To Armageddon/1

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[edit] 1. To Defy the Lord

"The sole advantage man has over ants is the ability to plan for the future.” – my father

In a rather cramped private sleeping quarters, darkened with the shadows and lit only with the light from a small LCD display, Sarah Miyae knelt softly before her bed. With her hands clasped together in the classical prayer gesture, she closed her tired eyes. It was almost one in the morning, and her alarm would ring at six - the same routine she had been following for the past two months.

The two months since the groundbreaking discovery by the STE in February 2024.

And overhead, as a substitute for a digital clock, was an LCD display whose decimal gradually, inexorably crept up. 8.354101972%. A number that was being simultaneously shown on billions of similar LCD's and on computer screens throughout the world. The most important statistic in that same world. The one that had started at 5% two months ago and had since then inexorably crept up as the STE posted the results of its latest calculations, aided by continued surveillance of the asteroids. At that rate the probability would only reach one hundred percent after quite a few years, but everyone had long ago been taught that, as the asteroids approached, this number would continue to increase faster and faster or, God willing, would suddenly drop like a rock (forgive the black humor). That change was waited upon with breathless and terrible anticipation, for it meant the very fate of humanity itself.

The chance of a head-on collision between the two celestial bodies.

Soon after the initial discovery of the threat, the media had gone out of their way to label the conglomeration of loosely connected space stones as the "Philippines" after their characteristics and arrangement. Two erratically shaped asteroids, both two dozen kilometers at their widest, posed the greatest threat to society and were named Luzon and Manila. The rest, many times smaller than the two large rocks, clustered in between them and had no publicly memorable name. Each was large enough to obliterate a city and rip it from the face of the earth and cloud the sky with the resulting debris.

It was the Search for Threats to Earth that had first detected, through its myriad spectroscopes, a cluster of asteroids of various shapes and sizes that had an abnormally great chance of colliding with the Earth and ending life as we knew it. Two damned months, she thought to herself, before mentally punishing herself for thinking such vulgarities. Society had enough trouble these days as it was without needing for even more interference, as only the Lord above knows, Sarah thought before beginning her nightly prayer to her Christian God:

O Lord, please grant us mercy, we beg of you, not just for my sake, but for everyone on earth. Let the computers at STE be wrong about their calculations. Let us live to see another year and atone for our past sins. Let us prove to you that we are worthy... And so on it went, for over a minute. Finally, the stress of the situation bore down on her again as it had constantly weighed down on her mind for fortnights, and she concluded her prayer: ...Though we recognize that You in your infinite grace have every right to withdraw Your gift from us, I kneel before you tonight to once again ask for repentence and the hope of at least some future for others and for our children. Amen.

8.354101981%.

Quietly, solemnly, she raised a leg and rose standing, before toppling into bed, so tired she was. There was only so much that a human could take. And this situation has brought us all to the brink of insanity, Sarah concluded wryly as she did not even bother to change into a nightgown. The spirit may be strong at times, but the body was too weak to support it. In the dim light, the power of the circadian rhythms within overtook her conscious, drawing her into the seemingly ever-short reams of sleep.

Before long, Sarah had fallen sound asleep. Her work the next day made that a necessity. Despite the fact that she had trouble falling asleep, a difficulty that had only grown in the past several weeks, petty problems like that could not be allowed to get in the line of duty. Society itself had warped in preparation for the perhaps inevitable, as did Sarah.

Her limp hand slid off the side of the bed, revealing a syringe from which a single drop of glistening blood fell. Within the cylinder, the residue of a whitish tranquilizer potion remained.

Like a ghastly death clock awaiting the time when it would knell, the display continued to spiral upward.

8.354101986%.