Prologue

For most of the world, ‘The Day‘ can only mean May 1^st, 2022; the day we destroyed Malkin’s Asteroid in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to keep it from hitting the Earth and causing, or so we were told, a cataclysmic event like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

One-hundred and Fifteen miles long and almost forty miles wide, it had been spotted in December of 2019 purely by accident and, in fact, it was almost not reported at the time. The young man who spotted it spent a rather sleepless night before deciding to announce its existence at all and, by the by, his crime.

The success of the Event Horizon Telescope team and the acclaim heaped on them after the first successful photograph of a black hole in early 2019 had been a spear to the ego of Bernard Malkin.

Malkin, a thirty-four-year-old post-doctoral researcher who was interning on the Hubble team, had an almost obsessive desire to have some celestial object named after him. He succeeded, but did so at the cost of his career and became a Hero at the same time.

Time on the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope was a highly prized, and often very expensive, proposition. Malkin, during his internship, found a way to shave seconds, sometimes just fractions of seconds, from other projects and assign them to himself. In a scam not unlike skimming interest for an embezzler, Bernard Malkin had been banking those seconds until he could use them to fulfill a life-long dream.

He succeeded, but not in a manner he had envisioned. Beside the job of scheduling various tasks, he was a librarian of sorts, collating reports and making sure they were attributed to the right teams and billing codes. He saw a pattern appear, not in what the various teams had found, but in the failures they had reported.

He saw the pattern developing and was sure that it was not a bug in the software causing these failures, but an object in space, a moving object, occluding the carefully scheduled and exacting windows of observation. That occlusion was the rock that almost ended our civilization.

There was a great deal of excitement, though much of it was aimed at the discoverer’s theft of Hubble viewing time. When scientists turned their eyes to the newly discovered body, they quickly discovered that it was headed right for Earth and that excitement turned to fear. Because of the path it was taking, there was absolutely nothing to get in the way, no body with greater mass to draw it off course and no way, of course, for us to dodge!

The world panicked a bit and then got to work. They threw together rockets and missiles and even had someone suggesting that the movie people had it right all along, they needed people who could drill for oil or something equally as stupid. No idea was disregarded, even Hollywood’s wildest suggestions were at least considered.

As the huge rock drew closer, doomsday cults started popping up and people were committing suicide by the bunches, by the hundreds and the thousands. Enough that the masses of dead bodies cropping up, were actually becoming a health hazard to sane people!

Mostly, the world sat and watched the news, spending every minute they could with each other and waiting to see what would happen.

The reports coming in were bad and getting worse. Something about the asteroid, some mineral or some isotope in its makeup, was blocking and even blotting out any electronic or electrical signal that came within a half million miles. The missiles being fired went dumb inside that envelope and the first attempts failed. Contact fuses that could stand the extreme environment of space were hurriedly assembled and fired but even the largest nuke wasn’t enough to do more than make it wiggle.

Of course, we were saved, kind of. A madman named Elon, a billionaire with a loose wire, got them to put a dozen nukes in a big rocket and he rode that thing right into the Asteroid as it passed the moon, directing it by hand so that it hit precisely where the eggheads back home said it should.

The resulting explosion ripped that huge rock apart and what was left rained down meteors and meteorites for two weeks.

Some of the chunks were big enough to cause tsunamis and earthquakes. The entire Wollaston Island chain, and Tiera Del Fuego, along with Asuncion and the entire country of Panama were gone in seconds.

Corpus Christi, Texas and Sioux Falls, South Dakota joined Nutak, Newfoundland on the missing in action list. Rabat in Morocco, Barcelona in Spain, and Tallinn in Estonia? All gone.

Okinawa was just ... missing, along with everything north until you hit Fukuoka. Poor Nagasaki was gone, again, but no coming back this time. Dozens of cities, hundreds of little islands and archipelagos, all gone.

In a ‘coincidence’ that still has the various religions up in arms, Mecca was left a glowing crater that is still, to this day, too hot to approach while Jerusalem was completely untouched except for the rock that leveled the Temple Mount in a strike so precise that man had trouble even calculating the probabilities. That was despite the thousands of smaller fragments that hit within a mile or two.

Millions of fragments lit up the atmosphere and shed untold trillions and trillions of tiny particles that we are only now, years later, starting to get a grip on classifying. We can’t explain how it all works, but we think we have a hint about the mechanism.

See, that dust, those microscopic particles of what they are calling PRIME (Pathogenically Recombinant Infectious Mutagen, Extraterrestrial), created a world-wide plague unlike any other in history.

Initially, the planet was decimated, and I mean that in a literal, historic sense. One out of every ten people died right away as a result of the strikes and the storms that resulted, almost seven hundred and thirty million people dead or dying. Within twenty-four hours, another ten percent, or six hundred and fifty-seven million people, were ‘infected’ and of those, one hundred and ninety-seven million would die, often horribly; four hundred and fifty-nine million would be changed fundamentally and six hundred and fifty-seven thousand, well, they would become a Power.