Ben Winters: World of Trouble

I go back to the kitchenette and stare once more into the red mess in the sink. There is a fresh jitteriness in my gut, a new chaos in my veins. Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. New information. I don’t know if Nico’s here, if she was ever here. But something happened. Something.

It was not the impending end of the world that drove a wedge between my sister and me, it was our diverging responses to the end of the world, a bedrock disagreement regarding the basic reality of what is happening—i.e., whether it is happening or isn’t.

It is happening. I’m right and Nico is wrong. No set of facts has ever been as rigorously vetted, no set of data points so carefully analyzed and double-checked, by as many thousands of professors and scientists and government officials. All desperate for it to be wrong, all finding it nevertheless to be right. There are some uncertainties on the fine points, of course, for example regarding the composition and structure of the asteroid, whether it is made up primarily of metals or primarily of rocks, whether it is one monolithic piece or a pile of agglomerated rubble. There are, too, varying predictions as to what exactly happens, postimpact: how much volcanic activity and where; how fast the seas will rise and how high; how long it will take for the sun to be dimmed by ash and for how long it will remain shrouded. But on the core fact there is consensus: the asteroid 2011GV 1, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia, at an angle from horizontal of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime.

There was this computer animation that got a lot of traction early on, a lot of “likes” and reposts—this was over a year ago, midsummer of last year, when the odds were high but not yet definite; when people were still at work, still using computers. This was the last wild flowering of social networking, people looking up old friends, trading conspiracy theories, posting and approving of one another’s Bucket Lists. This cartoon, this animation, it depicted the world as a piñata, with God wielding the stick—God in his Old Testament iteration, with the big white beard, Michelangelo’s God—whacking away at the fragile globe until it burst. This was one of a million versions of the coming event that ascribed it, however cutely, to God’s will, God’s vengeance, the interstellar object as Flood 2.0.

I didn’t find the cartoon all that clever; for one thing, the piñata image is way off. The world isn’t actually going to explode, fly off into pieces like shattered pottery. It will shiver from the impact, to be sure, but then continue in its orbit. The oceans boil, the forests burn, the mountains rumble and spew lava, everybody dies. The world keeps turning.

The crux of our falling out is that Nico imagines that she is going to prevent Maia from impacting. She and some friends. The last time we spoke at length was in Durham, New Hampshire, and she filled me in on all the details about her secret underground group and their secret underground plans. She was leaning forward, talking fast and passionate, smoking her cigarettes, impatient as always with her narrow-minded older brother, stolid and disbelieving. She told me how the path of the asteroid can be diverted by a pinpoint nuclear explosion, detonated at a distance of one object-radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface, creating “a miniature rocket effect” and changing the trajectory. This operation is called a “standoff burst.” I didn’t understand the science. Nico, it seemed clear, didn’t understand it either. But, she insisted, the maneuver has been gamed out in classified exercises by the United States Department of Defense and has a theoretical success rate of more than eighty-five percent.

She went on and on, me trying to listen with a straight face, trying not to laugh or throw my hands up or shake her by the shoulders. Of course the information about the standoff burst is being suppressed by the evil government, for purposes unknown—and of course there is this one rogue scientist who knows how it’s done, and of course he’s being held by the government in a military prison somewhere. And—of course, of course, of course—Nico and her pal Jordan and the rest of the cabal have a plan to set him free and save the world.

I told her this was delusional. I told her this was Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and she was being a fool, and then she disappeared and I let her go.

This was an error, and I see that now.

I’m still right and she’s still wrong, but I cannot just let her be gone. Whatever she thinks, whatever she’s doing, she is still my baby sister and I am the only person left with a stake in her welfare. And I can’t abide the idea of our final bitter exchange remaining the last conversation to take place between her and me, the last two members of my family who ever will exist. What I need now is to find her, see her before the end, before the earthquakes and the high water and whatever else is coming.

I need to see her so badly that it is like a low rolling heat in my stomach, like the fire in the belly of a furnace, and if I don’t find her—if I don’t manage to see her, hug her, apologize for letting her go—then it will leap up and consume me.

“Knives? Really?” Cortez looks up. His eyes gleam. “Are they big and sharp?”

“Two of them are big. The third is a paring knife. I don’t know about sharp.”

“Paring knives can be surprisingly effective. You can do some serious damage with a paring knife.”

“You’ve seen it,” I say. “You’ve done it.”

He laughs, winks. I rub my eyes and look around. I’ve caught up with Cortez in the three-car garage, the last unexplored area of the station. No cars left in here, just stuff—engine parts, broken pieces of tools, other miscellaneous junk that’s been forgotten or left behind. It’s big and echoey, smelling of old spilled gasoline. The sun comes in refracted through two grungy glass-block windows along the north-facing wall.

“Knives are always useful,” says Cortez cheerfully. “Sharp, dull. Take the knives.”

He gives me a congratulatory salute and goes back to what he’s doing, which is rifling his way along the wire shelving units in the back of the room, across from the big garage doors, looking for useful objects. Cortez’s features are strangely large: large forehead, large chin, big glowing eyes. He has the jollity and the fierceness of a pirate king. The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months. On this long and complicated journey he has proved himself to be endlessly valuable, skilled at picking locks, siphoning fuel and reviving dead vehicles, discovering stores of resources in a resource-depleted landscape. He is not the sort of sidekick I ever would have predicted for myself, but the world has been reordered. I never used to think I’d have a dog.

“The knives are covered in blood,” I explain to Cortez. “I’m leaving them where I found them, for now.”

He glances at me over his shoulder. “Cow’s blood?”

“Maybe.”

“Pig?”

“Could be.”

He waggles his eyebrows insinuatingly. We’ve eaten what we brought, what we stumbled upon or bargained for along the way: snack-type food, jerky strips, a big thing of honey-roasted peanuts in tiny foil bags. We caught fish in the Finger Lakes in improvised nets, salted them, and ate those for five days. All we’ve been drinking is coffee, working our way through one massive sack of arabica beans. Cortez rigged up a manual pencil sharpener into a grinder; we measure out cups from the barrels of spring water we took with us from Massachusetts; we boil up the coffee in an old carafe over a camp stove, strain it through a mesh spatula into a hot/cold thermos. It takes forever. It tastes terrible.