Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  Suddenly Huxley realized how he opened his mouth, much against his own will, and he was half expecting himself to utter something incredibly stupid that would anger Meitner and ruin the magic of the moment. But fortunately he didn’t have the time to say anything, because the moment he parted his lips, Meitner made the final move forward. She sealed his lips with her own and stuck her tongue in his mouth. In an instance, Huxley’s thoughts were washed away in a sea of unbounded passion and desire. The warm wetness of Meitner’s tongue sent shockwaves of excitement through his body. Rendered unable to control his conscious mind, Huxley gave in to his instincts. It was as though someone had unlocked some age-old secret knowledge in his cerebellum; knowledge that he had never been able to access before. All of a sudden he knew. Deep down inside he knew what was happening; he knew what he was supposed to do, what he wanted to do. Fervently, almost violently, he tore open the remaining buttons of Meitner’s blouse. Any inkling of guilt was swept away by her approving, sensual moan and the undeniable, pragmatic fact that the wine-stained blouse was ruined anyway.

  After Meitner had thrown away her blouse, she put her hands behind her back and unfastened her bra. Then she ripped Huxley’s shirt open with the same kind of passionate force. All the while, Huxley was pleasantly surprised at how much he loved this game, how much he enjoyed the complete annihilation of convention, the unbridled acting out of the most primal urges he had never even known he possessed. As they continued kissing, he put one hand into the soft, silky hair at the back of Meitner’s head while with the other he gently squeezed her breasts. His excitement rose to unknown heights when Meitner unbuttoned his trousers and eagerly pulled down the zipper. Huxley expected her to reach into his underpants next, but her hands wandered away to unbutton and unzip her own jeans. Then she grabbed Huxley’s hand, took it away from her breasts and led it down to her pubic area where he felt the lush patch of hair that he had secretly been dreaming of. He started combing it gently with his fingers.

  That’s when his alarm bells went off.

  Technically, they weren’t alarm bells. It was a klaxon, and it filled Huxley’s flat with a deafening howl, accompanied by flashes of red light.

  Startled, Meitner looked at Huxley and shouted over the noise, “What the hell is that?”

  “Oh my God!” Huxley said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “What?!”

  “I’m sorry,” Huxley repeated and stood up. “I have to take this. I’m sorry!”

  Pulling his zipper back up, he ran over to his workstation where he sat down and started punching keys on his keyboard. Meitner followed him, covering her bare breasts with her arms.

  “What the hell is going on, Huxley?” she shouted.

  Without diverting his attention from the computer screen, Huxley shouted back, “I don’t know! It’s one of my programs. One of my jobs. Well, not a job, technically. One of my side projects …”

  Covering her ears with her hands and her breasts with her elbows, Meitner asked, “Can’t you turn off that noise?”

  “Right!” Huxley said, and his hand slammed down on the big red button next to his keyboard. The klaxon went silent and the light stopped flashing. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

  “So what’s going on?” Meitner asked, lowering her hands and crossing her arms. “Are we in some kind of danger? Because that’s what it sounded like.” She looked around for signs of smoke or fire; a broken water main; a burglar; anything that would warrant an alarm like that.

  “Yes. No! Maybe. I don’t know! It’s …” Huxley kept staring at the screen and punching keys on the keyboard. “It’s … Okay, look: all the big space agencies, NASA, ESA, CNSA, they all have hundreds of satellites and telescopes and radio telescopes and shit, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Right. What they don’t have is either the man power or the computing power to sift through the vast amounts of data all these satellites and radio telescopes collect each and every day, right? So they outsource some of that work—most of it, actually—to people like me, right?”

  “Yeah,” Meitner said. “What we talked about earlier: you’re a crowdworker.”

  “Well, sort of. The reason they do that is because it’s an easy way for them to get their work done and save a lot of money, because they’re not only outsourcing their work but also their social responsibility, because if they employ me as a crowdworker, they don’t have to pay anything towards my healthcare plan, my pension plan and all that. Well, I’m not having any of that, because I need to make a living. So what I did was I signed up with them as a crowdworker so I could get access to their system. Once I was in, I created a backdoor, canceled my contract with them, and I’ve been accessing and analyzing their data ever since. I’ve been doing it for a year. During that time I’ve discovered three asteroids, a comet, and two exoplanets. If I had done it under crowdworking conditions, I would have made the equivalent of a dinner at Barnaby’s, drinks not included. Under my conditions I made two month’s worth of rent. Plus, naming rights. I get to name any celestial bodies I discover.”

  “So you basically steal their data and then sell it back to them?”

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “I see,” Meitner said. “That’s not entirely legal, though, is it?”

  “It’s entirely illegal, if you must know. But then again, so is ripping off crowdworkers, but they’re the government, so they get away with it.”

  Meitner started at the computer screen, trying to make sense of what she saw. “So every time you discover a comet this huge alarm goes off?”

  “Um, no, not exactly,” Huxley said. “The alarm only goes off if I discover something truly extraordinary.”

  “Oh. So what have you discovered?”

  Huxley punched more keys until a schematic map of the solar system appeared on the screen. “An asteroid,” he said. “Well, actually I’ve already discovered the asteroid itself back in November. But I’ve spent the last six or seven weeks calculating its trajectory for the next couple of years and decades.”

  “Calculations take that long?”

  “Calculating its trajectory for a few months or one or two years is really simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. However, the larger the timescale, the more complex those calculations become, because you have to include the trajectories of more and more objects; planets, moons, other asteroids et cetera, because they all influence your object with their gravity. You’d have to have a supercomputer to predict an asteroid’s trajectory over decades.”

  “You don’t have a supercomputer, though, do you?”

  “No,” Huxley said, “but I have access to the space agencies’ crowdworking pool.”

  Meitner raised her eyebrows. “So you’re exploiting other crowdworkers?”

  “Well, I’m routing my access to their machines through the crowdworking platform, so they’re getting paid for their computing time just like they would if it was an official job—just not for making discoveries like this.”

  “Naughty,” Meitner said.

  “Trust me, one day somebody is going to be very grateful that I did this, because this discovery is big—and I do mean big.”

  Meitner laughed. “We’re not going to get hit by your asteroid, are we?”

  Huxley just stared at her with a blank look on his face.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You better write this down: April 24, 2137.”

  “This thing is going to hit us?”

  “Yes. Well, with a certainty of ...” He looked at the screen. “... 98.73 percent.”

  “Holy shit,” was all Meitner could say.

  “I know.”

  “So how big is it?”

  “It’s big,” Huxley said.

  “How big?”

  “About ten miles in diameter.”

  “Oh,” Meitner said, slightly relieved. “That doesn’t sound that big, to be honest.”

  “It’s about fif
ty percent bigger than the asteroid that made the dinosaurs go extinct.”

  For a moment, Meitner stared at Huxley, processing that information. Then she said, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “I swear, I am so totally not kidding.”

  “Bloody hell,” Meitner said, turned around and walked back to the couch.

  “Where are you going?” Huxley asked.

  “I know it’s a weird thing to say on a first date, but I think you should meet my mom.” She picked up her purse from the floor and pulled out her phone. Then she paused, turned back towards Huxley and said, “Wait a minute! Are you sure you haven’t stalked me online and that this whole date wasn’t just a setup to get me to introduce you to my mother?”

  “Well …,” Huxley said and grinned.

  “Excuse me?!”

  Huxley raised his hands, put on a straight face and said, “Honestly, I didn’t. Until tonight I had no idea who your mother was, or that this asteroid was heading our way. I swear to God!”

  Meitner sighed. “That better be the truth, mister!”

  “Absolutely.”

  She dialed and put her phone to her ear. After a few moments she said, “Mom? It’s me. I’m coming to Paris. I want you to meet my boyfriend. It’s an emergency ... No, mother, I’m not pregnant. It’s a different kind of emergency.”

  Huxley hid behind the computer screen so Meitner wouldn’t see the bright grin on his face. Well played, Huxley, he thought. Well played.

  1.4 The Decider

  NEW YORK CITY – JUNE 9, 2122

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lily said. Sitting at a table in a boardroom on the eighty-eighth floor of the New United Nations Tower overlooking the Hudson River, she looked at the other four members of the United Space Agency’s executive committee.

  None of the four dared to look back at her. They were staring at their hands, at their tablet computers on the table in front of them, out of the window. They knew all too well that Lily’s piercing, intimidating look had the uncanny ability to make any man—or woman—falter and question their own most sincerely held convictions. None of them wanted to take that risk and head back to their respective regional space agency headquarters having to explain how their vote had been the deciding one. The world outside was just as divided on the issue as the men and women in UNSPAG’s executive committee.

  “I was hoping,” Lily said into the awkward silence, “that in a matter of such unprecedented magnitude we’d be able to set a good example for the rest of the world and reach a unanimous agreement. How naïve of me.”

  “Is simple decision, really,” Evgeni Nevzorov finally said with his heavy Russian accent, and when everyone frowned at him, he clarified, “Not easy. Simple. Two different things. Look, we are all scientist, are we not? We are used to reaching conclusion and making decision based on fact. Not fear, not emotion. Fact. Fact is that Tolstyĭ Mal’chik … Fat Boy is coming our way and that it is big. Very big. It is fifteen kilometer in diameter. I remind you that it is fifty percent bigger than Chicxulub. It is also fact that we do not have technical capability to deflect Fat Boy. It is coming. We must deal with what is going to happen, not waste time on what is not.”

  “We all know zat, Evgeni,” Sebastian Schröder, the tall, lanky German said. “Nobody is seriously sinking about trying to deflect Fat Boy anymore. We have given up on zat idea a long time ago. But if we can’t deflect it, we must focus on destroying it.”

  Evgeni shook his head. “You cannot do that either.”

  “You don’t know zat.”

  “You don’t know that you can.”

  Victoria Sanchez slammed her hand on the table. “We must at least try!”

  “And then what?” Evgeni asked her. “Majority of scientist say we cannot completely destroy Fat Boy, we can only split it up into hundred or thousand of fragment the size of house or football field. Instead of one big impact we have thousand of fragment carpet bombing one entire hemisphere of our planet. And that is best case scenario. How that is going to help us I don’t know.”

  “It’s spreading ze risk,” Sebastian interjected. “If we have sousands of small impacts, chances are zat many of zem will have localized effects on areas zat are low in population or have no population at all. If Fat Boy hits a densely populated area like New York City, it will kill tens of millions of people instantly, and ze long-term effects will affect ze whole planet. I don’t have to tell you what Chicxulub did to ze dinosaurs.”

  “I’m sorry,” Xiu Hsing raised her hand, “but I think your use of the term ‘small impact’ is very misleading. Yes, the impact of an asteroid the size of a house or a football field is smaller than the impact of Fat Boy as a whole, but as a singular event any such ‘smaller’ impact would still be considered to be big. Huge even. And we are talking about thousands of such events over the course of only a few hours, with catastrophic scenarios occurring all over the place. What you call spreading the risk, I call spreading the damage.”

  Victoria Sanchez shook her head. “What you’re proposing is that an extinction level event is going to happen and we just sit here, shrug our shoulders and say, ‘Ah well, what are you gonna do?’”

  “What are you going to do then?” Evgeni asked. “You want to spend hundred trillion dollar and drain all our resources on trying to accomplish what we know we cannot accomplish so that by time Fat Boy hit, situation will already be so dire and life will be so miserable that people actually want to die? Make no sense.”

  “That is so cynical.” Victoria sighed. “No. It’s just that planning for the time after the impact while doing nothing to prevent it … is that who we really are? Where is the hope in that? Where is our fighting spirit? All I’m saying is that we have to at least try to prevent it instead of just taking it for granted. We ought to be better than that. We have to do something. Anything.”

  “You will not prevent impact,” Evgeni insisted.

  “I have to agree with Evgeni,” Xiu said. “Wasting our resources on trying to prevent what is almost certainly unpreventable is suicidal. Even in the best case scenario our chances of preventing an impact are minuscule. To ensure our survival we must put all our efforts towards a viable long-term strategy.”

  “I sink what you fail to grasp,” Sebastian said, “is ze size of Fat boy. Again, it’s fifty percent bigger zan Chicxulub. Chicxulub killed ze dinosaurs. Who is to say zat after Fat Boy’s impact we stand even a minute chance of survival?”

  “No, no, no,” Evgeni said. “Is not that simple, you know? You make it sound like meteorite fell on dinosaurs head and next day they all were dead.”

  “But zat is very much what happened. Chicxulub’s impact produced vast amounts of ejecta material zat was hurled into space, and upon reentry into ze atmosphere, ze sermal radiation put ze whole planet ablaze. Zere can’t have been many who survived ze first few hours.”

  “You forget ash cloud, my friend. Ash cloud will have shielded the earth’s surface from most of the ejecta’s thermal radiation, but also from sunlight, so plant life die. Then small animal that eat plant die because there is no more plant. Then dinosaur that eat small animal die because there is no more small animal. Is very complex and took very long time. After Chicxulub it took thousand, ten thousand year for dinosaur to disappear.”

  “Even if zat’s true,” Sebastian said, “who are you to say zat zis isn’t exactly what will happen to us if we let Fat Boy bomb us back into the Stone Age? Zere will be sousands of years of indescribable suffering, of hunger and diseases, and zere is every chance that mankind will follow ze dinosaurs.”

  “No. Because we have something the dinosaur did not have.” Evgeni tipped his head. “Our brain. Dinosaur have chicken brain. Human brain is most complex thing we know in universe. We have ability to plan, to organize, to solve problem. We can live in place that is uninhabitable. We live on South Pole. We live on moon.” He looked at Victoria. “Earlier you ask where is hope. There is hope. Hope is not in our heart. Hope is in our
brain. We must use it to prepare for what is inevitable. Then we will survive.”

  Victoria snorted. “If we don’t try to prevent the impact we’re making the deliberate decision to let people die. We’re signing hundreds of millions if not billions of death warrants with that decision. How can we go out there and tell people we know that billions are gonna die but we’re not even trying to do anything about it? How are we going to explain this to our children? How can we ever look at ourselves in the mirror again?”

  “People die either way,” Evgeni said and shrugged. “Fat Boy hit Earth, some people die. We blow up Fat Boy, fragment hit Earth, other people die.”

  “So cynical,” Victoria said again, shaking her head.

  “Is not cynical. Is realistic. We cannot save everybody. So we must come up with plan to save as many as possible.”

  Victoria rolled her eyes. “This is outrageous. We let the weak die so the strong can survive. That’s Social Darwinism at its best, and it’s never going to get my approval.”

  Evgeni shrugged.

  “I disagree,” Xiu said. “Victoria, you make it sound as if we’re sitting here on some kind of death panel and we decide who’s going to live and who’s going to die. That is not the case. Evgeni is right, people will die. But who will die will neither be determined by us nor by their supposed strength or weakness. We don’t know exactly where Fat Boy is going to hit, and any resulting casualties will depend almost entirely on chance. Some supposedly strong people will die just like some supposedly weak people will live. You, Victoria, want to save everyone. I commend you for that, and I do understand your sentiment, but …”

  “Oh please don’t patronize me!”