Jumpstart

The little blue light blinks a steady rhythm as Apocalypse enters the upper atmosphere. The whole world has been watching this mysterious thing for weeks as it approaches Earth. It hasn’t been classified yet because it isn’t a known celestial object. Not a comet we knew of nor an asteroid we were expecting. Whatever it was, it was heading right for us, and we could do nothing to stop it.

It’s 2:04 AM, February 19th, 2025, and this may very well be the end of us all. At over six miles wide, this projectile—traveling at over 300 miles per second, should, in all likelihood, have the same effect on us as the asteroid that ended the last reign of dinosaurs. That is to say, kill most of the life on the planet.

I don’t think Mother Earth will miss us.

We’ve all seen the Sci-Fi movies where there’s a great plan to blow up the projectile with nukes or maybe some secret bunker miles below the surface where the wealthy can wait it out. Yes, there is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, but there won’t be anyone left to access it. We’ve had a good run, about two and a half million years, since a Supernova in the Scorpius-Centaurus OB association ended the Pliocene period.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

While it's true the world watches, most of the world believes what they’ve been fed, which is that this is a ‘fly-by’ asteroid, like the one in 2015, with the boring name 2004 BL86—which, by the way, was only a third of a mile in size. Not that it wouldn’t have ruined our day, but we could have survived that.

In the very small circles of those in the know, this object is called Apocalypse. Plain and simple. It's really just the end of the world, and no whining about it will change that. Those of us in the astronomy field, along with the majority of governments, agreed that telling the general public would serve no purpose. This wasn’t about saying goodbye to loved ones or making amends. There was no running away or hiding from this.

You’re all going to die. What’s the point in telling you?

There had, of course, been internet chatter, primarily conspiracy nuts (entirely correct, of course) who speculated precisely this scenario. Several amateur and contrarian professional astronomers tried to let the people of the world know that this would be no near miss.

Thank you, Fox News, for giving them air-time.

But, humanity’s desire to see hope, to believe that life will go on forever—or at the very least not end while they are still around—seems to be more than enough to make the crackpots sound like crackpots.

The blue light was blinking furiously now.

“Tim, are you tracking it?” I ask my colleague, Dr. Timothy Stallings, who has been tracking Apocalypse for over two months.

He replies, “No, Jack, after seventy-three days, it hits the upper atmosphere, and I figured I would go make some tea. Would you care for some?”

Tim was what you might call an asshole, which is great because when we all die in a little bit, no one will have missed him anyway.

“I know you’re tracking it. I mean, do you know where the impact will be yet?” I say aloud, but in my head, I thought, “You’re an asshole, Tim. I hope you die first so I can watch. And yes, I would like some tea, thank you.”

I push my chair back from my console to see Tim, and as I do I roll over Amanda’s toe. I hop up immediately and apologize. “Oh shit, Mandy, are you ok? I’m so sorry. I wasn’t paying attention...”

With a hitch in her voice, Amanda interrupts me to say, "It's ok, Jack, I won't even need toes in about an hour."

She reaches out and holds my arms with her hands to steady herself as she fights back the pain. I can't be sure whether it was from the toe or the certainty of death.

Amanda Talbot was an exceptional scientist, a fantastic cellist, a beautiful woman, and the secret object of my affection for the last three years. We both came to Strasbourg Observatory after failed marriages left us needing a new latitude. A friendship blossomed in a place where neither of us had any, and in a short time, we became close. However, I think the pain of loss that followed us from our pasts and the compulsion for professionalism stayed our potential. Even these last few weeks, we have been so wrapped up in work that we never took the time to speak aloud what we both hoped the other was also thinking.

It's too late now, Jack. You fool.

I walk with her toward Tim's desk, hoping to get some answers. Answers to where the object would impact. Not that it mattered, it's going to kill us with the fallout, if not directly. So, “where” is really just a matter of how long we will have after impact before succumbing to the cold nuclear winter of ash and radiation. Good times.

As I stand behind Amanda, I smell the floral scent of her curly auburn hair. The world and its prescient end melt away as I imagine waking with my face on a pillow near hers. That scent, those lips so close, always.

We all gather behind Tim as he sits facing his quad monitor setup. The upper right one is filled with telemetry data from satellites in orbit and dishes on the ground. The upper left displays live video. A global map on the lower right shows a line tracking trajectory and on the lower left, a projected line based on actively collected data.

Almost everyone has their eyes trained on the live feed, courtesy of the ISS and NASA, but something catches my eye. The projection seemed to be preceding the object en route to the midwest of the USA, but the tracking line did not match. The further into the atmosphere Apocalypse came, the more it deviates from the projection. I raise my arm to point this out to Tim—whose actual job it is to notice such things—when Amanda grabbed my hand.

I look down and see Amanda has instinctively reached for me. The screen doesn’t matter at this moment. Nothing else matters. We would be corpses soon, and she isn’t afraid to reach out for me. I replay the last three years over and over in my head, trying to rationalize why I never told her how I felt. I had no answers. I still have no answers. I don’t want to die. Not now. Now that I know.

I have to tell her before it's too late.

As the images show the object, surrounded in a cloud of smoke, and debris, hurtling through our world’s protective outer shell, I squeeze Amanda’s hand tightly and reach for her waist. Placing my hand on her hip, I turn her towards me—away from the screens flashing: “You’re all gonna die!”

She turns toward me, and when our eyes meet, I gently brush the hair from her face, tucking it over her right ear with my left hand. I push further, burying my hand in her soft curly locks until I have her head in my hand. I pull her close to me and…

The power goes out.

We all stand in silence and pitch black. I still have her in my hands, but I can’t see her. Only feel and smell her. She releases my hand, wraps her arms around my body, and buries her head in my chest.

“I’m scared,” she whispers.

“So am I.”

Our co-workers murmur in the darkness. An enormous explosive bang—the sound of the object catching up with the place we were at—rattles the office like a sonic boom, only a million times louder. The entire building shook. Glass breaks in every door, every window. I hear things falling from desks onto the floor. The sounds and smells of coffee mugs hitting the hard tile floor filled the room, and people began to panic.

I could hear Tim addressing the room in a relatively calm tone. Tim wasn’t just an asshole. He was also smug—a smug asshole. A winning combination, if in no one else’s eyes but his own.

“That, people, was an Electromagnetic Pulse, EMP, and I suspect it fried every circuit in ...well, everything, as Apocalypse flew over us,” Tim said as he lit a candle on his still quivering desk, the light quickly filling the room.

As our eyes adjust, I hold Amanda close. I asked Tim, “So you saw that the trajectory was not following the projection? I mean, how else would it have come anywhere near us?”

“Yeah, Jack, I saw that too. It looked more like it was headed straight for us than the midwest of the US. And that’s hard to reason. I can’t figure out what would cause it to deviate that much. Unless...” Tim answers and quickly turns and walks a few away. An idea must be forming in his head, but he's not sharing it.

Suddenly, the power returns.

“Not an EMP, Tim?” It comes out as a question but I meant it as a statement.

“Apparently. This is even stranger still. An object that size that close should have EMP’d the whole damn continent,” Tim answers.

We speculate a bit more as systems start to boot back up, and just as the screens at Tim’s desk come to life, their illumination was far outshone by the brilliant light outside our windows.

“This is it, folks. That’s the leading edge of the impact wave. I’m sorry for being a smug asshole. Steve, I’m sorry I ate your lunch,” Tim says aloud, eyes fixed on the impending glow of death as it comes over the horizon.

“Which one?” asks Steve

“All of them, Steve. All of them,” Tim replies, never looking away from the glow.

I take Amanda back in my arms and hold her for a moment. I cradle her face in my hands and look into her in the eyes. We both smile for a second, and I say, “I’m in love with you, Amanda. I have been since I met you. I’m sorry I never told you before. I was afraid. But now, now... I’m not. Funny how the end of the world puts things in perspective for you.”

Then I kiss her, and she kisses me back.

It is just a moment in time, but it seems to last forever. Such a great release of emotion, desire, and love that we had been hiding from each other. We would kiss until the end was upon us.

But the end wasn’t coming.

The light outside the window grows dim and fades to nothing before it reaches us. This seems to perplex Tim even further, exasperated he declares, “Ok, I give up. I don’t know what the hell is happening right now.”

Amanda looks up at me and smiles. I return the smile, and together we both whisper, “Smug asshole.”

***

We had our answer within a week, the mystery was solved.

“Tunguska. Remember that one, everybody?” asked Tim as he addressed the room with the findings.

“Well, this was a 6.34-mile wide chunk of frozen nitrogen, oxygen, and not much else. Most of it burned off on entry, but the unevenness of that burn-off radically changed the trajectory. Here’s the best part, the explosion over Baja somehow reset the atmosphere. Almost all of the greenhouse gasses are gone, and there are many more beneficial gases in the atmosphere. It's almost as if the Earth needed a jumpstart, and this comet, as we now know, brought exactly what we needed.”

I leaned back in my chair to look toward Amanda and could see her doing the same to look for me. I’m not sure about the Earth, but I know the Apocalypse was what we needed.

*Author's note: It occurs to me now as I post this cleaned-up version of this story from my podcast days, circa 2015 that there are similarities with a certain Netflix movie from 2022. Purely coincidental, I assume.