So, without further ado, straight from the seat of my pants, is chapter one of my NaNoWriMo novel, Boomtown.
1.
The world
started to end on February 15th, 2013, about 20 miles above the city
of Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was a few years before anyone knew it.
Not that
it wasn’t a big deal at the time. It was a huge deal. Thousands of people hurt,
buildings damaged, international news crews, scientific panels, the whole ant
hill. But it was an isolated event. The Chelyabinsk Meteorite. Come and gone in
a flash.
Meteorites
have never been a rare event. If you could put the Earth on a scale, you’d see
that it’s steadily gaining weight. Infinitesimal amounts of weight, in
planetary terms. Maybe a thousand tons a year. Space dust, space grit, the
occasional space rock, and every now and then, the big hunks, like Chelyabinsk.
Or the really big hunks, like the Tunguska event, which clocked in at about
1000 Hiroshimas. Or the really, really big, family-sized ones, like whatever
the dinosaurs called the left-right combo that hit hard enough to squeeze the lava
out of Earth’s volcanoes like an orgy of planetary zit-popping.
Throughout
most of history, we’ve owed the fact that we have history to our big brother, Jupiter, pushing along the flat
plane of its orbit like our solar system’s offensive line, sweeping the floor clean for
quick little squirts like Earth to zip along, relatively unbothered.
Chelyabinsk
marked a sea change.
Think about
our solar system, and you probably picture this: a big bright sun in the
center, and a happy family of eight planets circling around it, with drunk
uncle Pluto careening in off in his own lopsided orbit, grumbling about how
things used to be back when he was a planet, goddamnit.
Now, none
of what you’re picturing is probably very accurate. If you could see the whole
solar system in one frame, the planets would be pinpricks, almost too small to
make out. And they wouldn’t be zipping by like rocks on a string. But the model
is useful, because the model is, with the exception of poor old Pluto, a disk.
A big, spinning disk, close enough to flat to be considered two-dimensional.
But space
is not two dimensional. It’s infinitely three dimensional. And while we spend a
great deal of time peering out along the plane of the elliptical, we spend
considerably less time looking up, or down, in cosmic terms.
Most
scientists agreed that the reason we didn’t see Chelyabinsk coming was because
the sun was in our collective eyes. In hindsight, Chelyabinsk was just the
first hit from above, the opening salvo of a cosmic strafing run. A couple of
years later, September 7, 2015, another bright flash lit the skies above
Thailand. Then again, less than two months after that. Also in Thailand. It
didn’t seem like a big deal. Just part of the Taurids meteor shower.
December
9th, 2015 in Qatar. January
14th, 2016 above Honolulu. Unexpected, yes. But relatively harmless.
A bright flash, some barking dogs.
Then, as
they say, all hell broke loose.