ARC (New Earth #1) - Devon C. Ford Page 0,2

on the other end to pass.

“Yes,” Edwards confirmed worryingly, “our supercomputers have run the simulation twice now, and are running a third. It doesn’t look good,” he intoned ominously.

“What kind of ‘not good’?” Amir responded as he rose from his desk to pace the large office. Edwards paused on the other end of the line again.

“Ian?” Amir prompted.

“It’s …” he began, sounding unsure, “it’s going to hit us, we think, depending on the gravitational pull of the sun as it passes through our solar system.”

Amir said nothing, letting the phone drop away from his ear slightly before Edwards’ voice brought him back.

“Yes, I’m here, go on,” he said.

“I was saying that it’s not certain, but we could be looking at the big one. A dinosaur-killing sized event, only bigger …” He trailed away, waiting for some answer, some child-like hope of reassurance to come from his employer and benefactor. Instead he heard the coldness of the response.

“Who else knows about this?” Amir asked.

“Me and a handful here,” he said. “Three people working on the Hubble and that’s it. The Hubble people sent it down to us, but they do that with four or five a month. Usually we can tell within an hour that whatever asteroid they’ve found will pass us safely by millions of miles away, but this one—”

“I want total lockdown,” Amir interrupted him, “no media, nobody who doesn’t already know can find out, and no government report.”

“We have to tell the govern—” Edwards began explaining, reminding Amir of their contractual obligations when acquiring the Hubble, that every contact report had to be sent to NASA for analysis.

“Give them a different report,” Amir cut in again, knowing full-well what his obligations were, “just don’t tell them that it will hit us. Don’t even hint at it. Let them think it will pass by.” He paused as he shot his cuff to look at the Omega on his wrist. “I’ll be there in around … seventeen hours.” And with that, he ended the call and dialed another number.

“I need a jet ready for takeoff in half an hour,” he ordered into the phone, “with enough fuel to get to Texas.”

~

At the other end of the terminated call, Ian Edwards looked at the cell phone in his hand for a moment.

Have I just been ordered to lie to the government about an asteroid that will hit the earth? he asked himself, then considered what would happen if he didn’t. He looked at the initial calculations, measuring size and speed of the space missile and accounting for variables in the trajectory, and knew with absolute certainty that this thing would wipe out Earth if it hit them. Then he looked at the impact predictions, his eyes resting on one thing and staying there.

It’ll take nearly twelve years to get here, he thought, what would we do to each other in twelve years when there are no consequences?

Deciding against being personally responsible for worldwide anarchy, he took the report to his desk, adjusted his seat, swallowed hard, and typed out a new version to send to his former colleagues at NASA.

Chapter 2

Research Facility in Estonia

November 30, 2021

I guess I was a bit of a loner even before. I had been at the company’s research facility in the Estonian countryside for a little over two years after my project had been picked up and funded by Amir Weatherby’s company. My invention had been used all over the world before this, but my previous bad contract meant that nobody knew it was mine, and I didn’t have access to the profits for it to be developed. I was a genius and an idiot all at once. I knew that actors and singers needed agents to stop them getting screwed over, but for a robotics geek from Massachusetts with a pair of degrees in robotic engineering and computer linguistic programming, which I earned at the same time I might add, before blasting through my doctorate, I was just a dumb kid who got played by the big corporation.

My reluctance to jump straight back in bed with another big business after I earned less than half a percent of my last invention’s net worth was pretty obvious, like a recent wound. But when a guy lands a helicopter literally on your front lawn to invite you personally to work for him at a state-of-the-art facility, it kind of impresses.

So that’s what I did. I packed up all my things into storage, gave notice to my landlord,