PROCONNESUS

The death of the Earth took nine days, and not a living soul survived. Not a single person, not an animal, not a plant, not a strand of DNA. The destruction was total, utter and absolute.

   Death has always lurked above our heads, cloaked in the dark of the night sky. Flying unseen through our Solar System are asteroids, comets and other debris. These objects usually shoot past the Earth or fragment in the friction of our atmosphere, but the larger bodies can reach the surface intact, impacting the ground at enormous speeds and releasing massive amounts of energy. Their effects are deadly, but localized.

   Very large objects, miles in diameter, sear through the skies and strike with such force that they drive deep into the earth, producing impact craters hundreds of miles wide, shooting shock waves far across the land. They can expel enough rock and dust into the atmosphere to block the sun’s light and trigger new ice ages, changing the entire world’s climate for decades at a time.

   Any object larger still would be a planet-killer.

   During the later decades of the twenty-first century, NASA and the European Space Agency created the Earth Defense System, an agency whose brief was simple: protect the Earth from danger in the sky. EDS quickly launched an array of telescopes into orbit to scan the heavens and examine all debris approaching Earth’s neighborhood. In the case of a high risk object, EDS would focus a bank of lasers to nudge the body onto a non-intercept course. Over time, these activities matured, and eventually the process became routine.

   On an otherwise normal day near the end of the century, EDS detected a foreign object approaching from the direction of the constellation Hercules, bound on a hyperbolic course around the Sun. An unusually high speed and a high angle of approach above the ecliptic indicated that the object was an asteroid of interstellar origin. It was immediately logged and formally labeled K89FF7K based upon its order in the catalog of such objects.

   Significant variations in the asteroid’s measured brightness indicated that it was elongated and rotating end over end, like a thrown tomahawk, and among the science community the object quickly acquired the nickname Tom. EDS calculated that although Tom was between five and six hundred miles long, about the size of Cuba, its trajectory would take it clear of the Earth by a quarter of a million miles. Tom was assigned a low risk factor of only two on the Torino collision scale, denoting a routine discovery and no cause for public concern, and observers turned their attention to academic study of the object’s structure.

   But soon, secondary calculations demonstrated that although Tom would indeed miss the Earth, it was instead on a course to strike the Earth’s Moon. Unlike the Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere to moderate the impact of such collisions, hence its pock-marked surface. This new scenario was more complex, and thus less predictable. But, fundamentally, Tom was not on a collision course with Earth… as a result, Tom was never upgraded to a higher risk factor.

   EDS moved into its next phase and, over a period of weeks, bombarded Tom with its lasers. But the asteroid’s unusual rotation meant that most of its bulk remained untouched, and as it neared the inner planets, the pull of the Sun’s gravity caused it to accelerate.

   After an eternity of benign travel through the stars, Tom came to a catastrophic end when, traveling at a speed of one hundred thousand miles per hour, and unimpeded by any atmosphere, it struck the Moon’s far side, driving its thinnest point deep into the Moon’s surface. A small amount of peripheral rock and dust was impelled into the sky, creating a thin corona detectable only through instruments, and the Moon’s basalt crust and mantle absorbed Tom’s entire momentum.

   It was the ultimate worst case scenario.

   All objects in the Solar System occupy positions of delicate equilibrium, where the forces of attraction are balanced in a very subtle harmony. Tom’s initial effect upon the Moon’s position was tiny, but it was enough. Like a billiard cue striking a ball, Tom diverted the Moon’s course very slightly inward, by the merest fraction of a degree. And as the Moon circled around the Earth, its orbit began to narrow, at first slowly, and then more quickly. Like a marble spinning down a funnel, around and around and around, the Moon continued in ever decreasing circles, spiraling closer and closer to the center. It took nine days.

   During the first few days there was immense social upheaval as a terrified population watched the Moon’s familiar face grow bigger with every passing moment. And as it loomed larger and larger, displaying in the sky the very inevitability of mankind’s last days, the people knew the apocalypse was upon them. Society collapsed, infrastructure disintegrated, riots erupted, laws evaporated. Chaos reigned.

   As the Moon drew closer still, its gravitational influence upon Earth grew dramatically. Every low tide fell lower than its predecessor, every high tide rose higher. First the coastal areas flooded, then the plains, then the mountains. The water covered it, destroyed it, swept it all away.

   And as the oceans were emptied and the lands were engulfed, the people died in screaming clawing masses. And the creatures of the land died, and the creatures of the sea died. Within a week, every trace of civilization had been eliminated.

   During the last days, as the Moon swept huge across the sky, it dragged along a single massive tsunami. Ten miles high, the wave surged around the globe at a thousand miles an hour, obliterating all before it. Carrying within its body the splintered fragments of the Earth’s crust, it ground the surface into a charnel of seeping salt flats.

   When the Moon finally struck the Earth, it was the archetypal planet-killing event. But there was no-one left to witness it.

   The violence of the impact shocked the planet to its core. The Earth broke and buckled, and split along its tectonic plates, the edges soaring high above or diving deep below. Enormous rifts heaved open, and gouts of magma rose from thousands of miles beneath, spewing high into the sky, falling back to form vast lava fields flowing across the Earth’s surface, scorching the air, frying the land, boiling the sea. And as the planet revolved, the last remnants of the superheated atmosphere were swept away, admitting the cold unrelenting radiation of space. Nothing survived.

   The shattered Earth and Moon spun away from each other, altered forever, to find new orbits around the distant sun, and not a shred of evidence remained to demonstrate that humankind had ever existed.