What did people actually need to survive long term?
Water.
Food.
Shelter.
Medicine.
Energy.
Sanitation.
Tools.
Knowledge.
But stored food eventually ran out.
Water needed a source.
Machines broke and needed replacement parts.
Medicine would run out.
Crops needed seeds.
Agriculture needed land.
Land needed water.
Livestock needed feed.
Lena opened a spreadsheet.
Then another.
Her phone note titled OH FUCK became a workbook.
The categories multiplied.
FOOD — STORED
FOOD — PRODUCTION
WATER
MEDICAL
HYGIENE / SANITATION
POWER
FUEL
TOOLS
CONSTRUCTION
AGRICULTURE
SEEDS
LIVESTOCK
VETERINARY
CLOTHING / TEXTILES
TRANSPORTATION
COMMUNICATION
KNOWLEDGE
CHILDREN
ELDERLY / DISABLED
MANUFACTURING???
Lena stared at the last one.
“Jesus Christ.”
She was getting ahead of herself.
She didn’t even have somewhere to live.
That was the real problem.
San Francisco was home.
It was also almost certainly not where Lena wanted to be if disasters hit.
Dense population.
Earthquake risk.
Dependent on enormous interconnected systems for food, fuel, water and nearly everything else.
She needed somewhere rural.
But not so remote that getting supplies there during the next twenty-seven days became impossible.
Land.
Water.
Agriculture.
Road access.
Buildings.
Room to expand.
And face whatever the hell Transition was going to do to the environment.
“System.”
Listening.
“Can you tell me where I should live?”
Insufficient parameters.
“Of course.”
Lena thought.
“Somewhere likely to survive Transition.”
Insufficient parameters.
“Somewhere with water.
Farmland.
Low disaster risk.
Enough room for people.
Somewhere we can function without normal utilities if we have to.”
The interface flashed.
CONTEXTUAL QUEST GENERATED
A PLACE TO BEGIN
Stored resources extend survival.
Sustainable infrastructure creates it.
Identify and secure a location suitable for long-term post-Transition habitation.
Core Criteria
Reliable water potential
Food-production potential
Acceptable environmental hazard exposure
Independent infrastructure potential
Expansion capacity
Bonus Criteria
Multiple independent water sources
Existing agricultural infrastructure
Existing habitation
Renewable energy potential
Multiple access routes
Manufacturing potential
Enhanced Transition stability
Reward
Settlement Appraisal
Spatial Inventory Expansion
Additional rewards determined by settlement viability.
Lena leaned toward the last bonus criterion.
“Enhanced Transition stability?”
Information restricted at current Access Tier.
Naturally.
She looked at the quest again.
At least the System had finally given her something actionable.
Find land.
Unfortunately, Lena lived in California.
Land cost money.
Good land cost a lot of money.
And Lena had already spent enough today to make checking her bank account emotionally hazardous.
She opened a new spreadsheet tab.
MONEY
Then another thought occurred to her.
If the world really did change in twenty-seven days, there were financial decisions that would be completely insane under normal circumstances and perfectly rational now.
Credit.
Retirement.
Investments.
Loans.
She wasn’t going to start committing fraud because the apocalypse computer told her capitalism might have an expiration date.
But there was very little reason to protect her retirement account for age sixty-five if she had an eleven-point-eight-percent chance of civilization surviving the next month.
Lena stared at the number floating quietly in the corner of her vision.
28 DAYS : 01 HOURS : 07 MINUTES
“Tomorrow,” she said.
First she needed the asteroid to move.
Then she would start making decisions she couldn’t easily undo.
The replies began before bed.
Mostly automated.
One inbox rejected her message entirely.
One thanked her for contacting them and provided several links about near-Earth objects.
Lena snorted.
Then, shortly after midnight, she got an actual response.
An astronomer at one of the observatories she’d contacted.
It was courteous.
Brief.
They had reviewed her figures.
Their current observations showed no indication that QX₄ would undergo the alteration she described, and no known mechanism would produce it at the predicted time.
Lena read the message twice.
Then smiled.
“Perfect.”
That was actually better.
They’d seen it.
They’d checked.
They disagreed.
And tomorrow, if the System was right, they’d know she hadn’t extrapolated something they already suspected.
She replied shortly.
Thank you for reviewing it.
I understand.
Please retain my original prediction and reobserve QX₄ following the stated time.
Send.
Then she went to bed.
Lena woke before her alarm.
For several seconds she didn’t know why.
Then she saw the countdown.
PRECURSOR INTERACTION
00 HOURS : 38 MINUTES
She was out of bed immediately.
Coffee.
Laptop.
Phone.
QX₄ was still behaving exactly as expected.
The observatory had posted updated measurements during the night.
Normal.
Thirty minutes.
Twenty.
Ten.
At five minutes Lena stopped refreshing.
There wasn’t anything she could do.
She watched the System.
00:00:30
Her coffee went cold beside her, forgotten.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
PRECURSOR INTERACTION CONFIRMED
And…
Nothing.
Of course nothing.
The asteroid was miles away.
Lena refreshed.
No update.
Again.
Nothing.
Three minutes.
Five.
Ten.
Her confidence began doing something unpleasant.
“What happened?”
2026 QX₄ trajectory alteration occurred within predicted parameters.
“Then why isn’t anyone saying anything?”
Light-speed delay, observation cadence, data processing, and verification require time.
“Oh.”
Right.
Space.
Lena felt slightly stupid.
So she waited.
At eighteen minutes, an amateur astronomy account she’d followed the previous night posted something about unexpected residuals.
At twenty-three, someone replied that their equipment needed recalibration.
At twenty-nine: Seeing same discrepancy.
Lena sat forward.
Then nothing for eleven agonizing minutes.
At forty-three minutes, one of the professional observatories posted that follow-up observations of QX₄ had been requested.
Another observatory responded.
Numbers began appearing.
Lena opened the prediction she’d sent yesterday.
She didn’t understand enough orbital mechanics to independently compare every value.
But she recognized the important ones.
They matched.
Lena sat back.
For a moment, she felt nothing but relief.
Not because an asteroid had just done something impossible.
That was objectively terrible.
But because she wasn’t crazy.
The System was real.
The countdown was real.
And now she wasn’t the only person with proof.
Her relief lasted approximately ten seconds.
Then the implications caught up.
“Oh, fuck.”
Twenty-seven days.
She opened her sent folder.
Her original message suddenly looked very different.
Yesterday it had been a strange email from an unknown woman making an impossible prediction.
Today it was a timestamped warning from someone who knew, down to the numbers, what an asteroid was going to do before it did it.
People would read the second email.
Lena clicked Reply All.
Then stopped.
What could she actually tell them?
“System.
I need to warn them about Transition.”
Acknowledged.
“That’s not a lot of help.”
She thought about how to phrase the question.
“What information am I allowed to give them?”
All information currently available to you may be disclosed at your discretion.
“Okay.
What information do I actually have?”
That produced considerably more.
KNOWN TRANSITION PARAMETERS
Planetary Transition: 27 days remaining
Geophysical instability: Extreme
Atmospheric instability: Extreme
Climatic instability: Extreme
Oceanic instability: Extreme
Biospheric alteration: Certain
Technological disruption: Probable
Infrastructure disruption: Severe
Human biological alteration: Probable
Duration of primary instability: Unknown
Probability existing civil infrastructure remains continuously functional through primary instability: Low Lena read it twice.
That was considerably more information than the System had given her when she’d asked vague questions yesterday.
Apparently knowing what to ask mattered.
“Can you be more specific about the disasters?”
Specific events are dependent upon Transition progression and cannot be reliably projected at current Access Tier.
Lena stared at it.
“Fine.
Then what can you tell me?
What should people expect once Transition starts?”
Primary Transition effects will include sustained planetary instability and repeated natural disasters at magnitudes and frequencies exceeding those recorded by your civilization.
Affected event types will vary by geographic region and local Transition conditions.
Severe geophysical, atmospheric, climatic, and oceanic disruption should be expected repeatedly, frequently with limited recovery periods between major events.
Current projections indicate severe planetary instability will persist for years.
Lena stopped.
“Years?”
Correct.
“How many?”
Unknown.
“When does it end?”
No reliable endpoint can be projected.
Lena hesitated.
“Does it definitely end?”
The System took slightly longer to answer.
Unknown.
Well.
Fuck.
Lena leaned back in her chair.
Years.
Natural disasters worse than anything humanity had experienced.
Not one.
Not even a series with time to rebuild between them.
Again and again, with the type and severity depending on where you happened to live.
And nobody knew when it stopped.
If it stopped.
On top of everything else.
Biological changes.
Technological disruption.
Infrastructure failure.
Whatever human biological alteration meant.
Lena looked at the half-written email.
Yesterday she’d been trying to convince someone to listen.
Today she had to tell them what they were listening to.
She started typing.
This email was longer than the first, but not by much.
She gave them the System’s assessment as plainly as she could.
Years of extreme planetary instability.
Disasters beyond historical precedent.
Different regions facing different threats.
Little guarantee of recovery time between events.
Severe infrastructure disruption.
Biological changes affecting the planet and probably humanity itself.
And no known endpoint.
She didn’t tell them what to do about it.
That wasn’t her job.
The people reading this had entire agencies full of people whose job was figuring out what to do with information like this.
They had emergency planners.
Scientists.
Engineers.
Military logistics.
People who understood exactly what years of continuous global instability meant for a modern civilization.
Lena’s job was to make them believe they actually needed those plans.
The asteroid had done that.
Or at least she hoped it had.
She read the email once.
Then hit Send.
She forwarded it to every address she’d contacted the day before.
That was it.
No attempt to contact the President.
No posting it online and becoming the crazy asteroid woman on social media.
She’d given the right people something impossible to verify.
Then they’d verified it.
Now they knew what was coming.
What they did with twenty-seven days of warning was up to them.
Lena had her own twenty-seven days to worry about.
Lena had already lost a day.
She looked at the countdown.
27 DAYS : 14 HOURS : 07 MINUTES
“Okay.”
She opened her spreadsheet.
OH FUCK.xlsx.
The absurd filename was considerably less funny now.
She clicked the tab she’d created last night.
WHERE AM I EVEN PUTTING THIS???
Because while people with much larger salaries than Lena figured out what to do about the planet—
Lena needed somewhere to survive it.