One month after passing the proxy border to the solar system, the meteor passes Jupiter. As it does so, the magnetic fields that form and control the vast sail behind it shimmer almost imperceptibly with the first hints of the active deep space detection systems coming from its destination. After a few hours of final adjustment, the magnetic ties holding the entire solar sail together collapse. In an instant, any possible hint of the parachute they had caused to form vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind.

Under the steadily increasing wash of radar signals, the meteor then begins to slowly and deliberately disintegrate.

Part 1

Chapter 1: Under the Radar

The walls of Neal’s cube are the type that can be torn down and rebuilt, reconfigured to a hundred different formats, the quintessential faceless, formless walls that enclose millions of office workers across middle-class Eur-merica. You would not know from its creative shades of grey that this cube, and its dated Compaq PC, sit less than a quarter of a mile from the US Air Force Phased Array Antenna.

The magnificent and complex phased array was designed for deep space object tracking back in the 1960s by the finest minds in the world, when the finest minds in the world were all working on either looking into space, or getting into it. Four months before its completion, it was appropriated by the Air Force that had discretely facilitated its federal funding. They had covertly helped drive its completion in order to use it to track satellites, specifically Russian satellites.

In return for everyone’s hard work a team of civilian scientists were allowed to monitor non-military targets with any unassigned bandwidth during off-peak hours. Sixty years later, with the finest minds now working at Apple, the once extensive civilian team had been whittled down to four doctorate students from a nearby technical college in Phoenix.

This is due, in part, to the fact that “unassigned bandwidth during off-peak hours” translated to being on site from 11pm to 6am every day for perhaps two or three hours of highly interruptible system access.

The only upside of the job was that Neal got to tell the young students at the university bar that he monitors space for the next planet-killing meteor. Unfortunately for Neal’s love life, however, was the fact that while Armageddon may have made them all seem like superheroes, between each earth-shattering stellar event there are several million years of thoroughly unsexy peace and quiet, and it felt like he spent roughly that at the observatory each night looking up porn on the government’s PCs, usually in a vain search for a photo of a doppelganger of one of his female PhD students doing unspeakable acts with a slightly balding 39 year-old like himself.