Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  Bullshit detector at maximum, Cooper still believed him.

  Eight years as VP set Jackson up for his own presidential run in 2020. The right vice-president succeeding him would give him up to 24 years to fulfill his dreams. Jackson felt the cold knots in his stomach ease up. His anus unpuckered so hard he almost heard it over the portable heater.

  “Sold!”

  Jackson opened an email, then swung the laptop around. “Email your wife and staff, and you got a deal!”

  Euphoric, Cooper copied Jackson on the email, then they shook hands across the cardboard table like buddies. Truly, power is the only thing better than sex, fame, and money. Except for power, sex, fame AND money.

  Jackson had just killed Cooper’s fear of poverty, and Jackson got the support he needed to justify the massive spending his father dreamed of. This could shave years off of their plans.

  “I wonder if my dad wants to head NASA,” Jackson joked.

  “Cooper-Jackson for 2012.” Cooper liked it.

  “Ah shit!”

  Cooper looked exasperated. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need to ask my wife first. I have no idea if she will go along. We honestly never talked about running for president.”

  An angry groan burped up from Cooper’s political soul.

  “Well, go ask her, damn it.”

  Cooper could not believe that Jackson needed to ask his wife about such a thing. Could she really say no? The contrast was striking: one of the main things that attracted Ann to Cooper was his political potential, while Lorena gave her husband’s political future hardly any thought. Jackson did not even know if his wife was willing to become the first foreign-born first lady in America’s history. Cooper just couldn’t relate to it.

  “Henry, I really need to go.”

  “Take off, then, but call me tonight.” Jackson password-protected his computer, then ran up the ladder to find Lorena and break the wonderful news. Vice-President Jackson?!

  28

  Dan Cooper hopped across the basement feeling a billion dollars better. The spring in his step felt bionic.

  “President Daniel Cooper.”

  He sure liked how that sounded. As he climbed up the ladder, he was reminded of Lorena climbing down. That contented smile of sexual satisfaction, the flat abs, the firm boobs attempting flight. The comparison made Cooper’s satisfaction with his own wife wilt like a rose under the harsh desert sun. Not even his first marriage was anything like what Jackson enjoyed. He remembered his father telling him that 90% of his future happiness would be determined by who he spent his life with.

  Cooper felt his jealousies raise their ugly heads again. Cooper was going to get everything he wanted, but Jackson was going to get even more. Cooper felt played, and there is nothing a player hates more than being played.

  Well, after fucking losing.

  He stood there, halfway up the ladder, letting his conflicting emotions battle. His buzz fizzled out. In its place he felt a sense of resignation. Getting everything he wanted meant giving Jackson everything that he wanted. It rankled deep inside him that he would become the first billionaire president, but Henry Fucking Jackson would become the first trillionaire president.

  Instead of returning to the house, he exited the garage through a side door and nearly peed himself when that fucking dog, Body Odor or whatever, attacked him again. Or tried to.

  Tied to an orange tree, the white beast strained his leash, fangs flaring as he basically ran in place, kicking up dirt. Thank God Monique tied him to a strong tree. A few feet away was a wilting excuse for a tree that the dog probably could rip out of the earth. He turned to run away when he saw a baseball bat, a ball, and two mitts along the wall. He glanced back at the drooling monster that clearly wanted to kill him, then at the bat again.

  Cooper tilted his head to one side and calmly considered his options. Jackson sure loves that fucking dog. Past the dog he saw a large mound of dirt, clearly excavated from under the garage, conveniently with a shovel sticking out. Cooper smiled to himself.

  With great satisfaction, he took the baseball bat and strolled over to the frothing mutt. After making eye contact, Cooper swung the bat as hard as he could and bashed the dog over the head, dropping him like a hockey puck. Just to make sure, he hit it again. And then, cuz it just felt so fucking good, kept swinging and swinging. All the time reminding himself how much Jackson loved the dog. Really, who names their pet after “body odor”?

  Exhaustion finally stopped him. He leaned on the bat to catch his breath, wishing he was in better shape, then untied the leash. Cooper dragged the dog around the far side of the mound and dug an opening. He kicked the dead pet in, then shoveled dirt on top. He smoothed over the dirt from dragging the beast, carefully concealed any clues, then continued to the driveway where a supermodel let him fingerfuck her, before getting engaged.

  It even crossed his mind to key the side of Jackson’s million dollar car, but leaving quickly was more important. The front gate was still open, so he floored the borrowed green Hummer out of Jackson’s fortress.

  As he passed the rear entrance, Cooper glimpsed what looked like several news media vans with satellite uplink dishes on their roofs in the backyard. For some reason, the idea that Jackson had already called a press conference to announce he joined the ticket just pissed him off. Any guilt at having killed his friend’s favorite pet vanished as Cooper sped up and began to seethe.

  29

  The Jacksons liked to entertain, so they designed a large living-dining room with an open kitchen when they planned their dream home. They could fit a couple dozen people at the dinner table, with all of the extensions. The back of the house featured floor-to-ceiling glass because they found the Olympic-size pool and fountain relaxing. Everyone in the desert likes to see water.

  Upon entering the room, however, the first thing Jackson saw was a total stranger with his head in Jackson’s kitchen fridge.

  Then it got weird.

  Like a bad episode of Cops, several cameras and boom mikes immediately swung on him as he entered the room, long cables filtering out to their media vans in the backyard. All three major cable news networks -- CNN, Fox, and MSNBC -- as well as ABC were there. Several men, and they were all men, stared at him expectantly. Jackson stopped cold, surprised as hell, then looked at his father, who sat with his head buried in his laptop in the middle of the long table that dominated the room.

  “Lisa invited them in,” his dad said without looking up.

  Ahhh. Well, of course she did. Lisa never met a camera she didn’t like. Lisa stretched herself out on the couch, now in low hip-hugging jeans and a tight half-top that showed her belly button. With her knees near her face and her computer in her lap, she typed rapidly and ignored her father. Jackson hoped to God she put on a fucking bra. Jackson saw a camera without anybody behind it dedicated just to her. Well, he thought, that would work better than handcuffs to keep her there.

  “Chava!” Jackson yelped in surprise at seeing his tech guy filming him. “Why aren’t you in Alaska?”

  “Finishing the documentary.”

  Jackson wanted to record their efforts to move 100 million Democratic voters, so every field office assigned a cameraman. YouTube started a special channel just for “asteroid refugees”, which inspired people from around the world to upload their own personal stories of tragedy and heroism. Every day Jackson posted a short video diary on Facebook to later make a documentary.

  “You said I could stay,” Chava said defensively as the other cameras turned on him.

  Jackson snorted. “I also said you should go.”

  “You said I could ride out with you.”

  “Given the alternative, of course I can’t let you stay here and die, but I’d much rather not have to worry about you.”

  “I had to finish the documentary,” Chava insisted.

  Jackson exhaled a sad sigh. “So,” he asked his father conversationally. “What have I missed?”

  “The main
body is going to hit us.”

  “Of course. You told me that two weeks ago.”

  The professor closed his eyes, but didn’t turn around. “I predicted on my blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts two weeks ago that it would hit us. But only last night did it turn into us.”

  “Wowowo. Then why did you tell me on Christmas that it would strike Earth, you damn Scrooge?”

  He would have looked ridiculous if the damn rock passed harmlessly by, especially since he very publicly spent billions of his own money preparing for the Worst Case Scenario. At their urging, a billion people around the world left their homes and jobs to find inland shelter. And only now the main body turned on us?

  “Because every time out-gassing changed its course, it turned into us. It made sense that any further out-gassing would do the same. Which it did. Some astronomers kept dismissing these changes as the Yarkovsky Effect, when an asteroid radiates more heat from sunlight on one side than another, pushing it, but I always thought that bullshit. This rock wants to hit us.”

  The rock wants to hit us?

  “Wait just a damn minute. Based on your prediction, I spent billions on aircraft, ships, containers, trucks, buses, and construction. Plus the billions I bought in bulk food and supplies. Not to mention the $10 billion I gave aid agencies like the Red Cross on Christmas. You cost Lisa a big chunk of her inheritance.”

  His father finally looked up.

  “You never mentioned you gave away $10 billion.”

  Now Jackson looked embarrassed.

  “I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. You told me to assume the worst,” he said as if it was somehow his father’s fault.

  “And good thing I did. That money will save lives.”

  “How the hell did it change course so much?”

  “That delta V cost it a lot of mass. Several large chunks that broke off won’t hit us this orbit. Another cubic kilometer’s worth will probably smack the Moon. It’s now more a swarm inside a dust cloud than a single asteroid.”

  “Where’s it gonna hit?”

  “The Minor Planet Center is not 100% sure given its unstable path. It looks like Fidel will whack the Caymans, not Cuba. The fragments from the previous out-gassing have spread out and will probably hit everywhere but the poles, although the northern hemisphere will get most of it. In contrast, the latest prediction from the laser ranger says the main body will land around 3:00 a.m. in northern Mexico or the Southwest instead of the Pacific at 6:00.”

  The Lunar Research Institute in Tucson had been building a ranging laser meant to scan the surface of the Moon, 240,000 miles away. It would fire continuous laser pulses at the Moon, which would be returned via a radio telemetry link. The laser could hit the Moon 28 times per second and measure its relative height to within four inches. A purpose-built software program would render it into 3D for astronauts and Disney customers.

  Well, in return for the Jackson Space Foundation funding its completion, Jackson’s father got exclusive use in order to laser-range the Rock as it circumvented the Sun, which allowed him to immediately replot its course after each out-gassing. It also let him know where all the big fragments would hit. The Jacksons therefore had better information, earlier than the rest of the space community, which Jackson put to profitably use.

  Which meant the damn thing was going to hit northern Mexico or the Southwest at 3:00 a.m. Which really sucks since his home was only forty miles from the Mexican border.

  “But you said any collision with the main body would be around 6:00. How could it hit us at 3:00?”

  “The laser ranger says it’s accelerating. That’s bad because the faster it moves, the greater its kinetic impact. Doubling the asteroid’s speed quadruples its kinetic energy.”

  “How the hell can an asteroid speed up?” his son asked.

  His father look depressed. He obviously could not explain the unexplainable. He turned to the cameras.

  “Dr. Dennis Kowalski, the director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the editor of the University of Arizona’s Space Science Series, is tracking the biggest rocks with Kitt Peak’s laser ranger and says the main body will hit us a few hours sooner than the rest of the swarm. Its exhaust tail has multiplied since Dennis discovered it speeding up. It’s burning rubber like someone pushed the turbo button, almost as if someone wants to maximize its destructive power. The Rock seems to be targeting Kitt Peak which, with the world’s greatest collection of astronomy scopes, must be the biggest homing beacon on the planet.”

  Asteroids, of course, have orbital paths, not targets. Phrasing it that way made the Rock much more menacing.

  “Well, tell Dennis to turn the fucking laser off!”

  His father brightened, like a light bulb lit over his head, then started typing furiously into the computer.

  “Does the rest of the world know it will strike early?”

  “I sent out a press release, I mass emailed everyone, I posted it on my blog, Twitter, and Facebook, then I announced it to these geniuses when they got here and turned on their cameras.

  “Out of an abundance of caution, in your name I ordered all the hangers and sheds in the area to be re-deployed to the Grand Canyon, and advised your government and corporate clients to do the same. The governor agreed and ordered the Air National Guard to move every hanger the state bought from you.”

  “I remember Dennis. Where is he now?”

  “On Kitt Peak,” his father whispered.

  “I thought he went north with the rest of them.”

  The professor just grunted his disgust.

  30

  When his father told him in October that fragments would likely hit Earth, Jackson looked in his DemZilla database and found around 50 million people who consistently voted Democratic, and ten million more who periodically voted Democratic. As the self-described head of the Democratic Party, Jackson had a moral, ethical, and practical obligation to keep them alive. And, preferably, their children. So the question that faced him was: how the fuck do you protect 100 million people from multiple large meteorites in just ten fucking weeks?

  Impossible, was his first reaction. But then he asked himself a different question. With unlimited resources, how many could be sheltered in ten weeks? His resources weren’t infinite, but they were pretty large, given the money he was making.

  First, the Jacksons made an important assumption: the greater the distance from the impacts, the greater the safety. Everything within several hundreds of miles would suffer from pressure waves, intense heat that would cook the surface, and a really bad earthquake. So, okay, move people towards the poles.

  100,000 cubic kilometers of dirt and rock thrown into the sky would crush whatever it fell upon. Like people, cars, and roofs. However, the bigger the rock, the less far the impact would throw it. An impact can throw a one pound rock farther than a one ton rock. Surviving a meter of falling earth is easier than ten meters, and surviving falling pebbles is easier than surviving boulders. So they warned the public that “distance = safety.”

  So Jackson headquartered his companies, Dem organizations, and allies near the Article Circle in Fairbanks, Alaska, while signing open contracts with the world’s makers of steel buildings to monopolize supply. His field teams literally cleared out every Lowes and Home Depots of steel sheds.

  His first concerns were food and shelter, so he had his DNC staff rent every structurally sound inland building in Canada, Alaska, southernmost Chile and Argentina, Scandinavia, and Australia, then reinforced the roofs with aluminum siding, wood, or sheet metal.

  Getting food in the quantities he needed meant going directly to the world’s biggest suppliers and buying everything they produced, while buying up bulk food that was already stored. He also bought huge amounts of medical supplies, construction equipment and materials, tents, helicopters, etc. With regolith damaging every road and highway, Jackson figured he could not possibly have enough large helicopters.

  He sent hundreds of cement mixing truc
ks north and hired every major construction company in Canada and Alaska to build concrete-and-rebar asteroid shelters two meters tall by two meters wide and ten meters deep using 30X4 meter amorphous sheet metal as roofs. No windows, no plumbing, and no electricity, instead using car batteries for electricity and porta-potties. He even posted the design online and urged every family, church, company, and government to start building them. After the movie Regolith 3D came out on Thanksgiving, Congress tried to reassure a hysterical public by appropriating $100 billion to build concrete bunkers and warehouses, although the military got most of that. Jackson, naturally, had already bought futures of the world’s biggest suppliers whose shares soared as demand multiplied overnight.

  Assuming he could never have enough shelter, he monopolized production of temporary structures, from sheds to classrooms to warehouses. Literally thousands of steel buildings popped up in inland Alaska and northern Canada.

  He had his field teams buy every used van, bus, and commercial truck, including tractor trailers, in their districts to put metal over people’s heads since there was nowhere near enough buildings that far north to shelter everyone. They filled them with mattresses, futons, sleeping bags, blankets, food, plywood, and sheet metal, then drove them to Alaska. The tractor trailers, the same size as 40 foot shipping containers, he sent to Canada by train. Once insurers started dropping coverage of trucking companies, he bought entire fleets from around the world and sent them to Alaska, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, or Patagonia. They covered the windows with whatever was available, like old clothes or several layers of cardboard.

  In December, overwhelmed with people seeking shelter, Jackson held a press conference in the Carson Center in Fairbanks with Wal-Mart where they announced the retail giant would send their entire fleet to Fairbanks, and invited all corporate and government fleets to join them, as well as city transit and school buses. Fairbanks has valleys separated by ridges to its east and west, which Jackson was flattening with bulldozers to park thousands of trucks. With share prices so low, Jackson bought over 50% of both FedEx and U-haul and sent their trucks there. He also bought newly uninsured RV dealerships so his survival camps had more beds, bathrooms and kitchens. He modified hundreds of trucks to cook food and helped hundreds of clinics relocate to his survival camps.