Dear Reader,
Welcome to The Storyletter. There’s a special relationship between reader and writer, one that is unique to the medium. Without you, there’s no story. True, the writer facilitates the journey, but it comes to life when the reader makes it their own. So here’s a story for you and I can’t wait to see what you make of it. ~ WM
The planet-killer loomed in the choppy video stream, its ominous frost-bitten form resembling that of a slumbering giant awaiting the end of hibernation. It was an asteroid made up of a dense nickel-iron core, its thick olivine mantle encased in a basaltic crust. It made the approaching satellite drones look like metallic ants inching toward their demise.
On the receiving end of the DSN feed—in the secure, underground Cheyenne Mountain Complex near Colorado Springs—a crowd of military leaders and top representatives from prominent scientific and astrological agencies had gathered to watch the covert NEA mission take place, a mission that had been launched in secret over three years prior. The near-Earth asteroid was of significant magnitude, one that would inevitably cause a catastrophic event if left unchecked.
General Timothy Dante of the U.S. Space Force stood at the center of the facility’s watch floor, highlighted in a fierce blue light as he peered up at the four massive screens that featured the asteroid hurtling at twenty-eight kilometers per second. People stood all around him and lined the back of the room. Dozens of individuals manned the computers on either side of him, the clicking of their keyboards the only sounds within the hushed room.
“All four assets are in position and at matching speed, sir,” the mission manager said, breaking the eerie silence.
“Initiate contact,” General Dante ordered.
“Initiate contact,” the mission manager repeated, not only to alert the General that the order had been received, but to echo his approval to the satellite drone operators.
The Deep Space Network feeds—at only a three second delay—closed in on the massive, doomsday rock. In the room, eyes remained wide, sweat gleamed and glistened on foreheads, nails were chewed and mouths were dry. Everyone watched and waited as the operators skillfully navigated the drones into position, each feed’s border color switching from red to green.
“We’ve successfully made contact and we are now secured onto Parousia X2519,” the mission manager said, stating what everyone knew but hadn’t yet registered.
The crowd erupted into cheers and hugs as the first stage of the mission had been achieved. General Dante let a smile slip to his subordinate officers, dropping his stone-faced expression for the first time in several hours. He let the people in the room calm down before addressing the next stage of the mission, of which he hadn’t technically been briefed.
“So are we going to blow it up now?” General Dante asked.
A few choked laughs erupted behind him and he winced at the glaring judgment being passed against him by every mind in the room.
“Blow it up? What? No way,” a woman said as she pushed up to the front of the crowd. “If you blow it up, it’ll turn into a thousand smaller versions of itself and destroy the planet anyway. Besides, the drones aren’t equipped with explosives.”
The General turned around to look at the woman. She was relatively young, maybe in her thirties. Her glasses were round with black frames, her hair long at the sides but cut shorter at the back.
“I’ve seen you around. Who are you again?” he asked.
The mission manager stepped over and introduced the woman. “Sir, this is Dr. Gianna Floris. She’s head of the NEA department co-located with the team over at the Goldstone Observatory in California. I invited her here because she discovered Parousia and was the first to assess it as a ten on the Palermo scale, that’s the designator for—”
“I know what the Palermo Impact Hazard scale is,” he said, shaking the woman’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Floris. I’m afraid that due to the nature of this mission, you were not informed of the explosives we had loaded onto the sat drones before their launch.”
Someone yelled from the back of the room, “They were too heavy, sir! We had to leave them out in order to escape Earth’s orbit.”
“What? Who said that?” the General asked.
When no one took responsibility, the mission manager mumbled, “I’m pretty sure that was someone from NASA, but he’s right, the drones aren’t fitted to detonate, sir.”
“I work for SpaceX!”
“Who the—” the General started, his face a tinge redder than before.
Dr. Floris brought focus back to the mission. “Look, General, this is a very delicate matter. The nature of orbits in our solar system means that this asteroid isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s been biding its time longer than humans have known the Earth revolves around the Sun. Much, much longer. Destroying an object of this size won’t work unless it’s completely vaporized. It’s better if we maintain control over its trajectory by finessing it away from our gravitational keyhole so it doesn’t collide with us or anything else on a future orbital pass.”
“You mean to say that even if we deter this threat today, it may still be a problem for us in the future?”
Dr. Floris looked at the mission manager. “Luke, pull up the program that I sent you.”
Luke went over to his backpack and pulled out a tablet and began tapping the screen rapidly. “Don’t worry people, it’s a work-issued tablet.” However, even the General was squinting at the device inside the controlled area. “Okay, Gianna, I got it.”
“Wait, you two are on a first name basis?” the General asked.
“Not important. Parousia X2519 is going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Some might even say it's her fate to destroy the Earth and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t delay it,” Dr. Floris stated.
“Why not just send this thing careening into the Sun and be done with it?”
Gianna ran her tongue under her upper lip and over her teeth, thinking of how to sway the General. She didn’t know the answer to that, but she had to say something convincing enough to end his curiosity. “We don’t know what kind of solar storm we’d set off. Keep in mind, the closer that NEA gets to its perihelion, the faster the Sun is going to pull it in. An impact with an asteroid of this size traveling at that speed would send out a massive geomagnetic disruption, we’d possibly be in total blackout for days, weeks, or worse.”
The General looked around the room. No one objected. “Then what are you proposing, Doctor? That we kick the can down the road every so often?”
“Sort of. The important thing to consider is at what interval? Five years? Fifty? As I understand it, the sat-drones only have so much fuel, meaning we need to make the right choice now just in case the people of Earth at any point in the future, for whatever reason, aren’t in the same privileged position to do so.”
Dr. Gianna Floris held the entire room’s attention like a blackhole, their thoughts unable to drift away from the gravitational severity of her implications.
“How do we determine the interval then?”
“You're asking the right questions, General,” she said. “Luke, run the program.”
Luke tapped an icon which generated a series of lines and potential impact events on the tablet’s screen and walked it over.
“What’s this?”
“Uh, we call it ‘The Spirit’,” Luke said, glancing nervously at Dr. Floris. She didn’t react at the mention of her AI-software being named out loud for the first time in a crowded room.
General Dante took the tablet and stared at the outcomes for a long time, watching images flash by in quick succession. “So you’re saying these are the possibilities of the future depending on what we decide right now?” he asked. Dr. Floris nodded. “In this scenario here, if we guide it upward, it’ll knock Venus out of its orbit and then in roughly twenty six years we'll collide with Venus?”
“Something like that, yes. With the help of my team back at the observatory, we were able to come up with a program that calculated real-world butterfly effect patterns in order to determine the best course of action to deal with NEAs, and, of course, the lingering repercussions of diverting them away from Earth.”
“Wow,” the General said to himself as dozens of options played out on the tablet. “I didn’t think things like this were even possible. Is there no scenario where we completely avoid it?”
Dr. Floris gulped, then shook her head.
He tapped the screen again and again, testing out differing outcomes. “Alright, based on this best-case simulation it says that if we nudge it just a tad to the right we will buy ourselves 497 years. That’ll be the year….”
Luke stepped in, “The year 2519, hence the naming convention that we chose. It’s our best option for now, General.”
General Dante sighed and met the worried glances of his subordinate officers and the faces of the crowd. They were all deferring to his leadership, his rational way of delegating authority to those best suited for the job. However, it wasn’t a who this time, but a what. It had never been his mission to begin with, but apparently one wholly predicted and designed by an intangible and unknowable intelligence residing within lines of code. He passed the tablet back to the mission manager and signaled the go-ahead.
“Nudge it just a tad to the right,” Luke said, not only to alert the General that the order had been received, but to echo his approval to the satellite drone operators.
Luke glanced at Gianna and smiled nervously. Gianna didn’t reciprocate the gesture. Her gaze drifted down to the tablet, then back up to the screens to watch as the sat drones nudged Parousia X2519 into the orbital path that would ultimately have the greatest chance at destroying planet Earth. When the crowd cheered once again, she felt her chest tighten and her eyes begin to water. It had all gone to plan, just as The Spirit had predicted it would.
Wow, this story is so interesting 🤔 and really makes you think. Very believable and great writing ✍️. I’m hooked on your stories and poems.
Nice! How does the research process go, for all the science in this? Do you actually check with sources to see if it's accurate, or is it just made up stuff that sounds believable? Whenever I think of writing anything, one thing that puts me off is the amount of research I'd have to do, like for anything historical or science-y.