Prologue
Deep Earth Orbit
January 19, 2033
I took my last look at Earth through the window, or hopefully Earth as I knew it anyway, feeling almost numb for the knowledge of what was going to happen.
“Annie?” I said aloud, hearing the soft, muted tone of acknowledgement hum from the speakers in each section to signify that my creation was listening. “Exact time until impact?”
Her synthesized voice filled the small, round corridor I was floating in. “Time until impact is nineteen hours, thirty-seven minutes and eight seconds, with a variant threshold of forty-nine seconds. Recommend you begin cryoprocedures within six hours, Dr. Anderson.”
“Thank you, may as well do it now,” I said absently, treating Annie politely as I always did, like she was a person who was concerned for my feelings instead of what she truly was: an integrated computer interface operating system usefully informing me of a forty-nine second margin for error.
Placing a hand on the glass and almost covering the little blue and green orb I was born, raised, and lived on, I said my final goodbyes in silence. I turned to propel my body horizontally toward the access to the upper corridor of the ARC, or Ark as we’d quickly decided to pronounce it all those years ago, when it was still the International Space Station. I’d been on board for eighteen months, and although fully acclimated to the environment, I doubted I would ever really get used to it.
I’d intentionally taken a specific route to get my last view of the planet we were all born on. The return route to my assigned cryopod took me past almost everyone else aboard, which was just about everyone as the only remaining people awake were the two maintenance specialists who would be reminded to rotate every twelve months by Annie. They would go into cryo for six months to cover the impact and the aftermath, then Annie would wake them to take their turns as the custodians of humanity.
Rank after rank of white tubes looking like torpedoes lined the chambers, all of which could be individually sealed in the event of anything catastrophic happening, and the ARC as a whole could be preserved with minimal losses. All of that was controlled by Annie, following her in-depth internal flowcharts of decision making which had taken me close to fifteen years to develop. The new subroutines for her to follow and enact accounted for almost a decade of that, when she was repurposed to be the caretaker of the human race.
On arriving at my assigned pod, I spun myself around lazily, allowing the zero gravity to do most of the work, and settled myself in to the soft straps.
“I’m ready, Annie,” I said out loud as the pod began to flash a sequence of lights denoting the cryotube was starting up, then placed the breathing mask over my face and needlessly adjusted the tracker device on my left wrist. I saw no sense in waiting or delaying it, as it wasn’t as though I could stay up late to watch the big show.
“Commencing cryosleep now,” came Annie’s soothing tones, making me feel grateful for the year and a half I’d spent working on finding the right voice for her program. “Goodnight, David. Sleep well.”
With that, I closed my eyes and breathed in the subtle combination of gasses that would put me under before my body was frozen into a state of hibernation.
So long, Earth, I thought to myself, see you in a hundred years.
Part 1:
Pre-Event Earth
Chapter 1
Mumbai
May 25, 2021
As international billionaire entrepreneurs went, Amir Weatherby was young when he rose to the head of the family business. Their portfolio was so diverse that not one single person in the organization knew what fingers were in what pies, and there was a chief executive for each continent, often ones for individual countries depending on the concentration of assets and investments. The company, Icarus Investments, was so vast that it was everywhere and nowhere. They paid taxes to no country, and any organization that went after them for revenue ended up losing.
Amir, educated at all the right establishments and spending his time between his mother’s family in her native India and his father’s multiple estates in the US, was the epitome of the entitled elite. He appeared as a rich Saudi oil prince, spoke like he grew up on the upper east side of Manhattan, but was equally at home walking the sweltering, packed streets of the Indian capital.
Nothing was beyond his grasp; everything had a price that he could easily afford, and he always got what he wanted. Despite that privileged elitism, he was a likeable, charismatic young man.
The company was responsible for the first self-driving cars, for the automated drone delivery systems active in some major cities, for technological breakthroughs in ballistic body armor, as well as the armor-piercing munitions capable of defeating it. They sold indiscriminately to the entire world, albeit through a series of blind companies so no direct scandal could ever taint the company name.
When he turned twenty-four, he used his newly gained law degree to advise the best team of lawyers in the Netherlands in a case that was watched eagerly all over the world. The government was suing Icarus for millions in taxes for parts of the assets operating in their territory, and a win would reverberate over the globe and set a precedent for everyone to follow suit.
Amir’s father, Paul Weatherby, had taken steps to negate any losses and moved all of their European assets into a dozen other companies which would take years to follow, but Amir was confident of winning the case in court.
When they did win, the counter-suit he levelled at the federally collective twelve provinces of the Netherlands threatened to bankrupt the country. If not for the intervention of the European Union and a number of behind-closed-doors concessions made to company limitations, then they would have been finished.
Two years later, after losing Weatherby Senior to a sudden and unexpected heart attack, Amir calmly put on a ten-thousand-dollar suit and gave a heartfelt press release to the world on the sad passing of a great man. A visionary. Within six months, Amir had reassigned the majority of assets into research and development with an undisguised view toward commercial space travel. The privatization of government assets was an ongoing trend throughout the entire west, whereas the Russian and Chinese continents were becoming increasingly insular. Amir had acquired entire launch stations in former Soviet Union countries, had doubled the wages and conditions of anyone working at NASA or their sister organization of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, and invested so heavily in the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, that he found himself in the unique position of being able to influence the country’s policy priorities if not directly dictate their mandates. He even managed to privatize the running of the ISS, International Space Station, after the Chinese and Russians withdrew their personnel and funding from the program, leaving a financial vacuum which begged to be filled.
One of his biggest gambles was the acquisition of the Hubble telescope program, which was suffering with the reduction in investment from all the space-capable nations. This gamble ultimately paid off as, when it was being repositioned for full-time Mars reconnaissance, the operators saw the asteroid.
2021QX84 was what they had called it and Amir thought that was stupid. The report came with a warning that the trajectory of the asteroid would take it past Earth, at least inside the solar system, but nothing more accurate could be said at that time. He knew that dozens of such warnings came each year, and each year world-devastating hunks of rock and mineral and ice passed through their solar system without causing the panic that such knowledge would inevitably bring.