On Distant Worlds: The Prologues & Colibri. Brian Gonzalez
a chance of being significantly redirected. The great collection of icy bodies ensphering the outer fringe of the solar system would absolutely be disturbed, and if that disruption was severe and ongoing, then the odds of impactors on Earth went from fairly low to scary high.
Nor would this be a short-lived phenomenon. Primary disturbances such as native comets being disturbed by a passing Cataclysm body could occur at any time during the unknown number of years it would take the Cataclysm to pass through our stellar neighborhood. The gravitational changes they caused might take a very long time to fully play out; it was not at all unreasonable to expect impactors on Earth even centuries after the original disturbance. Whatever else, the regular rhythms of the solar system’s bodies, so thoroughly charted and understood over the last couple of generations of commercial expansion into space, would probably have to be largely rewritten.
Over the next decade we came to know a lot more about the Cataclysm. It appeared to contain an unnervingly large number of solid bodies, most of a size consistent with asteroids in our own system, as well as occasional larger bodies which some scientists named “Syncretic Massive Trans-systemic Asteroids” but which other, less polite scientists famously referred to as “the shattered remains of entire fucking planets.” It was the latter phrase which resonated with the public. Cataclysm dust itself registered as high in complex organic molecules, leading to some speculation that life-bearing worlds might have been destroyed in the event which precipitated the flight of this cosmic rubble through the emptiness. We had no idea how wide the Cataclysm might be; it was there for the dozens of light-years we could accurately scan, but after that it ghosted into the margin of error. So it might as well have been indefinitely wide as far as we were concerned, but after a decade of work we were able to calculate the Cataclysm’s approximate depth, and therefore the amount of time we would be subject to the effects of its passage.
Eighteen years. It would take eighteen years for the detectable majority of the Cataclysm to race through the solar system. A theoretical baby born during a theoretical first strike on Earth would experience a home planet under bombardment for his or her entire childhood and might even witness the last primary strike during a coming-of-theoretical-age party.
Then the adult that child had become could experience secondary bombardment for a lifetime.
The closer the Cataclysm drew and the closer we were able to study it, the more it became apparent that Earth was unlikely to escape unaffected.
One chilling problem was the sheer velocity of the objects. At their tremendous rate of travel even smaller objects became extremely dangerous, far more so than similarly-sized objects following long orbits in the comparatively sedate solar system. The Cataclysm bodies were essentially a curtain of incoming artillery fire cutting across the ballistic paths of the planets. It was true that we didn’t know if we’d get hit. But it was necessary to assume that we would, and hard.
And incredibly there was worse news yet to come. As the debris the Cataclysm carried drew close enough to Earth’s neighbors to be studied in relative real-time by our most distant assets, bizarre results started coming back from the ongoing observations. The dust seemed to register as existing sometimes, and other times as not being there at all. Sometimes the dust lightened the sky, and sometimes it seemed to darken it. For a while it was reported that the Cataclysm seemed to be speeding up, causing a wave of additional panic to race around the planet. Then it was reported that the Big Cat was not accelerating after all; it was an understandable miscalculation based on the fact that the approaching debris seemed to be increasing in size. That report was immediately challenged, and the two sides were still arguing when a third team reported that the Cataclysm was actually slowing down.
Then a fourth institution chimed in, reporting on their study based on mathematical analysis of changes in the distribution of energy in the observable wide-scale Cataclysm. They claimed that on average in the greater Cataclysm, the changes balanced so perfectly that in a sense the Cataclysm did not actually exist. Despite the fact that we were watching the Big Cat eat whole solar systems, nobody was ever able to find anything wrong with their math. But it would have taken observation of a much larger area of the Cataclysm than we could see to prove or disprove the set of equations.
“Nobody knows/If our race will survive/But our love will live on/As we look to the skies”
-- The Short-Termers, Thunk, 2110 C.E.
As it became increasingly obvious that humanity was facing what could very well be a global life extinction event, an emergency session of the Security Council of the old United Nations was held in New York. An agreement-in-principle to pool international resources for the purpose of developing a strategic survival plan emerged, along with a commitment for the funding to start the project, which became known as the CSP, or Cataclysm Survival Project. Offices were established at facilities in several nations and six months later the U.N. released its recommendations in the form of a three-point plan. Each point represented a different level of destruction caused by the Cataclysm - near-destruction of Earth, total destruction of Earth, total destruction of the habitable parts of the solar system – along with the recommended responses. The Plan contained no mention –no hope- of a future free of devastation and death. The Plan recommended that the majority of the world’s economic output be diverted for the purpose of humanity’s survival, essentially condemning what might be the last generations of humanity to largely be poor or –in the case of already struggling nations – poverty-stricken. The Plan relied heavily on theoretical advancements in nascent and unproven technologies. And the Plan flatly stated that even under the best circumstances, less than one in a hundred thousand people could expect to survive.
The CSP was explosively controversial. Assuming the total or near-destruction of the Earth as it did, it sparked a worldwide panic and angry backlash. Protests were held in almost every nation, some of which turned into riots, and a percentage of those riots went on to become insurrections or full-on civil wars. Some governments actually fell; others in order to survive withdrew from the United Nations, claiming they would handle their own preparations for the Cataclysm. Very few of those nations have much representation in the world today.
With the loss of funding from the countries which had seceded or which were embroiled in internal conflicts, along with the added expense of providing for refugees from the wars and assisting with security for the neighboring states, the Plan became economically tenuous. Cutbacks were made to each of the three sets of recommendations, and a robust Plan became a marginal one. Nonetheless, it was the only option humanity had and cooler heads managed to find a way to keep the necessary work moving forward through the opposition, the chaos, and the logistical difficulties inherent in a project so ambitious.
These latter were considerable. New technologies need to be investigated and developed on several intellectual fronts – human hibernation, nanosymbiotics, massive-scale orbital engineering –in a time of broken supply chains and frequent shortages of necessary resources. A worldwide organizational chain of production, quality control, and logistics had to be created and maintained in a political atmosphere of weak, divided national governments and an attitude among most countries of tepid support for the Plan in favor of immediate national interests. Even in some of the most advanced and liberal Western democracies, well-established research institutions crucial to the Plan sometimes found themselves fighting for mere existence against nativist forces in their own governments.
The first years of the effort were disastrous. Laboratories were opened and then shut down and sometimes reopened. Production facilities were picketed and vandalized and even bombed. A grassroots movement to stop the Plan, one of many but better organized than most, started drawing international appeal and organizing effective passive-resistance activities to perversely slow the effort dedicated to human survival. A key scientist and two major political figures were assassinated.
The next decade was not much better. Once a safe infrastructure was established, the predicted scientific advances were slow to come and when they did arrive, they proved difficult to implement in real-world conditions. Public and international support for the project continued to wane and opposition grew stronger, better organized, more effective. The last two years of this decade it seemed the Plan would collapse completely from lack of funding and physical facilities, but then the unexpected happened.