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, fragments of ancient collisions drifting silently through the cosmos. Most pass harmlessly by 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 violent, 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 dim the sun’s light and trigger new ice ages, changing the entire world’s climate for decades at a time. The Earth’s geological record bears witness to these events: devastatingly long winters, mass extinctions, glacially slow recoveries.
Any object larger still would not merely wound the planet. It would kill it.
During the latter half of the twenty-first century, this existential threat finally became intolerable, and NASA and the European Space Agency formed the Earth Defense System, a network tasked with one purpose: protect the planet from danger arriving from the sky. EDS quickly launched an array of telescopes into orbit, scanning continuously for approaching debris. Whenever a hazardous trajectory was detected, banks of lasers would be used to alter it, nudging objects onto safe courses. Over time, the system matured, and eventually the process became routine.
It was during one such regular scan, near the end of the century, that EDS detected a foreign object approaching from the direction of the constellation Hercules, bound on a hyperbolic course around the Sun. It was moving fast, faster than anything previously recorded, and its high angle of approach above the ecliptic marked it as an interstellar visitor. It was immediately logged and formally labeled K89FF7K based upon its order in the catalog of such objects.
Measurements of its brightness fluctuated regularly, suggesting an elongated body tumbling end over end, like a thrown tomahawk, and among the science community the object quickly acquired the nickname “Tom”. Initial calculations placed its length between five and six hundred miles - roughly the size of Cuba, but its trajectory would take it clear of the Earth by a quarter of a million miles. Tom was understood to be a routine discovery, no cause for concern, rating only a two on the Torino collision scale, and observers turned their attention to academic study of the object’s structure.
Revised calculations arrived days later. Tom would indeed miss the Earth - but not the Moon.
The Moon, lacking an atmosphere, has no defense against such an impact. Its cratered surface testifies to countless past collisions, but none on this scale. The mathematics of this scenario was greatly more complex, with uncertain consequences. But, fundamentally, Tom was still not on a direct collision course with Earth, and its risk rating remained unchanged.
The Earth Defense System proceeded as designed. Over the following weeks, lasers bombarded Tom, delivering repeated bursts intended to alter its trajectory. But Tom’s rapid rotation meant that much of its mass was never struck. And as it neared the inner planets and fell deeper into the Sun’s gravitational well, it accelerated.
After an eternity of benign travel through the stars, Tom reached the end of its journey. Moving 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 lunar crust. A thin halo of dust and rock blossomed briefly into space, creating a thin corona detectable only through instruments, and the Moon’s basalt mantle absorbed the impact of Tom’s entire momentum in silence
It was the ultimate worst-case scenario.
All objects in the Solar System occupy positions of delicate equilibrium, a choreography of masses where the forces of attraction are balanced in subtle harmony. Like a billiard cue striking a ball, Tom diverted the Moon’s course very slightly inward. The initial effect was tiny, a deviation of a mere fraction of a degree. But it was enough. 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’s orbit began to contract. At first the change was imperceptible, then it became measurable, and it 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 and distort 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 all, destroyed it, swept it 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 immense 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 seams. Continents rose and fell. Enormous rifts heaved open, and gouts of magma rose from thousands of miles below, 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.