Turner 454

          Cameron Capuno remembers The Strike.

          He was 25 years old. He had just made Lieutenant on the municipal force, then the Honolulu Police Department. It was raining hard that day, which was fortunate, because it seemed like the city was on fire. Everything, everywhere, was burning. It would later be said that most of the destruction in many neighborhoods – in the islands as well as in the States, in Japan, in South America – came in the last three days before The Strike.

          People do crazy shit when they’re scared.

          Cameron was supposed to have gotten married that week, but the wedding, planned two years in advance, was canceled seven months earlier. By then – it was late February – there was no doubt. Even the fringes of the fringe, the most cynical of conspiracy theorists, had by then abdicated. He remembered those few days almost as clearly as The Strike: when every soul on the entire planet fell silent, in shock, finally, simultaneously, coming to terms with the impossible but imminent truth.

          It was coming.

          It wasn’t the end of the world. But for a lot of people, it was impossible to tell the difference.

          It was, originally, simply called 2001 FB90. No one had bothered to name it when it was discovered at the turn of the century – it was assigned a number, and promptly forgotten for nearly fifty years.

          Cameron remembered feeling a slight twinge when he learned that FB90 was first spotted by scientists in Hawaii, working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory perched high atop the snowy summit of Haleakala on Maui.

          And they knew. Even then they knew that the asteroid was a threat. It was duly logged into the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking system almost immediately. But they were confident in their math. They pegged the probability of impact at 1 in 76,923,000 – a number that would be repeated so often, it became the most frequently dialed wrong number in dozens of cities.

          As it turned out, the asteroid beat those odds. But the scientists, even sixty-six years earlier, nailed the date exactly: October 18, 2067.

          Yet, even as late as 2064, no one was worried. Even when the first signs of trouble were detected, half a dozen governments effectively suppressed the news. Even Cameron remembered the first mainstream reports on the asteroid’s potential trajectory, which came out the following year, were treated as a novelty – a science sidebar blurb that inspired exactly two asteroid-themed political comic strips.

          But it turned out to be the story of the year.

          People finally started taking it seriously. The Global League, then the much larger United Nations, held meeting after meeting after meeting. The President of China was the first head of state to publicly acknowledge the danger, and called for decisive action. Another meeting was swiftly scheduled.

          Absurdly, most of the public discourse on the asteroid naively danced around the unmarketable topics of death and destruction, and focused primarily on the question of what to name it, how long the government knew about it and kept it secret, and its impact – or rather, the impact of its anticipation – on world markets. The U.S. President’s first nationwide address on the matter urged Americans to remain calm, to be patient, to pray, and to go shopping.

          On New Year’s Day, 2066, a bizarre coalition of business leaders, spiritual leaders, scientists, teachers, environmentalists and anti-government activists led a march on Washington, with a basic message: Even if you eventually determine the asteroid will hit the Earth, if you don’t start moving now, it will be too late to do anything about it. Cameron had watched the speeches at his fiancée’s apartment. It was the first time he actually felt afraid.

          “As big as an aircraft carrier.” The phrase was impossible to avoid, and a song featuring it spoken in several different languages was one of the big hits that year. FB90 was 300 meters – or 1,000 feet – in diameter. A speck compared to the Earth, perhaps, but experts everywhere seemed to take a perverse sort of glee in pointing out that even if half of the asteroid burned up in the atmosphere, it would still be six to seven times bigger at impact than the meteor that made the giant crater in Arizona.

          The Arizona crater was a mile wide, created with the force of 20 million tons of TNT – several million times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. People got positively silly coming up with ways to describe just how big the hole FB90 would make would be.

          Or, as it turns out, how big a splash.

          When an impact was all but confirmed, it was also clear that it would not hit land, but ocean. Cameron could still picture the maps in his head, on the front page of the papers and shown seemingly every 10 minutes on the news, with a red circle that week after week shifted diagonally across the globe, and got smaller and smaller, as scientists pinpointed where the asteroid will strike. The red circle seemed to favor the Pacific Northwest for a while – people in Vancouver and Seattle started to panic.

          But eventually, the point of impact was calculated to the centimeter: about 161 degrees West longitude, 40 degrees North latitude, or about 1,400 kilometers due north of Hawaii.

          Cameron was terrified.

          Right around that time, finally, an accord was reached on a concerted planetary response. A coalition of space-faring governments – led by China, India, and the United States – was regarded by most to be the greatest hope for real action, and the broiling anticipation of the announcement of their findings was so great, it might as well have been the Second Coming. And their decision was so unexpected, so unthinkable, the subsequent global controversy effectively paralyzed mankind until it was almost too late.

          There would be no massive nuclear strike aimed at blasting FB90 into a thousand hopefully harmless fragments. There would be no ridiculous attempt to attach a propulsion system of some kind to gently nudge it off course. There would instead be a massive regional evacuation, and coordinated stockpiling in case of unforeseen long-term or wide-reaching effects of an asteroid strike – the first in modern history.

          Instead of striking back, mankind would just roll with the punch.

          Of course, Cameron’s first thought became the unifying theme of protest by dozens of nations, and that thought was, “What about us?”

          Most of the world had breathed an uneasy sigh of relief. But most of the world was not living on a small island in the Pacific. Sure, the European Union was more than happy to praise the creative thinking and courageous call of the space coalition, but they were on the other side of the Earth. American leaders spoke solemnly and seriously about tough decisions and the strength of the human spirit, but they didn’t have anything to worry about if they could relocate a mere 18 percent of the West Coast population... Including Vancouver and Seattle.

          But dozens of Pacific island nations did have reason to worry. A handful, by most accounts, would be drowned completely by the massive tsunami FB90 would create when it hit. And the damage to those that wouldn’t be entirely wiped out was going to be unimaginable. Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Peru, and already financially decimated Alaska announced that they would essentially go bankrupt.

          Many critics were quick to point out that the countries that had the most to lose, with perhaps the exception of Japan, were already the least affluent, least politically influential (in terms of advocating a preemptive response), and least able to deal with the consequences of a decision made by the Rich Nations Club.

          And for Hawaii, the decision was doubly grievous. Cameron remembered the perpetual vigils, the constant protests, and how freely and frequently genuine tears would be shed. His own mother, who didn’t weep at his father’s funeral, had cried several times over it. She felt personally betrayed. Abandoned.

          After all, it had been less than a decade since the United States had formally withdrawn its commonwealth support, leaving the islands under competent but indifferent leadership as a UN protectorate, and dashing the hopes of a near majority of residents for repatriation. And now America had chosen inaction over action, chosen to duck and cover, leaving its former jewel, its once prized paradise, to fend for itself.