, everyday form of precipitation. Dust
stopped meaning dust, and grit stopped meaning grit, in their respective traditional
senses. Chunks were chunks (in fact, “Chunks Happen,” became a popular
bumper-sticker slogan, as chunks seemed to have an almost supernatural tendency
to hit cars). Hunks were bigger than chunks. Smashers would take out a house.
Anything above a smasher was usually a major event. Buildings went down. Towns
got wiped out. If you heard a newscaster say “There’s been a major event in Des
Moises, Iowa, then Des Moines, Iowa was probably not there anymore.”
There were also cataclysmic events.
In theory, anyhow. Those were the ones the agency formerly known as NASA were
worried about, those were the ones big enough to see coming. Those were the
ones that would knock Earth on its collective ass. Earth had dodged the
cataclysmic event so far, and maybe it would forever. Or maybe not.
But as the rocks fell, and fell,
and fell, the world collected data. It sorted numbers, compiled results, fed
vast tracts of facts and figures to its best silicon minds, and a pattern
emerged. Or a whole in the pattern, anyway: one town in central New York, a
little dot on the map called Owego, had never been hit. By anything. Not a
single grain of grit, not a single speck of dust. Ten miles to the east, ten
miles to the west – fair game. You could literally walk to the edge of the township,
take a single step forward, and immediately feel a pelting of debris. Take a
step back, and nothing.
There was nothing else like it on
Earth. The impacts petered off a bit at the poles, but even there they were
inescapable. No other country, no other continent had a spot like Owego, a spot
literally untouched by the cosmic rockfall that had forced its way into everyday
reality for the rest of the globe.
America rallied back to life. It
might have been just a few square miles, and it might have been just a few
thousand people, but the one safe town on Earth was on American soil, and thus
followed one indisputable fact: somehow, someway, America itself was exceptional.
Suddenly, a little town in central New York
became the most important spot on Earth. And everybody wanted a piece of it.
