REGOLITH

by

Brent Reilly

The paperback version is available at www.BrentReilly.com.

REGOLITH: Asteroid impacts have buried the surfaces of Mars, Mercury, and the Moon under meteorite ejecta called regolith. Regolith comes from two Greek words that mean “blanket” and “rock”. Now, the biggest impact in 65 million years threatens to do the same to Earth.

DEDICATION: The author dedicates this book to his beautiful wife Liz and their two wonderful sons, Brian and Lucas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The son of a magazine editor, Brent Reilly has a master's degree in counseling and lives with his family in the Caribbean island of San Andres, just south of the Caymans, where he builds oceanfront condos that can be seen at SanAndresCondo.com. His first book was “How To Kick Republican Butt!” and his next novel is “Raptors v. T-rex”.

Copyright © 2010 by the author, Brent Reilly.

Published by Brent Reilly, Smashwords edition.

This story is fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental. All rights are reserved. Except for book reviews, no more than four paragraphs can be reproduced without written permission from the author.

1

January 7th, 2012

“So, dad, when is the next president gonna get here?”

Henry Jackson snapped awake like he suddenly snorted smelling salts. Looking up from his black laptop, he saw his precocious sixteen year old daughter Lisa posing casually at the door of his new basement.

Jackson smelled trouble like a fart in the shower.

Lisa was like most teenagers, only more so. Ever since she got the bug to get into acting, singing, and modeling, Lisa never simply stood when she could instead theatrically pose. Even her casual poses seemed overly thought-out. Since she sucked at acting and hated singing, Lisa hung her hopes on modeling.

Given her talent for fucking with people, Jackson thought his daughter should follow him into politics. As a nympho for mind-fucks, Lisa took to politics like a pig to mud.

“What’s my little girl doing up so early?” he asked, knowing better than to give her simple question an honest answer. Despite working all night, Lisa’s unexpected intrusion jolted him awake. He planted his big feet on the hard metal floor and sat up straight in his cheap plastic chair to face her, a bull looking for red. After exhausting himself preparing for an asteroid strike that could exterminate humanity, something warned him that this final day before the impact would be the longest.

Lisa did not get out of bed before noon without a damn good reason. So why was she up before sunrise? From long experience, Jackson assumed Lisa was guilty, then looked for evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

Things weren’t always this way, however.

His daughter used to be everything that he ever wanted in a son. Until Lisa hit puberty – late as usual – she was daddy’s little girl, and she made him love her more than he ever wanted. She gave away affection like Santa gives away toys. Her hugs felt so good she could have charged for them. Whereas his son made him feel like a failure as a father, Lisa made Jackson feel like the champion of daddies. She called him her hero so sincerely it unnerved him. They shot hoops, played poker, went parachuting together – hell, he even taught her how to fly his prototype heloplane. She made him feel young, which kept him afloat when he unexpectedly became a grandfather six years ago. No one understood him like his little girl. She could read him like a book and quote chapter and verse. Jackson frequently joked that his daughter was the son he always wanted -- which really pissed off her older brother.

Then puberty struck viciously and she transformed like the metamorph from the movie X-Men. When Lisa hit puberty, puberty hit back. This delighted her Colombian mother, who unknowingly poured salt into his wound by helping Lisa get breast implants while vacationing in South America. At 15 fricking years old. Lisa joked that two great things have come out of Colombia, and she had both of them.

Like far too many teenagers, Lisa then started acting her age. Big tits made Lisa behave as if she had more hormones than neurons. Her wardrobe changed faster than a Broadway play. She and her cousins pillaged shoe stores like Vikings. Not since Bush and Cheney have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. A blind man couldn’t mistake Lisa for a tomboy now. The more attention men fed her, the hungrier she became. She began paying men compliments as if she expected a receipt. Lisa quickly turned to modeling to feed her insatiable appetite for attention. Jackson watched helplessly as the son he always wanted turned, Kafka-like, into a wannabe reality star. The favorite “son” once anchored in his heart floated away with life’s tide.

As Lisa later put it: “I was a buoy, but I drifted.”

Jackson had no idea last year that his wife was getting their 15 year old a boob job in Medellin. A dozen cops with tasers couldn’t have stunned him more. His daughter’s big tits crippled him as if she had inflated them with kryptonite. No Marine suffered a more humiliating defeat than Jackson watching his little tomboy vanquished before the onslaught of puberty. He hardly recognized his own daughter. She spent more time with the pretty-boy hotties wallpapered in her room than with her own damn father. He flew from hero to has-been at warp speed. Jackson went from feeling like the World’s Greatest Dad to the World’s Closest ATM. It was a bitter defeat for a guy unaccustomed to losing.

Girls keep getting older, younger.

Jackson knew he lost her for good when her boyfriend gave her a million dollar engagement ring two weeks ago on her 16th birthday. On Christmas, of all days. His cherished “Christmas girl” turned into a lump of coal in his stocking. He had even given her the high speed driving lessons at the Bondurant Driving School in Phoenix that she had always wanted, yet this was how she repaid him. By getting fucking married. Jackson couldn’t get over losing her so soon. The Grinch couldn’t have planned a worse Christmas. The holidays couldn’t have been a greater disaster if FEMA was put in charge of them.

His daughter’s eagerness to flee the nest gave birth to a Category 5 middle-age crisis as intense as it was unexpected. As a 50 year old grandfather in excellent shape, Jackson overnight felt decades older.

Why did his personal life always go to shit exactly when his professional life started taking off?

Always a lousy loser, Jackson hadn’t felt this bummed out since his mom “accidentally” ran over his favorite dog. For a guy who could otherwise outlast the Energizer Bunny, he lost energy like a leaky tire lost air. He now watched golf instead of football. Like the Aerosmith song, his get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went.

Jackson wanted to keep her for as long as possible. Lisa was the only one in the family for whom political discussions were not a sleep aid. Now who was he gonna talk shop with? No one but his enemies would appreciate what he did and, really, who gave a fuck what they thought? Now who was going to validate him? Certainly not the voters. Those fuckers could turn on you faster than a teenager blindsided by puberty. Jackson fell into a funk when his daughter turned into a girl. He lost more energy than the battery in his father’s ancient Ford F-150 pickup. Not even Methuselah ever felt this old.

Although freezing cold, Lisa dressed for her morning jog with skimpy white Lycra shorts, a blue tight-fitting half top that showed off her six-pack abs, and her long blonde hair in a ponytail. While she hated the cold, she loved to show off her hard abs, because they contrasted nicely with her now big boobs. It seemed just yesterday that Lisa lost her braces and found her breasts.

Ever since an ex-supermodel told her that she should see modeling as what she is, not just what she does, Lisa annoyingly stayed in modeling mode all day, every day. Which is why she posed when normal people simply stood.

To her father, Lisa was a singer who did modeling in order to get into acting. Or whatever they do in reality TV shows. The thought of Lisa becoming the next Paris Hilton made his bowels freeze. He suspected she knew this, and therefore played it for all that she could.

Jackson coldly examined his daughter like a forensic pathologist eyeing a corpse, searching for clues as to why she stood before him at dawn. He couldn’t have been more suspicious if she came home early on a Friday night. His artic blue eyes looked into her artic blue eyes, which stood out on her very Latina face. It was like looking into one of those weird carnival mirrors.

While he instantly realized that Lisa was fucking with him again, it took him a while to figure out how why. And she generously waited for it, too, patiently letting him catch up, like that old cartoon guy with the cane desperately trying to cross the street before getting hit by an 18-wheel Mach truck.

Something was not right, but it took him forever to see it. But when he did, he felt sucker-punched: Lisa was wearing makeup! Once again she reminded him that she wasn’t his little girl anymore. Once again he felt his age, and then some. Not even the French lost this many battles.

He quickly realized she was going to ambush his special guest, Texas Governor Daniel Cooper, the ungrateful bastard he was desperately trying to get elected president. His guest was the reason he was up all night, plotting, planning, positioning. His future would be determined by how well this meeting went. Billions of dollars and, more importantly, his reputation, were on the line. Lisa then was half-dressed not to actually jog, but to momentarily capture the undivided attention of what could be the next president of the United States.

Ah shit!

Ever since Lisa got hooked on politics several years ago, she talked openly of scoring a sweet post in the White House. Not a job, per se, but more of a “presence”. Not because she wanted to change the world. That would take, like, idealism and hard work. No, like other pretty teenagers obsessed with hotter girls in the gossip rags, she just wanted to stand out and be noticed (Paris Hilton-itis), and working at the White House did that.

Boy, he thought, Governor Cooper is screwed.

“I just want to help my daddy,” Lisa said with a fake smile, her tone telling him exactly the opposite. She was just toying with him now, generously throwing him clues like she tossed scraps to his ugly hunting dog, Chucha. “Chucha”, which means “body odor” in Spanish, only covered one of that dog’s many defects. Father and daughter had a long history of matching wits, yet he clearly remembered a time when he won most of the time.

Jackson was not surprised that his daughter wanted to stick her finger in the most exciting presidential race of his lifetime. Since President McCain died in 2010 after just a year in office, the country obsessed over the rematch between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to determine which would challenge President Sarah Palin in the 2012. Many saw war with China over its threatened invasion of Taiwan inevitable if Palin won, so the stakes were huge. War with China would make Iraq look like Afghanistan.

Many Democrats believed that Barack Obama would have won in 2008 if the financial crisis started in, say, September instead of just after the election in November. But instead of letting Lehman Brothers fail in September, Bush propped up the collapsing investment bank with secret Federal Reserve discount loans until just after the election. By concealing his administration’s massive incompetence, ignorance, and negligence, Bush delayed the financial crisis and subsequent trillion dollar bank bailout until after voters elected another Republican to succeed him. If Bush let Lehman Brothers collapse in September, Republicans probably would not only have lost the presidential race by several points and several million votes, but lost another eight senate seats and twenty-plus congressional seats. Hence many voters thought Obama deserved another shot. Even though he lost in the most favorable Democratic environment since 1964.

Another third of Democrats believed that only a woman like, say, Hillary Clinton, could take on a likeable telegenic female Republican president. Otherwise, white women would have to choose between a personable white female that they could identify with, and an aloof, professorial black guy with an odd name and foreign background. Pundits salivated over this dream match.

But other Democrats wanted a third choice, arguing that Barack lost when all the indicators predicted a landslide, and that Hillary proved an inept manager of her 2008 campaign, even if she ended the race ten times the campaigner than when she started. Losing in 2008 to a disorganized John McCain disillusioned many blacks, who feared getting jilted again. It was like thinking you were going to take the hottest chick to prom, only for her to publicly no-show on your sorry ass.

Polling among Democratic primary voters was all over the place, so Fox News didn’t know who to slime.

Any combination was ratings heaven, despite 2008 fatigue. A rematch with Obama, Hillary rising to challenge the first female president, or a dark horse Democrat overtaking them both sold commercials better than sex. That this election would probably determine whether America went to war with China over Taiwan only fueled passions across the ideological spectrum.

Then Daniel Cooper shocked them all. With Jackson’s help, Cooper out-raised both Hillary and Barack by raising $116 million in 2011, then scored surprise second place victories over Hillary in Iowa and Barack in New Hampshire. Even Garth Brooks reportedly asked, “Who the hell is Daniel Cooper?”

Democrats, used to their favorite candidates getting shot down by old, white Iowa and New Hampshire voters, now had three exceptional candidates to divide them. Even John Edward’s bastard children finally had someone worth rooting for. And polls showed all three blowing away President Palin, herself the most exciting Republican candidate since Reagan. Seeing the four of them slug it out every night was like watching reality TV with actual reality. It was stranger than non-fiction.

All while China staged the largest amphibious exercises in their long history of large amphibious exercises. Until large asteroid fragments threatened to sink every ship on the seas and wash away every coastline in the world. And bury the planet in trillions of tons of meteorite ejecta called regolith.

The only thing the pundits could accurately predict was that nobody could accurately predict this election. Like giving inmates Viagra, it was fucking wild.

Governor Cooper turned an exciting rematch into an even more thrilling three-way contest that was ratings fucking magic. His message was a tranquilizer, his presence an aphrodisiac, his touch a suppository. For four years Barack and Hillary planned their rematch, only to see some Texas nobody bitch slap them at the polls. Four exciting applicants fought for the world’s top job.

But Cooper was no match for a teenage girl at the top of her game. Girls teach each other how to manipulate men every time they migrate as a herd to the bathroom, and the harder the challenge, the greater the victory. Or, as Napoleon once put it, glory may be fleeting, but failure is forever.

“Thanks for the offer, honey, but Governor Cooper and I have a busy morning discussing how to beat the Chinese. You know, how we can save trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. Nothing that would interest you. But maybe later you can file some paperwork,” Jackson said coldly to dash her hopes of sticking around. She may love politics – at least the manipulation of people -- but policy couldn’t hold her attention.

Oddly enough, what he told her was true. America was about to get its butt kicked by China over Taiwan, and he was determined to prevent it while President Palin visited Belgium to bully the Europeans into joining her-- or else. Which is why he stayed up all night preparing for this meeting the day before the biggest asteroid in 65 million years threatened Earth. Jackson hadn’t tensed up this much since his last prostrate exam.

James Chiang, the grandson of Chiang Kia-Shek, won the presidency in 2009 and planned on changing Taiwan’s official name from “Republic of China” to “Republic of Taiwan” on the 100th anniversary of their founding by Sun Yat-sen in 1912. In response, China prepared the Chinese version of D-Day to invade.

Pundits called it C-Day.

When China fired missiles off Taiwan in 1996, military experts, noting the lack of transport ships, referred to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as “a million man swim.” Requisitioning thousands of civilian “junk” ships for this year’s exercise shut them up. For the first time ever, the communists Chinese had a credible invasion fleet. Not a great one, but a credible one.

If this crisis degenerated into war, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was going to lose four aircraft carrier groups when China dropped 100 kilo rods of enriched uranium from their new military satellites. Nothing could be less friendly than the sympathetic explosions as the uranium rods detonated fuel and munitions, deck after bloody deck. The U.S. Pacific Fleet would sink faster than a tax hike proposal on the elite superrich.

China did not even need to use their new supercavitating torpedoes with micro-nuke warheads, their so-called “Carrier Killers.” This was not an idle threat, either, since in 2006 a Chinese diesel sub got within five miles of the Kitty Hawk. A supercavitating torpedo, which envelopes itself in bubbles to reduce drag, was the equivalent of an underwater missile. “Micro-nukes” yielded less than a kiloton -- enough to devastate a 15-ship aircraft carrier battle group, but small compared to the 20-kiloton suckers that blew away Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II.

And if America intervened, China could drop uranium rods on American military bases in Japan, South Korea, Alaska, Hawaii, and the squadrons of multi-billion dollar stealth bombers at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. From orbit, the $100 billion in stealth bombers at Guam were more vulnerable than a half-naked teenager sucking up to a charismatic presidential candidate.

America could lose more troops in an hour than in every single conflict since the Korean War combined. The American dead in Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Somalia, the Balkans, the Gulf War, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined would not equal the loss of American life if China dropped on them. And that didn’t include the millions they could kill with the rods China reportedly held in geostationary orbit above major American cities.

In effect, China warned that it would have to adopt the Bush pre-emptive strike option in order to defend themselves from – wait for it – the Bush pre-emptive strike option. Bush’s pre-emptive strike rationale for invading a country that did not threaten America forced its enemies to pre-empt. Since Palin was threatening China with carrier groups, China could credibly argue that it was only acting in self-defense. It was like Bush threatening to topple the Iranian regime for building nukes, when nukes were the only thing that prevented the regime from being toppled.

Even the new Aegis II anti-air system, limited to an 85 degree angle, could not tilt high enough to strike weapons falling from orbit. Just one hundred uranium rods could sink all four Far East aircraft battle groups, leaving America powerless as China added Taiwan’s trillion dollars in American bonds to its own $3 trillion. China would then own more U.S. Treasuries than Americans, giving them default veto power over the world economy. China, the world’s biggest creditor, would have enormous financial leverage over America, the world’s largest debtor. Like banksters, China would become too big to fail.

The Taiwan Strait would no longer be international waters, and sure as hell would no longer be named the “Taiwan” Strait. Japan and Korea would bend over like new inmates as China screwed them with fees for everything that passed through the “China Strait”. China would be the Persian Gulf of imported electronics. America would be as dependent on China for electronics as they were dependent upon the Persian Gulf for oil.

Americans would not be this surprised since proud patriotic Iraqis fought a brutal foreign occupation that tortured and sexually humiliated them rather than accept letting their families get by without basic security, electricity, and drinking water.

Actually, Jackson knew that it was worse than that. American aircraft carriers operate on two-year operation cycles, with six months at sea followed by eighteen months in the shipyards getting overhauls, which left only three actually at sea at any one time. Commercial shippers would be shot dead by their shareholders if they only utilized their $100 million super-container ships a quarter of the time. Congress may as well go back to working 80 days a year as the Republicans did under Bush. Losing four carrier groups meant losing superpower status overnight, and once America looked vulnerable, a flock of two-bit dictators would be flipping her the bird.

Since President Palin needed a war with China to get re-elected, Jackson needed to prevent or delay war with China. And that is where the governor of Texas came in.

At least, if Lisa didn’t fuck it all up.

What Lisa did not realize was that he was betting the family fortune on not just making this guy president, but doing so in exchange for a long list of very specific favors. Jackson and Cooper shared more golden handcuffs than an S&M orgy. So Lisa could easily fuck everything up. And since she has such a talent for sticking her hook into people, especially rich, famous, and powerful people, fucking everything up was a real possibility.

The irony of battling his half-dressed daughter before dawn to save a trillion dollars, thousands of lives, and the family fortune was not lost on him.

“Mr. and Mrs. Cooper will be late, but you could always meet them after your morning run,” he suggested.

His daughter and Cooper’s wife did not get along. Lisa was way too good at acting cute, and Cooper had too long a history as a ladies man. Cooper’s wife feared that any man who could get it up was seducible and that her husband was only as faithful as his opportunities. If women were beauty objects and men success objects, then the most powerful man on the planet was a walking Spanish Fly attraction. Cooper could’ve looked like Mick Jagger instead of Dean Martin and still scored more views than YouTube.

Lisa wasn’t buying what he was poorly selling, however. When she smiled he knew she already checked his scheduler, and once again he regretted giving her his password. Because he worked so much at home since becoming the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, she acted as his executive assistant. She was so good that he was tempted to pay her what she was truly worth. But letting her know just how dependent he had become on her would only give her that much more leverage over him, and politics is all about leverage.

“What are you afraid of, daddy? Uncle Dan loves me.”

Governor Cooper, indeed, seemed overly fond of her. Which was the problem. Jackson had no doubt that Cooper liked her far more than he liked him. Hell, everyone liked Lisa more than they liked him. She called him “uncle” because he was old enough to be her grandfather, good looking enough to be her boyfriend, and looked rich enough to be her sugar daddy. And it allowed her to get away with so much more. His daughter could get under someone’s skin faster than a starving mosquito.

And she damn well knew what he was afraid of. She wanted to eclipse his own relationship with Cooper, which at the moment didn’t look hard to do. Jackson and Cooper were both political allies and rivals. Cooper needed Jackson because he raised millions of dollars for Democratic candidates as the chairman of the DNC. Jackson needed Cooper because he needed specific things that only the president of the United States could offer. Like multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts a la Halliburton.

Such complex and ever-evolving relationships were normal in politics. Politicians were slick, deceptive, word-splitting, self-serving, hard-to-pin down evasive publicity whores because their public perception determined their power relative to everyone else. The net perception of this web of relationships determined who had how much power, over whom, when, how, why, and for how long. And that perception changed every day. Politicians kiss ass 10% of the time to get their asses kissed 90% of the time. Which was why, as Henry Kissinger put it, 90% of politicians gave the other 10% a bad reputation. Cooper was simply better at this than Jackson, who relied on money to gain leverage. Businessmen like Jackson entered politics because money wants what it cannot buy.

“Cooper is mine,” Jackson said defiantly, annoyed how he came off like the child and she the adult.

“Not yet, he isn’t,” Lisa pleasantly replied, not at all intimidated. “But he will be.”

Just then he heard the echo of laughter coming from his house upstairs. Jackson easily recognized the seductive laughter of Cooper, who laughed easily and often. But Jackson had to concentrate for a moment before he realized that the woman laughing with him was their visiting French cousin, Monique. Jackson cringed as he realized that his daughter persuaded Monique to greet the governor at the front door so there would be no door bell for him to hear. Which meant Lisa was just distracting him while Monique ambushed Cooper. And she threw such a big clue at him with her first words.

The little bitch out-maneuvered him again!

While Lisa, post-boob job, was striking, Monique was the best looking woman in a family full of good looking women. Lisa may be a sports car, but Monique was a NASCAR-class hot rod. While Lisa struggled for grunt modeling work, Monique was something of a supermodel in Europe. Monique related to men via her sexuality, and thus always looked in the mood. Which made her an awkward house-guest for a happily married man with an insecure wife.

Lorena, Jackson’s wife, was afraid Monique was too much of a temptation for her husband of nearly 25 years. Which was a reasonable assumption. What none of them knew is that Jackson lost his virginity to Monique’s mother 35 years ago, long before he met his wife. He attended the mother’s wedding, changed Monique’s diapers a few times, and even became her godfather. He therefore had no sexual interest in Monique. Which was good. What he didn’t know was if Monique knew that he fucked the shit out of her mother one glorious long-ago summer. (Literally – she loved anal.) Which was not good. So being around Monique made him feel vulnerable, just not in the way that most men did. His wife, however, picked up on his discomfort, and naturally drew the wrong conclusion.

What Jackson was unable to explain to his beloved wife was that he did not lust after Monique, but after Monique’s long dead mother. The memory of her made him harder than calculus. She gave him more wood than Home Depot. Flashbacks kept him up longer than the neighbor’s rooster from his childhood. But, unfortunately, such Clinton-esque explanations were well beyond his meager means. Some itches simply cannot be scratched.

And this was no reflection on Lorena. She tuned him like a piano. Their sex life was better now than it was a decade ago. He bragged that making love to her was better than sex. If you’re fucking when you want to come and making love when you want your lover to come, then they both fucked and made love like newlyweds. They had a sex life that rabbits would envy.

Before proposing a quarter century ago, Jackson told Lorena a joke an uncle once told him. There are three types of women: (1) those who don’t like giving head, and thus give it as little as possible; (2) those who give it only when they are horny or drunk enough; and (3) the rare gem who fucking loves to suck cock. The punch line? If you ever meet a girl in Category Three, fucking marry her!

That he promised her two organisms for every time she swallowed him was all the incentive she needed. Each thought they were getting the better end of the deal, which is the secret to a happy marriage.

Jackson, for his part, went out of his way to not only stay faithful, but to give her nothing to even worry about. Her biological father left her mother for other women, which left Lorena permanently insecure. Which is why he always tried to bring someone along when he traveled.

Lorena had good reason to worry about an affair, though, because Monique was instinctively attracted to rich, powerful men. Monique was born with looks, money, and connections, so the only thing left was power. The men she went out with – it’s odd to call married men “boyfriends” – represented the rich, famous, and powerful. As Kissinger put it, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Jackson saw this coming a decade ago when Monique was his daughter’s age. Monique had a fling that brought down the French Finance Minister in scandal. Underage sex with a total stunner by a powerful married man in public office could do that. Even in France. The resulting media frenzy helped launch Monique’s modeling career. She did her first television commercial not a month later. For condoms.

If sex was a weapon, then Monique possessed WMD, and not even Iraq attracted this many inspectors. Cooper would not be the first president who tried to invade her and, as with the Iraqis, someone was likely to be sexually humiliated. What was worse was that Lorena knew that Monique was exactly his type, physically – dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and a narrow, athletic physique. In Spanish they’re called “morenitas.” Monique even laughed at his jokes without coming across as patronizing, which required true skill.

Although not a traditionally handsome man, Jackson was built like a bear without the hair: 6’4”, barrel-chested, with massive arms and legs from years of working out too much. While governor of Arizona, word leaked that he wore size 15 shoes and the flood of dirty letters from women shocked him. He joked that he got more letters from single women than votes. No longer could he count on his modest looks to protect him from the flirtations of women. Even a stunner like Monique.

Jackson mistakenly assumed that Lisa was the one ambushing Cooper, but once he heard Monique’s voice, followed by Cooper’s easy laughter, he knew how wrong, and how fucked, he was.

Monique wanted to seduce Cooper!

“No, no,” he quickly told himself. It was far worse: Lisa wanted Monique to seduce Cooper.

Shit! Fuck! Shit!

Nothing would attract Monique more than the next president of the United States. Jackson figured Cooper had only a 50-50 chance of winning the nomination, much less the presidency, but Monique didn’t know that. She would only know what Lisa told her. Like, say, “wanna meet our next president?”

That would do it.

Jackson had billions riding on Cooper winning, and hundreds of other rich investors counted on him to get Cooper elected. Even the hint of a sex scandal could blow Cooper out of the water like the USS Cole. He would not be the first presidential candidate destroyed by a sex scandal -- Gary Hart got caught fooling around with Donna Rice on a yacht ironically called Monkey Business in the 1980s. Jackson’s billions would go so far down the drain a plumber couldn’t save them.

The realization of what was going on struck him like a kick in the nuts that took his breath away. When he saw Lisa’s face light up, he knew he was right. He hadn’t been this fucked since one glorious summer 35 years ago.

2

The asteroid hurled around the Sun at over 100,000 kilometers per hour. Although impossibly fast for a human spacecraft, that was a typical speed for rocks crossing the solar system. Some, like 24 kilometer comet Swift-Tuttle, transverse the solar system at over twice that speed.

The C-type carbonaceous asteroid, half stone and half frozen gases, had traveled from at least as far as the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, half a billion kilometers away. Rocky asteroids tend to be dark, and icy ones bright. With an albedo of just .05, this asteroid was as black as coal.

Originally 12 kilometers when discovered passing Mars, it was larger than the asteroid that exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and therefore placed in the “Planet Killer” category of Earth-crossing space rocks. Although small compared to Ceres, a 950 kilometer Main Belt asteroid, Chiron, a 180 kilometer Kuiper Belt comet, or Chariklo, a 258 kilometers Centaur (between Saturn and Uranus), this new asteroid was still large enough to wipe out humanity.

But hell, over one thousand space rocks large enough to wipe out humanity crossed Earth’s orbit. What made this new asteroid stand out was that it would soon become the largest space rock that crossed Earth’s orbit. It joined other Planet Killer NEOs (Near Earth Objects) like 1627 Ivar, at 6 kilometers and 1580 Betula, at 8 kilometers, both of which cross Earth’s path.

Congress gave NASA the specific mandate, although not the money, to track all objects 70 meters or larger that crossed Earth’s orbit, although budget cuts by the Bush Administration delayed this mission by several years. The international Spaceguard, the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch, NEAT, LINEAR, the Minor Planet Center, JPL, and other automated NEO trackers had so far detected 1200 NEOs at least one kilometer large, tens of thousands at least 100 meters large, and millions that cross Earth’s orbit at least 10 meters large.

The typical 250 meter-long NEO had more explosive power than all of Earth’s 50,000 nuclear weapons combined, and tens of thousands that size crossed Earth’s orbit. So Earth was threatened by tens of thousands of space rocks potentially more damaging than World War III, yet Bush cut the few million to track them.

While the nuke that devastated Nagasaki had a yield of 20 kilotons, Earth was threatened by two million NEOs with explosive yields above a megaton, 200,000 in the gigaton range, 1200 in the teraton, and a handful in the pentagon yield range. All of the nuclear weapons on Earth would not produce a gigaton explosion, much less a teraton. The new asteroid had a pentagon explosive yield, which could flatten an entire hemisphere, like one did to Mars a few billion years ago, making northern Mars a couple kilometers lower on average than southern Mars.

They were not called Planet Killers for nothing.

Earth averaged a close call with a City Killer every few years, a “Nation Killer” every decade, and a “Region Killer” every century. Every year on average a rock with a yield of 15 kilotons or greater explodes in the atmosphere, with another dozen in the 1-kilometer range. In 1908, a 50 meter wide asteroid exploded several kilometers over Siberia and flattened 80 million trees over two thousand square kilometers, comparable to wiping out the entire New York metropolitan area. And that was just 50 meters big. Millions of rocks that size or bigger crossed Earth’s orbit.

If a large rock hit deep water, the resulting tsunami could reach a few kilometers high before washing away coastal cities. And this threat was not as hypothetical as politicians treated it. A tsunami deposit has been found almost one thousand feet above sea level on the Hawaiian island of Lanai -- higher than the Empire State Building observation deck. And the 350 megaton explosion that struck a few thousand years ago over Argentina was over twenty times more powerful than the relatively puny nuke that decimated Hiroshima in 1945.

A one-kilometer rock – and over one thousand of them cross Earth’s orbit – could kill a few billion and create a nuclear winter that lasts for centuries. Plants would die within weeks, animals within months, and most of humanity within a few years.

They’re not called “Extinction Events” for nothing.

This particular Planet Killer, new to the inner solar system, was soon named 2011FU. The “2011” referred to the year it was discovered, and the public assumed the letters meant, “fuck you.”

(The letters actually refer to when in the year it was discovered to clarify who reported what and when, since one object may be sighted by several observers. “AA” means it was found in the first half of January.)

Asteroids have been named after people, places, sponsors, and even pets. 55 Pandora was named after the woman who released all of the world’s evils (that bitch!). The Finns in the 1940s and 1950 named many after their cities and ports (what imagination!). At least 16 have been named for the relatives of the legendary discoverers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker. Max Wolf named 482 Petrina and 483 Seppina after his dogs, who must have been totally gay. 2322 Kitt Peak was named after the Arizonan observatory that has found more NEOs than any other in the world. Perhaps the oddest was 2817 Perec, named after a French author who wrote a 300-page novel called La Disparition that never once used the letter “E”, the most common letter in English.

Gabrielle was first seen as it narrowly missed Mars, which gave it a speed boost like a gravitational slingshot. This not only accelerated the asteroid, but made its new orbit a mystery. Tracking asteroids with known orbits is tricky enough, but finding one specific black-as-coal rock in the vastness of space is virtually impossible unless it passes in front of a shiny object, like it did Mars. Without that contrast, finding a dark object in the blackness of space is like a blind quadriplegic searching in a dark room at night for a black cat that already ran outside.

Astronomers detect fast space rocks by taking three sets of pictures to see what points of light in the sky have moved. The stars and the planets stay where they are, relatively speaking, so whatever light moves is an asteroid or comet. Astronomers don’t actually see asteroids, but their reflections, and some reflect far better than others. Finding space rocks, even large ones, can be so difficult that several bigger than Pluto have been found in only the last decade.

Many asteroids cannot be detected because they reflect sunlight poorly, orbit closer to the Sun so they cannot be seen because Earth faces them during the day, or if the rock is coming directly at Earth. Automated image-search software screens out objects that move less than 1.5 arc seconds per hour to minimize false positives. A space rock that heads directly to Earth or comes far from the plane of the elliptic may not be detected until too late.

Thus, weeks went by before astronomers found it again. Rogue rocks are rare, especially any this big. Gabrielle became only the fourth NEO larger than 10 kilometers and the largest that crossed Earth’s orbit. Humanity had already landed – well, crashed – probes into the surface of Eros, an S-type, to study its composition, but Gabrielle was their first chance to discover what the C-type asteroids from the Main Belt were made of.

How ironic if, instead, Gabrielle found out what humanity was made of.

With hundreds of telescopes trained on the new neighbor, it was determined that after Gabrielle rounded the Sun, it would miss Earth by over 10 million kilometers.

Gabrielle captivated the astronomy community worldwide because it was so different from any other asteroid: 1) it would pass relatively close by; 2) astronomers had enough time to study it with different types of telescopes – radio, radar, x-ray, gamma-ray, interferonomy, various infrared, visible light; 3) it was bigger than any other space rock that crossed Earth’s orbit; 4) it spun rapidly on its long axis, rather than tumble head over feet; and 5) it periodically shot out a long tail of dust, rock, and gas, which kept bringing it closer to Earth. A comet loses most of its gases from the part most exposed to the Sun, its head and shoulders. Gabrielle was, quite literally, losing her ass.

But, then, an odd thing happened on its way out of the inner solar system.

Gabrielle changed course.

3

Rays of morning sunlight began burning over the dark Rincon Mountains to the east as the always impeccably dressed Governor Cooper, driving uncomfortably alone, sped down Highway 19 from the Hilton El Conquistador Hotel in Tucson. The Chiricahuas and Santa Ritas Mountains loomed in the darkness behind him as he drove south towards Green Valley, twenty miles south of Tucson. While the freeway going south was empty, families fleeing the coming impact packed the freeway going north.

Candidates for president are never alone outside of the bathroom. Cooper never liked being alone. Yet here he was, defying his every instinct. He looked into the rearview mirror and again practiced hiding the fear eating him up inside. The day had barely begun, and already he wanted it over with.

The Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary had been nerve-wrecking. Coming in second both times kept him in the race, but coming in first just once may have knocked out either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Now he had a week before Nevada and he needed to hash things out with his staff. And since that space rock was going to pass so close by, he may as well take some time off to re-group, since he was not going to get any media coverage anyways.

Not with the Fidel Fragment about to obliterate Cuba.

Winning or losing either Iowa or New Hampshire would have reduced his stress. But no, God apparently had Groucho Marx’s sense of humor. Seeing Obama come first in Iowa and third in New Hampshire, and Hillary come first in New Hampshire and third in Iowa, made him feel like a meaty sandwich that someone, somehow, someday was going to take a big bite out of.

A burst of flatulence dampened his boxers and his urge for a bowel movement evaporated. He shifted position while lowering the window, feeling better as cold desert air invaded the car.

He soon passed signs for the 60th annual Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Showcase meeting at the Tucson Convention Center. He wanted to stop by to get in the local evening news, quickly visit the Tucson Chamber of Commerce at the Tucson Mall, and attend the chili cook-off at Vigilante Days in Tombstone, of OK Corral fame.

He loved chili, but was afraid to eat it because it once gave him wet diarrhea, which had him pissing out his anus like a garden hose right before a major speech. Projectile vomiting from one’s anus is some nasty shit.

In two weeks he had to come back to Tucson for the Tucson Rodeo Parade and La Fiesta de los Vaqueros, one of the nation’s largest outdoor rodeos. Texans loved rodeos, and Cooper tried to associate himself with this southwestern sport whenever possible. He didn’t actually enjoy riding horses – like George W. Bush, he was a windshield cowboy -- but voters like rodeos, and that’s what counted. Cooper knew he was going to need all the help he could get to win the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This year’s presidential campaign would be historic because whoever got the most votes would actually win the damn thing. That never happened before. The Founding Fathers designed a system that had an Electoral College elect the president because those heroes of democracy didn’t trust the voters. 2012 would be the first time in American history that the national vote winner officially secured the presidency.

Seventeen states, representing the majority of electoral votes needed to decide an election, passed legislation that gave all of their state’s votes to the popular vote winner nationwide. Called “the Interstate Agreement to Elect the President by National Popular Vote”, the initiative was started in the 1990’s by former Congressman John Anderson (R-Illinois and Independent presidential candidate), former Congressman John Buchanan (R-Alabama), former Senator Birch Bayh (D-Indiana), and Common Cause President Chellie Pingree who, inexplicitly, went around calling herself Chellie Pingree.

Now, every vote held the same value. Instead of turnout being important in just half a dozen battleground states, it became important in every state. Squeezing a million more votes out of Massachusetts or Alabama suddenly became easier and cheaper than winning over 100,000 more skeptical voters in Florida or Ohio. It was the opposite of disenfranchisement.

The Founding Fathers did not favor the current statewide winner-take-all system. In fact, only two states chose it in the very first presidential election in 1789. Since then, four elections were lost by the winner of the most votes: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Samuel Tilden in 1876, Glover Cleveland in 1888, and Al Gore in 2000. Tilden actually won over 3% more popular votes than Hayes, yet still lost the election.

That, like wet diarrhea, is some really fucked up shit.

The Constitution gives the states exclusive authority to decide how it chooses presidential electors, so there was no need to amend the Constitution. Congress has no oversight authority over presidential elections and did not need to pass any laws. Instead of awarding their votes to whoever won the most votes in their state, seventeen states awarded their votes to whoever won the most votes in the country. That’s all it took. Democracy at last.

However, to give the new system a moral and financial boost, Congress embraced the popular vote mandate with the No Vote Left Behind law of 2009, which required universal registration when drivers renewed their licenses, made Election Day a paid federal holiday, gave voters a $100 tax credit, made the DMV auto-re-register those who moved, and rewarded the twenty states with the highest participation. Which happened to all be Blue States. In particular, it gave billions to states that offered vote-by-mail and early voting, while giving nothing to states that used electronic voting machines that could not be audited with a paper trail. With early mail-in voting, “Election Day” now lasted a month. Registration drives, like those done by ACORN, became instantly obsolete.

America had 210 million licensed drivers, or roughly 80 million more drivers than voters in the 2008 presidential election. Registering everyone with a drivers license as a Democrat, Republican, or Other made it that much easier for those missing 80 million eligible voters to fucking vote. Especially by mail. You didn’t have to vote, like in Australia, but you had to register to vote in order to get a drivers license. Having the DMV automatically re-register those who move made voting both painless and idiot-proof -- two keys to a successful democracy.

The idea was to minimize the barriers to voting. The easier it was to vote, the more people voted. States mail out personalized ballots that included all local races and voters simply filled them out, signed and returned them, postage paid by the state. First time voters or those who hadn’t voted recently had to include picture ID. Those who didn’t get a ballot in the mail then had time to get on the voter rolls and vote by Election Day. Oregon’s three decades of experience with 100% mail-in voting let state governments know that they would collectively be saving billions leisurely scanning mailed-in ballots over a month rather than frantically fixing machines on Election Day that screwed up voters’ trust in the integrity of the system.

Democrats loved universal registration because the vast majority of the 65 million eligible voters who did not vote in 2008 were poor, minorities, and/or single women – all of whom disproportionately vote Democrat. Voting in 2008 increased only 4.3%, from 125,736,000 in 2004 to 131,114,000, far less than population growth. With early, no-excuse mail-in voting, experts predicted a 20% increase in voting, which would translate into around 25 million additional votes, most of which would be Democratic. That would make the White House a lock, score Dems several more senators, and a net gain of fifty-plus congressional seats.

Mandatory voter registration and mail-in voting virtually assured Democrats of super-majorities in the House and Senate, and whoever won the Democratic nomination was almost guaranteed to win the presidency.

As Thomas Jefferson put it, it is not the majority who rule, but the majority that vote who rule. Or, rather, the representatives of the majority who vote.

The catch – and there is always a catch – is that few of those 65 million potentially new voters were white men. Against either America’s first black or first female elected president, few Democratic primary voters were rooting for the old rich white guy. So, to solicit whatever sympathy he could squeeze out of an unsympathetic electorate, Cooper cast himself as the scrappy underdog fighting heroically against two political giants. Which had the convenient virtue of being true. And which earned him the silver in the first two contests.

Cooper adjusted his position in the driver’s seat in search of another fart, but came up empty, although he could still smell the coffee fumes from the last one despite the chilly desert air overwhelming the car heater.

If either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton won the presidency, Jackson would be immediately replaced as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). If Cooper won, then Jackson continued this thankless task.

After the 2008 election, instead of appointing himself to John McCain’s vacant senate seat, Governor Jackson decided to become DNC chairman and correctly figured that the best way to win over the DNC membership would be to bash Bush. So he wrote and self-published the surprise bestseller, “The Worst President Ever”, which became so popular that he quickly followed it up by funding a documentary, a joke-site, and a game-oriented website, dedicating all profits to the DNC. He gave away millions of free electronic versions -- a pdf version on scribd, Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s Ipad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, etc. Democratic allies, field offices, and local party groups made millions selling the book, video, and merchandise, especially Worst President Ever t-shirts. YouTube dedicated a special section for the amateur mock-umentaries, mashups, and smack-downs that the book and movie inspired. Jackson thus had the perfect platform to spend 2008 giving speeches, interviews, and fundraisers to boost his popularity among Democrats.

It would be his last time to make a first impression.

After winning the chairmanship, he funded the “Worst President Ever Museum” in Washington D.C. whose mission was to document the disastrous Bush years as comprehensively as possible. Every day the museum curators, backed by thousands of volunteer enthusiasts, deepened and broadened the documentation in exhaustive detail. Given that Bush left office with just a 20% approval rating, the museum opened with such success that every Democrat in D.C. gave away free tickets for visiting VIPs, activists, and constituents. The virtual museum was even more popular.

Jackson used the few hundred million the movie, book, and related merchandising grossed worldwide to expand Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy into a 435-district strategy. Every congressional district now had a permanent professional field office that coordinated virtually every Democratic campaign in their area, whether sheriff, school board, judge, mayor, congress, and especially president. Every campaign in a district could now share expensive resources, from software to technical expertise to media resources to fundraisers and canvassers. A permanent professional nationwide field army staffed by the party’s most passionate believers multiplied campaign effectiveness at a fraction of the cost. Bloggers, College Democrats, unions, issue advocacy groups, local party orgs, and allied associations now had a common vehicle that could drive them all to political success.

America elects over 500,000 officials. Campaigning is expensive. Having a force multiplier like a permanent field team started changing the partisan makeup from the local school board to congress. The sum became more than the parts.

And Henry Jackson nominally headed that national field team. Nominally, because Jackson set it up so that every local office elected its own District Coordinator, who chose his or her political director, finance director, field director, etc. The District Coordinators then elected the State Coordinator and collectively they decided what expensive talent they would share – media and consulting experts, pollsters, election lawyers, etc. The bottoms-up nature of the organization gave Jackson more influence than command, especially since he required every field office to do a lot of their own fundraising to make them as self-sustaining as possible. Jackson deliberately raised a monster that could be quickly viable outside of the womb.

While Jackson did not have total control or complete obedience, he had more influence than anyone else since he controlled the DemZilla voter database. And since both Obama and Hillary had four more years to build their own field teams, Cooper needed all the help he could get.

A permanent field office could get to know their district like the back of their hands. Volunteers could literally knock on every door (nearly 300,000 households) in a congressional district and build up a detailed database that ranked eligible voters and their voting triggers. Marketers could find out what issues mattered the most to which voters, then micro-target them. A network of field offices that identified virtually every voter in the country was worth its weight in gold. Spending $100 million a year on a huge field army yielded much better results than spending another billion on TV ads.

And Jackson controlled the voter files. He knew who they were, where they lived, how they voted, what issues influenced their vote, what they watched, what groups they associated with, their age, gender, and race, and how to contact them. It was both several times larger and several times better than what Howard Dean inherited as DNC chair in 2005. Fricking gold.

Better yet, because Republicans ridiculed the effort as a waste of money, they were out-hustled on the ground. After getting their asses handed to them in the 2010 mid-terms, the GOP reluctantly started going through the motions of duplicating Jackson’s 435 district field office strategy.

There was no way that any presidential candidate, no matter how organized and well funded, could possibly put together a national ground game that was even half as good as what the DNC had spent the last decade developing. Cooper needed that database. He needed those field offices. There was no way to beat his rivals without them. And so he needed Henry Jackson.

Ever since they formed their alliance, Cooper assumed that Jackson would demand the vice-presidency if Cooper won the nomination. But if Cooper did win the nomination, either Hillary or Obama would make far more political sense. Or he could pick a hero to progressives like Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. But why the hell would he pick another rich white guy? That would be like jumping through hoops to not make this election historic.

And if he lost, either Hillary or Barack would pick him in order to win Texas. Republicans cannot win the presidency without Texas, so he was practically guaranteed the vice-presidency if he came in second or third.

That should have been comforting. Except he promised Jackson the moon, and didn’t want to give it. So, now that he was virtually guaranteed to be on the Democratic ticket, thanks to Jackson, he needed to break that agreement. Basically, Cooper had to tell his biggest supporter to fuck off.

But not until his usefulness ended.

Light traffic barely improved his mood as he soon passed the Tucson International Airport on his left, the San Xavier Indian Reservation on his right, and then the Titan Missile Museum. Besides that, all he saw was dirt, tumbleweeds, and sagebrush hugging the one-lane highway. He finally exited, swung under an underpass, and then hung a right up the long lonely road to Jackson’s estate. Nearby stood a 50 foot Joshua tree that the city of Green Valley, which has no green and isn’t really a valley, treated like a national monument.

Those who succeed in becoming president believe that no price is too high. Those who fail, not so much. Winners believe it’s better to win ugly than lose pretty. Cooper was going to become president even if it killed him.

Cooper worked very hard at perfecting his campaigning because he was against the best in the business: Clinton, Obama, and Palin. This was crucial because voters don’t elect the best candidate for president – they elect the best campaigner.

The better campaigner always wins.

Take Bush: his 2000 campaign essentially said, “Things have never been better – vote for change”, and his 2004 said, “Things have never been worse – stay the course.” And won both fucking times. Although 92% of historians rank W a failure, he built up the largest base of Republican voters in history, enjoyed the highest approval ratings (90+) for the longest time from that enlarged base, despite repeatedly raping the Constitution, one signing statement at a time.

In contrast, Bush’s father won the most decisive war in American history, while preventing widespread chaos as the Soviet Union fell apart, then got his ass kicked by a non-inhaling, self-destructive, draft-dodging womanizer with more baggage than L.A.X. Some of our best presidents have been the worst campaigners, and some of the best campaigners have been our worst presidents.

Cooper was determined to become a great campaigner.

Campaigning is not a 9-to-5 job. Politicians work when others don’t: nights, weekends, holidays, golfing, and mealtimes, while staying on-call 24/7/365. A candidate will spend more time with his campaign manager than with the spouse. Lyndon Johnson shook so many hands his own hand literally bled and William Jennings Bryan gave 12 speeches in 15 hours.

Politicians are often compared to whores because they both screw people for money, but hookers have it much easier since sex practically sells itself, whereas politicians have to sell tons of bullshit in more flavors than Baskin Robbins.

Cooper desperately needed to win to justify several years of hard campaigning. He didn’t want to end up like Rudy Giuliani, who spent $50 million and won only one delegate. Or lose the presidency after winning the nomination. Once Kerry became the clear frontrunner, the Bush campaign launched a $40 million media blitz depicting him as a weak, indecisive flip-flopper, and Kerry was too broke to contest the charges. Voters accept uncontested accusations as true. It’s like your neighbor yelling in the street that you’re a putz, while you’ve lost your voice to a cold. And Kerry’s billionaire wife was too cheap to spring for a lousy $10 million to immediately counter the attacks. Kerry lost the war before he got the chance to start fighting. As the saying goes, the best time to win a fight is before it starts.

Not that Cooper had much sympathy. Neither Gore or Kerry measured up. Bush at least looked like he had his shit together. Gore, Kerry, Hillary, and McCain had decades to prepare for a presidential campaign, and then ran it so poorly that they had to replace their campaign managers and campaign slogans.

Static suddenly replaced his country station. As he fiddled with the radio button, he found one Spanish station after another and envied, for the millionth time, the radio reception that Mexicans enjoyed in America. After fruitlessly cycling the radio, he turned it off in frustration.

Although he tried to look presidential, the last thing he felt like was the most powerful man in the world. Cooper tired of stringing Henry Jackson along. Today was a perfect day for a confrontation.

4

Sitting in his Spartan bedroom on the second floor, astronomy professor and longtime Spacewatch director Henry Joseph Jackson stared at the picture of his dead wife and wished, for the thousandth time, that she was alive to see this. It was his favorite picture, just after they first got serious over half a century ago. She wore the tight green dress, the one that showed the cleavage, with his arm around her, smiling like he won the lottery.

Damn, she was hotter than a Class 4 solar flare!

His computer screen showed a live video feed of another beauty, a sleek nuclear-powered spaceship that he named after his wife as her dying wish right before she passed away a year ago. It still pissed him off that she made him name it after her, since she knew damn well that he didn’t want to. The she-devil always had to get the best of him. And now the bitch claimed his life’s work as her own by making a demand on her death bed that he could not refuse.

He missed her so much.

He had a hole in his heart the size of Valle Marinus ever since she left him. And it did not help that she seemed eager to go, after battling breast cancer for so many years. The professor would never forget her last words to him: “Fuck around on me and I’ll come back to haunt you.”

Normally, he used his online “Gaby-cam” to watch dozens of technicians crawl all over it as it sat in a huge hanger in Cape Canaveral, near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But the damn Rock kept getting closer. After Christmas, they secretly moved it to a decommissioned nuclear-missile silo in the High Plains near Chugwater, Wyoming. He hired experts who earthquake-proofed it, including a specially-designed “mattress” that could absorb shocks from any direction. They enclosed the entire spacecraft in vibration dampeners, with a hard shell in case an impact knocked chunks of concrete loose from the roof.

It pissed him off that he had to move the ship at all. They spent years getting everything just the way they wanted it. The Jackson Space Foundation bought the engine years ago when NASA stopped funding it, then designed an amorphous metal spaceship around it.

When his former students at Spacewatch first spotted the Rock, the Jackson Space Foundation raised millions to complete the ship in time to intercept it and futilely begged President Palin for the federal government’s help in getting the spaceship ready. Instead, she dismissed the opportunity while the Republican Slime Machine ridiculed the head of the Democratic Party. Moving it then set them back a few months more.

Astronomers for decades salivated over putting boots down on the easiest rock to reach from Earth, Apollo asteroid 4660 Nereus, so the prospect of landing on the largest rock to cross Earth’s orbit was a dream come true. Until the president of the United States called it a waste of money needed to give more tax cuts for the rich. That outrage mobilized the entire global space community – huge aerospace firms, academics, advocacy groups, sci-fi fans, even celebrities like Tom Hanks -- to do it themselves.

Their story made for great headlines, however. To capture it, Jackson funded a documentary to tell the story of the thousands of people who donated their time and talent to the project. Like in politics, he made heroes of the frontline workers who usually labored invisibly.

The spaceship looked like a huge silver penis with brass balls at the base. The design team took the Prometheus unmanned nuclear probe plans, then modified them to carry humans. This saved them years of design work, but left them with a big dick on their hands. Before she died, his wife pointed out the irony of having what looked like an impressive erection named after her. And ever since, he could not look at the ship without thinking of her. People naturally assumed the opposite: that it was so he would have something to remember her by.

What made their ship so valuable was its incredible speed. It used an ion engine powered by a gigawatt nuclear reactor that hits argon gas with radio waves instead of electrons. Superconducting magnets then shoot the ions out, generating fifty times more thrust than previous versions. Quite simply, this was many times faster than the fastest ever deployed, and light-years ahead of anything NASA was working on. Depending on their relative orbits, Gaby could reach Mars in less than a month. With space ports near Earth and Mars, this ship could act like a shuttle van to colonize the red planet.

The professor’s son wanted to fire it up during the campaign in front of thousands of reporters and wow the world. The Republicans would shit a collective brick. If it worked. If not, then the late-night comedians would have their biggest field day since Vice President Dick “Shoot First and Aim Later” Cheney shot a 78 year old lawyer in the face with a shotgun while drinking and hunting.

Professor Jackson had space in his blood: Vietnam F-4 Phantom fighter pilot, NASA/JPL engineer, director of the Lunar Research Institute in Tucson, senior member of the Planetary Sciences Institute, fellow of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, visiting professor at the International Space University, longtime space sciences professor at the University of Arizona, director of Spacewatch at the University of Arizona, and national head of the international Spaceguard program.

He had done it all. Well, except for actually going into space. And, at 72, he should be enjoying his golden years. Instead, like Ozzie Osborne on his Retirement Sucks Tour, he rocked on. And it was his own fault, since he founded the Jackson Space Foundation to turn his dreams into reality.

Called “Maximizing the Habitability of the Solar System”, the book described how the Jackson Space Foundation planned on cashing in on $10 quadrillion in space resources to re-orbit and terraform worlds to accommodate over a hundred billion people in our solar system. Then, in another example of how it is better to be lucky than good, the book came out just as the biggest Earth-crossing asteroid entered the inner solar system, turning the book into an international bestseller that quickly inspired a movie and merchandising.

His dead wife would have died of jealousy.

After Arizona elected his son governor in 2002, the Jackson Space Foundation started organizing annual “space summits” in Tucson held on Arizona State Day, February 14th, the day Arizona joined the Union, which also happened to be Valentine’s Day. Arizona was the last continental state to join the Union in 1912 (Alaska and Hawaii joined in 1959). In 2012 Arizona not only celebrated its 100th birthday as a state, but a big space mountain was expected to pass close by. Huge news since Arizona has the most wannabe Martians per capita on Earth.With the global space community’s help, the non-profit would soon become the only organization capable of flying people to BEO (Beyond Earth Orbit). Gaby’s mission was to push a trillion dollar metallic asteroid into a nearby Lagrange point, slice it up, then parachute precious metal ore back to Earth to end their funding worries. Dozens of metallic asteroids had trillions in precious metals, like 16 Psyche, 21 Lutetia, 22 Calliope, 69 Hesperia, 75 Eurydice, 77 Friga, 97 Clotho, and 135 Hertha.

Then Gaby would re-orbit 1036 Ganymed, the largest Near Earth Object, at 34 kilometers, into an eccentric orbit where it would be gradually converted into a space port. An easy-to-get-to space port would revolutionize space exploration, and the Jackson Space Foundation alone would control access to it.

Others wanted to use 403 Eros, the second largest NEO and by far the most studied. But at 33 x 13 x 13, it had the shape of a bent peanut which gave it uneven gravity, an odd spin, and limited burrowing possibilities. Ganymed, in contrast, was not only bigger, denser, and more massive, but more spherical, which evened out the gravity and allowed for larger underground facilities. They had to hollow out the rock anyways because anyone on the surface would soon die of isotropic cosmic radiation. Ganymed also had several trillion more in precious metals, which didn’t hurt. And the more gravity, the better, to reduce micro-gravity-related illnesses.

To reduce the cost of launching payloads into orbit, the professor planned to build a long magnetic levitation rail in Ecuador going up Mount Chimborazo, which had the highest peak on Earth, thanks to the planet’s equatorial bulge. This maglev launcher would allow them to keep both the engine and the fuel on the ground, saving them literally tons of weight, since rocket launchers are 99% rocket and fuel and only 1% payload. Capsules would exit the launcher above most of the atmosphere, saving huge costs. “Maglev” propulsion would drop the cost of putting payload into orbit by a factor of one thousand, and eventually getting into orbit would not cost much more than the electricity to launch it.

A cheap launcher and a space port gave them the Moon, which has an estimated $5 quadrillion worth of helium3 (HE3) on its surface, enough to power planet Earth for a thousand years. A rare element crucial to making fusion energy, helium3 was worth a thousand times more per weight than gold. A fusion power plant running D-HE3 would have no radioactivity, would be several times more powerful than fission, yet several times cheaper. The Foundation could not only cheaply install thousands of astronomy scopes on the Moon, but make billions a year selling lunar helium3 for fusion power plants.

Not that money itself motivated him.

After installing thousands of arrays on the Moon, he wanted to deploy x-ray interferonomy telescopes on Trojan asteroids floating 60 degrees before and after Jupiter. The lunar arrays would collectively be a million times better than terrestrial telescopes, yet interferonomy arrays in Jupiter’s orbit would probably be many times better than the lunar arrays. The glow reflected by inner solar system dust obstructed seeing far, clear, and deep. This reflected sunlight kept the inner solar system relatively bright, but declined in density the farther it got from the Sun. The solution was to deploy scopes beyond the inner solar system in Lagrange orbits 60 degrees before and after Jupiter.

Lunar helium3 also enabled them to build a fleet of fusion spaceships several times faster than nuclear fission ones. That effectively opens up the entire solar system to humanity. Getting to the gas giants at a constant acceleration of 5 g’s would then take several months instead of several years.

With a fleet of fusion spaceships, the Jacksons wanted to import asteroids to triple the size of Mars to increase its gravity and maximize its real estate. Then re-orbit Mercury equidistant between Venus and Earth, bulk it up with asteroids, then give it an atmosphere and oceans with thousands of comets and ice-teroids.

The gas giants had six moons (Titan 5150 kilometers, Ganymede 5262, Callisto 4821, Io 3643, Europa 3122, and Tritan 2700) larger than Pluto (2390 kilometers), and fourteen larger than 1000 kilometers (Titania 1578, Rhea 1528, Oberon 1523, Iapetus 1436, Umbriel 1170, Ariel 1162, Dionel 1120, and Tethys at 1072 kilometers). The Jacksons wanted to re-orbit them in Goldilocks orbits between Venus and the Main Asteroid Belt, bulk them up as much as possible, and optimize them for human habitability. This would multiply the carrying capacity of the solar system from roughly 10 billion on Earth to well over 100 billion living on a dozen bulked up, terraformed worlds. Each worth quadrillions.

To manufacture cheap bulk antimatter, the professor wanted to turn the largest asteroid, Ceres, into Venus’ moon, (Venus does not have a moon), after bulking it up with E asteroids to make millions of solar panels to eventually create a solar umbrella that blocked all sunlight from reaching Venus. That much solar could power thousands of antimatter production factories on Ceres.

With enough antimatter, the professor wanted to send manned ships on one-way trips to hundreds of the closest star systems, starting with the closest, most habitable ones. Antimatter-propelled ships can travel up to 67% the speed of light, compared to just 15% for fusion ships and 5% for nuclear fissure propulsion.

To reduce travel time, the professor proposed slingshotting ships around the inner planets, then Jupiter, and then the Sun to triple their speed while saving trillions in fuel. Getting to the Centauri System would then take just one decade instead of three.

Not that the professor thought humanity was going to conquer the universe anytime soon. Some galaxies have over a trillion stars. The Milky Way galaxy alone has 300 billion visible stars, and probably many more too faint to detect. The universe has over 400 billion visible galaxies (antimatter and dark matter galaxies may not be visible), some of which are 11 billion light years away. Even at half the speed of light, it would take 22 billion years to get there. The visible universe contains 70 million billion stars. If like our solar system, then those stars averaged one hundred large worlds. That’s a 7 followed by 24 zeros.

The professor figured that if only 1% of those 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars had habitable worlds; and only 1% of those had simple life; and if only 1% of those had complex life; and if only 1% of those had intelligent life, then there is a lot of intelligent life in the universe. Like, say, 700,000,000,000,000. On the other hand, that’s just one world with intelligent life out of every 10 million. So if just one world out of every 10 million had intelligent life, then 700,000,000,000,000 worlds in the universe had intelligent life. That comes to an average of 7000 intelligent life forms per galaxy, or just over 2% of all star systems. If our galaxy had 7000 forms of intelligent life, assuming one could include humans, then the professor wondered how close the closest intelligent life was.

Never in a million years did he expect to find out.

Fortunately or not, the universe is a very big place: at least 156 billion light-years in diameter. The universe is flat, spherical, pinkish (lots of red dwarf stars), 13.7 billion years old, mostly empty, and growing. The universe itself could be surrounded by multi-dimensional multi-verses, if those geniuses at string theory are correct. And the bigger it gets, the faster it grows, such that the galaxies are flying ever farther away from each other. In several billion years, few other galaxies will be even visible within our event horizon. The Milky Way will be a solitary island surrounded by an impassable ocean of space. When it takes billions of years to get from here to there, then you can’t get there from here.

As for travel time, one light year is almost 10 trillion kilometers. Even traveling at half the speed of light, or over 1 million kilometers per hour, the closest stars are not really all that close. There are about 200 stars within 25 light years, 2000 stars within 50 light years, and roughly 20,000 stars within 100 light years. Just visiting our closest neighbors will take millennia. And our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, although an outer layer of dust doubles that size. If it took a million years just to colonize our galaxy, then it would take 100 million billion years to colonize 100 billion galaxies. Assuming one found a feasible way to cross the millions of light years that separate most galaxies. Since modern humans have dominated Earth for only 10,000 years, compared to 170 million years for dinosaurs, it was hard for the professor to imagine humanity surviving 100 quadrillion years.

Not to rush things, but Earth will be destroyed within a couple billion years anyways, either 1) when the Sun grows large enough to consume our planet; 2) when Andromeda, a galaxy twice as large than our own, crashes into the Milky Way at one million kilometers per hour (creating the Milkymeda or the Andromeda Way); or 3) when the Milky Way, which is part of a galactic club dubbed the Local Group, slams into the Virgo Cluster. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe bound by gravity (well, technically, super-clusters are), some containing 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way. Each galaxy has millions of black holes, so a galaxy cluster could have billions of black holes, all heading our way. Talk about a cluster-fuck.

Our Milky Way galaxy itself has shredded hundreds of smaller galaxies, and even now is devouring the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius, a la Borg. (A “dwarf” galaxy has less than a billion stars, compared to one trillion for the big boys). 15-20 mini-galaxies orbit the Milky Way like moons around a planet.

And just when one thought it couldn’t get any worse, astronomers using radio telescopes discovered an invisible galaxy, presumably made of either dark matter or antimatter, in the Virgo Cluster, 50 million light-years away, but closing quickly. The entire galaxy, called VIRGOHI21 (because Holy Fucking Shit was already taken), has no visible stars, even though it had enough mass to qualify as a galaxy. Invisible galaxies may not be pretty, but, in astronomy terms, they are still rather attractive.

Since matter and antimatter explode on contact, and since that explosion is the most powerful known to science, it will be interesting for our doomed descendants to watch an entire invisible galaxy full of the stuff crash into our neighborhood at a million kilometers per hour.

The professor obsessed over space-related philosophy.

Will the universe expand forever, each galaxy hundreds of millions of light years from each other, such that one dominant intelligent life form expands throughout one galaxy but no more? Or will each galaxy have thousands of intelligent life forms living in peace or battling to the death? Will the empires of technologically superior life forms resemble the relationships between nations on Earth? Each galaxy could end up with just one dominant intelligent life form, unable to detect, meet or communicate with those in other galaxies, hundreds of millions of light years away.

Or will the universe one day begin to contract and collapse back onto itself in a “Big Crunch”, a karmic version of the Big Bang? If everything else has a life cycle, then why not the universe itself? Since it is 13.7 billion years old and still growing, and assuming it will contract no faster than it expanded, then its life span could be 30 billion years. Or eternity. We just didn’t know, and the professor desperately wanted to know. Although he was dying of curiosity, it pained him to die just to find out the question to the big, “What If.”

Is the universe infinite, or just really, really big? Is it eternal, or just really, really old? Einstein believed that only the universe and human stupidity were potentially infinite. The “universe”, by definition, means everything in its totality, so if the universe is expanding, then just what the hell is it expanding into? If you sat at the very edge of the universe, what would you see? Besides the restaurant from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. By expanding, is the universe turning nothingness into empty space? How would you tell the difference? How can the universe be the totality of all things that exist if it gets bigger?

And if God made us, then why the hell did he wait 13 billion years after the first planets formed? Are we that unimportant, or is he that patient? As Nietzsche put it, is God a blunder of man, or man a blunder of God? Humans separated from chimps several million years ago, so why wait millions of years before sending Jesus? Why bother making quadrillions of planets if we are so unique? He could have made Earth and taken the rest of the week off.

And some things just freaked him out. Like voids.

A void is not a lot of room with almost nothing in it, like interstellar space. Even tiny amounts of dust and gas exist between star systems and the millions of light years between galaxies. Even rogue planets are occasionally thrown between star systems and galaxies. Those are not voids, but lots of space with little in them.

Voids are totally different. Voids have absolutely no matter, antimatter, dark matter or dark energy because they give off absolutely no heat or variance in heat. A void is devoid of all thermal radiation. Their temperature is always absolute zero.

Nobody believed they could exist until they found one in 2007 that was ten million billion kilometers in diameter. That void, called the Big Fucking Void to not confuse it with the Bush Administration, was one billion light years across. 10 million billion kilometers without anything in it. No dirt, no bacteria, no water. No shit. Even Nirvana has a Buddha or two.

The professor somehow found it easier to accept that God can make Something out of Nothing than he can make Nothing out of Something. No matter how lost you have ever been using Yahoo Maps, you have never been ten million billion kilometers from the nearest sunlight.

Did it become this big, or was it always this big? How big must Nothing grow until it becomes Something? How can nothing exist? If it’s nothing, then by definition it does not exist. Yet, Zen-like, it does.

The Milky Way galaxy has 300 billion stars, yet this void is 10,000 times bigger than the Milky Way. That’s a lot of nothing. Some things are better than nothing. Voids, apparently, are not.

It would be convenient to write this off as a freak accident, a unique anomaly, except there were lots of voids. Millions, probably, although it’s hard to see something that isn’t really there. Unless it stars on reality TV.

Maybe astronomers should specialize in studying absolutely fucking nothing. We can’t all be slackers. You can’t have a map of the universe, much less a Hitchhiker’s Guide, without noting the billion-light-year holes where time and freaking space literally do not exist. It is difficult to even imagine a place where Father Time and Mother Nature have not hooked up.

After Paris Hilton, it was the biggest nothing in the universe. Maybe the Big Fucking Void is the undisclosed location where Vice President Cheney hid all those years. Even Hell had stuff -- fire, brimstone, self-righteous sanctimonious hypocritical Republicans.

The professor wanted to study what was immediately around the BFV – galaxies, dust clouds, freaked out astronomy professors on one-way trips. Where else can you watch Something stop and Nothing begin? He wanted to see the space-time continuum just stop continuing.

Maybe this void is Heaven, since Heaven is where you go when you have nothing to do and eternity to do it in.

Lost in thought, it took him a long moment to realize that someone was instant messaging him. He clicked to accept a video link, and saw the scared face of the director of Kitt Peak, Dr. Dennis Kowalski.

“Professor! Something happened to Gabrielle.”

He instinctively looked at his wife’s urn on a mantle, then at the spaceship on his computer screen, before realizing that Dennis was talking about the new asteroid that the local astronomy community named in his wife’s honor. Strange, the professor thought. Dennis was not the easily excitable type.

Yet Dr. Kowalski was practically screaming:

“And it looks likes it’s coming straight for us!”

5

Cooper put the Google map away and turned off the dome light as he finally found the long driveway. His headlights led him in the open gates between the 12-foot tall red brick walls. The place looked as deserted as the desert around it.

In his rearview mirror Cooper saw sunlight stretch over the eastern mountains as the Sun finally began showing up, diminished by the asteroid slowly eclipsing it. It would be hot in a few hours. Fucking desert. From west Texas to Hesperia, nothing but dirt, dust, and tumbleweeds.

Jackson placed his custom-built, 10,000 square foot home against a ring of hills for natural protection. The tall wrought-iron gate had “Guarded by Smith & Wesson” and “Beware of Owner” signs. Which was bullshit. Jackson preferred a Glock and traveled frequently. Ever since his family was attacked in their Phoenix home a decade ago, he kept enough weapons to qualify for an armory. Cooper himself owned guns he never used (which is Texan for “pussy”), but even he thought Jackson a bit paranoid.

Cooper turned his headlights off as motion detectors turned on lights, illuminating the driveway and the path to the front door. He parked his borrowed green Hummer to the left to what looked like a sky blue spaceship from the Jetsons. The white concrete path to the porch sat to his left and the odd car to his right. The shadows from the house lights danced like demons on the alien-looking car, giving Cooper the creeps.

Cooper stared at the strange car, lost in thought. He had to get into the right mindset before tackling Henry Fucking Jackson. Jackson sometimes came across as a Neanderthal, but one doesn’t build several multi-billion dollar businesses by being stupid. Besides, he arrived early, so he might as well enjoy the Sun coming up before fighting his greatest battle against his biggest supporter.

Cooper had been to Jackson’s house before, but the four frictionless residential windmills rotating at all four corners still surprised him. The white, three-fingered turbines made it look like the house was about to fly away. It still seemed strange that he couldn’t hear them. Because they use maglev instead of ball bearings, weaker winds could still turn the blades, increasing total electricity output. Gearboxes in conventional wind turbines require high maintenance from constant stress due to wind turbulence, whereas these connect the rotor shaft directly to the generator. Slower rotational speed is offset by magnets spinning around a larger diameter, and thus higher speed, which produces more current in the generator coil. Maglev thus costs less to maintain while generating greater overall electricity by taking advantage of slower winds.

Jackson made both the body and the blades from amorphous metal, a new material several times stronger and lighter than steel. Weaker winds can turn lighter blades, while stronger winds spin them more than heavier blades.

The residential frictionless windmills had three 12-foot blades and contour edges to keep noise below 45 decibels, the level of background noise. Sound isolators made of hardened neoprene rubber absorbed the vibrations before they reach the roof. The easy-to-install, plug-and-play windmills also rotate automatically, both vertically and horizontally, to catch the strongest breezes, so all four of them turned together like dancers when the wind changed direction. They were easy to install because they integrated once-separate components into one turbine body and connected four simple wires directly to the circuit breaker box. Incorporating them into the design of homes reduced the cost even more. Most homes only needed one, but Henry Jackson naturally had four installed to help split waste water into hydrogen gas.

Cooper envied Jackson’s wealth. Growing up poor made Cooper determined to die rich. And Jackson being such a rich bastard was one of the reasons Cooper didn’t want to help him become richer.

Democrats taking the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections convinced Jackson that Democrats would also win the presidency in 2008. If so, Democrats would probably take the $17 billions in annual federal tax breaks and subsidies that Republicans on average gave dirty energy companies every fucking year and give them instead to clean energy companies. For example, Bush unilaterally reduced offshore royalties for oil companies by $60 billion over several years. Democrats could give clean energy $60 billion just by reversing that one action. If a Democratic president and Congress simply gave dirty energy tax breaks to the clean energy industry, production would explode.

So Jackson doubled down on clean energy, pouring billions into new projects, factories, and research. He soon had the world’s best organic solar, wind turbines, and ultracapacitors.

Jackson also wanted to get into deep geothermal, drilling a couple miles deep until hitting extremely hot steam. They did this in Iceland, but it cost a lot to go through so many expensive diamond bits. So Jackson partnered with a drill bit company to set their best diamonds into his amorphous metal drill bits, which could withstand several times the heat and stress. Contrary to common assumptions, it was not the diamonds that break down, but the steel bit that encases them. High temperatures combined with constant friction inevitably weakens steel. Jackson’s solution promised to make deep thermal far more economical.

Then Barack Obama lost to John McCain, and a pissed-off Jackson decided to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee to recoup his investments.

Cooper secretly hoped that Jackson fell flat on his ass.

Instead, Jackson started making buildings out of amorphous metal to use his excess clean energy products.

Because of its resistance to fatigue, creeping, impact, buckling, corrosion, overload, rupture, thermal shock, wear and yielding, amorphous metal is widely considered the structural material of the future. It can form like a plastic and be injection-molded in one piece, instead of weakening it by taking sheet metal and cutting, drilling, and machining it to death. Not having to machine it after casting saves time, machinery, and expensive expertise, yet also makes it inherently stronger structurally.

Unlike most metals, metallic glass doesn’t dent, tear, or rust, and is imperious to bugs, humidity, and common fires. It is also light, strong, and ten times more “springy” than steel. When molted into a foam that is 99% air, it is still 100% stronger than polystyrene. Amorphous foam sandwiched between thin sheets of amorphous sheet metal would dampen sound, be bomb and bullet resistant, fireproof, corrosion-proof, and bug-proof. It is so tough that a dime-thin sheet cannot be cut with heavy bolt cutters, making it great for fences, safes, and locks. Made from ultra-pure boron, silicon, and phosphorus, it is tougher than ceramics and has twice the tensile strength of the highest-grade titanium. Amorphous metal is the only material with a better strength-to-weight ratio than titanium.

Several times stronger yet several times lighter than steel, metallic glass would be the perfect material if it weren’t so expensive. Which was why Jackson invested billions to get huge economies of scale.

Metals are crystalline, with highly ordered atom arrangements, whereas amorphous metals are non-crystalline. Although strictly speaking a “glass”, in that it has a disordered structure produced from a liquid state during cooling, it doesn’t have grain boundaries, the weak defects in crystalline materials, which gives metallic glass much better resistance to wear, tear, and corrosion. As true glasses, they soften and flow when heated, which allows for easy injection molding like polymers without abrasion powder or shrinkage when solidified. Hammering a crystalline metal will bend or dent it because the blow’s kinetic energy flows along the grain boundaries. Because atoms in amorphous metal are tightly packed and without grain boundaries, they bounce back to their original form.

Perhaps inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Jackson started making pre-fab homes made out of amorphous metal. Like modular homes, Jackson completed them in mass-production factories with cheap Chinese labor, then stacked them on ships like standard containers. From the port, helicopters airlifted them directly from the ship.

The homes were shipped complete: doors, wiring, plumbing, fixtures, etc, which saved thousands of dollars not employing expensive local tradesmen like electricians, plumbers, and roofers. Only the window glass was made locally. The entire house, from the floor, walls, and roof, were built with amorphous metal with an expanded polystyrene insulating core that eliminated thermal bridging. They were moisture, fire, insect, and sound resistant, never rusted, and allowed virtually no air infiltration for lower heating and cooling costs. Amorphous steel was lighter than aluminum, yet stronger than titanium, so it did not need structural supports to bear the weight of the light amorphous metal roof. That not only saved a lot of rebar to support the structure, but also allowed for a thinner concrete foundation that was easier, faster, and cheaper to build.

Although it cost several thousand to ship from China to Los Angeles, he saved many times that using cheap Chinese labor and materials. To reduce shipping costs, he often contracted out an entire ship to carry thousands of his homes at once.

He coated every roof with white organic solar. White reflective roofing absorbs roughly 10% of the sun’s energy versus up to 90% for black tops. Organic solar was only a quarter as energy efficient as solar panels, but cost ten times less, and yielded the same electricity by covering the entire roof. Better yet, Jackson saved several thousand dollars per home in state and federal tax breaks by qualifying for the EPA’s Energy Star program because it lowered air conditioning costs in sunny climates by 25%. Which really pissed Cooper off when he praised them in speeches.

And it helped slow global warming. If every roof in the world was white, it would save 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or what the entire world produces every year. Wal-Mart had white roofs so far on 75% of its 4300 stores.

Jackson loved these homes because they incorporated his organic solar, residential windmills, tankless solar water heaters, and ultracapacitors. He eliminated natural gas pipelines by using only electric appliances and a hydrogen gas tank for the clothes dryer. During the housing boom, he built entire communities in California deserts from Palm Dale to Hesperia to Sun City because California has tax breaks that made Jackson several thousand extra dollars per home. Thousands of his homes sat where the 10 and 15 freeways meet in San Bernardino going up the El Cajon pass.

Jackson built his clean energy communities in the desert because land was cheap, sunshine plentiful, and wind abundant. But it also required minimizing water usage and maximizing water conservation and recycling. So the homes used synthetic grass lawns, chemical toilets, and powered their water treatment with excess solar. Separating the piss and shit out with chemical toilets dramatically cut the cost of treating waste water. This multiplied the carrying capacity of desert living -- vital since global warming caused several years of extreme drought in the Southwest.

Time is money, and Jackson killed two birds at the same time: as soon as he got his construction permit, he prepared it with streets, sewers, and home foundations while thousands of homes were built and shipped from China. Jackson could therefore not only build a community at far less cost and at a far greater profit, but in far less time.

Families loved them because the electricity was free -- up to the state average. The micro-windmills and solar roofing charged the ultracapacitors, which powered the home at night. Since every home had an ultracapacitor, they collectively could store a hell of a lot of electricity. Jackson wired together the entire community with superconducting wire, which has five times the carrying capacity, yet does not lose any electricity in transmission, so that homes with surplus electricity carried homes that ran out. All automatically. The bigger the community, the more stable their power supply, without high voltage tension wires.

What most residents didn’t appreciate is that Jackson deliberately maximized solar and wind electricity generation in order to sell the excess to the local utility. He covered every bit of roof with organic solar, installed four residential windmills per home, and topped every street light and utility pole with a mini wind turbine. Electric companies even paid Jackson a pretty penny for the option of tapping thousands of residential ultracapacitors during peak hours. Not actually tapping that electricity, which cost extra, but just the option to tap that energy. It cost the company far less than brownouts.

But Jackson generated the most electricity by covering the streets, sidewalks, backyard patios, and driveways with organic solar. 6% energy efficiency wasn’t much, but it produced a lot of megawatts when it covered several square kilometers. He had to pave the streets anyways, so he might as well build them in a way that allowed him to cover them in white organic solar. It cost more up front, but generated cash flow for decades. Some critics argued he was building power plants in the form of residential communities. As if that was a bad thing.

Building thousands of homes, however, led to a lot of garbage. So he turned lemons into lemonade. Instead of paying someone else to haul away all this trash, he bought the local garbage company to take advantage of his captive audience. And instead of paying someone else to let him dump his trash into their landfill, he installed a $200 million plasma gas trash-to-electricity plant that could burn literally anything short of nuclear waste without emitting greenhouse gases, which were chemically altered into solids and used in construction. Jackson bought out landfills, dumps, and trash haulers in Southern California in order to keep the plasma gas plant operating at optimum capacity. Although it required a lot of capital up front, this trash-to-energy business looked so profitable that Jackson wanted to take it national.

The irony is that his plasma gas plant cost a fraction as much as a dirty power plant, required a fraction of the time and hassle getting permits, yet generated almost as much electricity as the average coal-fired power plant. Even better, coal plants average 12.5% downtime, or 46 days every year, for maintenance while his plasma gas power plant rarely needed to be shut down.

A large coal, natural gas, or oil-fueled power plant costs nearly $1 billion and takes a decade. Even getting permission for solar or wind power plants took years, with local interest groups fighting over water or environmental impact reports. Getting permission to build homes, in contrast, was relatively quick and easy because it only involved the local city. So Jackson found California utilities who promised to buy all of his excess electricity at favorable prices rather than build another power plant. They also paid more for clean energy because California mandated 20% clean electricity generation by 2020.

Next he wanted to make three story tall amorphous metal apartments, stores, and offices, all with a maximum weight of twelve metric tons. He had built demo models for several variations to get them approved under the nationally recognized Uniform Business Code.

His apartment building’s first floor had one large 2-bedroom apartment for large families -- parents of small kids did not want to climb flights of stairs. The second floor had two one-bedroom apartments, and the third story had three studio apartments. He chose three stories since anything higher required an expensive elevator. And instead of laying an expensive concrete foundation, he could simply lay them back to back, on level compacted dirt, then landscaped concrete walking paths and artificial grass around them. Once blessed by the Uniform Building Code, Jackson wanted to make thousands of them.

It pissed Cooper off that Jackson and his customers were going to get billions in federal clean energy rebates, tax credits, and incentives. Especially since he was the one who promised, if elected president, to provide them. Doing so just made his biggest rival that much bigger.

Of course, this was Henry Fucking Jackson, who was not content to stop there. No, once he became DNC Chairman, he made homelessness a moral crusade to boost a new business he bought, score cheap political points, and burnish his image as someone who helps the little guy.

Jackson bought a majority share in a tiny El Paso, Texas company that built 320 square foot homes out of used shipping containers, mostly for maquiladora companies on the Mexican side of the border who suffered 10% monthly employment loss because the rural migrants who flocked to the border had nowhere to live. Juarez was growing by 60,000 people a year and most lived in shelters built out of wooden crates and scrap metal. The container homes sold for $8000 which, even in Mexico, is cheap housing.

The idea first occurred to Jackson in 2006 after hearing that a California architect named Peter DeMaria designed a two story structure from shipping containers that received approval as a structural system under the Uniform Building Code. That interested Jackson because the United States received thousands of containers a year that were not worth sending back, and therefore sold for just $1000. So Jackson hired experts to put two standard containers together to make a 640 square foot residential unit.

Now that’s a mobile home!

Except he rented them as apartments. Or, more specifically, apartment buildings. He stacked them four stories high so he didn’t need to buy an elevator and rented the single containers as studios and two containers as two-bedroom apartments. He saved millions in construction costs since he didn’t need concrete and steel to support the buildings. He covered the building and parking lot with organic solar, installed lots of micro-windmills, then sold the excess clean electricity to the local utility.

With chemical toilets to minimize plumbing, Jackson included wireless internet and all utilities in the rent, although he didn’t provide landline phones since everyone has cell phones. He generally formed them in the shape of a U to maximize the number of units, then built a pool and playground in the middle so that kids would have a safe place to play. They shared a coin-operated ground floor laundry to eliminate the need for natural gas pipelines. For economies of scale, he made sure he only bought land large enough to house several hundred units.

Only Las Vegas offers apartment housing without a rental check, credit check, or signing a lease. Jackson filled a niche by not requiring a lease and renting them weekly or monthly. University students loved them. The market for cheap no-lease apartments turned out to be huge, so he bought and refurbished hundreds of thousands of container apartments over several years.

Critics labeled him the country’s largest slumlord.

To counter the slumlord criticism, Jackson championed the homeless problem, arguing to veteran and homeless groups that the solution to homelessness is cheap homes. His critics ridiculed his apartments as steel coffins, but he correctly pointed out that he filled a market need for cheap housing for people who cannot pass credit or rental checks. He dismissed his critics as clueless snooty elites who preferred families on the streets. Which was great since most of his critics were Republicans eager to tear him down. As the head of the DNC, Republicans had to grill him -- that’s their job, which gave Jackson the opportunity to paint them as hypocrites since he was using the free market to get families off the streets without government intervention or taxpayer dollars.

The controversy gave him millions in free publicity.

Jackson indeed had the solution to a problem. Not the homeless problem, since most homeless were dysfunctional due to addictions and/or psychological problems that made them unable to hold a job, but a solution for living on cheap land off the grid.

Watching Jackson build another billion dollar company while championing the homeless bugged the hell out of Cooper. Especially since it made Jackson look so good to the far left liberal base whose support he needed. What he didn’t know was just how the hell he was going to get out of his promises to the one guy he needed most to get elected president of the United States.

Shivering in the cold inside the house, Monique impatiently watched Cooper covertly from the window, wondering what the fuck he was waiting for. He kept staring at Henry’s car as if he wanted to either steal or destroy it. Waiting was making her antsy, and gave her second thoughts. She felt her anger morph into rage. Cooper continued to stare at the car like he’d gone psycho.

And this guy wants to be president?

Just as she was about to give up, Cooper finally opened his car door. What happened next scared the shit out of both of them because Jackson’s dog, Chucha, attacked Cooper as soon as he put his foot on the ground. The damn dog must have been hiding, waiting for this opportunity, the entire time. Monique gasped in shock as Chucha latched his huge jaws onto Cooper’s leg and bit down. Once the husky has something – or someone – in his teeth, it takes a blowtorch to pry him loose. Cooper yelped in shock and pain. He anxiously tried to get his leg back into the car as Chucha, snarling viciously, tried to swallow his ankle. The next president of the United States looked like he was going to be eaten alive before her eyes.

Monique threw off her fur coat and sprinted out the door.

6

Monique flew out of the house, screaming in French at the Alaskan husky. When Chucha didn’t release Cooper’s ankle, she kicked him as hard as she could. Chucha bounced into the air. Man and dog shared eye contact. Man was scared. Dog was pissed. Chucha turned on Monique as soon as he landed, snarling as he made ready to pounce. Monique, however, continued to scream at him, motioning with her arm for him to get the hell out. Chucha, recognizing her awesome scent, paused. He had known her for years and previously felt very protective of her. And it’s not like Chucha had never been kicked before.

The moment passed and Chucha lost the argument. Instead, he turned on Cooper who was desperately rolling up his window. The dog leaped at him with the window still half down, scratching the car door with his claws. The tall Hummer saved him, because Chucha probably would have jumped in a lower window. Suddenly the dog disappeared from Cooper’s sight.

In shock, Cooper stared through the window to see this skinny girl drag the muscular dog away by his collar. She didn’t even let him get all four feet on the ground, and he was a big dog. Since she was pulling his collar up, his barking became hoarse and uneven. He clearly was still pissed, though. Cooper lost sight of them when she dragged him around the corner to the side yard.

Cooper had no idea who she was. She clearly felt at home, man-handling Jackson’s beast. Cooper labored to get his breathing back. He honestly thought, for a second there, that he was going to be eaten alive. He loosened his fancy tie and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his dark business coat.

Who the fuck was she?

As she walked into the light towards him, Cooper spied the hottest girl he had never yet fantasized about. Thin, narrow, and big-chested, she had more curves than a NASCAR track. She walked with the grace and style of a model, though her brisk walk screamed anxiety. Trance-like, he could not stop staring at her.

Every now and then Cooper would come across a woman, usually on TV, and think to himself, “that’s as good as it gets.” And he wondered who she was giving it to, because only unattractive people don’t have sex. So seeing a simply stunning woman always reminded him that someone, somewhere, somehow, was fucking her. And it wasn’t him. Every beautiful woman you see is fucking someone. Else. This was just the first time it happened to him in person.

She finally reached him and, as he held his breath, she desperately asked him something in French. And he had no fucking idea what it was. Oh hell.

Cooper spoke decent Spanish, especially when written out for him, but he never studied French. And if this beauty didn’t speak English, then he was totally fucked because there was nothing more that he wanted to do than talk to her. All the adrenaline streaming up his spine now flowed directly to his penis.

When he didn’t respond, she gently tapped on the window, still looking worried. Cooper rolled down the window as if a traffic cop pulled him over, feeling stupid. He couldn’t seem to come out of his trance. Even with the window down, he still couldn’t speak.

“Blah blah blah?” her soft warm eyes asked of him.

Now that speech was unavoidable, he swallowed, coughed to get his voice back, then said the only thing he could think of.

“Gracias.”

He immediately kicked himself. You meet a total hottie and you tell her, “gracias?” She sure didn’t look Mexican.

She smiled, though, relieved that he seemed all right, and he just fucking melted. She had one of those thousand-watt smiles, the kind that light up the entire face. White teeth filled her perfect mouth. His heart was still pounding, his palms still sweaty, but everything was just a-okay. She said something else, but he had no idea what. His neurons were still not firing. She could have said it in Chinese, for all he knew.

Monique had freaked herself out by taking on Chucha. Sure, the dog normally loved her, but she risked ending her modeling career if Chucha so much as scratched her bare legs. It was like a world-class pitcher risk losing his throwing arm. She didn’t know what to feel, but the cold, hard knot of sheer terror at what she risked for his fucking politician began to grow like a weed in a garden. She recognized that it would soon overpower the instinctive relief she felt that he was unhurt. She didn’t care, per se, if Chucha ate him for breakfast, but she knew how important he was to her cousin Henry. Having just saved his sorry ass, her emotions quickly changed as her resentment for risking her career for him struck home.

She looked back at the side yard where she heard Chucha, tied to an orange tree, snarling threats. Then she tried to open his car door, which was locked.

Cooper, puzzled, stared at the door, never having remembered locking it, what with the dog attack and all. He was so out of it that he could have pissed his pants and not yet noticed. With the window down, however, the girl of his dreams simply reached inside, pulled the lock up, then opened the door.

With that, something clicked inside him, like a dislocated shoulder snapping back into place. Cooper instinctively got out of the car, and the girl gasped at the tear in his pants leg near his left shoe. He looked down and saw blood. His blood. Not much, but that fucking dog indeed got him. As dizziness set in, something told him he was going to need vaccination shots.

The girl sounded like she wanted to cry, like she shared his pain and felt somehow responsible. No sooner did he plant his second foot and get his balance, than she fiercely hugged him while babbling an apology in French. Cooper, on autopilot, naturally hugged her back and gently patted her lower back, as if she were the one the dog attacked.

Red faced, ankle bleeding, pants torn, chest heaving, Daniel Cooper could not remember feeling better.

When her sobbing eased, she looked up at him with the biggest puppy eyes he had ever seen on a hot chick. Her dark eyes perfectly complimented her jet black hair and bronze skin. She looked at him as if he were the hero, and not her. God, she smelled good; clean, but without that alcohol-perfume odor that too many older women put on.

Their faces were just inches apart and, before he knew it, she kissed him slowly, without a care in the world. If this was just a kiss of gratitude, then she must have been very grateful. Her kiss scratched him where he itched the most. He naturally responded in kind, then eagerly as the kissed continued. Cooper had heard about Five Minute Kisses before, but he had never bothered to try one himself. Anyone who had seen his wife would understand. He felt her arms wrap around his back and head as she pulled him closer to her. A warm breeze enveloped them as the day dawned. He gladly yielded to her full embrace, and they kissed literally until the sun came up. What was left of it.

He probably would have continued kissing her until election day if his big, hard dick didn’t unexpectedly kick her between the legs.

Startled, she abruptly broke off the kiss to see what kicked her, then laughed at the sight of his huge boner. He sported enough wood to reforest the Amazon. His dick looked like a lollipop looking for a sucker. Never, ever, had Cooper felt more embarrassed. Not even that time when he mistook a shit for a fart during a floor debate. He flushed deep red and began to pull away from her when she unexpectedly grabbed hold of his pecker and growled in pleasure. Well, she might as well have used a magic wand. And as soon as she moaned, he felt his dick start throbbing. He mentally kicked himself for not beating off last night so he could think straight today.

Just when he couldn’t imagine this getting any better, she smile seductively and took his left middle finger with her right hand, and slowly flew them south. She grinned as his eyes opened in shock, as she pushed his hand down her shorts and under her thong underwear. From there, he did not need a Google map to foresee where his finger was going, even if he still couldn’t believe it. As her hand returned to massage his hard cock, his middle finger found the cave he so desperately wanted to hibernate in. Fingernails digging into his flesh, she threw her head back and moaned loudly as his first finger penetrated her. Bingo!

Dear Lord, she was wetter than the Rio Grande! She was as wet as he was hard. And that was why he should not feel embarrassed, for she was as inflamed as he was. He felt grateful for her replacing his embarrassment with something so much better. It felt like a wet dream, with lots of wet. He briefly contemplated another finger, but then decided to go for depth over breadth. He shifted his weight to adjust his body’s position so that his hand had the best possible angle, and then he finger-fucked her slowly, steadily, but with an increasing intensity. She shifted her weight onto him, lifting her right leg up, letting him hold her steady as her knees got weak. She opened her legs to give him full access, while grinding her pelvis higher and closer, fucking his finger as much as his finger fucked her.

He watched, fascinated, as her eyes dilated, then she bit down hard to avoid screaming and blinked as he felt a wave of liquid wash over his hand. Her head shook and her body vibrated. Finally, a woman who didn’t fake her orgasm! He once read that 95% of women fake organism, and the rest are gay. Her fake attempt to keep quiet failed, as her groan echoed off the walls.

At first he thought she peed on him, it was so hot, wet and heavy. Women come in squirts, not quarts. But the smell told him different. It didn’t smell at all like piss. No, this smelled like sweet fucking pussy. The good, clean stuff, not that old, nasty stuff his wife burdened him with monthly. Never before had he ever made a woman come so hard or fast, much less with her clothes still on. This was becoming a day of firsts.

And, although he didn’t yet know it, lasts.

As she recovered, she slowly pulled his hand out, then carefully held it up between them. She stuck out her tongue, playfully flicked it at him, then licked the tip of his middle finger, tasting her sweet juices. Giggling recklessly, she then pushed his middle finger into his mouth, all the way in, and he sucked her juices off with a smile. Fuck, it tasted good. Salty, like the skin of original Kentucky Fried Chicken, back in the days when they actually fucking fried their fucking chicken. Yet it was also more sweet and more sour than Chinese chicken. Girls are supposed to be made of sugar and spice, but many tasted like chicken and smelled like tuna. Not this girl.

He had never been this turned on before. Ever. Cooper flew on Cloud Nine without a parachute. He hadn’t felt this alive since he lost his virginity. He had not had this much fun since his first honeymoon. Like all men, he had always wanted to fuck a supermodel nympho virgin -- 2 out of 3 wasn’t bad. He felt satisfied without feeling satiated. And he still did not even know this hottie’s name.

This was not the first time he had cheated on his second wife. And he was under no delusion that he, in fact, just cheated on her, although he tried to stay faithful with all of his one night stands. Like most people comfortable with power, he was just good at living with things like that. It felt similar to opposing a bill that he knew would save lives, like restricting pollution or increasing healthcare access, but didn’t because powerful special interests donate so much. Any just society takes cares of its citizen’s basic needs, yet many politicians had no problem living happily in an unjust society. Hell, he even married a socialite.

His marriages taught him that the more you open your eyes before you marry, the less you have to close them afterwards. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but ugly is universal. Woman look forward to their wedding day, but men look forward to their wedding night. Why do wives fart, but not girlfriends?

For years he believed that marriage is what happy couples resort to in order to ruin an otherwise great relationship. He and his first wife used to make love three times a week, and fuck the other days. Sex may be a poor substitute for love, but it was better than anything else. Despite his first wife being hot, he still cheated on her, telling himself that he wanted sex routinely, but not routine sex. The only time he had one night stands was when two nights were not possible. If you’re not going to be persistent, then you might as well give up. While other men had sex with anything that moved, Cooper refused to limit his opportunities. Free love didn’t come cheap, but he could afford the price.

It reminded him of a joke where a guy calls his wife and asks if she wants to have sex five times that night. She says yes, but asks if he can last that long. “No,” the husband replies, “but I have four friends with me.” As his college roommate once put it, “Making love is what women do when men are fucking them.”

When he first got married, he could not imagine living without her, but every year improved his imagination. Love blinds, and sometimes deafens. Fortunately, a successful divorce made up for a failed marriage. A healthy divorce cured their sick marriage.

Now, he got along better with his ex than with their ungrateful kids because he figured out how to make her happy. Women need to feel attractive, and the uglier they get, the greater the need. It’s why he still fucked her. After four short marriages, Cooper felt sorry for her. Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.

On the other hand, his second wife Ann had never had an orgasm with him, and he tried to notice these things. Just because she didn’t excite him didn’t mean he didn’t want to excite her. And he tried. Dear Lord, he tried. An old saying predicts that women who marry for money end up working for every penny. In bed, that is how he felt. He helped her climb the mountain, but she never reached the summit. And she didn’t even have the curtsey to fake an orgasm now and then.

Maybe it was her age. At 66, Ann was four years older, yet he felt decades younger. Men and women just age differently. Groucho Marx observed that a man is only as old as the women he feels. But, then again, he also said that he once shot an elephant in his pajamas, but what the elephant was doing in his pajamas he’ll never know.

His affairs taught him that adultery is sex that is wrong, but not necessarily bad. You can’t buy happiness, but you can rent it for the night. He considered most people perverts, and thought the rest were just plain weird. Happiness may be fleeting, but misery feels eternal. Cooper tried masturbation, but masturbation provides relief, not satisfaction.

His wife wanted to marry a powerful man, someone who could be socially superior to her demanding father, and he wanted to marry a rich woman, so they both got what they wanted. Wealth is the surest way to cure loneliness. His own father used to warn him that the problem with men who marry for sex and women who marry for money is that they must both wait until divorce to get what they want.

It wasn’t until that very moment, while he watched Monique pull out his cock and quickly jack him off, that he realized that he was far happier married to Ann than he ever was with his first wife. The sex couldn’t compare, but everything else was superior. Ann made him happy. The realization jolted him, like coffee laced with Jack Daniels.

Or, as his minister father calls it, breakfast.

“Please tell me you speak English,” was the first coherent thing he said to her.

“Yes, I speak English. And Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and some Russian, Finnish, and German. But I don’t like German. As Voltaire said, it has too many consonants and not enough vowels,” she said in clear but heavily accented English, handing him her business card. “My name is Monique. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Cooper could not help but laugh. He quickly scanned the card and learned that she was, indeed, a model, since her website had both “hotmodels” and “moniqueportfolio” in it. He instantly wondered if she had any nude pictures of herself on her website. He was just dying to see more of her.

He knew of Voltaire from quotes like, “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, “Politics is the second oldest profession”, and, referring to Rousseau, “I may not agree with a word he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it.”

“Are you a friend of the family?” Cooper asked to find out where she fit into the Jackson hierarchy.

“We are either third cousins five times removed or fifth cousins three times removed. I cannot remember.”

He liked it that she pronounced “Los Angeles” in Spanish, as in “los anhelles”, as opposed to “las angaleez” like Americans do. Most cities in California had Spanish names – San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, etc. It was ironic that a state infamous for being secular like California would have so many of its greatest cities named after saints.

Shaking her hand, he completed the introduction.

“Hi, Monique. I’m Dan.”

7

“Don’t you wish you had a Landshark?”

Sexy Monique posed in front of Jackson’s space-age car, turning her body to accentuate her curves. Her tan legs, flat abs, and ample boobs really caught the eye. The contrast between Cooper’s land yacht and Jackson’s plug-in fuel cell car couldn’t have been greater. But it was only when she repeated the marketing slogan that it hit him.

“You’re the chick in the TV ads!”

“Both of them,” she agreed, obviously pleased.

Cooper now couldn’t believe he didn’t recognize her earlier, with the sexy accent and husky voice. Jackson plastered her face in dozens of car magazines. This plug-in fuel cell luxury sports car was spreading in Hollywood like a celebrity sex tape. Jackson intended to roll out other plug-in fuel cell versions, like an SUV, a van, mid and full size four-doors, as well as a light and heavy pickup truck, when other factories came on line. What Jackson didn’t have were cheap versions.

Cooper looked past the hottie to evaluate the car once more.

Instead of two seats side-by-side, the Landshark featured the driver’s seat alone, then two seats in the middle, with another lone seat in the back, all nestled in a NASCAR-inspired body wrap called a “pod”. The 1+2+1 tandem seating configuration made it longer and narrower to optimize its aerodynamics, along with a clean underbody, a tapered front, and minimally-exposed wheels and rear-view mirrors. The amorphous metal body took off several hundred pounds, allowing the propulsion system to be smaller, lighter, and cheaper. The super-light frame made it all work.

The front had a wraparound windscreen without a conventional hood, so the driver, who sat just a few feet from the front bumper, had a unobstructed 180 degree view. The damn thing didn’t even have a steering wheel or gas pedals, instead using hand controls. Driving it was the equivalent of streaking nude at the Academy Awards -- people couldn’t help but notice you.

The bizarre story of how Jackson even became a niche automaker itself pissed Cooper off. Billion dollar opportunities just fell into his fucking lap. Jackson wisely co-opted Cooper’s investment banker wife to invest tens of millions in Jackson Motors, so he knew the story all too well:

Jackson made his first fortune fish farming in the Pacific, a thousand miles from the Mexican coast. Fossil fuels poison fish, so necessity forced him to maximize use of clean energy – solar, wind, and tidal. In addition to thousands of solar panels and windmills, he used the temperature difference between deep sea water and surface water to help power the pumps that brought up nutrients from a mile deep. Concentrated solar thermal – using the heat from satellite dish-shaped mirrors to split water to get hydrogen – provided his primary fuel. Then clean hydrogen turbines propelled his boats and ships, and hydrogen fuel cells powered his onboard electronics.

The problem with clean energy is it was not always there when he needed it. Jackson required stable power. Worst still, relatively little electricity can be stored in even the biggest industrial batteries. Batteries not only have problems with extreme temperatures, but don’t react well to humidity and salty air. Plus, not only do industrial batteries cost millions each, but they have limited capacity, don’t scale up well, and wear out quickly.

Scaling up batteries has been tried. The batteries used by utilities are the size of double-decker buses. Utilities need storage because they lose whatever electricity they don’t immediately transmit -- about 7% on average. The grid in Fairbanks, Alaska, has the world’s biggest battery backup, a 40-megawatt nickel-cadmium system. The Japanese have developed a sodium-sulfur model that can store five megawatts, while other big users of stored electricity resorted to flywheels.

So Jackson turned to ultracapacitors in the 1980’s, which store less energy per weight or size, but have none of the other drawbacks. A capacitor does not damage battery memory caused by partial discharging and has no reduction in capacity with each recharge, so they literally never wear out. Unlike batteries, they hold the same charge the millionth time as the first time. They have an electrical field that stores energy, allowing them to recharge millions of times without loss of capacity. Because capacitors have no wear-and-tear problem, they become cheaper the longer they last and the more they are used.

So Jackson invested in ultracapacitor companies that focused on nanotechnology to add more surface area by replacing porous carbon with tiny nanotubes, which have five times the ion-collecting surface area; and graphene, which is a layer of carbon atoms in a particular pattern. He eventually merged them to make the best ultracapacitors in the world.

Ultracapacitors could not compete with what batteries could do best, but they could do what batteries could not: store a lot of energy over millions of recharges. A battery can power a laptop, but ultracapacitors could power the laptop manufacturing plant. As Jackson expanded to fifteen deep sea fish farms, he needed thousands of bigger, better ultracapacitors to store his solar and wind energy for the night shift.

Once he won election as governor of Arizona in 2002, he bought out the other investors and took the company private. Then he gave the company a statewide contract, millions in state tax credits to build a local factory, and marketed to other states, utilities, and big corporations, with all profits reinvested into making bigger and better ultracapacitors.

The ability to store large amounts of electricity gave new life to solar and wind farms – thousands of them grouped together. Factories that used a hell of a lot of energy like utilities, automakers and steelmakers could now cover their parking lots and buildings with his cheap organic solar. The ability to store large amounts of electricity helped him sell more solar and wind products. Utility companies became his biggest clients because they lose whatever electricity they don’t use, in addition to the 6% on average that they lose in transmission.

So Jackson dominated another global industry, replacing backups in large buildings, factories, and utilities.

Cooper gave him his due props.

But then a Chinese automaker came calling, wanting to know if he could mass-produce them small, light, and cheap enough to power a car. Toyota’s hybrid Prius has been around a dozen years. Chrysler was making a pure electric car, the Dodge Circuit EV roadster. Tesla had the all-electric $100,000 roadster that used thousands of small lithium-ion batteries. Fisker Automotive had a $87,500 plug-in sedan called the Karma. GM hoped to mass produce their Chevy Volt plug-in electric, even though the Volt’s 200-lithium-cell battery pack cost $16,000.

Unfortunately, plug-ins kill batteries by fully depleting them. So battery-powered electrics and hybrids are great for those who never need to drive them far. Like, say, on golf courses.

For example, GM’s Volt needs a 10-year, 150,000 mile warranty in order to get the coveted California Air Resources Board credit. Drivers need range, but those who drive it too far deplete it, which means it won’t last either 10 years or 150,000 miles. So battery-powered electric cars cannot be driven too far without being recharged, yet every recharge reduces their life span. What they couldn’t do is have a powerful battery that would last a long time. And no automaker wanted to pay $16,000 for a 400 pound battery that they could not guarantee to last 150,000 miles.

Enter the fucking Chinese.

Jackson had just opened a next-gen ultracapacitor factory near his other clean energy and home construction companies in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong on the mainland, and the second busiest Chinese port after Shanghai. Shenzhen-based auto newcomer BYD (“Build Your Dreams”) started mass-producing a plug-in electric sedan in China in 2008, right after billionaire investor Warren Buffet bought a 10% share of BYD for $1.8 billion HKD (Hong Kong dollars). It used an electric motor and a 67-horsepower, 1-liter gasoline engine for a combined output of 168 hp. But they couldn’t get a battery that lasted long enough on a charge or live long enough with frequent recharging. Plus ultracapacitors are better at releasing electricity (for fast acceleration) and collecting electricity (with regenerative braking).

So they asked Jackson if he could make an ultracapacitor that could replace the car battery. After intense study, the short answer turned out to be “no”. Not without redesigning the entire fucking car. Staring at a huge opportunity, Jackson hired auto designers to completely re-design the modern fucking car.

The trick was the lightest possible car frame and recharging the ultracapacitor as often as possible, even in small amounts. The solution turned out to be coating the outer car body with organic solar. Organic solar cells are made from pentacene -- sheets made of rings of hydrogen and carbon that occur naturally. Since engineers do not have to chemically manufacture them in the complicated process required for silicon panels, the organic cells are far less expensive, but less efficient – 6% compared to 22%. They look and feel like 35 mm rolls of film. However, unlike silicon, organic solar cells are weather and scratch resistant, hold paint well, “bounce” back from small dents, and the ultrathin reels can be “painted” seamlessly onto virtually any flat surface, including windows. Adding organic solar cells to the car body added just a hundred dollars to the production cost, but saved that much in fuel every year.

A car body painted with organic solar could literally recharge itself while sitting in the driveway, the office parking lot, or while driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic. After all, the average car is parked 96% of the time. Solar constantly recharging the ultracapacitor meant smaller, lighter, cheaper ultracapacitors, fuel cells, and fuel tanks, which reduced production costs.

The Landshark also used regenerative brakes to charge the ultracapacitor, as well as a new cousin: a shock absorber called GenShock invented at MIT that converts vertical motion caused by bumpy roads into useful electricity. Hence, Jackson’s car is constantly charged by 1) a car body painted with organic solar, 2) regenerative brakes, 3) shock absorbers, and 4) transparent photovoltaic windows that use heat resistant glass which dramatically cuts air conditioning costs. Those who only drive short distances could conceivably go years between refills. Drivers could refill with pressurized hydrogen canisters from Home Depot.

Using an amorphous metal frame to take off several hundred pounds, Jackson now had a car design and business model that would allow him to dominate the global automaking industry.

But, then, he went one crucial step farther.

Instead of producing cars himself which, admittedly, is a bitch of a headache, he entered an agreement with BYD to buy up to 250,000 Landsharks a year. BYD already had several factories and the Chinese government seemed willing to lend them the money to build a new state-of-the-art factory, so Jackson asked them how many Landsharks BYD could make a year, including the new plant. Since they figured they could probably build just over 200,000 units a year, Jackson promised to buy up to 250,000 a year for ten years. China already offered a 60,000 yuan ($8800 USD) electric car subsidy, giving Jackson a big domestic market as well.

Jackson knew introducing them to the public was crucial, so he sold them through a reverse auction where insatiable demand and limited supply quickly drove up the price to over $100,000. Which became a selling point and a marketing tool as the Landshark became a status symbol.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis that resulted in Bush’s 2008 Wall Street Bailout was still increasing unemployment in China. Too much unemployment threatened the government’s image as capable governors. Fearing the seeds of revolution, they offered to expand capacity to as much as Jackson felt comfortable buying. They were willing to build BYD several next-generation factories if Jackson became a guaranteed buyer. They even offered very favorable prices, preferring to take a loss as long as they employed a few million more Chinese workers. Which, admittedly, is much cheaper than suppressing rebellions.

The Chinese made an offer Jackson couldn’t refuse.

With prices so low, Jackson decided to make the most of it by promising to buy up to ten million vehicles a year, not that he ever expected a tiny Chinese automaker to ever produce so many. The Chinese government, however, needed to give jobless workers hope, so they held a joint press conference to announce the government was loaning BYD several billion to make several large next-gen production plants that would employ several million Chinese. They even opened up a new school to train these new workers while the factories were being built. Jackson became a household name in China as the guy creating several million jobs.

So, to Cooper’s fury, Jackson was not only going to become the biggest automaker in the world, but was doing it with other people’s money. Cooper knew that Jackson was counting on him as president to buy several million of those vehicles to replace the federal government’s fleet. Jackson already told him that his SUV would be a great replacement for the post office’s 260,000 mail delivery vehicles, much less their freight trucks. Plus, Jackson wanted to allow state and local governments to buy into the pool to replace police cars, as well as school and inner city buses. Which Cooper hadn’t promised to do yet, if he won.

Yet the political profit was so much more:

Jackson had a car that didn’t consume oil, pollute, or contribute to global warming. Since transportation accounts for two-thirds of America’s oil consumption, and vehicles alone consume 44% of all oil in America, replacing gas and diesel vehicles with plug-in solar fuel cells would make America energy independent. This would save millions of Americans from dying prematurely from air pollution, save generations of kids from asthma and respiratory diseases, keep millions of workers at work instead of sick, and prevent future wars over oil. America remained at the mercy of oil exporters like Russia, Iran and Venezuela for only as long as its drivers consumed 150 billion gallons a year of gas.

Instead of an expensive national dealership distribution system, Jackson used a website where buyers could order exactly what they wanted -- outer color, interior, sound system, etc. The waiting list was over a year long anyway, so Jackson made a virtue of necessity. Or, in computer parlay, he turned a bug into a feature. Buyers could even track their car online though the production and delivery process, a la FedEx.

“I’m the Landshark girl,” Monique admitted, quite pleased that he recognized her from just two commercials that ran briefly. She appeared in tons of magazine ads, but print ads didn’t matter to models like television did. Fame to an aspiring actress is like dope to an addict. “Last week I finished several commercials for the new 2012 models. Are you familiar with plug-in fuel cells?”

Cooper flashed her his trademark smile, the one that barely fit on his face.

Jackson’s beautiful sky-blue Landshark stood out more than his borrowed three ton Hummer. Which was the point. While the Hummer looked like a land yacht, the Landshark looked like it could fly. Or swim. But the beauty of the Landshark was not just skin deep. It was the economics that rocked the industry.

Because the Landshark was freed from designing around big boxes like the engine, steering column, and trunk, it was far more evenly balanced, with its weight lower and better distributed to give it an optimal center of gravity which enabled it to hug curves at high speed.

But the best part was each skateboard chassis could accommodate dozens of different bodies, including compacts, vans, sedans, pickup trucks, and SUVs. Switching vehicle bodies only required tying down a dozen connection points and inserting the control wire into the main port. Because the bottom half of the vehicle was the same, one factory could produce dozens of vehicles with one platform, without costly makeovers. In contrast, GM had 68 car models using 50 different platforms.

While every major automaker develops models and then tries to share platforms to reduce costs, Jackson first designed a common platform, then came up with various models to build on that platform. Or, specifically, four platforms that theoretically could handle every car, truck, van, and SUV he imagined making. And even that fourth platform would make various buses, freight trucks, SUV limos, and an armored military transport that could accommodate an entire light infantry platoon. Designing several platforms was hard, but made turning out various models relatively cheap, fast, and easy.

And refueling was as easy as plugging into a 220 outlet, buying a canister of pressurized hydrogen gas, or just leaving it out in the sunshine. That eliminated the chicken-and-the-egg dilemma of sinking trillions in a vast hydrogen distribution network. If clean energy was the future, then Cooper was looking at tomorrow.

“I’ve heard of them,” Cooper obliquely answered her. “You know how I can get one?”

Monique leaned towards him and whispered.

“Don’t tell anyone, but Henry’s prototype is a piece of shit. That’s why he won’t sell it. He only drives it to show off or get on TV. Lorena won’t touch it because it’s so unreliable. He’s getting the very first 2012 model to replace this piece of crap.”

Cooper loved hearing bad news about Jackson.

“I won’t tell a soul,” he lied.

Despite having decided to replace federal gas hogs with plug-ins as much as possible, Cooper still had not told Jackson yet. He hadn’t decided what to ask for in return. Jackson was always pestering him for something. Cooper wanted something back. But when you’re already the president of the United fucking States, what more could you possibly want?

A billion dollars.

The thought hit him like a brick. He said it again in his own mind, loving the sound of it. One billion dollars. Now that’s validation! He then wondered what Jackson would have demanded if their positions were reversed.

Monique wrapped her arm around his and walked him into the house as he, still flying like a kite, reveled in the most unexpected sex of his life.

And, as it turned out, the last.

If he only knew how many cameras filmed his infidelity, then he would really realize just how fucked he truly was.

8

Buck naked in his second floor bedroom, Henry Jackson’s only son watched his longtime lover feed his warm cum to the next likely president of the United States. They just had sex minutes before, so Monique must really hate that guy to make him drink David’s juice. David had done a lot of mean things in his life, but feeding a guy someone else’s sperm topped them all.

If he wasn’t busy masturbating while operating three hidden video cameras, he would have screamed at the top of his lungs. Although it wasn’t clear what he would have screamed.

Named after his grandfather the astronomy professor, rather than his father the governor, he insisted on being called “David” instead of “Henry” or “Henry David” because he did not like being in the shadow of his father. David and his father had enough bad blood between them to stock a blood bank. Although a compulsive workaholic like his father, he otherwise did everything possible to appear different.

Jackson spent most of David’s childhood building his fish farms in the South Pacific. David tried all of the usual attention-getters, like excelling at sports, shooting, flying, martial arts, and learning the family business, but his father always seemed to have more important things to do than spend time with his only son. Other kids would have concluded that this was somehow their fault. Not David. He concluded that his father was an asshole. And grew up with enough issues to employ an army of shrinks.

David worked off the anger by kicking the shit out of people, first in martial arts tournaments, sometimes in bars, and later in semi-legal cage fighting bouts. He only stopped when he beat the reigning cage fighting champion to a bloody pulp, giving his father the governor another public relations bitch slap.

What kept David so pissed is that his father did the opposite with Lisa. His father tried to justify it by explaining that he was not spending more time with his daughter – his daughter was spending more time with him. In other words, she spent her free time with him; he was not spending his free time with her. Like David cared. While his father joked that Lisa was the son he had always wanted, Lisa had the father that David always wanted.

But that did not mean he wanted his father to fail. His father promised to fund his “special projects” if he scored big, and so David had serious chips on the table. Money drove father and son apart, so maybe money would help them connect once again.

The trauma of losing his wife to leukemia made wiping out deadly diseases his mission in life. So an obsessed David earned both a doctorate in microbiology and a medical degree, although he never took the medical exam because, quite frankly, he should not be around people. No, David wanted to become a research geneticist like his mother. Or, rather, manage genetic researchers.

David had two obsessions, and his twin six-year-old kids by his dead wife were not among them. First, he wanted to rid the world of genetic diseases via pre-conception screening of the egg and sperm. Choosing the best sperm and egg did not involve any genetic cloning or manipulation. This would prevent millions of babies from being born with disease and disabilities. No genetic disease has ever been cured. Prevention is the only cure. Or, as his mother phrased it, “prevention is the cure.”

Which is why he needed his father. Geneticists could identify ever more bad genes, while making screening eggs and sperm ever cheaper, but most people would continue to have babies the old fashion way unless the pre-screening and artificial insemination was fully covered by health insurance.

God, he hated politics. And politicians.

Babies screened of genetic diseases would be stronger, healthier, and live longer. Studies showed that people would pay ten year’s income for another good decade of life. The several thousand dollars invested would save hundreds of thousands later. Crippling conditions like Down’s Syndrome would be wiped out forever. As the genetic screening became better, more and more bad genes would be screened out. Every generation would enjoy greater quality and quantity of life, and turbocharge the economy with healthier workers productively at work instead of in hospitals.

David also favored a national healthcare system that paid for vaccinating babies against inherited forms of cancer, obesity, alcoholism, dyslexia, and diabetes. Just take AIDS. HIV attaches itself to a molecule called CCR5, which sits on the surface of white blood cells. Those who don’t have CCR5 don’t get infected. And a single gene producing a molecule called CCL3L1 prevents HIV from attaching itself to CCR5, meaning screened babies would be immune to HIV.

Prevention is the only cure.

Virtually everyone has genetic disease pre-dispositions, and the list of genetic diseases is long and sad: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Down's Syndrome, Tay-Sachs, Cooley's anemia, Werner syndrome (causes premature aging), cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, lupus, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, familial breast cancer, prostate cancer, fragile X syndrome, Asrskog-Scott syndrome, Beckwith-Wiedemann (gigantism), hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, and some forms of alcoholism, depression, mania, addictive behavior, schizophrenia, asthma, neurosis, and obesity. Experts could one day screen out nearly 2000 genetic diseases, disabilities, and preconditions.

Another example was cancer, the third biggest killer of all time after 1) stupidity and 2) not paying attention. Cancer has 67 “master” genes, so genetic versions could theoretically be prevented by removing or turning off these 67 genes.

Treatment is expensive, prevention cheap. Diabetes costs America $132 billion, autism $43 billion, and asthma $11.3 billion every year. Genetic diseases, including lost productivity, cost America half a trillion a year.

David also obsessed over life extension medicine.

Aging is mostly regulated by the gene clusters that control the release of certain hormones, which hold the key to slowing the aging process. Life can also be significantly prolonged by removing or turning off dozens of bad genes and enhancing dozens of good genes, or the proteins they control. These target genes produce antioxidants, make natural microbicides, and some, called chaperones, keep the cell components in good working order. Other ways involve reversing or repairing decay in mitochondria, organelles that serve as a cell's main energy source.

Some people collect baseball cards or rare coins. Others obsess over sports or soap operas. David’s mission in life was preventing genetic disease and extending life spans.

But everyone needs a hobby. David’s was re-creating extinct animals on a chain of islands his father controlled in the South Pacific, several thousand kilometers from the nearest continent. The Pitcairn Island group, with a total area of 47 square kilometers, consisted of Pitcairn, Sandy, Oeno, Henderson, and Ducie Island. Pitcairn Island is infamous because it was populated by the descendants of the ship Bounty, from “Mutiny of the Bounty” fame. Until rape and incest of young girls forced authorities to remove their leaders in the 1990s. With less than two dozen left, and their leaders gone, the rest of the descendants of the Mutiny crew sold their land to Jackson and left.

Like Puerto Rico, which is its own country as well as a territory of the United States, Pitcairn was its own country as well as an English territory, although it used the New Zealand dollar. Its mayor served as head of the government in the world’s smallest democracy -- well, until convicted of sexual abuse of little girls along with several other men. So, in buying out every land owner, Jackson effectively bought his own damn country. The couple hundred workers that Jackson employed on the five islands then became its only citizens, revoking everyone else’s citizenship and visitation rights. The new citizens replaced the 1964 constitution and voted unanimously for independence from the United Kingdom, which the English call Great Britain. And they elected Jackson as their mayor/governor/president. Not that the British Parliament recognized their independence.

Guaranteed privacy, David spent millions optimizing the islands for his experiments, such as enlarging the islands by incorporating the surrounding islets. He mapped the shallow water and even had engineers analyze how best to maximize the surface area. What he needed was a lot more money.

Especially since his wish list kept growing:

Dinosaurs: Spinosaurus, a theropod a dozen feet larger than T-rex; a 66 foot-long hadrosaur; a 26 foot-long head-butting pachycephalosaur; stegosaurs; triceratops; 30 foot-long armored ankylosaurs; a 23 foot-long raptor called Utahraptor; and Argentinosaur, a 100-foot, 100-ton sauropod, the largest land animal ever.

Extinct reptiles: flying pterosaurs the size of planes; 12 foot long turtles; 50 foot long croc-like armored amphibians called plagiossaurs; 45 foot snakes; and 30-45 feet long lizard-fish called ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs.

Extinct mammals: the indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever at 26 feet and 30,000 pounds; a 10 foot tall Bigfoot-like ape called Gigantopithecus; the 9 foot tall Australian kangaroo-rat; the camel/horse/giraffe-like macrauchenia; Josephoartigasia monesi, a one-ton hippo-size rodent; dwarf horses, elephants and mammoth the size of dogs; mammoths twice the size of elephants; the lion-bear-like sarkastodon with a raccoon tail; the bear-wolf-like borhyaena; the 10 foot long horse-like chalicotheres with claws; the 2000 pound wolf-like megistotherium; the rhino-like toxodon; the camel-like litoptern; the ox-sized rodent telicomys; the 16 foot long rhino called elasmotherium; the 20 foot long giant sloth megatherium; the 30 foot long Steller’s Sea Cow that survived until the mid-18th century; a Madagascan lemur the size of a gorilla; the allodesmus “sea elephant”; gomphotheres, a four-tusked elephant; the giant pig with wolf teeth dinohyus; the 60 foot long ancient whale called basilosaurus with a mouth like a crocodile; and giant beavers, dogs, peccaries, wooly rhinos, armadillos, deer, mastodons, lions, bears, and wombats;

Extinct birds: the 10 foot tall phorusrhacoids “terror birds” with meter-long beaks that ran 70 kilometers a hour; the 10 foot tall aepyornis “elephant bird” that laid the largest bird egg ever; argentavis, a vulture with a 24 foot wingspan, twice the size of the modern albatross; the 1000 pound B. planei, the largest carnivore on two legs since the dinosaurs; a giant eagle from New Zealand; and the 50 pound flightless dodo bird, so dumb British sailors could famously induce it to jump right into the cooking pot.

Others: foot-long cockroaches, a eight-foot scorpion; a spider-like, one-foot long bug called megarachne; a dragonfly-like creature two feet long with six foot long wingspans; six foot long millipede-like bugs; 800 pound Goliath groupers; and megalodon sharks three times bigger than great whites.

In 2003, paleontologists in Montana broke a femur bone of a T-rex to fit it into the helicopter. The lab then discovered collagen, a fiber protein in bones, and soft tissue, such as blood veins, as if it died hours before instead of 65 million years ago. That meant DNA, necessary for cloning and genome scanning.

In the early 1990s, expeditions sponsored by the American Museum of National History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences found fossils in the Gobi desert so well preserved they looked like carcasses that died hours before. The Gobi has since turned into the world’s largest dinosaur find, with literally thousands of fossils.

Similar finds, but of marsupials, were discovered by the Australian Museum in Sydney in the inaccessible region in Riversleigh, Queensland. These finds were so well preserved they also looked like carcasses just a few weeks old, exquisitely preserved in limestone caves by water rich in calcium carbonate. The Australian Museum now had DNA of the largest marsupial lion, wolf, giant rat-kangaroo, and the giant monitor lizard.

More recently, paleontologists found in Auca Maheuvo, Argentina, thousands of eggs and embryos of titanosaurs so well preserved that one could discern their skin texture. David and his mother themselves worked on soft-tissue from T-rex fossils at the National Dinosaur Monument in Utah and from the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Every year, more and more extinct animals were found either frozen in ice, preserved in peat bog or limestone, or mummified in salt or oil deposits.

But the real soft tissue finds were from 1) Alaska’s North Slope, 2) the Liscomb Quarry in the Arctic Circle, and 3) Antarctica. Northern Alaska was actually even farther north then than today, which begs the question of how 35 foot long dinosaurs survived months of freezing temperatures. Troodons, the raptors from Jurassic Park movies, grew twice as large in Alaska than Texas, so some dinosaurs flourished above the Arctic Circle.

David thought it fascinating how far continents have moved. Antarctica was once connected to Australia, India, and South America, as were Europe and North America, and England with the European coast. North and South America disconnected around the time the dinosaurs perished, then connected again 2.5 million years ago. India was an island after it separated from Madagascar. A shallow sea once separated the western and eastern United States, as well as northern and southern Europe. The Mediterranean Sea was a lake, and the Straits of Gibraltar a giant waterfall for 10,000 years as the Atlantic poured in.

Ironically, father and son originally fought over dinosaurs. Jackson taught David about deep sea fish farming, hoping he would take over the family business, then David’s mother hooked him on dinosaurs when the movie Jurassic Park came out.

It was David’s mother who introduced him to a Chilean professor who spent thirty years reverse engineering dinosaurs by the selective breeding of ratites (ostriches, rheas, cassowaries, kiwis, moa, emus, and elephant birds), the oldest birds on Earth. Birds descended from dinosaurs, so the oldest birds were their closest living relatives. What evolved could re-volve.

The Chilean professor sold David on using the latest gene sequencing machines to accelerate the selective breeding process. David loved the idea, but insisted on going one crucial step farther because reverse engineering dinosaurs using their closest surviving descendants would take too damn long. David had more money than patience.

No, David would only get involved if they injected dinosaur DNA into the ratites to create a dozen different species at the same time. The resulting transgenic chimeras produced a half-dinosaur, half-ratite hybrid, and injecting dinosaur DNA into each successive generation made them less bird-like and more dinosaur-like. This got them around the chicken-and-the-egg dilemma since you can’t get dinosaurs without dinosaur eggs that turn on and off millions of proteins at specific times in the embryo’s development.

This not only sometimes worked, but sometimes worked very well. And each generation produced better eggs, and thus more genetically-genuine dinosaurs. In effect, they reversed evolution, turning the world’s oldest birds into the world’s newest dinosaurs. All they needed was several more generations to really wow the world.

The catch, and there is always a catch, is that they were not cloning dinosaurs at this point, but re-creating them. Cloning is making identical copies, while they were reshuffling the deck to see what hands were dealt. Since the creatures grew to breeding age in just three years, they were now on their fourth generation, which were obviously not birds.

As a teenager obsessed with dinosaurs, it never crossed his mind to clone anything else. But as a researcher spending his father’s cash and patience, what David wished he did was start with something far easier. He could have started with mammals, like those Japanese geneticists who used an elephant to carry the world’s first cloned mammoth. And there was so much to choose from: ancient bears, lions, dogs, apes, kangaroo-rats, mastodons, beavers, wombats, horses, wolves, armadillos, rhinos, peccaries, rodents, deer, ground sloth, pigs, mammoth, and a four-tusked elephant. Except for the dog-size horse, all of these recreations dwarfed today’s versions, and would be in huge demand by the world’s zoos and animal parks. He could make a fortune auctioning them off to zoos and rich eccentrics around the world.

What still seemed impossible, for lack of DNA, were megalodon sharks and bus-size lizard-like marine reptiles that co-existed with dinosaurs: armored plagiossaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs with teeth like T-rex.

Now that would be a shark tank!

David shivered at the knowledge that his best dinosaurs were floating sedated on two cargo ships just south of New Zealand. The most dinosaur-like were a giant sauropod called Sally, three young theropods, several raptors, and a dozen terror birds. The triceratops-to-be sported horns, but was a few generations away from prime time. An armored, rhino-like dino showed promise, if they could get future versions to grow bigger than cows. Two stegosaurs looked good, but behaved like crazy drug addicts. Then there were his two largest T-rex-like theropods, Cain and Able, one of whom was crazy violent and the other rather dopey and confused.

His life’s work thus far.

What he really needed was a lot more money, talent, and technical expertise. Which meant he needed his father. So if David’s father needed leverage over Cooper, then he would help get that leverage. Which is why he was remote-operating the three hidden video cameras in front of their house for the best possible views, all while masturbating furiously.

9

“Captain? We have a problem.”

Wilivardo Ramirez, standing at the bow of his ship like Leo DeCaprio in the movie Titanic, stiffened as if an Antarctic breeze blew up his ass. The anxious tone of the vet’s voice said it all:

The dinosaurs in his cargo holds were waking up.

The Pitcairn islands were relatively small, so each predator specie needed its own. Fortunately, the animal caretakers had drugged their food right before their arrival, which sped things up. They, too, wanted to survive. The ostrich-like ratites on Sandy Island, with their huge beaks and clawed feet, were easily bagged and dragged with wheeled carts. Wili had never seen birds so damn big. Bad-ass ostriches, that’s what they looked like.

On Oeno, even after drugging their food, they still sedated the raptors with darts shot from the heloplane, which was difficult in the heavily forested island. The three crews with heavy machine guns almost seemed disappointed they didn’t get to shoot them. Dino-steaks were awesome. But no, the dinosaurs stayed drugged out, drooling like any addict or Jonas Brothers fan. The crane lifted the muzzled and handcuffed raptors, some as tall as a man and twice as long, without incident.

Instead of taking the ship to the third island, Pitcairn, David simply hauled the theropods in his heloplane and dropped them into the cargo hold. Three small T-rex-looking fuckers. Except they had longer arms than a T-rex and three fingers while the T-rex only had two. And pretty frills on the head. Still, except for paleontologists and dino-nuts, they looked like fucking T-rexes. Only playful like teenager gorillas. Wili never imagined seeing anything like a T-rex, much less three handcuffed to his bulkheads.

The entire voyage was surreal, from learning it would rain space boulders, to learning that Jackson’s son was a fucking Frankenstein secretly bioengineering monsters. One day Wili believes that dinosaurs died 65 million years ago. The next David Jackson flies in and offers him a million bucks to carry some special cargo. Plus triple wages and a bonus for the crew. And all they had to do was hold some dangerous animals, then return them after the asteroid passes.

He watched dumbfounded as David Jackson anguished over which ones to save. Wili thought he was going to cry. For example, he decided to save three fourth-generation teenage sisters, but not two third-gen adult theropods. The best ended up in Wili’s three largest cargo holds, while the rest were put into shoebox-shaped amorphous metal shelters and air-lifted to Valley Ridge, the summit of Pitcairn at 1109 feet above sea level. The shelters were strong enough to withstand even huge waves, and heavily secured so they couldn’t be displaced. Whatever farm animals survived the waves were going to wake up tomorrow to find T-rex-like theropods, Jurassic Park-like raptors, and ten feet tall ostrich-like ratite birds looking at them and seeing breakfast.

The captain did not look forward to going back.

Once loaded with the extinct animals and thousands of dino-ratite eggs, they sped south at maximum speed to join their sister ship in 6000 meter deep water between New Zealand’s Campbell Island and the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica. 25,000 Pacific islands would hopefully disrupt any tsunamis coming from the north, particularly the northern and southern islands of New Zealand. Even the Challenger and Campbell underwater plateaus around New Zealand would help. The more landmasses between them and an impact, the more walls the waves would have to flow over.

The deeper the water, the more a wave would flow under them, rather than over them. And even distance helped, since the water pushed by an impact would spread out and slow down over time. So an impact in the Caribbean would have to travel several thousand nautical miles before it reached them. If a big space rock hit, say, south of Australia, well, then they were fucked.

As captain, all Wili could do was point the bow of the ship directly at any wave, above or below water. Getting sideswiped would flip his ship over like in the Poseidon movie. The problem was that multiple rocks could start multiple waves, which meant he may need to quickly turn the ship. He couldn’t even use storm anchors because tsunamis would come in the form of a giant swell that his ship needed to float over.

The best place far north was in the Bering Sea above the line of Aleutian Islands in the Pacific or north of Iceland in the Atlantic. Thousands of ships sought shelter in the huge Hudson Bay in Canada or in the Great Lakes. Most European vessels were trying their luck in the Mediterranean. The Strait of Gibraltar narrowed to only 14 kilometers and was relatively shallow. Whatever volume of water that got through the Strait would disperse as the Mediterranean widened. Asia, however, had few good options. The Chinese were belatedly putting everything afloat either upriver or into the Bohai Gulf near Beijing which is partly protected by the Liaodong and Shandong Peninsulas.

With his ship flying over the ocean’s surface at maximum speed, the captain welcomed the cold salty air pelting his weathered face. Such a beautiful day. And, possibly, his last.

The vet coughed impatiently.

Wili’s current dilemma was they could not sedate the damn beasts forever. It’s not like they could hook up an IV to feed them nutrients while they slept. Sooner or later, their hunger would wake them up. Sure, he put cattle, pigs, and chicken with them so they didn’t eat his crew, but he preferred they stayed unconscious. He only needed another day to return to Pitcairn.

Except the dinosaurs may not wait that long.

Wili suddenly lowered his binoculars.

“There!” he shouted over the freezing wind. He turned around to beam at the vet, who clearly didn’t care. She was the same age as his daughter, but otherwise a different species of female. Probably all those fancy gringo schools. He liked looking at her, however. He couldn’t comprehend how someone could be so fucking sexy without being hot or beautiful. Maybe the bulky clothes were to blame. She just had one of those engaging smiles and delightful personalities that shined through even when she casually handled multi-ton monsters. She treated them like her children, but they sure as hell didn’t look at her like their mother. The granddaughter of the geneticist who hooked David a dozen years ago, she basically grew up with dinosaurs and bad-ass birds. She worked for the Jacksons for as long as he and yet until a few days ago he never knew she existed.

Not unlike the dinosaurs she raised.

The only thing that scared her were the health of her “kids”. Not space mountains, falling boulders, giant tsunamis, mad genetic experiments, or even an unknown disease that resembled a cross between bird-flu and swine flu. The vet called it dino-flu. Not very comforting. Not that she needed comforting. Lord knows he tried to comfort her. For a girl who spent a lot of time alone, she certainly didn’t seem lonely. He commanded a crew of twenty and was lonely all the time. No matter what whore slept in his cabin.

No, according to the other caretakers, the only sex she was interested in was with the theropods sisters. When they met, she told him she was trying to impregnate the dinosaurs, so he volunteered: “I’ve never fucked a dinosaur before. Tie one down and I won’t be a minute!” Wrong answer. Their relationship had not improved since.

“Look!,” he told her, passing the binoculars.

“I see a dot.”

“Your brother is on our sister ship, the Lorena. She’s carrying the herbivores.”

At least, those not left to die on Henderson, the largest of the five Pitcairn islands. The vet told him that David put the remaining sedated herbivores inside several amorphous hangers near the inland pond so they wouldn’t be displaced by large waves. They were finally making progress on creatures that resembled the bony-plated stegosaurus, neck-frilled protoceratops, armored ankylosaurs, the three horned triceratops, the rhino-like centrosaurus, and the head-butting pachycephalosaurus. And of course the huge sauropods.

“Captain!” The lovely vet looked pissed. She was used to being taken seriously. Well, she was in charge of raising T-fucking-rexes, so she should be used to being taken seriously. “One of the dinosaurs is missing.”

“What?” His sweet buzz died like a swatted fly. “But they’re chained to the bulkheads! We have manacles on their arms and legs. You said they can’t even stand up!”

“One of the eggs hatched. At least one hatched.”

“Are you sure?” which was a stupid question.

“Well, we found a lot of egg shells and an assistant cook has been partially eaten. In the kitchen. I’m assuming he was trying to boil the egg and the egg fought back.”

“Which one did it kill? The Guatemalan, the Costa Rican, or the Nicaraguan?”

She was a vet, not a detective. And from Chile.

“I’m guessing the dumb one.”

Wili raised his fists in rage. That fucking Guatemalan! Sometimes the cheapest workers are the most expensive employees.

“Please don’t tell me it’s not a fucking T-rex.”

“Oh, no. It’s probably a raptor. It’s hard to tell from the size, shape, and color of the egg shells since we had to put all the eggs together in the walk-in fridge. We used to have them carefully organized. It could be anything, really.”

“Maybe it’s a herbivore,” Wili hoped.

“Oh, no. My brother handles all of the herbivores. Ever since the accident. No, all the eggs I have are from predators.”

Meaning the few thousand eggs on his ship were all predators-to-be. For the first time, he supported abortion.

“It’s the size of a chicken. How bad can it be?”

The vet glared at him. She had seen her kids melt many a macho man, and had no patience for it. Or them.

“Why don’t you ask the Guatemalan?”

10

David and Monique lost their virginities to each other when she was 15 and he just 13. It all started when Monique discovered her dead mother’s diary, and the details of one glorious summer when her mother and David’s father fucked like rabbits. Every sordid detail was described at length, like a good romance novel without the romance. And so when Monique became her mother’s age when she fucked Henry Jackson, Monique decided to repeat the conquest with the son, while they were still virgins. He was so tall, athletic, and good looking that she also needed to act quickly before he lost his virginity to another. And so just as her mother carefully planned the seduction of the father, so too did she plan the seduction of the son. And everything that her mother did, she planned on doing. Although she had no idea how much anal hurt, even with tons of liquor and lubricant. Pot, she found out just in time, helped the most. She even bought nine inch “stripper” high heels, which she called her “anal shoes”.

And they had been friends and lovers ever since.

Going from boyfriend to husband to father to widow while still a teenager in a doctorate program was just too much for David when he lost his teenage wife to leukemia. An overwhelmed David was forever grateful to Monique for taking care of him when he needed it the most. She was incredibly busy herself with her modeling career, but she dropped it all without hesitation.

For Monique, it was not a tough decision. There was even some symmetry to it, because when her parents died in a car crash when she was just eight, David and his father were among those who most comforted her.

Then David learned hypnosis in medical school and everything changed. Hypnosis helps with memory, relaxation, and concentration – useful things for medical school students. He even studied hypno-therapy and past-life regression to re-live previous lives. But, more importantly, a classmate taught David how to use hypnosis to induce “hypno-orgasms”.

Some women cannot have orgasms due to psychological reasons – stress, anxiety, self-esteem, or because of a traumatic experience such as childhood molestation. After treating the causes, such as desensitizing them to the traumatic experience, they still have to actually orgasm in order for the therapy to be successful. Since sex with patients is illegal, immoral, and frowned upon, some therapists use hypnosis to induce the orgasm – without touching the fully-clothed patient, and without the patient touching herself. Nice work if you can get it.

But hypno-orgasms don’t have to be part of therapy. Anyone, or at least any woman, can and should enjoy them.

Thus began David’s obsession with mastering this not-so-dark art. He learned that he could not just induce them, but make them far longer, stronger, and intense than any they have had before. Since physical contact was optional, hypno-orgasms were the ultimate in safe sex. Since they build upon the best orgasms a woman has ever had, then exceeds them, they outclass everything available to mere mortals. David learned to take a few lucky bitches up to one peak after another, until she reached a mountain range of orgasms. Dehydrated, some were too exhausted to crawl to the bathroom.

And no one was more receptive to hypno-orgasms than Monique. So much so, that she complained of the shakes if she went too long without one. And she said it with unnerving sincerity. David, a medical doctor, didn’t know whether to diagnose it as an addiction, an obsession, or a blessing from God.

Monique became so conditioned that he could get her off by using a trigger word that hypnotically induced her to re-live – not just remember – the best hypno-orgasm she ever had. He had her re-live that experience so many times, vividly recreating the sights, sounds, and smells, that the sensations felt fresh every time.

Especially when he did it in public.

When they went out dancing, she could have several orgasms before leaving the club. When she collapsed on the dance floor, everyone assumed that she was just drunk.

For a model who excelled at manipulating men, the humiliation was exquisite. It was the sexual version of becoming a reborn Christian. After dominating so many powerful men, utter helplessness before one man was strangely fulfilling.

Determined to become more than just friends and lovers, last year Monique enlisted Lisa and Lorena’s help, learning to cook David’s favorite foods, buy his clothes, and befriend his kids. For years Lorena assumed that Monique was after her husband, so she became enthusiastic about helping Monique win over her son.

Not that anyone clued in poor ol’ Jackson, who avoided Monique like the plague.

David always had strong feeling for Monique, ever since they were kids. Now, however, the sheer intensity of their relationship had traveled far beyond mere friendship with awesome benefits. He was not sure what to do. He wanted lots of kids, while she, working as a model, obviously did not. Or not for another decade because pregnant models don’t get a lot of work. So they assumed a normal relationship was out of the question.

Well, when you can’t have normal, you might as well enjoy abnormal.

David always understood his own imperfections: he was an asshole. Parts of his emotional makeup were frozen in time from his fights with his father. David knew he was obsessive-compulsive – hell, that got him through his doctorate and medical school. With all other women besides his wife and Monique, he was emotionally unavailable. That was why he thought Monique chose him.

Yet Monique now made him feel and behave different. She somehow sucked his anger out like snake poison. Fewer things pissed him off. Not even his father could trigger a decent rage in him anymore. He no longer went to bars looking for the biggest, baddest bully to kick the shit out of. Even more surprising, his own kids now wanted to spend time with him. Just the other day he made his own kids laugh. Deliberately. David recognized it for what it was. He was no longer a big asshole.

David learned long ago that something is only kinky until you’re tried it yourself. David had watch Monique do sex scenes in several European movies. That no longer felt kinky. But David had never before filmed Monique sticking another man’s finger into her pussy. It shocked, disgusted, and provoked the hell out of him. If his rock-hard cock didn’t nearly smack him in the face, his first reaction would have been to grab one of his guns.

The longer they kissed, the harder he got. Putting Cooper’s finger in her rocked his world. But when smooth motherfucker Daniel Cooper smiled, clearly enjoying the taste of David’s cum, well, that was just too much. David came right then and there, all over the camera controllers. David was out of breath like he had just run a marathon. And he actually ran marathons -- it helped dissolve the anger -- so he knew what it felt like.

Trying to catch his breath, a few things became very clear to David. One, he was going to fuck the shit out of Monique as soon as possible – she loved anal -- even though he had come twice in the last ten minutes. Two, he hoped to God that Cooper won the election, because (three) Cooper was now their bitch. “Bitch” was a strong word, and not one lightly used to describe a president. But when a guy has tasted your sperm, and liked it, and you had it recorded, then that sorry motherfucker was your bitch. Any other word was simply inadequate.

If his dad needed leverage over Cooper, he just got it in spades. He figured that he just videotaped another decade of funding for his dinosaur project. David looked at the rising dawn and predicted that this would be the best damn day of his life. If they survived.

“Danny, my boy,” David said to his video monitor, with unexpected pleasure, “you are fucked!”

Of course, they were screwed if his mother ever found out.

11

Henry Jackson knocked his white plastic chair back as he leaped from around the card table to save Cooper from the claws of these beautiful women. Across the shoebox-like basement he squeezed through the partially open doorway. Outside of the metallic basement, in a hole ten feet deep, he crawled up the ladder to the garage. At the top of the ladder, Lisa darted ahead of him, laughing recklessly, clearly enjoying the chase.

Jackson felt off-balanced as he raced after her, his heart pounding and his head ringing. His mouth dried up as he sucked in desperately needed oxygen. Normally a fitness nut, he was only too aware how far his aging metabolism and sedentary lifestyle were adding on the pounds. Months with very little sleep had not helped.

He expected to sleep in today, in Fairbanks, to rest up for the Big Event. Not be blindsided by his own daughter before sunrise. After another sleepless night, one moment he is calmly checking his emails, and the next he is racing after his half-naked daughter before sunrise before she fucked up his relationship with the next possible president of the United States.

Well, at least the day could not possibly get worse.

Bursting through the door to the house, he saw that Lisa already made contact. Monique held Cooper’s arm in hers, as if she had to hold him steady, when what she really wanted was for him to feel her – physically and otherwise. Jackson heard her talk softly to Cooper in charming French-accented English, which she learned was a huge turn-on for any man who didn’t speak French.

Dumb models often became stuck-up because everyone praises them while asking nothing in return – not even gratitude. Smart models like Monique, who like many Europeans spoke several languages, wielded her beauty more skillfully. She used her wit, graciousness, and culture like a rapier sword while less sophisticated hotties sliced and diced their way through life with machetes.

Jackson quickly calculated the damage. One look told Jackson that Cooper was hooked. He had never met Monique before, and it showed. Monique got bored with men quickly, but now she was giving Cooper the full treatment – looking up at him with big, dark eyes, smiling and laughing easily, and making him feel like he was captivating her. Women conquer men by making the men believe that they are conquering them. Cooper, expecting a dull meeting with Jackson, must have been completely taken by surprise when Monique answered the front door while Lisa distracted her father. It only took a minute for men to fall in lust with Monique, and she knew how to maximize every second.

It struck Jackson again how Reagan-esque Cooper was. Or, at least, how Reagan-esque he became. When he ran for governor of Texas in 2006, no one gave a Democrat – any Democrat – a chance in hell of winning. Not in the middle of Bush country. With his poll numbers embarrassingly in the teens, Cooper needed a media gimmick. Since he was tall, folksy, and friendly, Cooper decided to out-Reagan the opposition. Bush hand-picked his successor, Governor Perry, who had been a Democrat, so Cooper started lumping them together as anti-Reaganites.

The irony is the far-right would no longer elect Ronald Reagan today, given their treatment of Republican candidates for president.

Taxes? Reagan raised taxes eight times as president, including to save Social Security. Reagan even signed the largest income tax hike in American history in 1983 -- apparently deficits do matter. At least back in the day when Republicans cared about fiscal responsibility.

Spending? Reagan increased government spending so much faster than revenues that he left taxpayers with the largest deficit in American history – more than all of his 39 predecessors put together.

Abortion? In his first year in office in 1967 Governor Reagan legalized abortion in California six years before the Supreme Court imposed it upon the rest of the country and his first Supreme Court appointment supported abortion rights.

Immigration? Reagan gave millions of illegal aliens blanket amnesty, which encouraged further illegal immigration, never protected the border, and never cracked down on employers as the amnesty law required.

Foreign policy? Reagan negotiated with the Evil Empire, gave chemical weapon precursors and billions in aid to Saddam Hussein, traded weapons to Iran, armed terrorists in Latin America who wiped out entire villages for political purposes, and armed the Taliban. Cut and run? He pulled out of Lebanon after letting 241 Marines die in vain, then invaded Granada to erase the fiasco from public memory.

Reagan represented the opposite of what the Republican base wants today – on national security, taxation, foreign policy, spending, and social issues. Reagan couldn’t get elected today. So for a Democrat to both dismantle Reagan and discredit his opponents for not being sufficiently Reagan-ish was too much.

Cooper didn’t claim to be Reagan-like, although he died his hair and imitated his mannerisms to come across like Reagan. No, he simply used Reagan to paint Bush and his hand-picked successor as anti-conservative. It didn’t even have to be true as long as it got him in the news.

Cooper now acted Reagan-like for so long that it was a natural part of him. His likable personality radiated confidence while his considerable personal charm won him friends and disarmed enemies. He proved that Democrats could win even in Texas. In 2011, Cooper drew crowds that rivaled Obama and Hillary. He wooed the national media like an ugly chick.

But the thing that struck Jackson the most was how presidential Cooper looked. Palin may have charisma, but Cooper had gravitas. Cooper was too superficial to make a great president, but he would look like a great president.

Just like Ronald Reagan.

12

Jackson arrived just in time to see his daughter yell out, “Uncle Dan”, then jump up and give Cooper a big hug as if she were still ten years old, when they first met.

The surprised look on Cooper’s face made Jackson realize that Cooper had not seen Lisa since the boob job. Cooper, damn him, could not look happier, as Lisa took Cooper’s other arm and pressed her bra-less breasts against him. The three of them were still laughing when Jackson reached them, trying to catch his breath. Today was going to be one of those days.

“Good morning, Henry!” Cooper greeted him. “You look like you haven’t eaten your Wheaties today.”

Henry blocked their path, bent over with a hand on the wall while he calmed his heaving chest. Red faced and perspiring, Jackson realized what a contrast he made to the dapper Cooper, with beautiful women clutching each arm.

“How are ya, Dan?” he got out between heaves.

“Why, Henry, I’ve never been better.” Cooper was not just enjoying his female company, but also Henry’s discomfort. “You know, if you told me what a great welcoming committee I’d have, it would have been a lot easier to get me here.”

And wasn’t that the truth.

This observation only made Jackson feel worse. Jackson wasn’t a natural politician, and it irritated the hell out of him that he still missed a trick after a decade in the business. He had worked hard to master politics, yet still fumbled the basics, like using beautiful women against your closest friends. If their positions were reversed, Cooper would never have missed such an obvious trick.

“Dad,” Lisa exploded breathlessly, “Uncle Dan wants me to sing the national anthem at his campaign rallies -- maybe even at his presidential inauguration!”

In 2008, Governor Jackson hosted the XLII SuperBowl at a newly built next-gen stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Which turned out much better than when the Steelers beat the shit out of his precious Arizona Cardinals at the SuperBowl the following year in Tampa. Lisa, who began singing the national anthem at his 2006 re-election campaign, later sang before games with the Arizona Diamondbacks (baseball), Cardinals (football), and Suns (basketball). With her father backing her up on guitar, she belted out that tune literally hundreds of times, but really hit it out of the park at the 2008 SuperBowl. Pre-boob job, she cut a cute figure, innocently charming the audience, just like she practiced thousands of times in the mirror. The local media loved it. The Arizona Republic even put her on their front page, which triggered her addiction to fame.

In just seconds, Lisa not only put the next possible president in her debt, but reminded him what a big media splash she made singing the national anthem at the SuperBowl in the 3D movie Regolith. Right before the impact incinerated her, which left audiences weeping.

The 3D visuals were compelling: a mountain punching through the atmosphere, the scorching heat, the sonic boom, the blast from the pressure wave that made viewers in 3D theaters jump out of their seats, as a stadium full of football fans looked up at what would soon vaporize them. All interspersed with Lisa, post-boob job, belting out the national anthem. To get free publicity, the studio quickly turned that scene into a popular music video that frequently played before sporting events. Thousands of public school replaced their national anthem with Lisa’s. That scene and movie had such an emotional impact, amid all the asteroid hysteria, that some people couldn’t look at Lisa and not re-live the trauma of seeing her character kill. So Lisa singing the anthem would turn audiences putty in Cooper’s hands as he wound them up with his stump speech.

The movie only came out on Thanksgiving, but within days she had a big label record contract. The hours she wasted shopping, blogging, and twittering Lisa now spent in a Tucson music studio or modeling photo shoots.

Watching Lisa become the next Kardasian horrified her father, who reacted like the world was coming to an end. She was even getting movie parts from studios who didn’t yet know her acting sucked.

So of course Cooper would love her to sing the national fricking anthem at his campaign events -- she could double his crowds. Lisa could make even a presidential candidate look cool. Ask Barack Obama or Bill Clinton -- it’s not easy. More importantly, it associated Cooper with the movie and all the disaster preparation, in contrast to Palin and the Republicans who ridiculed the hysteria. For once, Democrats tapped into fear while Republicans tried to reassure. And Dems won hands down.

Lisa would be forever associated with President Cooper, and she knew exactly how to play that card: frequently and forcefully. Just like she often heard her grandfather the astronomy professor open an argument with, “Well, according to Einstein…”, so, too, could she say, “Well, the president of the United States told me that he, like, totally agrees with me on this.”

Anything that raised her profile gave her an edge over more talented actresses. Most actors become famous because of their acting; Lisa wanted to become famous in order to break into acting. If Paris Hilton could get acting, singing, and clothing-line gigs, then there was hope for her.

And, unlike Paris, Lisa had tits. Bought and paid for.

Lisa got into singing the anthem in the first place because that was one of the few songs that her father mastered on his electric guitar. Jimmy Hendrix inspired him to learn the song when he was just a kid. Aside from easy numbers like Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, the anthem was one of the few songs that stayed with him over the years. When he ran for DNC chairman, the sight of billionaire Governor Jackson playing guitar while his teenage daughter sang her heart out at the SuperBowl made a huge impression on the 400 members who elect the chair of the national party. The national anthem is hard, yet Lisa picked up some notes and carried them to the heavens, wowing critics and the audience alike. And the sight of an eccentric billionaire letting his adorable teenage girl shine won him sympathy from a lot of women. Something he traded on ever since.

Jackson noted that she said nothing about him playing with her. As usual, she excluded him. Feeling old and obsolete, Jackson used an old politician’s trick and changed the subject.

“Dan, if you like your morning so far, just wait til you see what I got waiting for you in the garage,” directing Cooper’s attention to the open door. “Just go down the ladder while I have a quick word with the girls.”

Down the ladder? In the garage? What the fuck?

Neither Cooper nor the girls, however, seemed eager to disentangle themselves, which pissed Jackson off. The girls began to complain, which made his bad mood grew worse as the long sleepless night caught up to him. As he finally extracted Cooper and pushed him towards the garage, he quickly rushed the girls around the corner in the opposite direction.

Then Jackson spoke quietly in French. Monique was related to him through his Belgium mother, so they all spoke French.

The beauty of French is that you can say anything, no matter how vulgar, and it sounded like music to someone who didn’t understand the language. “I just shat so hard I fried some neurons”, in French, can sound like, “It’s so wonderful to meet you”. So, keeping his tone light, Jackson let the girls understand his position. Jackson was not a natural at clever deception, like most politicians, but he was a master of declarative sentences.

“You can’t fuck him,” Jackson bluntly told Monique. “At least not for another decade.”

He then turned to Lisa or, rather, turned on Lisa. “What the fuck are you thinking? If the media picks up any hint of a sex scandal, I will lose billions. Caesar’s family, like Caesar, must remain above suspicion.”

Monique turned cold before his eyes, and Jackson realized that he just made her feel like a prostitute. Which was not true. Monique never fucked for money. She fucked for kicks, and powerful -- usually married – men provided those kicks. Along with corporate jets, expensive presents, and exotic resorts. The reference to Julius Caesar, the biggest over-achiever of all time, who used the line to justify divorcing his third wife, also innocent of infidelity, soared over their heads.

Lisa, used to going head-to-head with her father, grew hot. She used her left arm to gently push Monique away from her father and then stepped into the gap, protectively putting herself between them. Then, even though he towered over her, Lisa quietly fired back in French with a full artillery barrage.

“You said we needed leverage over him, that he wasn’t flying in formation anymore. You said his campaign manager was out to use you for money while cutting off your access.

“I know better than to jeopardize your precious plans. We’re not trying to seduce him. You wanted leverage, we now have leverage. Monique greeted him as if they were longtime lovers, giving him a big hug and kiss, while David worked the video cameras. All so that you could get the leverage over him that you have been constantly complaining about!”

Silence filled the room like tear gas. Lisa was livid. Monique looked flush and felt like a cheap whore. But at the same time, she felt incredibly grateful to Lisa for sticking up for her. Women were usually the ones sticking it to her, not protecting her.

Jackson looked at his daughter for what seemed like hours, feeling very stupid. She was such a better politician. Manipulating people came second nature to her. Which was just one of the many reasons he was going to miss her so much when she got married and moved away.

He also immediately understood why she did not tell him – deniability. If things turned to shit, as they tended to do, he needed to get in front of cameras and say with a straight face that he had nothing to do with it. Which is much easier to say if it’s true.

Another of Jackson’s many political weaknesses is that he was a lousy liar. He was getting better, as he was with evasive hair-splitting and subtle blame-shifting, but he knew that he was not a natural liar.

Lisa watched her father shrink in front of them. His shoulders crumbled and his head grew heavy with shame. If David worked the angles and zooms right, then he now had the leverage he needed over Cooper. And he owed it to his foresightful daughter and eager-to-please cousin.

It’s not every day you thank your half-naked teenage daughter for entrapping the next possible president of the United States with a fake sex scandal. But Jackson did so now. Barack Obama, who had a beautiful daughter Lisa’s age, probably never had this problem.

With sad, apologetic eyes, Jackson turned to Monique, who still refused to look up at him. He then unexpectedly pushed past Lisa to wrap Monique in his world famous bear hug, while apologizing in French over and over again in her ear. He literally picked her up and twirled her around like a doll, something that he would never have done if they were alone.

Monique finally looked up at the huge man holding her, the same guy who melted an eight year old’s grief, and found him smiling apologetically. She still was unsure how to feel. It suddenly dawned on her that she needed to convince David to carefully edit the video to omit the finger fucking and beating Cooper off. Otherwise, she would never feel comfortable in his house again. It horrified her to imagine what his family would think of her, much less her own status-conscious family in Europe.

She knew that he would keep holding her until she forgave him, so she hid her shame and smiled back.

Jackson quickly let her go to turn on his daughter, tickling her sides, which he knew she hated. Which was why he did it. Lisa fought back, her anger dissipating. Then Monique turned on Jackson and tickled him, something that she never would have dared before. Soon all three of them were on the living room marble floor, laughing until David triumphantly walked in, a smile on his face and a DVD disk held high in his hand.

13

Jackson was off-balanced and Cooper could not be more pleased. This would make his job so much easier. With Jackson’s back now to him, Cooper casually put Monique’s business card in his jacket pocket as he walked to the garage. He planned on checking out her pictures on this website. He often checked out porn online, Googling “gay facials”, “cuckold”, or “cum snowballs” to get his fix. He wondered if she had nudes. If so, with so many image hosting services (like photobucket.com, flickr.com, imageshack.us, smugmug.com, allyoucanupload.com, picturetrail.com, mac.com, webshots.com, and editgrid.com), he would find them.

Hmmmmmmm. Today may not turn out so bad after all.

Unclear why Jackson wanted to meet him in the garage, Cooper’s jaw dropped when he opened the door and saw a hole in the floor. And instead of two cars, Jackson had filled the entire garage with boxes. Cooper walked over to the hole and found an aluminum ladder leading to a big hole in the ground.

A basement? In Arizona? He didn’t know anyone in Arizona who had a basement. At least in Texas they had hurricanes, tornados, and Texans.

He quickly stepped down the ladder into what looked like a tornado shelter. Or a panic room. Or the beginning of a really bad horror flick.

As soon as his head got below ground, he saw two metallic boxes in a hole the size of a garage, with used tires squeezed between them, around them, beneath them, and on top. Both were partially open like shipping containers.

Eager to discover Jackson’s secret panic rooms, Cooper followed an electrical extension cord down the long ladder. One of the metal rooms was half full of pressurized gas canisters, five-gallon water bottles, and boxes of food.

He immediately entered the empty one and saw a laptop sitting on a foldable card table at the other end. It had the stale air of a tomb. Nothing hung on the walls or ceiling except battery-operated lights and fans that stick via suction cups. No heating or air condition vents.

He knew what it was, of course. A shed. Cooper was in a fucking shed. Under the garage of the former governor of Arizona.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” he asked himself.

The problem with Jackson building his fish farms in the middle of the Pacific was having to import literally all the building materials: metal, wood, glass, gravel, sand, and cement (which humidity dries quickly). So, instead of building actual buildings, he bought large refurbished WWII-era cargo ships. But these rust buckets developed ever larger leaks and wouldn’t float forever.

Jackson needed to replace them. Yet anything on the sea made of steel eventually rusted, so he hired material scientists who just recently discovered how to make the world’s thickest amorphous metal by mixing large atoms with small ones.

Their first product was very simple in order to work out the wrinkles of the tricky manufacturing process: a warehouse made out of eight very large pieces -- four walls, three floors, and a roof -- that could be easily snapped together onsite like legos. With a special salt-resistant sealant, they became air and watertight. String a bunch of them together over huge air-filled tubes, and he had a bunch of floating warehouses in the middle of the ocean.

Making a large building out of smaller pieces would make transport easier, but weaken it structurally. Jackson needed buildings that would not collapse in the worst’s storms, which meant each wall and roof be made in one single piece. Just like a table made of one piece of oak is stronger than one made of several pieces glued together, so too was one wall forged at the same time structurally superior to many.

Since the ground floor weighed the most, its weight determined the size of the warehouse. Jackson had long used a civilian version of the Russian Hind M-24 helicopter because its seven titanium rotors gave it the greatest lifting capacity of any helicopter in the world -- twelve metric tons. So they made a twelve ton floor, which determined the size of the warehouse. Because amorphous metal is so light and strong, a twelve ton floor turned out to be the size of a high school gym.

The warehouses solved several problems. They offered great shelter, storage, and housing, while they protected his aircraft from the salty, humid air. Yet their roofs, coated with organic solar and fitted with twelve residential windmills, generated lots of electricity. Even better, to transport them he could stack hundreds of them like a pile of paper on one ship. Shipping their equivalent in steel, cement, sand, gravel, and wood would have cost several times as much and taken several times as long. Stringing two lines of warehouses back to back solved his storage problems.

When he pumped nutrient-rich seawater from a mile-deep current, it spread out on the surface like buckshot from a shotgun. So he anchored his warehouses in three or more lines on top of thousands of the world’s largest inner tubes. His larger fish swam in nets between these lines, and large cages secured to the warehouse platforms confined the smaller fish. Securely anchored, Jackson now had a three-story-tall water break which minimized storm damage to the rest of his fish nets. In all, these warehouses gave him a very long floating island in the middle of nowhere. His largest three lines were even visible to the naked eye from orbit. On Google Earth it looked like Mother Nature was giving humanity the finger.

It was genius!

Well, if he thought of it thirty years ago, it would have been genius. Now it was just painfully obvious.

Jackson applied another, diamond-hard layer of amorphous metal via high velocity oxygen spray to the outer walls of the warehouse to sell to the military, also adding gun slits on the third floor and remote-operated cameras at all four corners. A spy blimp tied to the roof would monitor their area. With obstacles to prevent suicide bombers driving speeding vehicles, it was as invulnerable as a tank. Inside, the first floor had enough room to accommodate a dozen vehicles, while troops slept on the second floor and recreated on the third floor.

Jackson’s public relations team went city to city, lending paintball weapons to 1200 volunteers who formed a circle just outside of range, then attacked from all sides. Inside, Jackson’s 12 shooters used the paintball equivalent of heavy machine guns, mowing the civilians down like fish in a barrel. Jackson’s team never even had to expose themselves, and walked out afterwards inevitably paint-free, having defeated one hundred times their number. This story was especially powerful when recounted afterwards by a local paint-soiled TV reporter, still high on adrenaline, who attacked with 1199 others. What a fucking rush.

It was not hard to imagine hundreds of these perched on strategic passage ways, hilltops, and mountain ridges along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, each remote-operating attack drones to monitor their designated area. These armored buildings could shelter armored vehicles that intercept potential enemies, drop off Ranger teams, or pick up a malfunctioning Predator drone. One helicopter company could support a couple dozen stand-alone armored buildings on the Afghan side of the border. If America wants to stop thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda from crossing the border, this covered the most territory at the least cost.

President McCain loved the idea and placed a big order, only to have President Palin try to renege on it later.

After experimenting with several versions, Wal-Mart made all of their new buildings out of amorphous metal designed specifically for their stores, super stores, and neighborhood markets. Wal-Mart could finish a 200,000 square foot superstore in a fraction of the time and half of the $35,000 million it used to cost them. They not only put organic solar on the roofs and outer walls, but on top of their huge parking lots, with micro wind turbines on the roofs in windy locations. Most of these stores produced more electricity than they used, becoming micro power plants. Which interested Home Depot and others.

Business was good. Really good.

Then, in October, Jackson’s father shat on his parade by showing him laser ranger software that gave a greater than 50-50 chance that some asteroid fragments would strike Earth. Or, more likely, water, since water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface. Water covers so much of Earth’s surface that a random meteorite had a 3-to-1 probability of hitting water versus land. Throw in lakes, rivers, glaciers, and the frozen poles and as little as 20% of “Earth’s” surface is actually “earth”. Naming the planet “Water” would have been more accurate.

In light of the new danger, Jackson now looked at his warehouse-hangers and saw a bomb shelter the size of a high school gym. Well, with space rocks raining down unpredictably around the world, you can’t have too many of those. He therefore triple-shifted production of the hangers, converted all of his amorphous metal plants to make them, and paid the five factories in China that were making his car frames to instead make asteroid shelters for the rest of the year. Even with the right equipment and technical expertise, changing products quickly was fucking expensive. Still, knowing that millions of lives could be saved, Jackson paid eight other companies that had amorphous metal facilities to churn out his shelters for him. Virtually overnight, Jackson monopolized global bulk amorphous metal production.

Now, instead of a few hundred, he could now make several thousand shelters before Judgment Day.

Except most of these other factories were too small to make hangers the size of a gym. So Jackson had the smaller factories make asteroid shelters the exact size of a 20 foot shipping container, which conveniently fit in most garages. Or, in his case, under the garage. He wanted to make millions of them, but they needed to serve a purpose after Judgment Day. Although it was not a shipping container, it could be used as one, even though amorphous metal costs several times as much as steel. But calling it a shipping container would only confuse people.

So critics called it a shed.

But instead of snapping together several pieces, they molded the entire shed at once to maximize its structural integrity. These smaller asteroid shelters could be easily blown away if not well secured. However, every American garage sits on a thick concrete and steel foundation. Every shed came with four amorphous metal poles. Owners simply used a jackhammer to drill four holes a meter into the garage floor, place the poles that fit into each corner of the shed, then pour concrete into the four holes.

His “asteroid shelters”, as he cleverly renamed them, were extremely heat resistant, could withstand all but the largest falling rocks, and had no glass. Properly secured to solid bedrock among hilltops, even tidal waves would just wash over them. In short, nothing could protect people better. Given the growing worldwide hysteria, and his monopoly on amorphous metal asteroid shelters, Jackson became world famous.

And rich. Because people who believe the world will end are willing to spend whatever it takes to survive.

Everyone naturally wanted them, as every mayor, congressman, and governor quickly found out. Democrats championed a special $100 billion appropriations to buy or build asteroid shelters (not necessarily Jackson’s). Republicans fought it all the way, from committee to conference, which really pissed off a terrified public.

Large companies and foreign governments got most of them, bidding up the price to obscene levels. Before September, Jackson sold mega-hangers to Wal-Mart for as little as $15 million each. Now, individual purchases went for $50 million and large orders for over $100 million. The larger the order the higher the price because time and supply were so limited. CEOs thought nothing of spending their shareholder’s money to protect themselves, their families, and their operations. Governors had little choice but to act like they were doing everything possible to protect their constituents. And foreign governments spent whatever it took. Everyone lobbied Jackson -- governors, CEOs, hedge fund managers, billionaires, celebrities, heads of foreign states, -- and anyone who could do it in person did so. Jackson never knew he had so many friends.

Like most governors, Cooper bought as many hangers as he could. He didn’t even mind that Jackson made him bid just like everyone else. What he did mind was Jackson making another fucking fortune. And not with porn, guns, drugs, stocks, or gambling. No, Jackson was making bank selling fucking warehouses! He could call them anything he wanted to, but they were just metallic barns for Christ’s sake. Which made Cooper all the more determined to not enrich him any more.

Not one single fucking dollar.

Especially since Jackson organized a well provisioned and well defended “survival camp” in northern Canada where he rented the sheds for a million bucks apiece.

Perhaps what pissed him off the most was his wife paid a fucking million for one to protect her children and grandchildren. Even her father, the cheapskate banker, forked over a million.

Seeing Jackson’s laptop on, Cooper quickly cross the room and instinctively sat down to discover what dirty secrets Jackson had on his computer. Like many politicians, he was an incurable busy-body. Which is how the Patriot Act got passed.

Email! Excellent. Cooper went through his friend’s shit.

Jackson returned to his underground shed to find Cooper sitting arrogantly in his chair and looking intently at his laptop. Cooper had that “I’m gonna get laid” look, which is superior to the “I just got laid” look. Jackson cursed himself for not locking his computer with a password. How many times had he lectured his staff on computer security, only to fail himself when the most dangerous man in his world comes to visit, his good friend and strong ally, the next possible president of the United States?

Jackson quickly descended the ladder to distract Cooper from whatever had evidently gripped his interest.

“Let’s get started on learning how you’re gonna win the war with China!” he shouted in the small room.

And that was the real reason Cooper was there, or at least that was the reason that Jackson invited him there, to learn how to delay the war that Palin was about to botch up. After blowing trillions on the American occupation of Iraq, America literally could not afford another Republican-managed war. Since Cooper refused to talk about the incoming asteroid, the upcoming war with China was the only thing that could prod Cooper into visiting him.

Cooper didn’t even look up, or in any way acknowledge that Jackson, a huge man, yelled loudly in a small basement with no windows. The bad feeling in Jackson’s gut grew worse, as he walked up to and kicked the flimsy card table and screamed, “What the fuck are you doing going through my email?”

Jackson needed to stop Cooper from reading, but he got nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. El crappo. Cooper ignored Jackson like a non-voter.

Cooper, apparently deaf and mute, but not blind, continued speed reading as he scrolled down. He seemed oblivious to everything but the fascinating document in front of him. Jackson, desperate to assess the damage, moved behind Cooper to see what he was reading.

Ah hell.

He had only a moment to organize his thoughts until Cooper finished scrolling. Cooper then twisted in the cheap plastic chair and angrily asked, “what do you need one hundred nuclear spaceships for?”

When Jackson didn’t answer, he asked it again:

“Henry, what the fuck do you need one hundred nuclear spaceships for?”

Jackson sighed. This was going to be a long day.

14

Since the best defense is an aggressive offense, Jackson summoned his anger and shouted back, “What the fuck are you doing reading my email?”

Jackson, a 6’4” tall, barrel-chested workout-a-holic, clenched his huge fists and flexed his muscles under his faded blue jeans and tight t-shirt. That usually worked.

Cooper wasn’t buying it and Jackson, for the millionth time, wondered why he only intimidated unimportant people. His parents, wife, children – hell, even his grandchildren felt no fear of him. If he yelled at his grandchildren, his daughter would turn it back on him and say, “oh, grandpa just needs a hug.” Everyone in his family knew he was just a big softy. But his inability to instill respect with his strongest political ally was a professional, and not a personal, failure. And that had real consequences beyond six year olds changing his TV channel.

“Nuclear spaceships, Henry? I know you’re greedy and secretive, but what the hell are you thinking? Is this your plan for beating China?”

Whoa. Secretive, yes, but greedy? He was very good at making money – that was no secret. But he gave away around ten percent of his annual profit, mostly in the form of his protein bread. So he was surprised because he always thought that politicians like Cooper were the money hungry ones. Cooper had been squeezing money out of him since his campaign for Texas governor, and became quite insistent since deciding to run for president, as if Jackson owed him, and not the other way around.

Jackson honestly liked and respected Cooper. But, like many successful politicians, he felt that Cooper was terminally ungrateful. The irony is that, as conservative Democrats, one of the things they railed against was the entitlement mentality.

Jackson honestly believed that Cooper would not have won either of his governorships without his help. Jackson knew he had a larger-than-life personality, and his campaigning for Cooper generated tens of millions in free publicity. What consultants call “earned media.”

So for Cooper to accuse him of greed was nothing short of chutzpa. Which, as his Jewish pollster informed him, is a Hebrew word about a guy who kills his parents then, when caught, pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Chutzpa.

Cooper was virtually ignored before Jackson raised his profile. Jackson was a popular Democratic governor of Arizona and appeared more Texan than any of the five Texans in the race. With his outsized personality, bulked up body, and vast fortune, he looked and acted very Texan. And since Cooper was, in effect, running against Bush in Texas, Jackson knew that the only way to win was to go over the top and catch people’s imaginations. Or at least their attentions.

Except for presidential elections, only hardcore partisans pay attention to campaigns because they care about the issues. Getting everyone else to pay attention requires entertaining them, usually by throwing spectacles or by picking a fight. So Jackson picked a fight with President Bush, who was far less popular than his hand-picked replacement, the guy actually on the ballot. People love fights and the blow-by-blow. They want to see how a fighter responds to pain, insults, and body blows, and they rally behind a fighter who rises from near-defeat to kick ass. The quickest way to see someone’s true character is for someone else to attack it.

What made the 2006 governors race so fun was that Jackson, more than Cooper, was providing that fight, but he was beating up former governor Bush rather than the current governor. It was a proxy kicking the ass of a proxy. Which allowed the verbal blows to go lower and hit harder before it felt unseemly.

Reporters didn’t cover Cooper’s campaign until Jackson started sticking it to Bush in the heart of Bush country. The uproar was immediately, vicious, and unprecedented, even by Texan standards. This not only made news, which is free publicity, but made anything Cooper say seem moderate by comparison.

Campaigning for Cooper in 2006 was a turning point for Jackson because progressive bloggers had become a big influence within the base, and they suddenly noticed him when he started whacking Bush with such gusto. The top progressive blog, www.dailykos.com, saw more traffic than the top several Republican blogs combined, meaning progressive bloggers were far stronger in the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers were in the GOP, who instead reached out to their rank-and-file via political talk radio and cable news.

Most progressive bloggers saw D.C. Democrats as spineless capitulators, either unwilling or unable to stand up to the Radical Right Reactionaries. Then here comes the first Democratic governor of Arizona in decades, bitch slapping Bush day after day. Bloggers loved it so much that they gave him a keynote speaker slot at the national 2008 progressive bloggers summit, “Netroots Nation”. Running for DNC chair, Jackson knew he would have to knock their socks off. That’s difficult enough on an easy day, but he was going against real progressive heroes like Howard Dean, Al Gore, and the Rude Pundit.

Jackson knocked the ball out of the stadium. Instead of discussing policy, he brought the roof down by repeating the jacksonisms that he had compiled over the years. Like Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, he became an instant hero and the first choice of bloggers to chair the Democratic Party after Howard Dean, who endorsed Jackson after he promised to expand the 50 State Strategy into a 435 District Strategy. In return, DNC Chairman Jackson sent out regular email blasts to everyone in the DemZilla database urging them to check out the 100 largest progressive blogs, allied organizations like College Dems, progressive think tanks like the Progressive Policy Institute, and progressive magazines like The Nation and Mother Jones.

15

Jackson’s speech at Netroots Nation in Austin, Texas:

“It takes a strong man to admit he is wrong, and Bush clearly is not that man. W has sold us so many whoppers that Burger King must be paying him a commission. He dances so well around the truth that rappers are jacking his moves. Mr. 20% rides his bike so much apparently to practice back-pedaling.

“I’ve known guys who were legally blind and legally deaf, but Bush is the first who is legally dumb. Blind and deaf to the suffering of working Americans, Bush is the Helen Keller of presidents. If Bush gets any lamer, he’ll qualify for disability. The Worst President Ever must be anesthetized, because he sure as hell doesn’t feel anyone’s pain. Mr. Delusional doesn’t talk to us like he’s an idiot; he talks to us like we’re the idiot. Twenty years of frying neurons with drink and drugs has made this cliché-spewer talk as if Jerry lost one of his kids. You can tell when he is ad-libbing by the rivers of sweat pouring down his face. He’d be speechless if he stuck to the truth. He needs a script in his hands to keep his feet out of his mouth. Cheney’s Bitch has become the Milli Vanilli of presidents. Question: does Bush inhale when he tries to blow smoke up your ass?

“Bush follows the Bible until it gets to Jesus. He apparently wants to put the poor through hell before Jesus takes them to Heaven. He believes he is infallible, which is really pissing off the new pope. When Bush talks to God, it’s prayer; when God talks to Bush, it’s policy. The most unpopular president in polling history is responsible for enough disasters to qualify for scripture. Unlike Carter and Clinton, Mr. Self-Righteous isn’t even a regular church-goer. He may not follow the Commandments, but at least he’s good at the plagues. Bush believes that we are all descended from cavemen who rode dinosaurs to church 4000 years ago. It’s no surprise that a guy who cannot spell ‘DNA’ does not accept evolution. Bush does not believe in Darwinism, but he does believe in survival of the richest. He’s against gay marriage, but sodomizing reality is okay. Bush may be dumb, but he wasn’t reborn yesterday.

“Hindsight is 20/20. Or, if you’re Bush, 20/50. He is so two-faced he speaks of himself in the fourth person. Bush has sold out America so often he has his own EBay page. Unlike Pinocchio, whenever Bush lies, the deficit gets bigger. His lies have made his mouth so big it needs feng shui. America hasn’t stunk this much since millions of buffalo roamed the Great Plains.

“Karl Rove thought Bush would make a great president. Frankenstein also looked great in the lab. It wasn’t until they were field tested that their defects turned them into monsters. Bush is proof that being ordinary doesn’t make you normal. Bush’s insistence on wearing ideological blinders makes him look like a horse’s ass. For those of you familiar with George Orwell’s book, Animal Farm -- Bush is the jackass. For his entire second term, Bush has been a lame duck – and for those of you in the back, I said ‘duck’ with a ‘D’.

“Last Thanksgiving, Bush pardoned two turkeys, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Dick, Bush, Rove, Candi, Scooter, and Rummy are either running the country or starring in a porn movie. Bush rewards incompetency like the military rewards heroism. Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans -- for a president who likes to kill people, he sure doesn’t execute well. Bush is so divorced from reality it’s possible they never consummated the relationship in the first place. If only the military had Humvees as impenetrable as Bush’s head.

“Have you seen the latest poll numbers? Most Americans thinks Bush sucks more than Dick. If you think Bush stinks, then you just know Dick sucks. No Republican in history has had negative approval ratings longer than Bush – he’s been underwater longer than the Titanic. Bush spent his entire second term with negative approval ratings. A recent poll showed that 30% of Americans disapprove of Bush violating international law, while 70% disapprove of him violating domestic law. His disapproval rating went from 6%, after he failed to stop the largest attack on continental America in two centuries, to a record 76%, beating Nixon at the peak of Watergate.

No joke: when he left office, the only Americans who approved of Bush watched Fox News.

“Cheney’s Bitch is so unpopular his advisers wanted to boost his numbers by putting him in a Paris Hilton sex tape. The most oblivious president in history hasn’t fallen this hard since his last bike ride. He cannot balance the budget or trade deficits -- no wonder he can’t ride a bike. Republicans are jumping off the bandwagon as if they’ve spotted a Bible sale. So many Republicans have abandoned Bush that Angelina Jolie considered adopting him. The press smells so much blood they’re snorting it.

“The old drunk stopped going to his AA meetings because trying to remember ten steps made him want to drink. Bush, an acknowledged alcoholic, switched from JD to BS when he entered politics, and has been drunk on power ever since. And Bush proved that nobody does denial like a delusional alcoholic ideologue. And he hasn’t veered left since he last got caught drunk driving when in his 30s. He has failed so many moral, ethical, and character litmus tests, it’s a wonder he can still pass gas. Lincoln said power is the ultimate character test, and no one fails such tests more than the Worst President Ever. Bush reminds me of Frankenstein – a poorly built monster with someone else’s brain who destroys everything around him in a mad rampage for total domination. His mind has been parked in denial for so long the Secret Service thinks it’s been lo-jacked. Unlike most of you, I don’t think Bush suffers from insanity -- I think he enjoys every minute of it. Unfortunately, crazy is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Have you noticed how our freeways are more congested since Bush started pushing his ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ politics?

“Clueless George has spent more time on vacation than any president in history. My momma always told me to never trust a rancher who doesn’t ride horses, doesn’t have cattle, yet insists he runs a ranch. The only thing that Bush raises on his ranch is our impatience. Bush killed almost as much time as president as Muslims. And it is not ‘swagger’ when the vice-president’s hand is that far up your ass.

“Cheney called the new Miss America a traitor – apparently she wished for world peace. Cheney’s speeches are so wooden that he attracts tree-huggers. His standard stump speech has given off so many death rattles that his speech writers want to embalm it. Cheney stoops so low he looks ready to crawl. Cheney has told so many white lies that his tongue comes with snow chains. Even his smirk is far to the right. Cheney has more charisma than a rock, but less than a tree. His Secret Service code-name is ‘Septic’ because he’s always full of shit. Did he really shoot his friend in the face after drinking too much? It sounds like a gay cowboy movie to me. I’ve seen lots of guys who were shit-faced – just never literally. Bush and Cheney have three DUIs between them -- no wonder they drove the economy into a drunken stupor.

“Cheney received tens of millions in Halliburton stock options – who says no one won the war in Iraq? Only Republicans would make their biggest national security authority a guy with five draft deferments during Vietnam. When told most Americans oppose the brutal occupation of Iraq, Dick replied, “So?” No wonder most Americans want to smack the smirk off his face.

“Cheney was so unpopular that Bush almost replaced him when running for re-election. His campaign slogan was going to be, ‘Ain’t Got Dick.’ Since the Republican ticket had a dick and an asshole, they had to contrast themselves by calling the Democratic ticket a couple of pussies. Cheney is a dick and Bush an asshole because they’re both so afraid of looking like pussies.

“The most intrusive president in history is willing to torture, spy, and wiretap Americans to keep America safe, but he draws the line at reading NSA memos, helping first responders communicate, and keeping American ports out of the control of al-Qaeda’s bankers. It’s now come full circle: Lincoln freed all enslaved Americans while Bush is enslaving all free Americans, one signing statement at a time. W is not promoting our freedoms overseas, he is outsourcing them.

“Someone needs to explain to the most lawbreaking president in history that he did not put his hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible, but put his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution.

“The least accountable president in history is so far above the law that NASA wants him to carry supplies to the Space Station. Bush is a star in the Republican Party because he is a massive ball of gas that heats everything around him to extremes, and who will eventually collapse upon himself before going nuclear. The only Republican interest in space concerns how far to launch the deficit into orbit. The only thing that Republicans have in common with the space station is that they are both in perpetual freefall. Gravity can bend light, warp space, and slow time, while Republicans can bend laws, warp principals, and slow investigations. Bush is denser than a neutron star, dimmer than a brown dwarf, and more destructive than a supernova. Democrats are from Earth, but Republicans are from Uranus, which is why their policies are so shitty.

“Bush’s lies have become so massive that they are warping space. Dubya is so dense he bends light. Scientists are now measuring the distance between Bush and reality in terms of light years. Not even astronomers can figure out just what planet this idiot is living on. He thinks black hole is a golf term, superstrings are for fishing, and parallax is a cleanser. Bush says that global warming is not yet scientifically established, which is exactly what the Republicans on Venus once said. Do you know why Bush likes Mars? There are no trees, no clean water, and the air is poisonous -- it’s like Earth after thirty more years of Republican rule. But, hey, if you’re just killing time and Muslims waiting for the Rapture, why not make our national forests horizontal?

“Bush fought a war on poverty – and the poor lost. Unlike Bill Clinton, Bush is the Unempathizer: he can’t feel you, much less your pain. His borrow-and-squander economic plan has so many minuses that economists started using the division sign. Bush, the biggest spending president in American history, proved that “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply to Republicans.

Bush entered office with a $5.6 trillion projected surplus and left office with a $8.8 trillion projected deficit. W added more debt than every previous president combined. While President Clinton took the biggest deficit in American history and turned it into the biggest surplus, Bush took the biggest surplus and turned it into the biggest deficit. While the S&P 500 tripled under President Clinton, it actually lost money under Bush. The Dow fell from nearly 11,000 in 2000 to 6500 right after Bush left office. While President Clinton reduced the national debt for eight straight years, Bush added to it for eight straight years. Bush is the only president in history to watch two recessions start under his watch.

“The economy is deteriorating so fast that voters are feeling worse off than they were four hours ago. The dollar lost half of its value to the Euro under Bush. If the dollar gets any weaker, we’ll have to peg it to the peso. Bush thinks we should strengthen the dollar by making it two-ply. W has made the Misery Index depressing. No wonder Bush says the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.

“Republicans have turned general prosperity under President Clinton into major pain, private suffering, and corporal punishment under Bush. Bush has added $20 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the federal balance sheet and his deficits cost taxpayers $400 billion a year just in interest alone. For a guy who says he quit drinking, Bush sure knows how to run up a tab.

“The most delusional president in history may not have a complete monopoly on presidential incompetence, but he sure has cornered a lot of market share. There is so much oil in Texas that any competent oilman could find some. Bush was not that oilman. Apparently the three companies that Bush bankrupted were just practice for the big finale. It’s ironic that an oilman like Bush would generate so little electricity despite being so full of gas. Bush increased America’s dependence on oil while Democrats tried to end it. Bush proves that you don’t have to be stupid to be an idiot. And why is Bush so weak? Because knowledge is power. For a guy lousy at math, Bush sure is good at compounding problems, dividing Americans, and multiplying debt.

“The most destructive president in history makes slow decisions because he first waits for the check to clear. He gutted the Clean Air Act so much we might as well call it the Republican Retirement Fund. Republicans have so many convictions because Bush hired more felons than any president in history. Just ask the nine federal prosecutors that Bush fired for not harassing Democrats. Mr. Uniter gets too little credit because he takes too much cash. Bush oozes integrity, which is why he has none left. Cheney eventually plugged the leak with his fist. Bush passes more bucks than an ATM machine. Thanks to Bush, the words ‘Republican’ and ‘competent’ are used less often in the same sentence than ‘sex’ and ‘gerbil’. Bush spent one-fifth of his presidency on his 1600-acre ranch because he needed that much time and space to bury all of his lies and bullshit. The Rose Garden proved waaaaay too small.

“Bush governs like Big Oil pays him by the pollutant. He is the best president that the worst polluters can buy. The Bush White House is so polluted that we will need a SuperFund to clean it up. If you think your sex is dirty, try sleeping with Big Oil. Bush Sr. got $50 million for his presidential library as soon as Bush Jr. let Big Oil secretly write our national energy policy. Bush has pocketed so much oil money that his pants leak. He dines on so much pork, he’s turned into the Chitlin-in-Chief. Bush is so crooked that he makes Nixon look straight. Bush is not Reagan’s political heir, but Nixon’s, and you remember what we had to do to get rid of that dirty bastard. Bush is in bed with so many rich white guys that the First Lady must be scrutinizing their Pre-Nup. Bush’s knee-jerk reaction when a Big Polluter enters the Oval Office is to hold out his hand and pull down his pants. A president should bend backwards for his supporters, not bend forwards. If you judged Bush on his record, you’d swear he ruled Saudi Arabia. Bush would sell his soul if only he had one. Giving dirty donations to Republicans is like giving Viagra to sex offenders.

“Incompetence kills. That’s why dangerously incompetent Republicans are better at creating disasters than relieving them. That’s why Democrats never wanted to go into Iraq and Republicans never want to get out. Competent Republicans are disappearing faster than glaciers. Take Hurricane Katrina, the most predicted natural disaster in history: the Oval Office hasn’t had such a leadership vacuum since Hoover. Republican President Hoover was so despised for not doing more during the Great Depression that when he asked his Treasury Secretary for a nickel to call a friend, he was given a dime and told to call them both.

“Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Bush played air guitar while New Orleans flooded. Celebrating John McCain’s birthday was more important than saving drowning blacks in New Orleans. At least when Clinton got caught with his pants down, there were not thousands of trapped Americans dying on CNN. Bush hasn’t been this responsible for so many black deaths since the last time he ignored genocide in Africa. Bush does not have a sixth sense, which must be why he can’t see dead people.

“The federal response to Hurricane Katrina was so slow that FEMA won American Idle. Bush’s political hacks at FEMA had such padded resumes that first responders used them to fill sandbags. Bush is rolling and rocking. He flies like a bee and stings like a butterfly. He is kicking names and taking ass.

“Supporters say that Bush is not to blame for the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina. He was, after all, on vacation for several weeks. Who would have guessed that Bush’s Waterloo would turn out to be water in a loo? Bush will cut vacations short in order to keep a brain-dead woman alive against her wishes, but he draws the line at thousands of Americans starving in a stadium.

“Hurricane Katrina got rid of so many Democratic voters that Republicans have started calling her Kathleen Harris. New Orleans had such little electricity, drinking water, and so many dead bodies that the National Guard started shooting reporters, thinking they were still in Baghdad. Do you remember rats eating the corpses of dead blacks as they floated in the flooded streets of New Orleans? Well, it turns out that those little fuckers were Republicans, feeding off of the poor. Forget FUBAR – Iraq has been FEMA’ed.

“Mother Nature stuck her boot so far up Bush’s ass that she kicked Dick Cheney’s hand. Republicans have come up with a bold visionary plan to re-imagine New Orleans. They call their plan, ‘Venice.’ But don’t blame Republicans for being anti-government – if I was that incompetent governing, I’d be anti-government, too.

“The old Orleans was the old Bush: wild, reckless, foolish, and drunk. The new Orleans is the new Bush: swamped, oil-based, eerily detached, polluted, a shell of his former self, and practically dead inside. If it weren’t for George Bush voodoo dolls, New Orleans wouldn’t have any economic activity.

“Bush is slicker than an oil spill and twice as hard to clean up. When his mama told him that honesty was the best policy, he asked what the worst policy was. He has enough egg on his face to make an omelet. He is a serial failure. He loses more often than a Vegas tourist. Even St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, looks at Bush and thinks, what the fuck?

“America and Iraq fought a war and Iran won. Have you seen Iraq lately? Bush hasn’t choked this much since his last pretzel. Bush will sodomize Iraq until it becomes pregnant with democracy. Osama says he attacked on 9/11 to bankrupt America and kick the American military out of Saudi Arabia, so Bush closed our Saudi military bases while bankrupting America with trillions to the elite superrich, trillions for the occupation of Iraq, and trillions more to reckless Wall Street bankers. The only thing Bush gave the rest of us were excuses.

Bush started history’s most expensive war by arguing that it would pay for itself. Like that trillion dollar tax cut for the mega-rich. But that’s what happens when you shoot first and aim later. The worst commander-in-chief in history still hasn’t realized that if the invasion of Iraq has not made America safer, then our heroes there died in vain. And since his own state department reports that terrorist attacks outside of Iraq have multiplied since the invasion, it’s hard to see how America has become safer. Bush has spilled enough blood to flood New Orleans.

“Bush’s Plunder’n’Blunder foreign policy is so retarded it needs a special bus. I’ve seen guys who sucked before, and I’ve seen guys who really blow, but I’ve never seen a guy who can suck and blow at the same time. Foreigners haven’t hated America this much since we gave the world disco. He attacked the only country of the Axis of Evil without nukes. Iraq was so dangerous we conquered it in three weeks. Bush couldn’t conquer New Orleans in three weeks. They are either as dumb as they seem, or Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld constitute an Axis of Drivel. Some wars are unpopular; the rest are victorious.

“The GOP is so unpopular that they are thinking of changing their name to the Dixie Chicks. So many Republicans are living in a state of denial that they’re gonna quality for their own senator. Our soldiers in Iraq are taking more hits than Rush Limbaugh after his maid scores big. Why have American casualties increased every year of Bush’s presidency? Because Bush never plans farther than his next vacation.

“Bush can’t find any shame or decency, much less Osama bin Forgotten. Bush says he isn’t worried about Osama bin Laden – just like FDR didn’t worry about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, or the emperor of Japan. If I failed to catch the guy who murdered 2749 Americans, I’d make up crap, too. Bush let the only foreigner to attack continental America in two centuries get away – but not before helping Osama’s family escape the next day. The only ones not shocked that Bush isn’t doing more to capture Osama is the bin Laden family, who have invested in W’s companies since 1986. Talk about a Family Plan – Osama, a diabetic with an economics degree, has over fifty siblings, yet Bush still cannot reach out and touch him.

“If Saddam had any WMD, he would have used them when we invaded. If Bush had any brains, he would have used them when we invaded. It’s hard for Bush to win hearts and minds since he has neither. A rock exudes greater self-reflection. Bush bragged to the Australian president that he was kicking ass in Iraq. Bush kick ass? Bush couldn’t beat the crap out of a dirty diaper. Bush seems to believe that Iraq will be free for only as long as he occupies it, and democratic for only as long as he tells them what to do. Those dead-enders are so far in their last throes that Bush can only briefly visit unannounced at night, while the Wipe-Israel-Off-The-Map Iranian leader can drive around in an open jeep before thousands of cheering Iraqis.

“The irony? Bush majored in history while the president of Iran has a doctorate in traffic management.

“We’ll stand down as they stand up? Republicans are one cliché away from their own sitcom. The only certainty in Iraq is that Bush will leave the mess for his successor to fix. Like Clinton, Bush won’t stop until he has shot his wad. Bush must love anal given how often he fucks up other people’s shit.

“In Iraq, you are a coward if you leave and a fool if you stay. Watching Bush and Cheney wage war is like watching a tragic sequel to ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ A dumb president negates smart bombs. Never before Iraq have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. It turns out that the opposite of progress isn’t Congress, it’s this administration. After spending so many years repeating what doesn’t work, W figures it’s never too late to start procrastinating. Americans are bleeding in Iraq like the Treasury. The bottom line doesn’t get much lower. Bush wants to spread freedom and democracy so badly that he does not care how many ragheads he must kill to do it. Bush believes it’s not a sin to kill Muslims since they are going to Hell anyway.

And, with Bush’s help, soon.

“Bush has become so politically radioactive that the UN is sending WMD inspectors. If Bush wanted to sexually humiliate 26 million people who detested him, he could have saved money by invading New England. Waging war to establish peace is like raping women to instill virginity. Bush apparently is not trying to turn Iraq into America; he is trying to turn America into Iraq. Bush says he doesn’t believe in nation-building – and it shows. There are a thousand ways to tell the world to fuck off, and Bush is racing to say them all. Bush’s heart may be in the right place; it’s too bad his head is so far up his ass.

“What do Republicans call Muslim suicide bombers who kill other Muslims? A two-fer. Some people borrow trouble; Republicans lend it with interest. At $12 billion a month, Republicans can’t even kill Muslims cost-effectively. In Iraq, those who make their constitution subservient to their religion are called Muslims. In America they’re called Republicans.

“Bush’s date with destiny stood him up. Free elections in liberated Iraq took place only with the help of 200,000 heavily armed foreigners -- just the way our Founding Fathers intended. Millions of Shiites are happy that Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein. They live, however, in Iran. The Shiites writing the Iraqi Constitution have finally come up with a new name for Iraq. They’re gonna call it ‘western Iran’.

“Bush has so much oil in his veins that he doesn’t mind all of the blood on his hands. He mistakes prejudices with convictions. When you pull foreign policy out of your ass, naturally it’s gonna be shitty. Peace in Iraq is taking longer than a Bush vacation.

“American troops in Iraq are cleaning sewers, guarding pipelines, and directing traffic – all the things covered in boot camp. It’s nice to see the world’s most expensive military execute its core competencies. No wonder we’re paying half a trillion a year for our military. Bush believes America wins regardless of which Iranian-backed religious fundamentalist controls the government. In Iraq, Halliburton got a $32 billion gold mine while taxpayers got the shaft. Bush thinks adding 20,000 more troops four years too late resulted in clear progress, as opposed to, say, paying billions to the Sunni insurgents to stop killing us. I usually don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but it explains Bush so well. The only goal that Bush met in Iraq was regime change. After Bush invaded, Democrats swept Republicans from government.

“Bush is so determined to create peace in the Middle East that he seems willing to kill everyone there to achieve it. Bush believes that anyone who isn’t a reborn Christians is going to Hell, so why not speed up their trip and trigger the Rapture at the same time? Bush’s perversion of Christianity makes him as indifferent to killing Muslims as Hitler was to killing Jews. Bush may not be the anti-Christ, but Christ would be anti-Bush.

“There is an old saying that boat owners enjoy just two happy days -- the day they buy their boat, and the day they sell it. That is what the war in Iraq will be like.

“This administration has more flaws than Microsoft Windows. The Bush White House is like a bad horror movie – every stupid action, no matter how predictable the consequences, is painstakingly acted out, with frequent screaming and lots of bloodshed. If you thought the original was bad, then you know the sequel sucks. The White House is getting so little done that people are starting to confuse it with Congress. The Bush White House has enough moral cripples to hold their own Special Olympics. Who knew the Keystone Cops were all Republican? America deserves an apology from this sorry administration.

“With great power comes great responsibility – unless you’re Republican. Were you aware that your values aren’t good enough? That’s why the GOP wants to replace yours with theirs. Thank God small-town Republicans are not as morally depraved as big-city Democrats. The Democratic Party may be full of mice, but the Republican Party is run by dirty rats. How can Republicans honestly be against government? Politicians being anti-government is like teachers hating education, doctors slandering medicine, and cops hostile to laws.

“The voter always wins – unless Republicans get their way. Republicans can only stay in power if they make reasonable ideas sound radical and make radical ideas sound reasonable. Why have Republican presidential candidates averaged less than 10% of the black vote over the last 50 years? Because the only time Republicans talk to black voters is when they challenge them at the polls. Republicans call their party ‘GOP’ because ‘KKK’ was already taken. No wonder only 11% of Republicans are non-white, compared to 27% of independents and 36% of Democrats.

“American justice should be blind, but Republicans prefer her deaf and mute. Republicans love deficits like Bill Clinton loves sex. Republicans believe all life is precious, unless it’s foreign, non-Christian, or brown-skinned. Republicans backed off privatizing Social Security so fast that they were practically moon-walking. The Republican future is so bleak that their only support is coming from Gothic fans. If Republicans keep churning out the same lame slogans, they won’t be spinning, they’ll be spamming. Why are Republicans in such pain? Because the truth hurts.

“Not all Republican leaders are dangerous, ideological extremists. Some are secretly gay. If it weren’t for gay prostitutes and teenage male congressional pages, Republicans wouldn’t have any satisfying sex. Republicans have apparently traded the Big Tent for the Big Closet. Republicans believe that sex is only bad if you enjoy it. Republicans believe that politics is only dirty if you do it right. Republicans are against sex unless it screws minorities. The GOP is full of dicks, and I’m not talking about Nixon and Cheney. They believe that gay marriage is bad, but an orgy of special interest is okay. Republicans are owned by so many lobbyists that everyone in D.C. looks like they’re about to get laid, while everyone else looks like they’re about to get screwed.

“Most Republican leaders are not monsters. Most Republican leaders are cruel, corrupt, secretive, unaccountable, lying, greedy, selfish, power-hungry, self-righteous sanctimonious hypocrites. The rest of them are monsters. There is a rift within the party of Lincoln between those who want to screw all of the people some of the time, and those who want to screw some of the people all of the time. With plummeting approval numbers, Republicans act like their reality check is about to bounce.

“Jesus says the meek will inherit the Earth, which rules out Republicans. Imposing rigid reactionary Southern values upon the rest of the country leaves them no time for anything else, like winning wars and rebuilding American cities. Republican pollution-promotion policies have heated up so much global warming that minorities, veterans, and the poor flock to DC just to get the cold shoulder. And remember: no one pissed off Jesus more than hypocrites. Good thing those fiscally responsible, small-government, limited-spending, get-government-out-of-our-lives, humble foreign policy makers are living up to their principles.

“Republicans complain that immorality keeps them on their toes, but I suspect the kinky bastards secretly enjoy it. Republicans hate dirty sex but love dirty money. Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff alone conned American Indians out of $80 million. Republicans don’t like porn – unless acted out by naked Iraqi men on dog leashes. Republicans sure are prude when they are not sexually humiliating naked civilians. It’s no coincidence that Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay looks like a big, fat Hitler without the mustache.

“Republicans represent traditional American family values, like the young should abandon the old, the healthy should abandon the sick, and the rich should abandon the poor. The Bible says that you can either serve God or Mammon -- Republicans serve Mammon. How do you know Republicans are near-sighted? Because they can’t see any middle ground. Truth, shame, decency – Osama bin Forgotten is not the only thing Republicans cannot find. Republicans are against cloning because their candidates are already exact copies. Deficits are a Republican aphrodisiac – what else can explain their excitement in bankrupting the country? My dog must be a Republican: he’s always barking up the wrong tree, pretending to be tough, and peeing on my property.”

16

Jackson couldn’t believe that Cooper was fucking with him like this, yet knew he had to tread carefully.

“I am not really building spaceships. My father just wanted to get more accurate details on how much they would cost. It’s really just an academic thing at this point.”

Which was two truths followed by one big lie.

“But why, Henry? I know you. You don’t do things without a reason. And anything that costs $100 billion must be worth a hell of a lot more than that. What billion-dollar business are you cooking up?”

Ah, money. Cooper was obsessed with money, since he himself had none. Born poor, raised poor, like Nixon he was permanently scarred by poverty. Like George Bernard Shaw, he believed that lack of money was the root of all evil. Cooper had always seemed envious of his ability to make money. Maybe he was embarrassed that his investment manager wife supported him in the rich lifestyle he wanted to deserve. Well, hell, that’s why he married her. His father-in-law owned a bank.

“Dan, you ungrateful fuck, I’m making you and your campaign millions. Your wife she has been shorting everything she can get her broker’s hands on. I cut you in on the action and you pay me back by shutting me out.”

Gratitude was a core Jackson value because he believed that those who appreciate their blessings continue to be blessed, and those who do not, do not.

“Ah, shit, Henry. Don’t get started on that again.”

Cooper was dead tired of Jackson urging him to short stocks. For the last few months Jackson was telling anyone who would listen to short, short, short. Cooper let his wife, the investment banker, handle all that crap. Cooper just couldn’t buy all the doom and gloom that Jackson and his father were selling. As long as the main body missed, we would recover, and everyone but Jackson agreed that the asteroid was not going to crash into us.

So what the fuck was everyone freaking out about? Not a day passed without another city overwhelmed by food riots. Governors, himself included, were forced to deploy the national guard because too many cops were quitting right when people needed them the most. Unlike cops, soldiers cannot quit. They can run, but not quit.

Everywhere Cooper looked, it seemed like the world had lost its freakin’ mind. And the Jacksons were the most to blame. Sure, evacuate the coasts, like he did as best as he could in Texas, but get some perspective, people.

“I’m running for president!” Cooper wanted to scream. “Reporters should report stuff besides the fucking asteroid!”

Astronomers first saw the Rock pass in front of Mars over a year ago, but it remained just a curiosity outside of the space community because it would not come close to Earth. But its orbit changed dramatically at perigee last September, when it passed closest to the Sun. Although it missed the Sun by 30 million kilometers, that extra heat torched frozen liquids that resulted in massive out-gassing, like explosive mountaintop removal by coal companies. The thrust from these explosions changed its orbit such that it would miss Earth by just several million kilometers. Huge news for the space community. As Gabrielle raced from the Sun, a plume of dust and rock thousands of miles long trailed it, much like millions of miles of gas follow a comet.

Or, put in layman terms, the Rock farted.

Using the world’s most powerful laser ranger, Jackson’s father had accurate positional data far sooner than the rest of the world’s astronomers, who had to take positional measurements over many days with radio telescopes, since optical and infrared scopes don’t work Sun-ward. The greater the stakes, the harder it is to reach a consensus because being wrong can be fatal.

Hence, the professor was the first to conclude that the asteroid “fart” would carpet bomb our stratosphere like Dresden, riddling everything in orbit. Like, say, satellites. But alarming the public would have been irresponsible without other prominent astronomers backing him up, and they all wanted more time. So the director of Spacewatch had to wait for the rest of the space community to catch up.

But just because he couldn’t warn the public didn’t mean he couldn’t warn his family.

Few stock analysts appreciate how satellite-dependent the developed world had become. But his son did. Jackson and his wife immediately traveled the world opening accounts at every major and minor brokerage in every market possible, even small regional financial markets like Singapore and Dubai. He pledged everything he owned, which included several multi-billion dollar companies, as collateral to maximize how much leeway they would give him on his margin accounts. Which is why he brought the wife, who needed to sign off on using deed, title, and corporate ownership papers to maximize his leverage.

They also applied for the biggest possible loan or line of credit from every lender they could find, pledging that very same collateral. Which is illegal since there would be no clear title if he defaulted. Business loans, personal loans -- he didn’t care. He maxed out credit for himself, his family, his companies, and Democratic organizations like the DNC, DSCC, DCCC, and DGA.

Although he referred to their trip as their “second honeymoon”, he expected to score more than just trim.

Before they traveled, he formed a hedge fund called The Great Bear where he sent all this cash and through which he would place all of his trades (hedge funds are only taxed at 15%). Naturally he never told those giving him loans that he intended to gamble with their money.

With tens of billions in his hedge fund account, the Great Bear borrowed the maximum possible from major lenders who were impressed that Jackson could raise so much cash so quickly, never guessing that all the money was his. Ponzi-like, the more borrowed money he poured into his hedge fund, the more loans the hedge fund qualified for. A billionaire securing the loans against everything he owned minimized the risk.

He hired traders, analysts, and research specialists who shorted every publicly-traded satellite-dependent company on the planet, starting with News Corp, Sirius XM, TerreStar and SkyTerra. News Corp has 40 million satellite subscribers to BSkyB, Star TV, and Sky Italia. Making billions while destroying Fox News, the propaganda arm of the GOP, was very satisfying.

Brokers first borrow stocks from their own clients, so having an account with every broker in every market made it that much easier to make big moves quickly, while disguising the actions of just one player. Traders loved it because they made money on every share, and they could borrow millions of shares with just one phone call or email.

But then in October it farted again.

Although the media referred to it as the Rock, the asteroid was really more a mountain of ice with dirt and rock held together by frozen volatiles like carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane, which act like jet fuel when heated. As surface gases boil off, the mass contracts and the density increases, often shifting its center of gravity, which changes its spin and destabilizes its orbit. Sunlight can cook its surface unevenly, like a two engine plane with one engine barely functioning, or even penetrate deep enough to explode deep pockets of gas like a rocket.

Late night comics joked that the good news was that the Rock was a bit smaller, but the bad news was it’s gonna come closer to hitting us.

The change in “delta V” shocked astronomers. Instead of missing Earth by several million kilometers, they now expected it to pass Earth by just a few million. And its tail now contained several million miles of rock and dirt, much of which Earth would plow through in early January. At relative velocities of 50 kilometers per second.

The Jacksons were therefore the first in the world to realize that millions of people were going to die. It was only a matter of time before astronomers developed a consensus strong enough to justify terrifying the public, so Jackson started auctioning off his fish farms, his lumbar and bamboo businesses, and his condos in the Caribbean island of San Andres. He also instructed his insurance broker to over-insure every remaining business and property using as many different insurance companies as possible.

Jackson sought out the owners of Freddie and Fannie mortgage securities, which were about to lose trillions in market value, and companies that insure securities like stocks, bonds, and mortgages. Ambac and MBIA, the two largest monoline insurers, each insure $700 billion worth of securities, so he went after them just like he shorted every publicly traded insurer in the world.

Under the cover of a registration drive, Jackson bought three months of life insurance, comprehensive auto, and home property insurance on behalf of every registered Democrat, with the Democratic National Committee as joint beneficiary, and offered three months of free supplemental health, accident, and disability insurance for everyone who signed up. All they had to do was complete, sign, and return the forms. Sure enough, several million more people immediately registered as Democrats. To not bankrupt any one insurer, Jackson spread out these policies evenly among the biggest national insurers, while his hedge fund shorted them and their reinsurance companies.

Republicans ridiculed this as a very expensive way to register voters who may not even vote Democratic, while the Democratic establishment naturally freaked out that he essentially bankrupted the DNC. But Jackson didn’t care because he had access to the raw data, which spooked him. Astronomers, by temperament, are patient, cautious, and reluctant to terrify the public, so the people still had no idea what was coming. Governments who had a clue like the Europeans looked for the United States to claim the sky was falling. When President Palin repeatedly blew off the dangers, there was no one to rally the world behind disaster preparations. While Jackson instructed his brokers to short everything.

Except they didn’t believe him. So he had to repeat it: in person, on the phone, and via fax and email: every-fucking-thing. Any publicly traded security at any price in any country.

With the CEO’s of the mega-brokers like Citi and JP Morgan along for credibility, Jackson personally visited the heads of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, endowments, and private equity firms to ask them to borrow every security that they planned to hold for the next 3-6 months. He offered to short everything they lent, meaning they got to choose what he shorted and how much.

To speed things up, Jackson posted proof on his hedge fund website that he had $50 billion in cash and had pledged everything he owned to cover these shorts. After various investor news media verified the documents firsthand, the markets talked of little else.

Henry Fucking Jackson invented bulk shorting.

He started with Prince Alwaleed bin Talallisted, the world's 22nd richest person, who lent Jackson his huge stakes in Apple, News Corp, eBay, and 180 million Citigroup shares. Harvard University, still trying to recoup the $11 billion they lost betting on interest rates, lent nearly their entire portfolio, as did thousands of other large institutional investors. Institutions hold three-quarters of the world’s stock, and the bigger they were, they quicker they jumped on the bandwagon because lending stocks you planned on keeping was just free money. Or so they thought. So while several thousand institutional investors called the big brokers or Jackson’s hedge fund directly to offer their shares, thousands of traders at dozens of firms contacted virtually everyone else. Virtually overnight, Jackson exhausted the market for short selling.

But Jackson also used derivatives to place huge bets on currencies and commodities. All his brokers needed were companies willing to be on the other side of his bets. Thousands of corporations, hedge funds, and speculators routinely hedge currencies and commodities worth trillions in nominal value. Manufactures hedge the price of steel, Big Ag hedges wheat. If Disney is making a lot in Europe, it may hedge the Euro. Virtually every big international company hedges either currencies or commodities to minimize unpredictable losses.

So finding counterparties was easy. The universe of players in this particular sandbox is relatively small, and brokers know everyone by past trading or reputation. After all, just 10% of Americans own 75% of American stocks.

He instructed his brokers to focus on shorting lenders, brokers, credit card issuers, insurance companies, shippers, airlines, parcel delivery services, port managers, real estate investment trusts, coastal resorts, and small island stocks. In particular he wanted to short big banks because Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citi, Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley handle 95% of the derivative market, issue over half of all American mortgages, and two thirds of all credit cards. Citicorp alone wrote down over $100 billion in losses around 2008, so Jackson knew that the bigger the lender, the harder they would fall.

Jackson also bet against island nations, their currencies, their corporate and government bonds, and their sovereign credit-default swaps (betting that the cost to insure their government debt would rise). Once the menace became clear, trading in third world currencies would basically dry up as investors fled to more liquid money. Professional traders found lots of institutional investors happy to become counterparties to bets against England, Ireland, Iceland, Taiwan, and mighty Japan.

Jackson missed one opportunity of a lifetime and he promised himself that he would never miss another. Especially not a sure thing that now stared at him in the face. Under Bush’s housing bubble, Goldman Sachs sold $135 billion in subprime mortgage securities, while at the same time using derivatives to bet against those same mortgages. Sachs made so much betting against their own securities and clientele that they paid a record $20 billion in bonuses in 2009. Apart from salaries.

This time Jackson was not going to miss out or wimp out.

But that kind of return required complex financial instructions called derivatives, whose value derives from something else, so he instructed his brokers to underwrite any derivative for any amount against any stock, stock market, any debt-backed security, and all third world currencies. To avoid legal and public relation problems, his stipulated that his brokers only deal with “Qualified Institutional Buyers” in the United States, a class of sophisticated investors afforded fewer protections than small investors under federal securities law.

He bet long only on gold, the dollar, the Euro, and food futures, while buying and storing as much food staples as possible (wheat, rice, grains, etc). He literally bought as much bulk food like wheat and grain that he could get his hands on, which single-handedly drove up their price. Not future crops, since he expected them to die, but stored grains that he could ship to his strategically-placed amorphous metal warehouses in the United States.

Jackson quickly discovered that few big financial institutions wanted too much risk in any one area. So when they met their limit on, say, third world currencies, Jackson’s brokers would max them out on commodity futures or junk bonds. If they didn’t like bets against the dollar going up, maybe they’d take bets on oil, corn, or copper. Many traders thought themselves smart by diversifying their risk, like a balanced portfolio of stocks, bonds, and REITS, so Jackson had his brokers maximize their appetite for every possible niche.

Who could predict that virtually all currencies, commodities, stocks, and bonds would fall at the same time? Well, aside from the director of Spacewatch, really, who could have predicted this?

Unfortunately, brokers underwrite juicy derivative contracts with the expectation of reselling them to the usual suckers -- pension funds, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds. Occasionally a university endowment or corporate hedging department. But with so many of his derivatives sold to so many financial institutions, brokers found themselves increasingly unable to resell all of the huge bets they took on. Which scared the hell out of them because no one wanted to become the next AIG. Taxpayers sure as hell weren’t going to give $182 billion to one fucking company like Bush did with AIG.

Banking is about managing risk. And as the 2008 collapse of Wall Street proved, the only risk bankers avoid is to their own paychecks (Wall Street paid out a record $140 billion in bonuses for 2008 after costing their companies and their country several hundred billion). So Jackson’s bets against their companies really hit their bottom line: the value of their stock options.

So the world’s largest brokers decided to break Henry Fucking Jackson and take his shit. Which is how they also found out that he pledged the same collateral to them all. Never had so much money targeted one guy.

The market only needed to go up a little to bankrupt him, given the size of his bets and the virtually limitless leverage brokers gave him. So the biggest banks and brokers, those Jackson hired in the first place, turned on him by buying the thirty stocks that made up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

They acted in unison the day after Thanksgiving, when trading is really light, buying the thirty Dow companies as if their McMansions depended on it. Jackson already shorted a few hundred billion shares of those thirty companies (which collectively have over a trillion shares) -- meaning they were not on the open market. That left far fewer shares still available, which helped them to buy enough shares to drive prices up. After making billions off Jackson’s bet against the Dow, they planned on squeezing his margin accounts to force him to post most collateral.

Until Jackson’s hedge fund brought it to his attention.

All thirty Dow companies rose after the opening bell while the rest of the market fell. Sensing an attack, Jackson immediately instructed all of his brokers to cover every short of every Dow company, which released them back onto the market. Many of the owners, eager to take advantage of an uptick in prices, sold while they could, flooding the market with billions of shares.

Their attack probably would have worked were it not for the movie. Since when can a fucking movie move the market?

Regolith 3D held its worldwide release the day before, and theaters were packed all holiday weekend. Since the movie naturally scared the shit out of people, stocks nose-dived the day after its Thanksgiving premier, except for the thirty Dow stocks, which stood out like an erection on trading charts. Jackson’s traders noticed the obvious and Jackson acted accordingly.

The big brokers’ attack not only failed, but they now had a shitload of stock that no one wanted to buy. Selling at a loss only aggravated their growing insolvency.

Jackson, however, made several billion because the Dow had fallen so much since he borrowed those shares the month before. Sure, he would have made a lot more if he had been able to sell them a month later, but several billion is still several billion.

Not that their attempt did not freeze Jackson’s bowels, who immediately made every space expert worldwide a paid “consultant” to the Jackson Space Foundation. The more speeches, interviews, and articles they did, the more Jackson paid them. He hired public relations firms in their home countries to help them get the word out and to standardize their message. Like renaming the asteroid “The Planet Killer” and predicting billions of deaths if the government didn’t move faster. Because no one ever believed their government acted fast enough. Many astronomers were already doing this, since it would lead to bigger budgets in the future, but getting extra pay redoubled their efforts. The public was so alarmed that Jackson was able to do a “full Ginsberg” by appearing on five Sunday political talk shows right after Thanksgiving.

Jackson won the argument: the sky was falling.

Which pissed off every national government who now had terrified rioters demanding immediate action. Which is not what government does best. People accused their government of conspiracies and cover-ups, which the global space community promoted. The movie and its disastrous predictions dominated the news around the world. All the more so because the asteroid in the movie was 12 kilometers and the one coming at them was now only half that large, after having shed so much weight. As the longtime head of Spacewatch, Jackson’s father now had a field day appearing on one TV interview after another, urging people and governments to prepare for the worst. The professor soon had one of the world’s largest Twitter and Facebook followings.

Then the Rock blasted off another hill’s worth of dirt, which would bring it within one million kilometers of Earth, right when billions of people started to pay attention. Now, catastrophe was not just unthinkable, but inevitable. The latest positional data predicted fragments striking open ocean, and thus wash away islands. Like, say, Wall Street on Manhattan Island. Around the world, stock markets shrieked like first day felons giving unlimited anal. Currencies of island nations, from Great Britain and Japan on down, went into free fall. Currency traders joked that the pound should be renamed the ounce.

The problem with trading $500 trillion in derivatives in a $50 trillion global economy is that financial institutions lack the reserves to cover even a tiny fraction of their losses if shit happened. And shit was definitely happening.

When asked how it felt to be the world’s most famous person, Jackson quipped, “Well, for one thing, Paris Hilton is pissed!”

Ironically, as much as Jackson wanted to kill the big brokers like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, he instead had to keep them alive to function as intermediaries. When your bet against everyone prevails, the last thing you want to do is kill the bookie before you collect your money. And nobody knew better than Jackson that the markets had farther to fall after the impact.

He could, however, cash out those bets against every other counterparty not rich enough to sustain greater losses later. Jackson didn’t know who would survive the impact and the inevitable global depression, so after Christmas he covered as many shorts and derivative contracts as possible, leaving only the brokers and the richest corporations, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds for later.

And some of those pockets were deep. That Saudi prince lent him half a billion shares yet Citi went from trading in the 80’s in October to the single digits. Wealthy Arabs and Arab sovereign wealth funds alone lent him a couple trillion dollars worth of securities, which after the impact would probably trade for 95% less. Thousands of large international companies like IBM, Intel, and Mitsubishi unknowingly bet the survival of their companies by becoming counterparties against Jackson’s currency and commodity bets. The richest financial institutions in the world unexpectedly faced trillions in losses to one fucking guy.

Jackson made everyone but the richest pay up before the impact. If they couldn’t pay, he had the courts freeze their assets and liquidate their companies before the courts were overwhelmed.

But Jackson could still punish the brokers without killing them, so he bled them of liquidity, capital, and credibility. Fearing for their survival, the big American bank-brokers begged the Fed for interest-free loans so that Jackson wouldn’t kill them. The more the Fed loaned them, the more they could reduce their debts to Jackson, reducing his leverage over him. If the finance sector collapsed, the global economy would collapse, so the Fed and other central banks gave the mega-banks a few hundred billion in near-zero interest loans to prop them up. Not knowing this money went towards paying off Jackson, who held a sword to their throats.

And if the main body missed, they could quickly recover.

But, really, they were zombie banks at this point: dead, but still scaring people. Every lender was going to take a huge hit, and the bigger the lender, the larger their loan losses would be. Property loans, student loans, car loans, credit cards, corporate loans and lines of credit -- their typical losses were going to multiply overnight, when their ability to tap private markets to recapitalize was hardest. Even if they didn’t owe Jackson billions.

In 2008, bankrupt Washington Mutual’s $300 billion in assets sold for just $2 billion. But that was back in the day when other banks had money.

And no one on Earth was doing more to prepare for the Worst Case Scenario than Jackson. While Palin embraced denial, Jackson spent billions of his own money trying to relocate, shelter, and feed 100 million Democratic voters. Which made Cooper’s accusation of being money hungry intolerable.

“Dude, your wife’s been piggybacking on my trades since Halloween. She has made mad money. She even convinced your campaign treasurer to short sell, so who the fuck are you to bitch to me about money?”

That Cooper didn’t give a fuck was written all across his face.

17

“You ungrateful fuck! How much did I make you? I helped you out-fundraise Obama and Hillary in 2011. Even your wife made millions off my plays.”

Cooper leaped out of his seat to get into Jackson’s face. They stood flaring nose to flaring nose.

“That has nothing to do with it!”

“Bullshit!” Jackson warned, resisting the urge to kick Cooper’s ass. The ingratitude was infuriating.

Jackson helped raise hundreds of millions in early, hard money donations for Democrats from the defense and aerospace industries by working with a new defense-funded think tank, the George Washington Institute. Several hundred retired generals and admirals formally founded the think tank right after the 2008 elections and several instantly became TV pundits, serving different networks, but all expressing their consensus opinions on foreign policy and national security. Their official mission was to design a next generation military that was not just unchallenged, but unchallenge-able by making it as capable and as invulnerable as possible. Their unofficial mission was to prevent any future Iraqs, which they regarded as a disaster for the military, the economy, and for America. They regarded the occupation of Iraq as the most expensive foreign policy blunder in American history.

They hit the political talk shows, wrote articles, gave speeches and interviews, and pushed their book, website, and video of their vision of a next-generation military. Showing worked better than telling. Facts tell, but stories sell. The illustrated book was okay, but the website and videos that compared their new military with the old one really brought the point home. Backed by a massive media campaign funded by the defense industry, the Institute was selling a compelling line of products. Which, apparently, is what it takes to sell taxpayers on trillions in new weapon systems.

The retired generals and the defense industry CEOs co-opted Jackson early because he had the most advanced ultracapacitors, organic solar, and amorphous metal factories. They literally could not make what they wanted without him.

Jackson’s slice of the pie was worth billions, so he convinced Democratic party leaders to publicly praise it. Daniel Cooper, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in particular, received thousands of maxed out campaign contributions worth millions from the defense industry, while millions more poured into the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC, which can receive unlimited soft money.

Unfortunately, this extensive public cheerleading by leading Democrats made Republicans reject it out-of-hand, like a father to a daughter’s prom date. Industry lobbyists tried to get the GOP back on board, but Palin refused to enrich the Democrat she rightly detested the most.

Defense giants had spent years on research and development, but could not translate them into actual contracts because the occupation of Iraq drained the DOD’s budget. So they spent the entire Bush term churning out products from the 80’s while researching new ones. Even the “cutting edge” $143 million F-22 Raptor Fighter, which cost $44,000 an hour to fly, was designed 26 years ago.

The think tank was presided by Major General Bob “Bulldog” Barker, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs that Rumsfeld drove out a month before 9/11. Bush tainted everything he touched, but one way or another, America would have a new president in 2009.

The generals wanted to influence policy because Iraq and Afghanistan proved that even the best military can lose if its commander-in-chief is an idiot. A superior strategy can defeat superior technology. A great military with a bad commander can lose to a bad military with a great commander. Good armies win battles, but good generals win wars. Tactics win battles, but strategy wins wars. And what America needed were strategic weapons. Constantinople survived centuries of Muslim attacks until the Turks defeated it with just 70 long range artillery pieces. Constantinople, the valuable gateway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and where Europe meets Asia, is still part of Turkey several centuries later.

What could be a strategic weapon today?

The most radical change that the Institute advocated actually spent years on the DOD’s Militarily Critical Technologies List: amorphous metal. First discovered in the 1950s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s structural amorphous metals program has poured billions in university grants and company start-ups. Since 1998, companies like LiquidMetal used amorphous metal to make expensive golf clubs, tennis rackets, and knives that never needed sharpening.

The defense industry helped the Institute redesign the entire U.S. military using amorphous metal for every ship, vehicle, and aircraft because only through great economies of scale could they make it affordable.

Glass-metal was a natural for ship hulls because it’s very light, absorbed sound (when sandwiched between a foam layer), didn’t rust, resisted fire, was several times harder to puncture than conventional hulls, and had several times the structural integrity. They replaced diesel fuel with compressed hydrogen gas, which has twice the energy content of diesel, to further raise the thrust-to-weight ratio. Hydrogen gas is also lighter-than-air, so a ship full of it was literally lifted up a bit, rather than millions of gallons of diesel fuel that literally weighed a ship down.

So much thrust pushing so little weight enabled designers to scale up the “double-M” hulls already used in Navy surface-effect fast-attack boats. They sought to out-perform the Australia-based Austal trimaran littoral combat ship called the Independence. The Alabama-built, aluminum, tri-hulled, 418-foot warship had a sustainable speed of 45 knots (52 mph) and used steerable waterjets instead of propellers and rudders.

Using amorphous metal, Jackson had already built a double-M ship because if it can go twice as fast, it can delivery twice as much. Now the defense industry wanted to apply Jackson’s hulls to warships, and he wanted to fucking let them.

The more a ship sits in the water, the more it drags, so Jackson had his designers get it above water as much as possible like a surface-effects ship. The double-M provides a much smoother, faster ride at high speeds in rough seas over conventional hulls by spreading its weight over a wider area. The wider the ship, the more stable it becomes in rough seas and the harder to capsize.

Military analysts loved it because double-M hulls reduced the strength and length of a ship’s wake, which makes it safer since spy satellites don’t actually look for ships, but their wakes, which look like a long white scratch on the surface of a dark blue sea. Its wider design disperses the wake over more water, like the foam from waves, rather than an unnaturally long straight line.

If it can’t be seen, it can’t be killed.

The double-M hull channeled air into four arcs that provided lift and reduced draft. The more a ship can be lifted out of the water, the easier it becomes to increase its speed. In a virtuous cycle, faster speed gave the ship greater lift, and greater lift channeled more air, literally lifting the ship up, which increased its speed. The new lighter hull, with oversized hydrogen-fueled turbines, had a fraction of the draft of older designs, which enabled the new ships to operate far closer to shore and up rivers.

Given that Beijing sat along a river 60 miles from the ocean, which westerners a century before used to take the capital, this low-draft capability opened up new war scenarios. Or, in Beijing’s case, old war scenarios. Mimicking the radar signature of civilian ships, under cover of night and stormy weather, battalions’ worth of armored vehicles could be quickly transported via low-draft cargo ships right to Beijing. Marines could now invade where they could not before, forcing the enemy to spread themselves thin defending greater terrain. Such an ability can not only win wars, but can prevent them.

Now that was a strategic weapon.

The Institute showed the Navy how it could have several times the combat presence at a fraction of the cost. The US Navy has 280 ships, but few are deployed at any given time, and most of the combat ships protect vulnerable aircraft carriers. The new ships could reach their patrol area in half the time and stay several times as long with limitless hydrogen fuel split from sea water. Without having to defend aircraft carriers, the Navy could cover several times the ocean with a fraction of its current inventory.

Anything that can be found can be killed. A smaller, faster, stealthier ship that left a smaller wake would be a bitch to find, even with radar and spy satellites.

Speed not only makes a ship harder to find, but also harder to kill. Supercavitating torpedoes, like the Russian VA-111 Shkval, are capable of 200 knots. With supercavitation, the torpedo actually glides through a thin air bubble and the water around it is literally vaporized to form small bubbles of gas to reduce drag. These monsters are 27 feet long, weigh almost 6000 pounds, can fit a nuclear warhead, and have a range of 7 kilometers. A suicide diesel sub could take out an entire aircraft carrier battle group with nuclear-tipped supercavitators.

But who wants to use a nuke and miss?

Supercavitating torpedoes have great speed, but they do not have great range. A fast ship could drop wide “torpedo nets” and attempt to out-distance it by running as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The faster the ship, the closer the sub would have to be before launching. Yet the closer the sub, the more likely it would be detected.

Speed gives the Navy a strategic advantage because enemies don’t go to war against forces they can’t defeat. The lower the enemy’s confidence of success, the less likely they would attack in the first place. Especially with micro-nukes. The new ships may not be able to outrun a faster torpedo, but they may be able to out-distance it. And that reduced the incentive to buy the expensive subs capable of actually launch supercavitators.

Maximizing the weight-to-thrust ratio meant huge turbine engines, which also generated a lot of electricity. And without having to worry about conserving fuel, they could generate as much electricity as they wanted. Which solved a problem that long vexed the Navy.

Enormous power requirements had long delayed the installation of electromagnetic railguns on US ships. The engines didn’t generate enough power and their batteries could not store enough electricity or release it fast enough. Even the railguns on the latest DD(X) destroyers could only shoot 60 miles, compared to railguns in the lab that could shoot nearly 1000 kilometers.

A low-draft ship with a 1000-km railgun was a strategic weapon since virtually everything on Earth is within its range. A fleet of railgun ships that can ride rivers hundreds of miles inland could project its power over virtually the entire planet.

And now they had enough juice to operate it.

They designed the entire ship around the railgun. They incorporated a network of Jackson’s best ultracapacitors because they could store far more electricity than industrial batteries and, more importantly, they could release that energy far faster.

Which helps fire a railgun more than once.

Now, unlike “strategic” nukes, this was a strategic weapon: a small, fast ship that could approach any coast in bad nighttime weather without detection, quickly fire GPS-guided shells, then disappear. The mere existence of such a ghost ship virtually negated conventional nation-against-nation warfare. One ship could decimate Iran with impunity or could have wiped out Saddam Hussein’s invading force into Kuwait in 1990.

A strategic weapon does not just win battles. It wins wars.

And, hopefully, prevents them.

This new railgun ship could strike dozens of long-distance targets an hour – more than an entire aircraft carrier battle group. Even more impressive, those shells could be target-optimized – meaning anti-personnel shells hit troops, penetrators hit bunkers, buildings and armored vehicles, while others shed thousands of tiny munitions over convoys, military bases, and runways. Matching the munition to the target meant destroying it on the first try. Target-optimized warheads were a force multiplier.

But if the new ships can hit something one thousand kilometers away, then what use are aircraft carriers? $30 billion aircraft carrier battle groups exist to deliver several tons of explosives several hundred miles away. Something that a $1 billion railgun ship can do far better, cheaper, easier, faster, and safer, while putting 6000 fewer troops in harm’s way.

Carriers are so vulnerable that they need two dozen vessels and fifty aircraft just for protection. As Warren Buffet put it, price is what you pay, while value is what you get. A carrier’s value can be measured by the damage it can inflict, which hasn’t improved in decades, while its vulnerability increases every time another two-bit country deploys anti-ship missiles, supercavitating torpedoes, and their own satellites. 99% of a carrier group’s cost is defense-related, including over half of its aircraft. While the Chinese may be tempted to deploy a micro-nuke on a $30 billion battle group, it becomes harder to justify releasing a nuke on one of many railgun ships. The Navy only deploys 3-4 carrier groups at a time, so destroying one makes a huge difference. Destroying one railgun ship makes little sense when there are a hundred others to take its place.

Whereas a stealthy railgun ship can approach an enemy coast in bad nighttime weather, an aircraft carrier must stay far away to avoid detection and destruction, rendering it relatively useless. Carriers are simply too vulnerable and not very capable.

Railgun ships made aircraft carriers obsolete.

But that’s not all they did. Defense industry experts designed it not just around the railgun, but also around a speed-of-light free-electron laser weapon. The Army and Air Force had been improving them for years, but lasers, like railguns, require huge amounts of juice. Batteries can neither store that much electricity, nor release it quickly enough.

But Jackson’s latest ultracapacitors could.

The defense industry knew that they would not get any new orders until they made a compelling case. A super-fast railgun ship was compelling, but a super-fast ship with both a railgun and a speed-of-light laser really captured the imagination. And made for great animated battle scenes to wow the public. They had to generate and store huge amounts of electricity anyways. Adding a laser weapon in the design phase added little to the ship’s cost.

A laser can fry anything within its line of sight. Not just aircraft, torpedoes, and fast-attack boats, but anti-ship missiles or uranium rods dropped from orbit. Speed-of-light means not just a faster defense, but a more accurate one. Lasers make a missile attack so unlikely to succeed that no enemy would probably try, unless at very close range like in a foreign port.

Traveling at the speed of light means there is no need to lead the target because time-to-target is virtually instantaneous. That also makes it impossible to evade. It eliminates the influence of gravity and wind which can throw solid projectiles off target, which makes lasers ideal for killing over long distances, especially since laser beams don’t generate light or sound to betray their position. A stealth ship during a rainy night could laser-fry an enemy coast with virtual impunity.

The downside is it requires line-of-sight, which limits its usefulness on a ship, although they installed it on the highest possible point. An enemy bomber flying near the surface water must “pop up” briefly to get a radar lock on the American ship. If the Americans know where he is coming from, the laser could melt him during that brief pop up. Another interesting application was using the laser to boil the water around a mine or in front of an incoming torpedo.

The problem with lasers is that they waste a lot of energy as heat, which requires power-intensive cooling equipment since simple air cooling would leave too much time between shot cycles. Jackson, however, solved this problem with second-generation superconductors that don’t require super cooling.

To maximize profit while minimizing taxpayer costs, the defense industry wanted to standardize the entire Navy on as few hulls as possible, like automakers producing several cars from the same chassis. Defense lobbyists were trying to sell Congress on using just four hulls to serve almost all of the Navy’s needs.

For example, Jackson had just started producing a 200 meter long Roll On, Roll Off cargo ship that could double as an amphibious assault vessel. At 60 knots, twice the speed meant half the time to close with an enemy coast. Its cargo bay opened a ramp out of which hundreds of small, fast, amorphous metal hovercraft could assault an enemy coastline. Just one cargo ship would be more effective than an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit.

Hovercraft are peculiar beasts that resemble a truck driving on water, a ship sailing on land, and a plane flying on the surface. Armed hovercraft are much more useful than wheeled or tracked vehicles because they can travel over any surface (sand, snow, slush, mud, water, grass, ice, rocks, waves, coral reefs, fast-flowing rivers, and minefields) and do not need a port to be off-loaded. The Navy has used them since the 1980’s.

In addition to assault and transport hovercraft was a version specifically designed to carry a standardized 40 foot container. Planes, trains, or trucks could deliver the containers to the safest, closest location, then armored hovercraft could relay them over sand, rivers, mud, swamps, snow, or ice to the front lines. Loading and unloading a ship using hovercraft to move standardized containers meant the Marines did not need to invade, capture, and then operate an enemy port under fire. Ports will always be the most heavily protected areas of an enemy’s coastline -- which Marines could now simply bypass.

And the 99.9% of the time the ship was not attacking an enemy’s coast, it served as a general-purpose cargo or transport ship. The Navy needed a hundred cargo ships anyways, but having a hundred fast, stealthy, railgun-laser cargo ships that could be reconfigured to serve as amphibious assault ships that unleashed several thousand heavily armed hovercraft meant the entire Marine Corp could D-Day a coastline at the same time. As Napoleon proved, concentration of firepower wins battles.

In essence, this was exactly what the Communist Chinese needed to invade Taiwan, since hovercraft could travel hundreds of miles up rivers, across reefs, or down highways at high speed.

The Marines could park a stealthy cargo ship pre-loaded with armed hovercraft in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and throughout Asia, to back up the regular railgun-laser ships carrying F-35s and heloplanes. Just one cargo ship with one hundred hovercraft, drones and/or spy blimps could reduce the pirate threat off Somalia better than an entire aircraft battle group.

The enemy never knowing when a stealth railgun ship was around alone multiplied the Navy’s ability to project force. Saddam never would have invaded Kuwait if he assumed a railgun ship was within a thousand kilometers.

But it got better.

Amorphous metal submarines, injection molded at the same time for maximum structural integrity, had several times the 600 meter depth and blast-resistance of current American subs. Because torpedoes and depth charges cannot handle greater pressure, any sub that can submerge deep enough can also operate with impunity. An American sub could thus sink an entire enemy fleet without endangering itself if it had enough depth to protect it.

Since they were designing new submarines from scratch, and since they needed to capture the public’s imagination, the defense industry maximized the new subs’ ability to descend. Instead of rising or falling slowly like a blimp, they duplicated research subs by using water running past two stubby “wings” to create reverse lift to descend at 400 feet per minute, or four times faster. The depths would be the sub equivalent of the high ground. Smaller, faster, quieter subs that escape danger by descending quicker made enemy subs virtually obsolete against the U.S. Navy.

Then they put a fucking pop-up railgun in the sub to nail the value proposition. It only shot 50 kilometers, but that was enough for one sub to stop an entire Chinese invasion fleet from overwhelming Taiwan. And since they would run on compressed hydrogen gas, they could be refueled and re-supplied at sea, multiplying their time on station, rather than waste weeks going back home.

And the Institute just loved Bell’s new heloplane.

Bell Helicopters, owned by defense giant Textron, shocked the crap out of the aircraft industry in 2009 when they first showed off the prototype of their evolutionary helicopter-plane hybrid. As the owner of fifteen deep sea farms, space a thousand or more kilometers apart, Jackson couldn’t imagine having too many aircraft that could takeoff and land vertically like a helicopter, but had the range, altitude, and carrying capacity of a cargo plane. Bell, however, needed a large order to justify building a mass-production plant. Jackson, therefore, became their first customer in order to replace his entire fleet of seaplanes with heloplanes that landed right where he needed to unload his supplies.

Called the 2X, which some confused with a new duel rotor technology by Sikorsky Aircraft also called 2X, the amorphous metal airframe was both stronger and lighter than conventional bolt-and-weld airframes. The canard amorphous metal rotor wing spun a central wing to take off vertically like a helicopter, then after accelerating to at least 120 kn, would deploy flaps from the front and rear wings. This allowed the central wing to cease rotation and lock into place across from the fuselage and act like a third wing. The flaps on the other two wings would retract so that all three provided lift loads for fixed-wing flight. Shifting in mid-flight from rotor to wing while using a canard rotor to maintain lift during the transition was revolutionary. Switching to amorphous metal rotors and airframe was critical in literally getting it off the ground, while also increasing its speed, altitude, and range.

The Army was so excited about the heloplane that many in the Pentagon’s E-ring openly talked about replacing every single helicopter in the service because it rendered helicopters obsolete.

But the jumbo version inspired the greatest excitement. Jackson needed vertical takeoff and landing craft with the longest possible range and the heaviest possible load capacity for his sea farms, so he challenged Bell’s engineers to design the largest heloplane possible by promising to buy a thousand of them. Large helicopters like the Blackhawk, Sikorsky’s Skycrane, or the Russian Hinds max out at roughly 70 feet, yet Bell came up with a jumbo nearly twice as large. While the reigning world champion, the Hind Mi-24, could lift 12 tons, the jumbo heloplane could lift over twice as much and fly several times as far.

Small heloplanes would make great scouts and tank-killers; medium-size ones could insert special forces behind enemy lines, but these jumbo versions could transport an entire light infantry platoon or 25 tons of supplies a thousand miles. Their range meant they could stay over a battlefield or escort ground troops several times longer than helicopter gunships, while their amorphous metal frame automatically made them virtually immune to small-caliber fire without having to weigh them down with heavy armor. They were not as fast or have the range of other planes, but they could land virtually anywhere, which multiplied the Army’s reach and lethality. This meant that one hundred stealthy jumbo heloplanes, each carrying a light armored vehicle, could move 4000 light troops a thousand miles at night in bad weather to avoid detection.

Like, say, to Tehran.

But building every new vehicle, ship, and aircraft out of amorphous glass was not the Institute’s most controversial proposal. That award fell to their proposal to replace almost every warhead with gamma-rays, which have thousands of times the explosive power of conventional explosives. When exploded correctly, gamma-rays left virtually no radiation. They scaled up, so they could destroy anything from an underground bunker to a small town – all without radiation.

Their main problem, aside from high cost, was exploding the gamma-ray completely, because anything that did not explode left radiation. 98% didn’t cut it. Any undetonated isomer disperses as slightly radioactive particles, similar in effect to the uranium tank shells that reportedly caused so many birth defects after the Gulf War. And, perhaps, caused the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome that screwed up so many returning veterans.

A stealth bomber could use a small railgun to fire thousands of tiny GPS-guided, gamma-ray munitions from hundreds of miles away, instead of flying right over the target. A speed-of-light laser plane using Boeing’s new fuel-sipping Dreamliner 787-9 was possible as well. Just coat the upper frame with high efficiency nano-solar to supplement onboard electronics, pack it with the best ultracapacitors for power, and switch to hydrogen fuel to improve the weight-thrust ratio.

That much juice could also fire a 10 nano-second-long, gigawatt bursts of power to induce a surge in unshielded electronics to fry enemy weapons, radars, and communications. Unlike an electromagnetic pulse, this microwave pulse could be targeted to travel up pipes or down ventilation ducts into underground bunkers.

And the Holy Grail was a maglev-launched, hypersonic scramjet that could fire gamma-rays, laser beams, and microwave pulses, and hit any target on Earth within an hour.

The Institute was also selling a “railgun tank”, which more accurately resembled a railgun truck.

The Institute flatly declared the tank obsolete. The U.S. Army lost hundreds of tanks in Iraq after Bush claimed “major combat operations” over. One division alone, the 1st Cavalry, lost 70 tanks during just one tour in Baghdad.

What’s the purpose of a tank that’s so easily destroyed?

The Institute wanted to replace it with a quiet 90mm railgun with no muzzle flash, can strike several times farther, and whose projectiles travel four times faster. Its target would have four times less time to evade, which means higher kill rates and greater safety since fewer of the enemy can fire back. With quiet shots, no muzzle flashes, and firing from farther away, the enemy needs more time under fire to determine where they are being attacked from. The railgun tank made the Abrams obsolete.

But the heavier the vehicle, the less juice there is to power the railgun. A railgun converts 30% of its electrical energy into kinetic energy, so the more electricity, the more powerful the railgun. The solution is to use the lightest possible truck that carries the most ultracapacitors. So they designed a plug-in fuel cell truck around the railgun.

The purpose of a tank is to send a few pounds several thousand feet. A railgun tank could fire several times farther, while traveling faster and farther than an Abrams could dream of. Just multiplying its range on a tank of fuel dramatically increases capability while reducing vulnerability when long range artillery or local insurgents can strike at any time.

But the real value was that the “tank” doubled as mobile artillery, which made howitzers obsolete. Yet it was so light that even a jumbo heloplane could transport two of them a thousand miles. A fleet of heloplanes could therefore airlift an entire armored battalion wherever they were most needed.

Like, say, from a ship at night to Beijing or Tehran.

Veterans loved Jackson’s double decker bus that accommodated a platoon of forty along with their gear. Instead of a utility truck where troops sit with their backs to the enemy, these seats faced small bulletproof windows so soldiers could insert their M-4 into a slit and fire while comfortably seated. Each seat even had a cup holder because, as any gamer knows, shooting shit up is thirsty work. On the second floor in the front and back there were special openings for two heavy machine guns each to give the bus 360 degree coverage. Its amorphous metal frame, with an extra diamond hard coating, and an apron to shield the tires, was all the armor it needed to repel rifle-caliber bullets and RPG’s. They even reinforced the floor in a “V” shape to dispel bomb blasts from IEDs. With forty weapons shooting with relative impunity, it was the perfect transport vehicle for inner city hot spots like Iraq or Compton.

A smaller version the size of a van accommodated a squad: a driver and five shooters on the first level, each facing out, and on the upper level four heavy machine gunners laying flat, to reduce its height, facing all four directions. Its boxy design made it look like a tall Volvo.

The shorter, faster “economy” version just had a driver and one shooter with a .50 cal, Hellfire rockets, and a wide angle lens camera on a platform that turned 360 degrees while the gunner stayed safely inside. In case of trouble, their immediate superior could monitor their progress in real time by tapping into their video feed. They were still tinkering with the design so that the weapons could be remote-operated in order to park them at hot intersections, which would draw out any enemies in the area. Even more exciting was Jackson’s plan to make a hovercraft version -- not only to help Marines storm beaches, but for soldiers to fly over sand, snow, mud, rivers, lakes, swamps, and rocky terrain.

An armored car, van, and bus sure beat the hell out of Marines invading in unarmored Humvees like in Iraq.

Jackson would have made billions if McCain didn’t croak. Instead, Palin and Senate Republicans blacklisted Jackson as a supplier and subcontractor, but at a cost since the millions in defense contributions that used to go to Republicans now went to Democrats. And the Democrats who received the most from the defense industry were those running for president.

So, yeah, Jackson felt under-appreciated.

He knew, of course, why Cooper was pissed. Jackson and the mega-donors in his Millionaire’s Club bought futures just as shares of defense contractors soared a year ago. Critics claimed they pocketed billions.

And no one profited more than Henry Fucking Jackson.

18

Cooper finally chilled out enough to sit down.

“Henry, don’t try to change the subject. What the hell do you need one hundred nuclear spaceships for?”

Jackson hesitated to tell him the truth, which would take way too long, so he told him a fraction of the truth and hoped it would take just a fraction of the time. He sat down in one of the cheap chairs in front of his desk.

“Ah, hell, Dan. You got me. But it’s not a billion dollar opportunity we’re looking at. It’s $1 quadrillion.”

Cooper did not look impressed.

“Remember this joke? Bush was told that two Brazilian soldiers died, so he asked, ‘how many soldiers are in a Brazilian?’”

“You don’t believe me!” Jackson played offended.

“Stop fucking with me, Henry. You say you want me to back you, but you won’t even level with me.”

Which was funny since Jackson thought exactly the same about him.

“Aren’t you in a hurry, Dan?”

“Oh, I got time for this.”

“You think I’m playing? If you must know, we want to mine space rocks. Of the Near-Earth Objects at least one kilometer big, at least 50 are metallic or Type M, which are up to 99% metal. One of these, Amun, is a two-kilometer wide rock that, according to John Lewis, a planetary sciences professor at the University of Arizona, has $8 trillion in nickel and iron, $6 trillion in cobalt, and another $6 trillion in precious platinum-group metals, for a grand total of $20 trillion. These large metallic NEOs are collectively worth $1 quadrillion, those 100-1000 meters a $1 quadrillion, those 10-100 meters a $1 quadrillion, and those less than 10 meters another $1 quadrillion. And those are just the M-class and stony-iron NEOs, which make up only 4% of the NEO population. The other 96% are worth several quadrillion dollars more. The average non-M NEO has a higher concentration of precious metals than the richest ore mines here on Earth. To put it another way, several quadrillions dollars worth of metals float near Earth.

“And past Mars lie millions of rocks in the Main Asteroid Belt. Three times that many float 60 degrees in front and behind Jupiter. Then there are billions of asteroids and comets past Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, and trillions more past Pluto in the Oort Cloud.”

“Yeah, but how do you get them?”

Cooper was interested in anything that made money.

“We capture a big one when its closest, then re-orbit it into a gravitationally stable orbit called a Lagrange point. There are five of them: L1 and L2 are on either side of Earth relative to the Sun; L3 is on the other side of the Sun directly opposite Earth; and L4 and L5 are 60 degrees before and after Earth in its orbit. More specifically, like we have with many satellites, we give it a Lissajous orbit around L2 from where we return precious ore and send people, materials, and supplies.”

What Jackson didn’t mention is that his father had already located a $20 trillion asteroid in a Lagrange point sixty degrees behind the Earth, that they named The Jackpot. They didn’t even have to move it. No one else knew of it because its location made it visible only momentarily at the horizon at sunset.

Jupiter has many asteroids that orbit sixty degrees before and behind it, but what got the Professor started was the discovery of the asteroid 1990 MB in a Lagrange point near Mars. If any rocky planet should have Lagrange asteroids, it should be Earth, which has the greatest gravity well of the four rocky planets. Because he headed the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch program for so long, the professor had more equipment than virtually anyone else on Earth. And he looked specifically for it.

He not only knew where to look for, but what to look for. Detecting NEOs requires different telescopes than those that measure their spectra. Most astronomers rely on colleagues from other universities or in other countries, but Spacewatch had access to the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, which has the largest collection of scopes in the world. So the Jacksons became virtually the only people on the planet to know that a $20 trillion asteroid floated exactly behind Earth. And if he told Cooper, then as president he would take it away. Sure as hell.

“It sounds like you just need one. Why do you want one hundred?” Cooper, sensing weakness, dug further.

“The more ships we have, the more money we make,” Jackson argued defensively.

“But wouldn’t you flood the market?”

Jackson had no honest answer to that. But that was the trouble with being a lousy liar. He never learned to lie well because his father taught him that those who know how to carefully phrase the truth never needed to lie. Which was a damn lie.

Staying awake all night didn’t help. He was running on fumes. In truth, he only needed one ship to fly crews and supplies back and forth. Thousands of capsules, sure, but just one ship.

Although two or three would be nice.

And Cooper was right. But he wanted to flood the global market to buy up distressed mining companies as he became the world’s dominate automaker, aircraft maker, and ship builder.

Which is why he needed so much political support.

Once in office, President McCain had Congress update the McCain-Fiengold campaign finance laws to allow for more generous federal matching of small-dollar contributions for candidates who accept public financing. Republicans, in turn, demanded eliminating the cap on donations from a single individual to multiple candidates, then capped at $125,000 an election cycle, since they were largely funded by billionaires.

In response, Jackson started the “Millionaire’s Club” by asking rich donors to give $1 million in early, hard money contributions to hundreds of Democratic challengers. That is how PACs became so powerful – by giving early hard money donations. The website was specifically designed to automate the donation process because the easier it was to give, the more people would go through the trouble of giving.

The webpage made it as easy as possible, by listing the candidates and suggesting how much to give. Once a donor gave their bank and personal information, it only took one click to give $1 million to hundreds of candidates. Donors could change the amounts and the candidates, but most gave the suggested amounts to the candidates Jackson listed. And because his websites tracked how much early hard money contributions went to which Democratic candidates, the candidates never were allowed to forget how in debt they were to him. Not that they complained. If anything, their main fear was not making the list.

Jackson, notably, chose which Democratic candidates got funded. It was, after all, his fucking website. Not that the idea was new. Progressive bloggers had raised tens of millions via their ActBlue website. The main difference was scale: if a PAC, business executive, or rich donor wanted to impress the party, he now had an easy way to distribute millions right when they were most needed. Joining the Millionaire’s Club quickly became a requirement for any PACs, lobbyist, trade organization, companies, and rich person who needed access. No special interest could afford not to join.

As every campaign manager knows, early money is worth four times as much as late money because early money gives a candidate credibility, which allows him to raise more money later. Early money determines viability. The media eagerly pronounces a campaign dead if the candidate can’t raise enough early money.

Hard money is worth several times more than soft money because of the limits placed on hard money. Parties can use “hard money” for any purpose, including supporting specific candidates by name, whereas soft money cannot pay for overhead or get out the vote. Up to half of all campaign money goes towards one form of advertising or another. Hard money is not only harder to get, but candidates need more of it than soft money.

The resulting media frenzy was all the advertising that he needed. His critics provided his publicity, getting the word out. It was like Coke paying for Pepsi ads.

This was just one more example of how Henry Jackson got criticized for doing nothing wrong, yet he would be praised for doing the morally ambiguous. Like dominating the global metals market, automaking, ship making, and aircraft making, and using a hundred spaceships to optimize the solar system for human habitability. He need broad political support to execute his agenda, which required a hundred manned spaceships.

“But we will save billions through economies of scale by building a hundred of them.”

Which sounded weak, even to Jackson. After all, how do you justify one hundred nuclear spaceships? And fuck telling him the truth – that would take too long and Cooper wouldn’t believe him, anyways.

Cooper wasn’t buying it, and grew angrier.

“Henry, what aren’t you telling me?”

Jackson sighed to himself. They had so many important things to talk about, like how to win the presidency, how to stop China from invading Taiwan, and how to rebuild Earth after hundreds of mountains struck it. He finally had Cooper one-on-one, without his asshole campaign manager and annoying advisers. For once, spaceships were the last thing he wanted to talk about.

Jackson’s watch beeped. He received a text message from his father that said, “911”, which meant an emergency. But now he had an emergency of his own. Besides, what possible emergency could his dad have? For billions of people, the world was already going to end. What could possibly be worse?

No, he would have to get back to his dad later. He had his own crisis on his hands.

19

As soon as Jackson left, Monique ran up the stairs with an alarmed David close behind. She fell on her bed and cried uncontrollably. David closed the door and turned on music, afraid she would wake up the house.

Bewildered, he climbed in next to her to comfort her. He intertwined their arms and legs and whispered to her that she had done nothing wrong. His warm embrace only increased her sobbing, as she saw what she did from Jackson’s perspective.

The one thing that leaped out in David’s mind was that he never wanted Monique to do anything sexual with anyone else ever again. No matter how hard it made his cock. Unsure what to do, David just held her with all the love that his puny, under-utilized heart had to offer. It wasn’t enough.

Lisa knocked on the door and entered without waiting for an answer. She immediately kneeled just inches away from Monique. Monique quit crying, but closed her eyes and said nothing. Lisa knew that something was terribly wrong, and felt responsible even though she didn’t know why. Guilt, shame, and remorse were not normal emotions for her, and she had trouble recognizing them for what they were.

“Go away,” her brother begged her.

“What did I do?”

Lisa did not know that Monique almost let Chucha maul her father’s choice for president, risk her modeling career, then stick a stranger’s finger in her pussy so that she could feed him another man’s cum.

Then Lorena popped her head in the door.

“Is he here yet?” she asked excitedly. Although she had known Cooper for several years, the fact that he may become president thrilled her. She wanted to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, get her picture taken in the Oval Office, and take home something that said White House on it. Not bad for a country girl from Tablaza, Colombia.

“What’s wrong?” Lorena then demanded to know.

David looked up at his mom and realized he needed to explain quickly before she started interrogating them.

“Chucha attacked Cooper when he got out of the car. Monique saved him from being mauled, but almost got mauled herself. If dad expects to make billions when this guy is president, then he owes Monique a pretty penny, because she risked her career just saved Cooper’s ass.”

Lisa gasped as everything fell into place. She herself had a love-hate relationship with that bitch of a dog. Mostly hate. She felt relieved to learn that she was not responsible but, most of all, that she knew what the hell was going on.

Lorena sat down on the bed, started stroking Monique’s luscious black hair, and instinctively fell into empathetic mothering mode. Only recently had they opened up and bonded as women, which kind of annoyed Lisa, who felt replaced.

“Oh, you poor girl. I’ve been telling Henry for years to keep that beast on a lease. Or in a cage. He never forgave his mother for running over Chucha’s mother. It must have been terrible. You are so brave.”

Scared and vulnerable, Lorena had never seen this side of Monique before. Super-confident Monique never seemed to need anyone. Not now though. Monique looked up and lunged into her arms with an intensity that shocked Lorena. Monique lost her own mother nearly twenty years ago, and really needed one right now. Lorena returned the fierce embrace, then Lisa and David joined in.

David, unlike his dad, was not a hugger, much less a group hugger, but the energies they gave off permeated him like water a sponge. Before he knew it, he was crying too. Once the first tear fell, a billion more soon followed. It only now hit him on an emotional level that he really could have lost her. Forever, just like he lost his wife Evelyn to leukemia. Something deep within him clicked as he resolved never to let that happen again. His love for Monique stared at him in the face, and he was the first to blink.

They finally pried themselves apart when the tears dried up, and David needed to know something.

“Monique, what would you do if Chucha had really scarred your face and ruined your career?”

“Finally have your babies, if you’d still let me.”

She didn’t even need to think about it. She always wanted to have children with him, but the shelf life of a model is short. Plus, he already had two small kids and until recently was still in med school. David was in no position to have kids, or at least raise them. Raising kids takes a lifetime while having them only takes a moment.

Monique said exactly what he wanted to hear.

“Can I have this?” David asked his sister, even as he began taking her engagement ring off of her finger.

Surprised that he wanted to borrow her ring, she reflectively said, “sure.”

Her brother then shocked them by getting on one knee and proposing to Monique, who never looked less hot.

“I love you more than I can express in mere words. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And I want us to have children. Will you marry me?”

Monique’s stunned eyes opened as wide as dinner plates. Taking advantage of her state of shock, David quickly slipped Lisa’s ring on Monique’s finger as Monique, statue-like, stared at him in disbelief.

“You’re giving her my ring?” his sister demanded.

Lisa sounded alarmed, shocked, and pissed. She needed to break the spell that had enchanted the room.

“I’ll buy you a better one.”

David’s eyes never left Monique’s. David didn’t seem to care that he just took something very special from his little sister. He neither knew nor cared that Lisa spent months plotting to score the baddest possible ring, soaking it to her parents and her boyfriend’s parents. She must have spent a thousand hours mastering the little details of expensive jewelry. Now all that work was going to waste? Or, at least, going to her cousin?

Re-gifting an engagement ring clearly did not bother him. David simply needed to act on this moment.

“But that’s a million dollar ring!” Lisa protested, as if she just lost her first-born. While she got a great deal at just $250,000, split between both sets of parents, experts estimated its retail value at over $1 million because jewelry has a huge 400% retail markup.

“I’ll buy you another one worth twice as much.”

It did not escape Monique’s weary mind that David thought her answer was worth a few million dollars. Rich men have spent a lot of money on her, but none sprung a few million on her. But, hell, she would have accepted his proposal with a candy ring.

Monique remained speechless as the energy in the room changed. Despite knowing several languages, she couldn’t get a “yes”, a “oui”, or a “si” out of her mouth, although the tears again flowed out of her eyes. Instead, she held up her arms, asking to be held, and David embraced her like a python. Overwhelmed with happiness, he picked her up like she weighed a feather and twirled her around like a helicopter rotor. Lisa and Lorena backed up just in time to avoid getting kicked in the face. David, the emotionally repressed guy in the family, hollered in joy like he won the state’s cage fighting championship. Again.

As David and Monique cried in joy, and her mother whooped at the news, Lisa felt like crying for her ring. For once, Lisa didn’t know what to think or how to react. Monique and David could not possibly have looked happier, beneath their tears.

One thing was perfectly clear to Lisa, though. She was not getting her damn ring back. All that time and effort to get it, and she lost it to the least devious man she knew. Her father was always drilling her about how one single mistake, usually done without a second thought, could dramatically change one’s life forever. He was referring to crossing the street without looking, or losing one’s situational awareness when flying, but giving your ring to your brother had to rank high up there somewhere.

This day could not possibly get weirder.

20

“When you first ran for governor, my father, as head of Spacewatch, the Arizona Space Commission, and the Jackson Space Foundation, rallied thousands of space enthusiasts for you. Do you remember what he told them?”

From Cooper’s blank look, he didn’t, but he appreciated Jackson reminding him that his now-infamous father helped him win the governorship. Kudos.

No Democrat won statewide office in Texas since 1994. The Republican takeover of statewide offices in Texas was truly remarkable because as recently as 1982, Democrats held every statewide office. Within a dozen years Republicans reversed this.

“I remember he was writing a book,” Cooper answered.

This was one of the things that pissed Jackson off about Cooper. His father rallied pro-space voters for Cooper, who didn’t even read his bestseller.

“Oh yeah!” Cooper suddenly seemed to remember after all. “Didn’t he say something about re-orbiting Mercury between Venus and Earth?”

Jackson put his best poker face on. He couldn’t believe so many people got so hung up on the same detail.

“My father’s basic idea was to move and bulk up as many worlds as possible into the Sun’s habitable zone, between Venus and the Main Asteroid Belt just past Mars. With billions of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, we could bulk up dozens of moons to maximize their real estate and increase their weak gravity. The solar system’s carrying capacity – meaning how many humans it could support – would grow from ten billion to over one hundred billion. Ninety billion people would then owe their lives to my father. Or, at least, his idea.”

“So the ships have nothing to do with the Chinese?”

“They have nothing at all to do with the Chinese,” Jackson assured him. Which, oddly enough, was true.

“Do they have anything to do with Horace Butler?”

Ah, hell. Jackson shifted in his cheap plastic chair.

“No. They have nothing to do with that old fart.”

Cooper leaned over Jackson’s card table like a psychologist reassuring a patient, nodding his head and folding his hands.

“Butler tells me you’re after his company.”

Yep, they were talking again. Ever since Cooper hired that D.C. consultant as his campaign manager, everything related to Cooper fell to shit. The guy was a shit storm who rained crap.

“What has Butler promised you?” he asked.

“He wants me to publicly promise to pay the OmniNet systems used by the Special Forces Command in Tampa,” Cooper admitted. “He says Defense owes him a few billion, plus interest and penalties. And he says Palin won’t pay him cuz she hates your fucking guts.”

Jackson audibly sighed.

“You’d actually fuck me over for a broke coot?”

It was so much easier in the old days, when a politician, once bought, stayed bought. Jackson promised to raise big bucks and get him tons of headlines in exchange for several very specific things if Cooper won the presidency. And Jackson already delivered on his promise. Starting a presidential campaign is very expensive, even before one gets to advertising. Payroll, transportation, websites, logistics, opening and staffing hundreds of offices – and that is before one gets to the primaries.

Jackson stunned the party when he actively campaigned for Cooper over Obama and Hillary. He could not undo that political risk. The piss had left the penis. He had no choice but to make sure Cooper won. And then somehow force Cooper to keep his fucking promises.

Jackson spent millions building up the party’s contact database. Voter databases had become so huge they resembled that old joke about the pre-Yahoo Internet – everything you could possibly want to know is there, but you just can’t find it. As his district field offices expanded, more candidates turned to them for help. In return, their campaigns uploaded their new voter contact information into DemZilla. The net result was thousands of rivers of information flowing into the DemZilla ocean.

Which infuriated Jackson when D.C. Democrats whined about all of the money he was investing in the field offices. He didn’t understand how they couldn’t see something so basic: more field offices led to a bigger and better voter database, which improve GOTV, which won elections. Which was why a Party existed.

Jackson took Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy and expanded it into a 435 district presence, each with the responsibility of winning every election within their district. This wasn’t cheap, and Jackson quickly had to justify the cost to the DNC committee membership.

Traditional dinner-and-speech fundraisers generally cost 25% of every dollar raised. Direct mail and phone solicitation usually costs around 13%. Online donations cost as little as 3% using banner ads.

In contrast, money raised via email is virtually free. So while the cost of getting more and better information cost several million a year, turning that information into contributions cost almost nothing, if done online. Jackson studied the psychology of political contributions and knew how to include several triggers in as few words as possible.

He always asked for a specific amount to go to a specific cause or candidate, and then targeted those most susceptible to that message. He learned to summarize the purpose in the first short paragraph, then ask for a specific amount to fulfill a specific goal in the first sentence of the second paragraph so viewers didn’t have to scroll down (stayed “above the fold“ in newspaper jargon).

Instead of holding several dinners to net $1 million, he would simply mass-email a specific part of the DemZilla database and raise several times that much. At no cost and in no time. The donations came in online as well, so he didn’t even need clerks to process checks. The website processed everything automatically, and organized it for filing FEC reports. He figured he saved thousands of hours in payroll on the processing side, alone worth a few million. His field offices paid for themselves because the better the database, the more money he raised. DemZilla meant more than just money – it meant money on demand.

Whenever a Republican or Teabagger said something offensive, the DNC would sending a fundraising email to those Democrats most likely to be outraged. Since wing nuts frequently said offensive things, Jackson referred to their fundraising as an “outrage-a-thon.” But the bigger the database, the more Democrats he could reach and hence the more money he could raise.

With Jackson’s blessing, progressive bloggers set up a system where anyone could throw up an Internet ad on YouTube, and donors would support those they liked. Various groups like bloggers and College Democrats competed with each other for the best ads. Thousands of amateurs fought to get into the Top 10. The best weekly ad, by definition the one that earned the most donations, Jackson emailed to specific demographics in his database and sometimes turned into TV ads.

Some Weekly Winners naturally went too far, like one that ran several clips of Teabaggers to make the convincing case that the GOP was the party of angry white assholes.

Jackson didn’t have to make the ads, spend money to run the ads, or even choose the weekly winner. The base did all that, which also kept them engaged and energized. The most passionate partisans felt they were helping the cause. Then an independent non-profit organization placed them on the Internet. Every progressive blog, College Democrat office, and many allied groups featured the weekly winner, which guaranteed that millions saw it. The best ads became popular Tweets, or even developed a cult status. Ken Olberman on MSNBC always featured the Weekly Winner, and routinely interviewed the authors of the best ads.

Free bottoms-up advertising. Thanks to the web.

Jackson’s first ad was also his most infamous:

“Why do Democrats have several times more women and minorities in Congress and at presidential conventions than Republicans? Because Republicans apparently don’t like women and minorities. Why were just 1% of their presidential convention delegates black? Because Republicans don’t like black people. Do you know why Republicans don’t have a single black, Asian, Muslim, gay, immigrant, or non-Cuban Hispanic in Congress? Because Republicans don’t like them, much less the disabled, the ill, and the poor. If you are not a white male conservative fundamentalist Christian, then you are a threat to everything Republicans defend. To get a Congress that resembles America, vote Democrat and only Democrat. Because the life, health, and job you save may be your own.”

That confrontational ad set the tone under Jackson, who used controversy to generate free publicity. The bottom of every ad urged viewers to support the ad, which also exposed people to their entire YouTube channel. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to make an ad that other people would pay to play. The sheer volume of ads posted to their YouTube channel made standing out that much more difficult, which led to higher quality and more creative ads. Which inspired more donations.

So his field offices expanded the voter ID database, while they base did online ads that Jackson emailed to that ever-growing database, which resulted in millions for Democrats, while attacking Republicans for free. And no one benefited more than Cooper, now riding his wave all the way to the White House.

“You’re meeting with Butler, aren’t you?”

Cooper gave him a big, easy smile. “Tonight, actually.”

Aww fuck. Honesty from a politician made Jackson feel like raising shields, firing photon torpedoes, and hitting warp drive.

21

“Wanna know what Butler’s gonna tell you?”

The day was full of surprises. “I would love to know what Horace is gonna tell me,” Cooper replied.

“First, he’s going to brag about the satellites he worked on, like the Mars Global Surveyor, without mentioning the failures like the lost Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter. After boring you with how he started his own company, he will tell you about all of the big satellite contracts he scored and the fortune he would have made if Iridium didn’t go bankrupt.”

Cooper nodded. This much he already knew.

“Butler’s genius was to build a network of satellites with a modular design and central core, all of which use the same propulsion systems, communications, sensors, shielding, etc. The same amorphous metal frame can accommodate many plug-and-play configurations. It’s like Toyota building a dozen vehicles from the same platform, or Taco Bell making a dozen products from half a dozen ingredients. Because it costs $10,000 a pound to get payload into orbit, he designed everything to be as light as possible. That’s why we got into business together, since I own the best nanosolar panels, micro fuel cells, ultracapacitors, and amorphous metal factories. Butler didn’t have any money, so he paid me in equity, making me a minority owner.

“Butler calls it OmniNet. Imagine global wireless communications and satellite services, with dedicated spread-spectrum, wireless super-high-speed connectivity. His sats can communicate via the whole spectrum: short-range VHF and UHF, long-range HF, CB, AM/FM, SSB, L-band, and videoconferencing. That’s why I want to share the military’s highest spectrum because the higher the frequency, the greater the content carrying capacity.

“Imagine five billion people wired all the time, even in Siberia, the Congo, or Antarctica. Ships and planes would love it. Cell phones would double as Internet and email devices, radios, tiny televisions, video cameras, PDAs, answering machines, pagers, MP4 players, and even live multi-player game consoles. My fish farms have spent the last few years testing a few hundred OmniNet-equipped blimps over the South Pacific. Just getting realtime weather imaging has recouped my initial investment.

“Grunts in Afghanistan love my high altitude blimps. They can walkie-talkie, email, page, or instant message anyone, anytime, anywhere, from the guy in the next foxhole to the theater commander’s office. Leaders like it because they can send orders with graphics, video, maps, or animation to make the orders idiot-proof. They can download the latest maps or weather forecasts, log into a database to get the latest intel, or take a picture of a suspect and do a match-search. Every cop in the world would love to patrol with this capability. Troops advancing on the enemy could even blog their progress, Twitter-like, so everyone knows how things are progressing.

“The new SOP is to float a spy blimp above the unit to always see what’s around them. The OmniNet phones coupled with my OmniNet-equipped blimps gives local commanders realtime tactical information at their fingertips. Three of my blimps hover over the Green Zone in Baghdad and a few hundred more roam over the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan.

“Can you imagine the jarhead who scores the first peek at Osama bin fucking Laden humping some nameless hill, clueless that some E-3 is guiding a Hellfire missile up his ass?

“In September, when my dad first told me that all satellites might be wiped out, I triple-shifted blimp production and contracted seven other blimp makers. If giant waves wash away the coastlines, then I will have virtually the only means of long distance communications, other than ham radio. I even ordered ten million PDA phones from the Taiwanese company, just in case.

“I want to take it national, using several thousand blimps instead of cell towers. Instead of expensive billing software, I limit it to domestic calls and charge a flat monthly unlimited rate. I already put OmniNet in my Landsharks so drivers can listen to their playlists from radio websites without commercials.

“I plan on restricting it to pre-pay monthly plans and links to credit cards or bank accounts. That will save me a fortune sending out bills and processing checks. 80% of customer service calls are billing related, but I will have no unpaid bills and thus no collections. Except for pre-pays, I’m going to give away the phones, yet charge a $150 cancellation fee to minimize switching.”

“So why isn’t Butler filthy rich?” Cooper asked.

“He has the satellites he needs, but can’t afford to get them into orbit. He had to pay me stock options to take his satellites from storage in Long Beach to one of my hangers in Alaska. Hell, low orbit costs $100 million and high orbit nearly $500 million. Since the collapse of Wall Street, he just can’t get loans.”

“Maybe I could get him financing,” Cooper threatened.

Seething, Jackson wanted nothing more than to use a brick to wipe the smug smile off of Cooper’s pretty face.

“Maybe I should just endorse someone else.”

Cooper, to his credit, didn’t even flinch, although his face lost some of its tan.

“I bet both Obama and Hillary would promise me the bottom of the ticket if I buried you. Maybe not a few weeks ago, but you scoring the silver in Iowa and New Hampshire must have them scared. You could win this thing. After all that they went through four years ago, I doubt they would risk losing again.

“Everyone knows I’m your biggest supporter. If they agree, then I could tell the press that I learned something terrible that disqualified you. Anything bad enough to cost you my support must be pretty bad. I wouldn’t even have to say what. Although I may suggest you need to spend more time with your family.”

Jackson folded his huge hands on the card table, just inches from Cooper’s, and shined his own shit-eating grin. They both knew this would sink his campaign.

“Regardless of who wins the nomination, I would be vice-fucking-president of the United States and, eight years later, a trillionaire president. And you would die a broke nobody. Just because you tried to fuck me over.”

Cooper fumed silently like magma under pressure. Carefully controlling the tone of his voice, he changed the subject to buy himself time.

“If you don’t need the spaceships to beat the Chinese, and if they have nothing to do with Butler, then why are you asking Lockheed Martin for price quotes?”

“Look,” Jackson answered, gathering as much patience as he could. “That Request for Proposal is mostly academic. I need to keep my dad engaged after my mom died a year ago, and this is what drives him.”

Cooper’s defensiveness softened. “So this is just therapy so your dad doesn’t blow his brains out?”

“Something like that. Everyone designs spaceships to lift off and return to Earth, while my father wants a spaceship that stays in space. You see, a ship can be optimized to penetrate Earth’s thick atmosphere, which requires heavy ablating heat shields, or it can be optimized for space, which must shield against cosmic radiation and solar flares. Penetrating our atmosphere requires a narrow, bullet-like body, while a ship designed to cross our solar system must be wider to accommodate a few meters of water, compressed hydrogen gas, and various alloys to deflect high energy rays. Those are two different ships. We will soon have a manned nuclear spaceship that can get into space to re-orbit a rock to give us a space port, so we need ships that dock there.”

“How to you get them into space then?”

Jackson studied Cooper, who seemed to appreciate that Jackson could derail his nomination. But snakes are hard to predict, even if you have known them for years.

“If I tell you, you must promise me that you will not tell anyone, ever. Not Butler, not your wife, and sure as hell none of your consultants. Nobody must know.”

“Sure.”

Like Jackson was going to accept that. He stood up so his full height towered over Cooper.

“Get the fuck out of my desk. If you really want to know, then we have to switch places.”

Cooper stared as Jackson disappeared into the adjacent shed, then came back with an old massive Bible. Jackson dropped it on the flimsy table with a loud thud.

“This is my grandfather’s family Bible. If you want to know what you want to know, then you have to swear on this here Bible not to tell anyone what I’ve got to tell you.”

Cooper stared at Jackson for the longest time. Smelling money, Cooper finally got up, since he knew that he wasn’t going to get anything else out of Jackson until he did. And squeezing Jackson of information was why he was here in the first place.

They switched places in silence.

“Do you, Daniel A. Cooper, swear to God that you will never reveal what I am about to tell you?”

Cooper, naturally, looked at him like he was crazy. Yet he could see that Jackson was deadly serious. And that made him very curious. Henry made so much money in so many businesses that there was no question of hearing him out. So he put his right hand on the Bible, even though he was left-handed, and swore with as much sincerity as he could muster. His father was a Southern Baptist minister, and even though he did not buy into everything his father spent a lifetime selling, swearing on a Bible was still not something he did lightly.

“And as far as you know, I have been recording this conversation, so don’t fuck with me on this.”

Cooper’s eyes opened with shock, then he nodded.

Now they could get down to fucking business.

22

“What is the highest point on Earth?”

Jackson stopped, but then quickly moved on.

“Wrong! Mt. Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but it is not the highest point on Earth. Astronomers measure distance not from the Earth’s surface, but from Earth’s center. The Moon’s mean distance, for example, is 384,500 kilometers from the center of our planet. And because the Earth is fat in the middle, meaning it bulges around the equator, the mountain that rises farthest into the atmosphere is Chimborazo, an extinct volcano in Ecuador. When you stand at its peak, you are almost in orbit. You are above so much of the atmosphere that when you look up you see black space instead of blue sky.

“And careful with this information. Locals call it ‘Chimbo’, which should not be confused with ‘chimba’, which is South American slang for ‘pussy’.”

Cooper could not help but laugh. “That may be the only thing you say today that I remember tomorrow.”

“The reason that America launches almost everything from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is because it is the closest American soil to the equator, and thus requires the least amount of energy to get into orbit. We only launch satellites from Vandenberg in California when we want a polar orbit. The equator moves faster than any other part of Earth, with respect to space. All launches, regardless of where on Earth, are also sent into the east to take advantage of Earth’s rotational energy.

“Mt. Everest is 8.2 kilometers above sea level, while Chimbo is just 6.3 kilometers. But because our planet bulges around its equator, Chimbo actually rises just over 10 kilometers into the atmosphere. Now imagine if we could launch from there?

“Orbital velocity is 7.7 kilometers per second, or 27,720 kilometers an hour, meaning a launcher must reach that speed in order to get into orbit. Anything slower is like swimming 99% across a lake, only to drown within sight of shore. Yet at that speed, the atmosphere is a brick wall a dozen kilometers thick. What we want to do is penetrate as thin a wall as possible.

“Space is only fifty miles away. Many Americans drive more than that every day to work. The reason it is so hard to travel up is that half of the atmosphere is compressed into the bottom 5.6 kilometers. The lower atmosphere is four times thicker than the upper atmosphere. Atmospheric density falls exponentially with height. 100 kilometers above sea level has only one-millionth the atmospheric pressure of sea level. So the higher we go, the thinner the atmospheric wall. The higher we launch, the less atmosphere we must penetrate, which reduces costs.

“The more atmosphere we must punch through, the greater the friction, the greater the pressure drag from the resulting sonic shock wave that forms in front of the launch vehicle, and the greater the parasitic drag and skin drag from air flowing over the vehicle body. Rockets launched near sea-level face compression from the shock wave that superheats the nose of the vehicle to about 54,000 degrees F. So we use ablating materials as heat shields, which literally melt away in carefully controlled layers like an onion, but protect the vehicle underneath. But heat shields are heavy, which increases costs and reduces payload.”

“Henry, you’re losing me,” Cooper warned, in his most honest statement of the day.

“The goal is to get payload into orbit as easily, safely, and cheaply as possible. But today’s launch systems are 99% rocket and fuel, and only 1% payload.

“What if we could get that ratio down to 1-to-1? Or better?

“Rockets need fuel to lift their payload, but they also need fuel to lift their own fuel. Carrying fuel to lift fuel quickly leads to diminishing returns. But what if you could leave the fuel and the propulsion system on the ground, and put your energy into moving just the payload?”

The capsules actually needed small engines for maneuvering in orbit to match speed and angle with the space port, but it was almost engine-less and fuel-less. And Jackson didn’t want to confuse Cooper.

“Henry, are you saying you’ve solved this? Because if you have, then you have my attention for as long as you want. Or until 9:30, whichever comes first.”

“When my family and I saw the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, we rode the 19 mile rail to Shanghai. That sucker went several hundred kilometers per hour, the fastest commercial train in the world. The Chinese are spending $300 billion building 8000 miles of maglev tracks. The magnetic levitation trains, as their name implies, never actually touched the tracks. Because there is no friction, maglev trains can go incredibly fast. The track has no moving parts, uses electricity for power, and the tracks last virtually forever since there is no friction to wear them out.”

“But they can’t go into orbit,” Cooper pointed out, while watching Jackson click away on his laptop. The guy had the teenager’s irritating ability to type at high speeds and hold a conversation at the same time.

“Actually, they can. Reaching orbit is a question of speed, not altitude. Anything that can be accelerated to 7.7 kilometers per second can reach orbit. And it turns out that a maglev catapult can reach that speed. And then some.”

“Bullshit!”

“Check this out,” Jackson boasted, rotating his laptop around so Cooper could see the 22 inch screen. “A maglev catapult, at a constant acceleration of 5 g’s, which is the most the average healthy person can tolerate with a pressurized G-suit, blood thinners, and a special seat, only needs to be 25 kilometers long to reach orbital velocity. Some roller coasters, like the Fahrenheit at Pennsylvania’s Hershey Park, hits nearly 4 g’s.

“High speed airlocks will maintain a permanent vacuum, and it leaves the atmosphere at nearly 11 kilometers up, so it avoids about two-thirds of the atmosphere. Imagine how easy you could hit home runs if the back fence was two-thirds closer.”

Now he had Cooper’s attention. Jackson must have put a lot of money into this, because his software had tons of buttons, links, and data points. It was a full business project, not something he did himself. He watched as Jackson clicked through a series of pages, all detailing different aspects of his launcher. Thousands of hours of work already went into this. Jackson may be fucking with him, but he is certainly serious about this launcher. Albert Camus once wrote that no man is a hypocrite in his behavior, and Jackson was certainly putting his money where his mouth was.

“Lorena and I enjoyed our honeymoon in Ecuador 25 years ago. The green mountains south of Quito are the most spectacular I have ever seen. Anyways, after hitting the hot springs in Los Banos, we visited Riobamba where I learned that the nearby Chimborazo Volcano has the highest peak on Earth.

“When I told my dad about it, he insisted we climb Chimbo ourselves. Now, Chimborazo is not, technically, a difficult mountain to climb. It has relatively gentle slopes and most of its ancient glacier has melted away. We took along a team of geologists and surveyors and have continued researching this project ever since. I am telling you we can build this.”

That is, if he could convince the Ecuadorian government to sell the national park it was located in. He had been working on that for twenty years as well.

Jackson clicked through hyperlinks located within the image of the mountain to show Cooper data on composition, density, fault lines, glacier envelopment, slope angle, landslides, chemical makeup...

“The idea of using a maglev catapult is at least as old as the 1950s movie, When Worlds Collide. Arthur Clark described it in a book half a century ago. Over a decade ago researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Center proposed a 2.4 kilometer long track for the Kennedy Space Center that would accelerate at a constant speed of 2 g’s for 9.3 seconds to reach 1000 kilometers an hour.

“What is original is building it within Chimborazo Mountain. My dad even found a research paper that ran the numbers for Mt. Kilimanjaro at 5.9 kilometers above sea level, Mt. Kenya at 5.2, Margherita Peak at 5.2, and in Ecuador, Mt. Cotopaxi at 5.9 and Mt. Cayambe at 5.8 kilometers high.

“Chimbo worked better than these others because it reaches farther into space, it’s right on the equator, and because its summit is almost four kilometers long and has a long, gentle slope. Alpine peaks, in contrast, have sharp slopes. The wide caldera on Chimbo lets us extend the amorphous metal launch to about 11 kilometers.

“I want as long a track as possible, but one that stayed within the national park, so we started from the peak, then worked our way backward. My dad predicts the ride will be the longest two minutes of your life.

“To learn from the experience of others, we hired consultants of the Irvine-Corona Expressway, the $5.8 billion traffic tunnel that goes for twelve miles under the Santa Ana Mountains between Orange and Riverside Counties. Our tunnel will actually be smaller, but 20% from straight vertical presents its own challenges. Instead of a huge corkscrew-like machine, we bought a very high pressure water canon that cuts through the hardest rock like a hot knife through soft butter. Even better, by digging up, gravity should take away most of the debris, cutting time and costs. Fortunately the volcano is already hollow inside. The extremely high speeds mean we need a relatively straight line, even as we cross ravines or burrow underground. And, to top it all off, we have to fully enclose and seal it to vacuum the air out.

“Not only do we leave the fuel and propulsion system on the ground, but the amorphous metal capsules are very light, strong, and heat-resistant. Bypassing two-thirds of the atmosphere means a fraction of the heat for a fraction of the time, which saves literally tons of ablation shielding.

“The capsule will actually ride on top of a sled that has superconducting magnets. Otherwise, the capsule itself would need magnets, which would add weight and drag. This project was little more than a wet dream until researchers found a new superconducting material made of iron pnictides that operated in far higher temperatures. In contrast, Europe’s Relativistic Hadron Ion Collider was delayed a year by a liquid helium leak that kept their first-generation superconductors at near absolute zero.

“The sled will parachute after it separates out of the launch tube and the capsule itself will land on water in order to eliminate the need for heavy landing gear.”

Jackson now showed him several versions of the bullet-shaped capsule, for passengers, bulk cargo, water, pressurized gas, fertilizer, and heavy equipment.

“We will need a three gigawatts power supply and 50,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. The local utility can power it only at night, so I may need to buy a nuclear battery from Toshiba, like the 4S design that they put in Alaska. It’s only two meters tall and encased in cement 100 feet underground. It uses molten sodium as coolant and has no moving parts to maintain or repair. Once buried, it stays buried forever. I don’t have permission yet, but I’ve already started the permit process in Ecuador. The battery operates 24/7, so I will use all excess electricity to charge my largest industrial ultracapacitors and to split water into hydrogen gas for my largest fuel cells. Although my initial capital expenditure may run as high as $10 billion to complete the launcher, my operating costs should be just pennies per pound.

“We have designed a 25 X 5 meter-long capsule that can lift twenty-five metric tons of payload. That gives us a 1-to-5 ratio of vehicle-to-payload, compared to 25-to-1 for today’s rockets. We should be able to launch 500,000 metric tons of payload a year, compared to today’s total global capacity of a few hundred tons. In other words, we could put more payload into orbit in a few hours than the rest of the world in an entire year. And a 1000X cheaper.”

Now he showed Cooper computer animation of what the sled and capsule would look like in the airless launch tube, with the sled separating and returning back to Earth via a parachute.

“The passenger versions can accommodate thirty people with two pilots, or a few thousand a day at full capacity if we had the ability to receive them somewhere. The capsules need small engines to match angle and speed to dock with the space port.”

“Space port?”

“Uh, yeah. I’ll get to that.

“That spaceship my father is emailing Lockheed about is also just five meters wide so it can fit on all of the couple dozen maglev launchers we plan to build in the solar system. However, at the space port, we will be adding sections to hold layers of water, compressed hydrogen gas, and various alloys that deflect cosmic radiation, which will double the ship’s diameter. The ship will actually spin within this outer casing to give it some artificial gravity to minimize bone and muscle loss. The long lunar maglev will catapult ships at over 100,000 miles per hour, then the nuclear engine will fire up to maximize speed and minimize travel time to the outer planets.

“The asteroid swarm could destroy every satellite in orbit and leave most orbits uninhabitable for several years. Convenient since it will take several years to build the Chimbo launcher. However, once built, we could monopolize a few thousand of Earth’s best orbits. Today’s satellites only last several years. Ours will last several times that long.”

“You’re talking about monopolizing space!”

“Every orbit we occupy denies it to those unfriendly to us, which means we must occupy all GEO orbits over North America and Europe. China right now has military sats sitting over us that can drop uranium rods over major American cities at a moment’s notice. Which is why we should not get between them and Taiwan. Are you willing to sacrifice a dozen American cities when Taiwan can defend themselves without our blood?

“Can you appreciate the national security implications? Our weakest link is our dependence on satellite communications and services. Having a few thousand satellites in a network, rather than the hub-and-spoke system we have today, would be virtually impossible to destroy on demand. We would have not just space superiority, but space supremacy. No nation can wage a conventional war against us unless they can deny us our space supremacy. Conventional war would end. For us.”

“Fuck me.” Cooper seemed stunned.

“Now imagine how much such a network of multi-functional satellites would be worth. We could save taxpayers $40 billion a year, every year, while offering several times the satellite services. Communications, imaging, remote sensing, weather tracking. Our farmers alone would save billions.

“We could dominate the $60 billion global launch industry and install solar power satellites that beam down electricity so developing countries don’t have to build billion dollar dirty energy power plants. Asia alone builds hundreds of coal-fired power plants every year. One billion people don’t have electricity and another 1.6 billion don’t have reliable electricity. So we make big bucks, reduce extreme poverty, pollution, and global warming, while bringing cheap, clean, reliable electricity to the world’s poorest people. We do well by doing good.

“We could even reverse global warming by positioning huge arrays of solar panels in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning it always stays between Earth and the Sun. With that many gigawatts of power in orbit, we could turn those solar power satellites into speed-of-light laser weapons. Forget Reagan’s Star Wars plan. As Eisenhower put it, hitting a missile with a missile is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. But a laser strikes at the speed of light. A network of solar powered laser sats could fry hundreds of ICBMs in midair. Such a laser satellite network could strike anywhere at any time with virtually no lead-time. Except maybe the poles.

“Oh, and have I told you about the space port?”

23

The hatch from the garage above suddenly opened, startling them out of their conversation. They reacted like boys caught watching porn with their pants down. Jackson heard Daddy Yanke reggeton music blasting from the house. Cooper didn’t know what the hell that racket was.

A pleasant voice called down to them.

“Morning, boys! Could you give us a hand?”

Jackson’s wife, Lorena, carefully handed down a tray of food and drinks to Jackson, who beat Cooper there by a country mile and a New York minute. Lorena’s younger sister, Lina, passed another tray to Cooper. Lina was pretty like Lorena, but lacked something that Jackson’s wife had. Like makeup.

Jackson’s wife was Colombian, but looked Italian. She had the dark eyes, copper skin, and long, flowing black hair that reminded him of Monique. Yet while Monique was simply stunning, Lorena instead resembled a friendly TV news anchor. While Monique seemed to radiate sex, Lorena gave off a comfortable motherly vib.

Lina wore very loose-fitting clothes and dressed as plainly as possible. In contrast, Lorena sported tight, form-fitting Colombian jeans and a light green blouse that hugged every curve and suggested a few more. Lorena dressed to be noticed, while Lina dressed to not be noticed. Happiness is the best cosmetic, and Lorena looked very happy.

“First kiss of the day!” Jackson exclaimed as he planted a noisy kiss on her lips. Lorena giggled in delight. His actual first kiss of the day was an hour before sunrise when she was still sleeping, after his morning shit-shower-and-shave routine. It was either cute or nauseating, depending on how happy one’s own relationship was.

“Your father says he needs to talk to you.”

Well, picturing his father sure killed his buzz.

“Please tell him I’ll be up as soon as I finish.”

Lina maneuvered around them as Jackson picked his wife up in one of his bear hugs. After setting down her tray, Lina quickly turned to leave, but Lorena tapped her on the shoulder.

“Dan, I want to introduce you to my sister, Lina.”

Lina, looking terribly frightened, said nothing. Cooper, used to dealing with shy voters, gave her a big, easy smile that put most people at ease.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lina,” he said, trying to make eye contact as she looked for an escape route. If an individual resembles just one animal, then Lina was a mouse. A scared, timid mouse. Cooper felt momentarily put back, since connecting with people was what he was so good at. “Mucho gusto,” he even said in Spanish since he did not know if she spoke English. She did not even nod in his direction. Confused, he looked over at Lorena who was angrily signing with her hands. Ahh, Lina is deaf!

“Thanks, Lina, for breakfast!” Jackson told Lina. As usual, he spoke louder than necessary, especially in this windowless tomb. As soon as Cooper let her hand go, Lina flew up the ladder, head down and radiating unease. Cooper, puzzled, looked at Henry for clues.

“Eat!” Lorena commanded them, as if she actually cooked the meal. “Have you ever ate whale, Daniel?” she asked, then did not wait for a answer. “The rice and beans mixed together is called calentado. Then you have bunuelos and empanadas with a salsa called aji. And fresh fruit juice with a mixed fruit salad, which Henry has every morning. I make sure my man is well fed.”

“I’ll say,” her husband chimed in to annoy Cooper as much as possible. “Lorena satisfies all of my appetites!”

Lorena playfully slapped him on the shoulder, but he just pulled her on his lap as he sat down. The $5 white plastic chair groaned under their weight. Cooper could not imagine having such a physically comfortable relationship with his own stiff and proper wife who obsessed over the opinion of others.

“Thank you, God, for all of your blessings,” Jackson whispered softly before digging in. Cooper knew that all the Jacksons said this before every meal.

“Lorena, Lina, Lisa, and Linda. I’m a poet who doesn’t know it,” Jackson claimed, as if he personally named his wife and sister-in-law, much less his granddaughter. It was sheer accident that their names all began with the same letter.

“Who’s Linda?” Cooper asked.

“My granddaughter. My son named my grandson after me, and it only cost me a million bucks. I call him Big Henry cuz he’s growing up so fast, but everyone else calls him ‘H’,” he said, pronouncing the letter “awchee” in Spanish, “because he is often seen, but rarely heard.”

“H” in Spanish is not pronounced.

“You paid your son $1 million to name his son after you? I thought the first son of every generation of yours was automatically named Henry.”

Cooper felt like he was falling behind the 8 ball. Jackson’s father, grandfather, son, and grandson were all named Henry. Remarkably, five Henry Jacksons lived under the same roof.

“His teenage girlfriend was diagnosed with leukemia, and he wanted children from her before she died to always remember her. Her older sister was willing to undergo artificial insemination, but they first had to screen her egg for the genetic disease, or else risk passing it to the baby. Fortunately, my wife here is a geneticist, so between us we had a lot of resources at our disposal. David did his research and said it would only cost $500,000 to do all the genetic screening. As if he could sell me on the cost.”

“It was so beautiful,” Lorena chimed in. “When David sat us down, we thought he killed someone again and were so relieved he just wanted a baby. He was very well prepared, with papers on the process, safety, success rate, etc. Henry here cut him short, said it was a great idea, and just asked how much. When David said half a million, Henry told him he better take a million because things like this always are harder and more expensive than one anticipates. Which turned out to be true.”

“Yeah,” Jackson said expansively, stretching out his arms. “Having children with my son has brought us closer together. Now he barely hates my guts.”

Which wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

“Oh, I’ve got some great news!” Lorena suddenly generated more energy than a quasar. “David proposed!”

“Proposed what?” Cooper was confused.

“After Monique saved you from getting eaten by Henry’s damn dog, David found her crying in her bedroom. One scar would have ended her modeling career.” Lorena laid the guilt trip on him with the ease of a mother.

“Chucha attacked Dan?” Jackson couldn’t believe it. Much less that Monique took on his hunting dog and, apparently, won. “And I’m just now finding this out?”

Jackson hated being out of the loop. Why else did he pay people to monitor Twitter for him?

“They’re getting married?” Cooper looked stunned, like someone sprung Fermat's Last Theorem on him. A very bad feeling trickled down his spine. He examined Jackson closely, but could only see his anger at being uninformed. He breathed a sigh of relief. This crushed his fantasy fuck, but that was probably for the best. And now he was even more curious to see her webpage.

“Not only that. David gave her Lisa’s ring!”

Now nothing made sense.

“Why would Lisa give up her ring?” Jackson asked. “She loved that ring more than her fiancée.”

Jackson was confused. Doing something so unselfish was very un-Lisa-like. Her ring was a symbol of how she got the best of him. Again. Why would she give that up?

“I don’t know, but Monique is now wearing her ring.”

Both men looked dazed at the news. They had too much on their mental plates to properly digest this appetizer. Then Lorena gave them a second helping.

“I have some more great news,” Lorena told Cooper conspiratorially, leaning over so her ample chest dusted the card table. “I may be pregnant.”

“Wow! Congratulations you two!”

Cooper seemed genuinely shocked, which was not surprising. Not many grandparents intentionally have more kids. Most parents would prefer to skip the whole parenting stage itself and go straight to being grandparents, which offered all of the fun with few of the responsibilities.

“Yeah, well, don’t start buying me cigars yet,” Jackson quickly cautioned. “Judging by the scale, I may be pregnant, too. The last time she told friends we were expecting a baby, she lost weight from lack of appetite while I gained weight by eating her food so it wouldn’t go to waste. People then asked which one of us was pregnant. No, we’ve had false alarms before. I ain’t gonna celebrate until I see the whites of his eyes. Or until Lorena looks like a snake who swallowed a pig.”

He had reason to lower expectations. They had their egg and sperm frozen 18 years ago when they genetically screened the egg and sperm that became Lisa. They had lots leftover. If David didn’t have kids, they would have had them several years ago. Now that their grandkids were six years old, they wanted babies in the house again. Neither imagined Lisa would get married so young, and David seemed unable to get over the death of his beloved Evelyn. So they figured it was up to them.

Lorena needed to screen their old egg and sperm with all of the new techniques developed since Lisa was conceived. You don’t mess with your children’s genes lightly. Well, other people don’t mess with their kid’s genes lightly. So it took time. Well, it took three years.

Only in the last year was Lorena ready to artificially inseminate herself. Yet fertilizing the egg and sperm, then surgically implanting it in the womb was still more art than science, and failed more often than it succeeded. Perhaps because of her age, Lorena did not become pregnant the first two tries last year. Jackson, tired of getting their expectations up, declared that either the third one was the charm, or three strikes meant they were out. In other words, this is the last time they were going to put their emotions on this particular roller coaster.

Cooper, looking at Lorena, thought it was ridiculous for grandparents to have more children. He himself got along much better with his grandchildren than his children, those ungrateful fucks. Yet it seemed that nothing could make Lorena happier than getting pregnant again.

“Well, I wish you both the best,” Cooper lied as sincerely as possible. Groucho Marx once observed that “the key to success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you’ve got it made.” Like most politicians, Cooper faked sincerity well.

“Is your sister deaf?” he asked, taking a bite out of the whale. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

“Oh, don’t mind her,” Jackson said dismissively. “She’s autistic, which means she doesn’t have great language and social skills. Her biological father thought she was retarded, which she isn’t, so he beat the crap out of her until he abandoned his family and blamed Lina. She can speak well enough to communicate, but still doesn’t talk normal. She actually prefers sign language because she thinks she sounds retarded when she speaks.”

Which, unfortunately, was true.

“Henry insisted that she come live with us when we got married,” Lorena pointed out proudly, kissing him as he ate. She made no effort to get out of his lap.

Cooper didn’t want to get into something that he could not get out of, so he went into concerned politician mode.

“I’m so sorry. And your father never returned?”

Jackson laughed unpleasantly. Lorena flushed.

“After like thirty years since abandoning his family, I get a message from Lorena’s family that he has been kidnapped and demanding some huge ransom. Well, this was too good to pass up, so I contacted the kidnappers to ask them how much to kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

Jackson was now laughing too much to continue. Cooper, for the life of him, could not tell if Jackson was kidding or serious about killing his wife’s father. It was one of the many things about Jackson that disturbed him.

“Any-hoot, it turns out that dear old dad was behind it all. He finally found out how rich we were and, instead of asking for forgiveness and money, which may have worked, set up this phony kidnapping.” Jackson laughed harshly as Lorena reproached him with a slap on the shoulder. “He must have crapped his drawers when he learned of my offer. From their surprised reaction, I think his buddies were sorely tempted to knock him off!”

Lorena didn’t like it that her husband found this so funny. She was embarrassed that her biological father would stoop to something as despicable as arranging his own kidnapping to rob his daughter. She also found out that he had children by at least three other women, and supported none of them. Lorena was mad that her father was so good looking and smooth talking that he could fool so many women. He was why she feared infidelity.

“That terrible man is not my father,” Lorena sternly told them. “My father was the one who raised us since we were kids, and treated my mother like a queen.”

“The American Henry rescued in the Amazon?”

“Oh, it was terrible!” Lorena still flinched from the memory. “Dad worked for years as an engineering supervisor for Texaco throughout Latin America. He had just married my mom and started working for Henry when they kidnapped him in Cali thinking Texaco would pay up. We were devastated.

“Then Henry promised that he would either bring my new father back, dead or alive, or kill those who took him. I can still clearly remember his face when he told me. He was not kidding, either. I think it was that moment when I got a crush on him.”

“I can’t believe your dad went with you in the Amazon.” Cooper knew his own dad would have written him off as God’s will and slept soundly at night.

“Ah, hell. My dad had great jungle experience from when he got shot down in Vietnam, and brought along some Special Forces guys that he knew back in the day. Plus, my cousins love an excuse to shoot people.”

Jackson’s book debut caused a big sensation in Arizona. His dad became an instant hero, which pissed him off. Jackson was already somewhat infamous as a billionaire, but this fleshed out his public image. Before he knew it, Democratic leaders asked him to run for governor.

“After they got back safe and sound, I grew up fast,” Lorena continued. “I accelerated my schooling and convinced my momma to buy me pretty dresses so Henry would see me as a women. I almost died when I heard that he got a beautiful girlfriend from Cali! The girls in Cali are the hottest in Latin America. Just go to any mall like Chipi Chapi or Unicentro, and you’ll see ten times as many beauties as malls here.

“I panicked and pressured my mom to get me breast implants. I was only 15, but I needed to hook him before someone else did. In case you didn’t notice, my own daughter recently did the same to me.”

Cooper, ever the adroit politician, finished chewing his empanada and expressed it carefully. “It didn’t escape my attention.” Which was a huge understatement since Lisa’s big tits stunned him. No more public hugs for her!

Lisa said she needed them for her tiny role in the Regolith movie and felt so proud of them that one could practically see the blood rush to her ego whenever she showed them off. Which was frequent. The real reason Lorena gave Lisa the over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders was to tie an anchor around her boyfriend’s penis so he did not swim away. Rance Gardener was a whale of a catch, and there were a lot of fish in the sea eager to nibble on his bait.

“Lisa’s getting married this summer!”

“Yes, Lisa showed me her engagement ring. I have to admit, I have never seen a more beautiful ring.”

And wasn’t that the truth.

Cooper thanked her for breakfast as she collected their empty plates, shocked at how much he loved the fucking whale. As Cooper watched her carefully walk up the ladder carrying the trays, he could not help but check out her ass and legs. Because she still had a flat stomach and a big chest, she looked real good from the front, but he had never checked her out from behind. The comparison to Ann fueled his resentments. Only the thought of becoming president and destroying Jackson calmed his nerves.

24

“Henry, let’s wrap this space thingy up fast.”

Jackson was surprised Cooper wanted to continue, but he explained this much. He might as well finish it.

“The Chimbo launcher gets people into orbit, and has the power to launch supplies directly to the Moon, but we still need a way to get everywhere else.

“Unfortunately, nothing works in zero gravity, including humans. We grow 2-3 inches taller, our bodily fluids flow towards our head, our face and eyes get all puffy and our legs skinny, we lose calcium in our bones, our muscles atrophy, we get cardiovascular deconditioning, balance disorders, the toilets don’t flush without suction, we can’t take showers, we have to pee and poop in diapers, we can’t cook normal meals – we can’t even have sex without strapping our lover down.

“95% of astronauts need medicine. I can’t think of a worse place to drug expensive workers than in space, where sudden decompression, which almost happened on Mir, can literally pop your eyes out. Russian cosmonauts are forced to wear a ‘core temperature monitor’, which is a penny-sized probe inserted up their butts. The toilet recycles urine into drinking water, so the crew could die of thirst if the toilet breaks.

“No, micro-gravity sucks. We need mini-gravity. Humans just can’t be productive in micro-gravity, wearing diapers and anal monitors. Which means we need to make Ganymed, the largest Near Earth Object, our space port.

“We land on Ganymed as it passes nearby, install mass thrusters, and carefully re-orbit it into a high earth orbit like satellite Vela 1A, just over 100,000 kilometers high. That makes it easy to retrieve capsules launched from Chimbo, which could be re-launched from Ganymed to a much longer and faster catapult on the Moon.

“Ganymed has several trillion dollars worth of precious metals and we have to hollow it out anyways to shield us from cosmic radiation. We could make billions off tourism since surveys show that 60% of Americans would pay a year’s salary to get into space. Yet at the same time, Ganymed offers four trillion tons of mass, whose gravity will do our bodies good. Workers will be less sick and medicated, and thus more productive. After a Russian cosmonaut spent a year in orbit, he could barely walk after a week back on Earth since he lost so much muscle mass and bone tissue. In contrast, people could live years on Ganymed aided by heavy boots and arm weights. Compared to micro-gravity, bathing, defecating, and sex in mini-gravity will seem almost normal.

“Because of cosmic radiation and zero-gravity-related illnesses, we want all trips through space to be as short and fast as possible. The Chimbo launcher can accelerate non-living payloads at 20 constant g’s directly to the Moon, while people and animals would get to the Moon’s launcher via Ganymed. A long lunar catapult could send capsules and ships to Mars in just a few weeks, and a similar launcher on Mars could return them just as fast.

“At a constant acceleration of 5 g’s, a thousand mile long lunar launcher could shorten trips to the outer planets from several years to several months. A similar launcher on the largest moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune would send capsules back just as fast. Maglev catapults could make the entire solar system accessible and affordable by keeping the fuel and the propulsion system on the ground. Like airports, maglev launchers could turn something extraordinary into something routine.

“Chimbo gives us a space port, which gives us the Moon, which gives us the solar system and a better platform to study the universe. Navigation, global warming, ballistic missiles, satellite communications, and nuclear weapons all derived from astronomical observations. Europeans would never have dominated the world without first studying the stars.

“Astronomers have always wanted to put scopes on the Moon. The Moon has no atmosphere to obscure telescopes, and it provides a steady platform because it is seismically dead. Because the Moon rotates only once every 28 days, it has 28 more days to collect light, meaning it could see 28 times better simply by focusing on a distant object for 28 times as long. So we want thousands of optical telescopes, all focusing for long periods at specific objects. And because of the light gravity, we could build telescopes five times heavier than the heaviest on Earth.

“Because it lacks an atmosphere, the Moon is much better for infrared, near-infrared, cosmic-ray, x-ray, gamma-ray, radio-wave, and ultraviolet astronomy. We could put scopes in permanently shadowed craters, each studying a narrow range of the infrared spectrum. The constant cold gives infrared scopes better resolution. Interferonomy scopes would work best in the submillimeter spectrum, which doesn’t work well on Earth because of the water vapor in our atmosphere. And very low frequency radio waves are blocked by our ionosphere, so we need the Moon for that as well. We’re essentially blind at that range of the spectrum. And the only place in the galaxy permanently shielded from our radio waves is the lunar far side, so that is where we must put our radio telescopes.

“We should maximize interferonomy scopes, where one device combines the light from several telescopes, all focused on one single distant object. The power of a single telescope in resolving detail is proportional to its diameter, while the resolving power of an array of telescopes is proportional to the diameter of the array. In other words, instead of one huge telescope, it is cheaper, easier, and better to have several smaller telescopes working together. So we want thousands of scopes, organized into hundreds of interferonomy arrays. All remote controlled, computer enhanced, and computer-filtered. Only amateurs still eyeball space anymore. With this we could systematically map every Earth-size planet within 100 light years. We could learn a lot about Earth by studying other planets, which may serve as young and old Earths.

“The best interferonomy arrays operate in the range of X-rays because its short wavelengths allow for shorter interferometric baselines, which are more practical than visible light systems. X-ray is the best band for high resolution imaging, and a good lunar X-ray interferometry scope could detect something the size of a car at the center of our galaxy. If a lunar array could see a car 30,000 light years away, a Jupiter array could read its license plate.”

Cooper yawned, which he discovered is a very effective way to cut meetings short. “Can we bring this back to Earth?”

“Remember the $10 quadrillion in metallic asteroids floating nearby? It would be faster, easier, safer, and cheaper to mine them if we soft-landed them first on the Moon.”

Jackson almost laughed as Cooper sat up straight. Jackson clicked through images, graphs, and blueprints as he continued.

“Then there’s $5 quadrillion in helium3. When mixed with deuterium to become D-HE3, it becomes the perfect fuel for nuclear fusion, which is several times more powerful than nuclear fission, without radioactivity, pollution, or greenhouse gases. By weight, helium3 would be worth about fifteen thousand times more than gold. And the Moon has enough to power humanity for the next thousand years. With it, cheap fusion would make every dirty energy power plant in the world obsolete.”

This woke Cooper the fuck up. “How much?”

Jackson wondered how much detail Cooper wanted.

“Solar wind carries this rare element until it crashes into the lunar surface over billions of years. Earth’s magnetic shield prevents helium3 from reaching Earth, except for minute quantities near the poles. The greatest concentrations of helium3 are outside asteroid craters in the highlands near the equator where the Moon is most exposed to sunlight and where the regolith is oldest. The higher or lower the latitude, the less incidental sunlight, and thus the less solar wind and helium3.

“Replacing America’s several thousand dirty power plants with fusion nets $100 billion a year in lunar helium3. Worldwide you’re grossing a trillion a year for the next thousand years.”

Cooper was not yawning anymore.

“But why is helium3 worth so much?”

“Helium3 mixed with deuterium, found in heavy water, releases the highest energy content of any substance except antimatter. A fusion ship or power plant is several times more powerful than a nuclear fission one, yet because it releases virtually no radiation, it does not need heavy shielding. That makes it cheaper to build and maintain.”

“So, Henry, how much do you expect to make total?”

And that, for Cooper, was really the bottom line.

“But, Dan, we’re not done yet. Don’t you want to know why we want one hundred nuclear spaceships?”

25

“What do you mean, you haven’t fucked her?”

Cari Pisini looked pissed. Sweaty from sheet shredding all night, her hair a total mess, her anger only made her look hotter. A woman is never better looking than right after a great orgasm.

Rance Gardener turned over in his bed to face her. Naked, hungry, and exhausted, he made the mistake of actually talking to her before she drove to the airport for her flight. It had been a year since they last fucked, and who knew when he would get some from her again. In gaming terminology, this was called a free kill. If Lisa knew he was fucking his ex, especially just two weeks after he proposed, she would kill him.

Literally. Lisa was enormously proud of her recently earned blackbelt, far more so than her pilots license, her meager modeling jobs, or acing calculus.

“Yeah. I know what you mean. For the last year, I have been surviving on one-night stands. Good thing cheap hookers are less buck for the bang,” he joked. “Too bad we don’t have more time before the Fidel Fragment strikes.”

He had arranged for her to fly to Fairbanks. Who knew voting against Bush would save so many lives?

“But you’re fucking engaged to be married! You gave her a million dollar ring! Even if your and her parents paid for it.”

Cari really could not understand it, and she was very bright for a hot chick. The fact that Lisa just turned 16 didn’t seem relevant. Cari, like most attractive American girls, had played around plenty by age 16. Rance saw things differently. He caught the wave of a lifetime and intended on riding it to shore.

Rance and Cari had been the “hot couple” all through high school, but she put her career before all else, which was the only way to get ahead in today’s competitive world. America has 18 out of the world’s top 20 universities, and she made sure she found a way into one of them, even though it meant working all out just to keep up with the smarter students, much less the Asians. She just didn’t have time for a serious relationship. She still had a boyfriend, but that was to not spend her own fucking money.

Their four-year relationship effectively ended when she won her scholarship. She was straight up with him about it, too. He had to stay local to help his father’s helicopter-over-the-Grand Canyon tour business. If he studied at Georgetown with her, then she would have been happy to stay with him. Until she found someone with better prospects. Not that she wanted to be a compulsive relation-shipper like some of her friends, hooking up with robo-sapiens just to feel alive.

“Don’t blame me! God knows I’ve tried. But she wanted to wait until she had a ring on her finger, and then wouldn’t accept one until she turned 16. And ever since then, we’ve never had any privacy. She and her father have flown to Alaska, Canada, Patagonia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Australia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, and even China in just the last few weeks.”

“Why won’t she fuck you? You’re the best I’ve ever had.”

Which made Rance speculate on just how many that was.

Cari couldn’t complain too much about her ex-boyfriend’s fiancée not fucking her ex-boyfriend. The irony was that Rance was a much better fuck than her current boyfriend who, although tender and romantic, didn’t have what it took to make her scream. Cari occasionally needed it bite-the-pillow rough. Or spin the dildo with her special girlfriends.

Rance was aware of his good looks, and he worked hard to stay in shape, but good looks are less of an advantage for a man than a woman. Society judges women on their attractiveness and men on their social status. A man who doesn’t work is a loser while a woman who doesn’t work has found a man who does. A man who cannot support his family is a loser while a woman who cannot support her family is simply in need of a man who isn’t a loser. So men felt pressured to get ahead, while women felt pressured to look their best. While the biggest insult to a woman was being seen as unattractive (a big, fat, old, ugly bitch), the biggest insult to a man was being seen as a loser (a broke, lazy, jobless failure). Society is okay with an ugly guy if he’s rich or a poor woman if she’s beautiful.

People try to get the best deal they can, including who they marry, so a man who marries an unattractive woman is less respected, as is a woman who marries a loser. Who you marry reflects on you, because people assume that was the best you could do. Which is why men marry pretty girls and women marry successful men.

As far as Cari was concerned, only a stupid woman marries a man who cannot support a family. Love is not just a choice, but a decision, and one bad decision can lead to a lifetime of misery. Unlike boys and girls, men and women decide who they fall in love with, which is why successful men don’t fall in love with fat ugly bitches and why poor beautiful women don’t fall in love with handsome penniless failures. Women prefer a rich alcoholic over a poor workaholic. Women want a sugar daddy while men want a hot mama. A man wants to be a woman’s first while a woman wants to be a man’s last. Smart women may fuck down, but they marry up. And Cari was smart. And Rance respected that.

Except their roles were reversed.

Rance had to stay home to help his ill father and their ailing business while Cari had to go off to school to become not poor. So hooking up with a hot meal ticket like Lisa Jackson was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Even if she wouldn’t fuck him yet.

The irony struck hard: Cari would fuck but not marry him, while Lisa would marry but not fuck him. Life just isn’t fair. Which is why a court of law is not called a court of justice. But, as his father frequently reminded him, “life was not meant to be fair.”

“Lisa wants to fuck me. You should hear our phone sex or see our online chats. But she insisted on no intercourse until she turned 16, and since then we haven’t been able to get alone. I think her family is deliberately keeping her busy.”

“Rance Gardener, don’t tell me you’re not getting any.”

“Oh, well, she blows me several times a month. Good, too,” he added sincerely, as he casually stoked Cari’s breasts. He could not help but notice that they were nowhere near as nice as Lisa’s, which defied gravity, and hoped that Cari could not read his mind like Lisa sometimes could. “In fact, she loves to visit me just to suck me off. At first she just sucked the head and thought that was enough, but I’ve taught her to relax her gag reflex to properly deep throat. Now she’s hooked. And Lisa being a swallower instead of a spitter just closed the deal for me.”

He didn’t mean to implicitly criticize Cari, but she never let him cum in her mouth. The one time she was drunk enough to not avoid it, she spit it out like sour milk which – like it or not -- felt like rejection. Lisa, in contrast, not only liked to suck his cock, but loved to suck him dry. He had never known a chick that did that, out of dozens who had sucked his cock. If swallowing a man’s juice didn’t reflect a special relationship, then what did?

Limiting yourself to just one woman for the rest of your life just did not appeal to most men. Like limiting yourself to just one pickup truck -- after several years you tire of seeing all those dents and scratches. Yet devoting oneself to one worthy, appreciative man brought most women a sense of stability and security.

After his mother remarried up, his own father warned him that 80% of a wife’s cock-sucking occurs in the first 20% of the relationship. So if they don’t suck now, don’t expect them to suck later. Most married men go years without their wife drinking their juice. That, quite frankly, scared the hell out of Rance. A girl could be the best damn wife in the world, but he knew he wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t suck him off. He would be happy to return the favor, but oral was a deal-breaker for him.

Which is why he didn’t mind Cari breaking up with him. He would never marry her because she wouldn’t suck him off. And that’s why he didn’t go to Georgetown with her. If you were going to hypothetically limit yourself to just one woman for the rest of your life, he felt blessed to have one who got soaking wet swallowing his seed. That she was hot, fun, smart, a virgin, and the daughter of a billionaire only cemented the deal. If Lisa sucked him off a few times a month, he honestly thought he could stay faithful to her for the rest of his life. And he never knew a girl who met that criteria. Rance knew how rare Lisa was, getting wet from swallowing him, which motivated him to take her off the market.

So, yeah, he would wait. As long as she blew his dick if not his mind, he would respect her wishes. If she had given him any the last few weeks, he would not now be sticking it to Cari. Cari didn’t know it, but this was their last fuck.

Rance remembered a story about a farmer who gave President Coolidge and his wife separate tours of his farm. As they passed a rooster having sex with a chicken, Mrs. Coolidge asked if that happened just once a day.

“No,” said the farmer. “Several times a day.”

“Please tell Mr. Coolidge,” she told him.

When later giving the same tour to her husband, the farmer did tell him. “Always the same chicken?” asked the president.

“No, sir,” replied the farmer. “Always a different chicken.”

“Please tell Mrs. Coolidge,” Silent Cal commanded.

Cari shook her head. She certainly didn’t want to debate the definition of “virginity” with her ex to convince his fiancée to fuck him. Time to change the subject.

“How the hell did Jackson make billions raising fish?”

“His family had long been farmers and ranchers. When Jackson’s father came back from Vietnam, he told Jackson’s grandfather about the shrimp farming he saw along the Vietnam coast. So they went big into shrimp farming.”

“In the 1970s, they heard about a tiny uninhabited island called Clipperton -- well, really a coral atoll -- in the Pacific, 1300 kilometers off of the Mexican Coast. It’s just seven kilometers long and encircles a lagoon. FDR visited it twice and ordered a military base installed on it. Now, for some reason, it belongs to the French. Anyways, they heard that once a year the island is overrun by spider crabs. Since Jackson’s father is a pilot, they rented a cargo plane, then flew to Tejupan Point on Mancanilla Bay, Mexico, where they bought a ton of ice that they put in new trash cans. The three Henry Jacksons flew to the island, grabbed every one they could, then flew back before nightfall. In Tejupan Point, they re-iced the crabs, then flew to Los Angeles to make a bundle.

“It was a deciding moment in his life. He says your job is only work when you’d rather be doing something else. If you enjoy your job, it isn’t work. He couldn’t believe you could make so much money doing something that didn’t feel like actual work. So they decided to return the following year. But Jackson, who was just a kid at the time, suggested that they set up shrimp farms around the island and hire Mexican fishermen to tend them. Well, that worked so well that they gradually diversified into salmon and tuna farming using huge floating pens, raising fish like cattle.

“They tried the tuna you find in your salad like skipjack and albacore, plus yellowfin and bigeye tuna, but then learned in vitro fertilization to produce larvae for the warm-blooded bluefin tuna, which are four meters long, larger than Great White sharks, and weigh three quarters of a ton. They spent years cross-breeding bioengineered versions that broke the 2001 record for 1500 pounds. The Japanese go crazy for bluefin in sushi and sashimi. A single 200 kilo bluefin sold for $173,600 at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo in 2001. They turn the fat belly meat into a delicacy called maguro and Toro, the best quality maguro, goes for up to $400 per pound, which is more expensive than caviar. Compare that to a buck a pound for chicken.

“Japanese pay so much for maguro that Jackson grows thousands of tons of it in the lab by shocking it with electricity or some shit. Scientists have done it with chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cattle, and sci fi writers have described doing it with human corpses, but it’s not cost effective for meat that sells for just a few bucks a pound. The Japanese apparently cannot tell the difference. Can you imagine making a billion a year growing fish muscle?

“Bluefin is an awesome fish. A single female can lay ten million eggs a year. These fish are fast – up to 80 kilometers per hour, and cross the Atlantic in just sixty days. They are one of the few fish that are warm blooded, and they can dive a kilometer deep. They eat anything and hunt in packs. And here is Jackson, raising millions of them like a cattle ranch. Or, in his case, fifteen ranches. The Japanese alone eat 60,000 tons of bluefin a year.

“His wife, a geneticist, has helped him selectively breed and bioengineer fish that grow faster, bigger, healthier, reach maturity sooner, reproduce for more years, and reproduce more in each season. Cattlemen have been doing the same for years, but he’s probably the only fisherman who optimizes his own fish.

“But bluefins aren’t his biggest catch. Working with Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, Jackson started the world’s only whale ranch. In South Korea, a whale sells for as much as 100,000 dollars each, and he had thousands of them.

“He breeds Blues, Southern Fin, Southern Sei, Antarctic Minke, and Belugas in huge pens that occupy hundreds of cubic kilometers of ocean. The fin whale grows up to 24 meters long and weighs between 45 and 64 tons. He has net factories all around the pens to grow them hundreds of meters every day. He doesn’t touch Sperm whales because they mature too slowly, breed infrequently, grow too slowly, and are too aggressive. Sperm whales have sunk ships five times their size.

“Males and most females are harvested after their teenage growth phase, but the best females only after they stop reproducing. Each has an a GPS identity tag to track them. With selective cross-breeding and growth hormones, each generation grows larger, grows faster, breeds sooner, and has more meat. Whale meat is a delicacy in Japan. Rock carvings in South Korea indicate that humans have hunted whales since at least 6000 BC.

“Did you know he opposes whaling? He sees whalers as the competition. He argues that raising whales in giant pens is not ‘whaling’, since they don’t roam free in the wild. Anti-whalers say whales are too intelligent to morally kill, yet thousands of dolphins are killed by nets every year. Both dolphin and pig's intelligence are rated higher than dogs.”

Like Cari gave a shit about that. She was earning an MBA.

“How much did he sell the fish farms for?

In October Jackson suddenly sold all but his Antarctic fish farms, including the whale farms, to a Japanese consortium that apparently wasn’t aware tsunamis would soon destroy them.

“He wouldn’t say, and believe me I asked him when he gave us a tour. Reading between the lines, though, I think he’s going to simply rebuild the sea farms afterwards in the same places, only bigger and better. He didn’t include the huge nutrient tubes or the amorphous metal hangers in the sale, and he took the best of each stock to repopulate. He even harvested almost everything before closing the deal, froze them, then sent them with his fleet up the Yukon. He kept all his net-making machines and talked about increasing the whale pens to several thousand cubic kilometers. He wants to build fifteen fish pens, each larger than the United States. Can you even imagine that?

“And why not? He makes his own boats, ships, hydrogen fuel, and clean energy products while his foreign labor is cheap. He builds the fastest cargo ships in the world and has ordered a thousand jumbo heloplanes.

“It gets better, though. In the 1970’s they grew more and more fish, crabs, lobsters, oysters, and shrimp until they exhausted the local nutrients. So they started pumping to the surface nutrients from a nearby deep water current. The ocean apparently has the equivalent of Amazon-size rivers flowing hundreds of meters deep.

“The tube, however, pumped too many nutrients, which caused algae to grow on hundreds of square kilometers and suck the oxygen out of the water. Algae need just nitrogen and sunlight to proliferate. To reduce the algae, he cultivated microorganisms that fed on algae, then tiny sea creatures that feed on those microorganisms, and so on until he artificially created his own ecosystem. He saved millions from having to import food to feed the predator fish.

“But the pump still dumped too many nutrients on the surface, so he built floating boats called skimmers that scoop up the algae. They figured out a way to bake the algae into different bread-like protein products shaped to resemble loaves, tortillas, buns, biscuits, bagels, papusas, and arepa. His fish empanadas are pretty awesome. They used artificial flavoring to make them tasty, and suddenly he could feed his growing army of workers. The Russians had been feeding algae to their cosmonauts for decades. Algae bread is extremely high in nutrients and free of fats.

“Then he gave away whatever his workers didn’t eat. He made deals with as many major churches, temples, mosques, and food aid organizations as possible. Instead of him transporting millions of tons to ports around the world, the churches and charities contract out cargo ships who pick them up right where he makes or stores them.

“So when he says he gives away a billion dollars a year, he is talking about the retail value of his protein bread that he writes off his taxes. But because the skimmers and processing equipment are so automated, and his economies of scale are so huge, his costs are pennies per ton. He saves millions in taxes while helping feed millions of starving people every year. Not bad doing good.”

“You admire him.”

While Rance tweaked her tits, she got turned on enough to fondle him in return. Did he have enough for one more time?

“Of course I fucking admire him. The guy’s a business genius. And this isn’t even his best business idea. Check this out!

“A decade ago, the European Union started an anti-global warming program which paid businesses to remove or reduce greenhouse gases. This encouraged companies to start monitoring and reducing their release of greenhouse gases.

“Well, Jackson’s fifteen sea pumps brought up millions of tons of nutrients a year, which created vast algae fields that soaked up millions of tons of carbon dioxide. So all he needed to do was get the EU technicians to track how many tons of gases he was removing, and watch his bank account grow.

“Ditto for his tree and bamboo farms, which he also sold in October. He had seeded fast growing trees and bamboo on hundreds of uninhabited islands. Jackson bioengineered bamboo with stalks as dense as hardwood, strong enough when compressed for beams one meter wide and ten meters long that are capable of supporting eight tons. Bamboo is also the world’s fastest growing woody plant and absorbs a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide.

“And being paid in euros didn’t hurt. During Bush’s presidency, the euro rose from 87 cents to $1.79 dollars, doubling in value. So Jackson not only made several billions a year, but made an extra billion just from the dollar’s depreciation.

“Not content with that, he purchased huge amounts of iron direct from producers, then used his own ships to distribute it around his sea farms. The resulting algae blooms gave him more algae bread, tax write offs, and carbon dioxide payments.

“The Japanese consortium paid so much because they were buying both his fish farms and his greenhouse gas money machine.”

“And Lisa will one day get half of that,” Cari pointed out.

Rance tweaked her tit and smiled.

26

“Mars,” Jackson explained helpfully.

Cooper looked like a cow about to be tipped over.

“Mars…”

“Look, we want to maximize the habitability of the solar system asap. Mars is relatively close, has a Goldilocks orbit, the right axial tilt to make seasons, an Earth-like day, and literally oceans of water buried under its surface. However, Mars is only half the size of Earth and has only a third of the surface area.

“Mars is too inhospitable for humans as it is. The constant radiation kills everything living on the surface. The temperature extremes between day and night make travel nearly impossible. The freezing weather and ultra fine dust would destroy any people, equipment, or vehicles on or near the surface. Including the pressure suits that everyone would have to wear since the atmospheric pressure is one hundred times lower than Earth. The air is 95% poisonous carbon dioxide, which forces people to carry heavy oxygen tanks. And the talcum powder-like dust will get into one’s eyes, nose, ears, throat, anus, food, clothes, suits, equipment, and vehicles. Nothing that depends on grease, oils, sealants, gears, or lubricants could work for very long, including our eyes. Our lungs would quickly fill up with the stuff.

“Even a tiny tear in a glove or suit, or a tiny leak in a joint or seal would kill you on the Martian surface. If you cut yourself, your exposed blood would literally boil away, which I imagine would be painful. And anyone working in a bulky pressure suit on equipment is likely to cut himself sooner or later.

“And we couldn’t grow anything because there is no soil on Mars. Martian regolith is deader than disco. Nothing organic grows on the surface, not even bacteria. As hydrogen leaked out of the atmosphere into space, the resulting oxygen literally rusted the planet, creating super-oxidant dirt. We need to cover the entire surface with leafy plants and trees to scrub the atmosphere of CO2, but can’t without soil. Because the whole planet is covered with fine dust and dead dirt, the obvious solution is to bury the planet with organics.

“There is another problem. The gravity is too weak to hold hydrogen, which leaks into space, which is why Mars has no liquid surface water. Increasing its mass increases its gravity, which thickens the atmosphere and warms up the planet above freezing.

“Our goal is to optimize the planet for human habitation. We are not going to convince millions of people to move to Mars if every day is a brutal, life-or-death ordeal. So we are going to make Mars not just more Earthlike, but better than Earth in many ways.

“Ultimately, we want to triple the size of Mars by importing thousands of asteroids. This will multiply its carrying capacity.

“Bulking up Mars will solve several other problems, besides burying the ultra-fine dust and dead soil under a few thousand kilometers of asteroid regolith. First, thickening the atmosphere with trillions of cubic meters of gases protects us, our farm animals, and crops from deadly cosmic radiation, even while it warms the planet up by retaining the Sun’s heat. Mars today is like Antarctica, except colder, dryer, windier, dustier, and the nearest help is 70 million kilometers farther away.

“The atmospheric pressure is now so low that virtually no plants could live on the surface. Humans need a minimum density of 100 millibars and Mars at ‘sea-level’ only has 6. Greater air pressure means if you cut yourself, you put on a Band-Aid instead of watching in agony as your blood boils away.

“It would also reduce temperature extremes. Temperatures on Mars today fluctuate more in a day than on Earth in a year. It can be 60 degrees F in the day and -100 that very night. Also, raising the mean temperature above freezing would melt the millions of square kilometers of permafrost lying under the surface, and create new lakes, rivers, seas, and oceans via rainfall.

“Bulking up the atmosphere would also add needed oxygen, while diluting the carbon dioxide that we cannot breathe. Mars now only has .2% oxygen, and we need several percent. We need billions of tons of oxygen in the atmosphere, and the only way to get that is by direct importation via comets and iceteroids. While primitive plants can get by without it, advanced plants need about 1 mb and humans need 120 mb. Afterwards, we could walk around Mars in t-shirts and shorts while breathing through a simple CO2 filter mask. We would not even need heavy oxygen tanks.

“The solution to all of these challenges is bulking up the planet as much as possible and as fast as possible, and the way to do that is to capture thousands of large asteroids from the inner Main Belt seventy million kilometers past Mars. That is why we need one hundred spaceships. Gravity, atmospheric pressure, rain, snow, wind and storms will later settle the rubble and regolith into something more solid.

“Scientists will want to study Mars for several years before we bury it, however, so first we need to quickly bulk up the atmosphere so that they are not killed by radiation, global dust storms, fine powder, or freezing temperatures. Just getting in and out of vehicles or rocket planes would be tough in huge suits.

“We could quickly thicken the atmosphere by crashing its moons, Phobos and Deimos, and the largest nearby asteroids and comets into the poles or into deep areas of permafrost. Phobos has three trillion tons and Deimos another two trillion tons of frozen water and other volatiles. Exploding Phobos over the larger South Pole and Deimos over the smaller North Pole would vaporize millions of tons of ice, instantly doubling its atmospheric mass.

“Mars’ two moons are doomed anyway, since exploding thousands of large asteroids will knock them out of their low orbits. Phobos orbits only 6000 kilometers above the surface and Deimos 20,000 kilometers. If you stood on Phobos, you could throw a rock and actually hit Mars.” He stopped to smile. “Well, Lisa couldn’t – she couldn’t hit Earth if she stood on it.

“Comets average 60% water by weight, and over one hundred short period comets cross or approach Mars’ orbit. We could simply nudge the comets at perihelion – when they are closest to the Sun -- to collide with Mars since most of them are small, in the 3-4 kilometer range. Exploding the two small moons and a hundred small short-period comets would quickly give Mars enough atmosphere to shield us from deadly radiation, allow us to walk around without pressure suits, warm the mean temperature above freezing, and allow liquid surface water.

“Tripling the size of Mars could double its gravity from 38% of Earth’s to roughly 75% of Earth’s, which will be great news for the elderly. Gravity and ultraviolet rays are the two main causes of wrinkles, and sunlight is only half as strong on Mars.

“A thicker atmosphere will help burn up and explode the chunks of asteroids falling from the sky. The first few dozen asteroids that we capture from the inner Main Belt should be as rich in frozen liquids as possible to thicken the atmosphere to lessen the devastation of large M asteroids that will follow. Like on the Moon, having metallic asteroids on the surface gives us easy access to quadrillions of dollars worth of metals.

“Afterwards we seed the surface with bacteria, fungi, lichens, algae, and self-composting plants. As the atmospheric pressure increases, we will have more complex self-composting plants, mosses, grasses, bushes, and eventually trees.

“Botanists once believed that only soil microbes could convert organic nitrogen into the nitrates and nitrites that plants need, but since have discovered 15 self-composting plant species that generate nitrates and nitrites in their tissues when they die. We can therefore create soil by cultivating self-composting plants. In addition to catapulting millions of tons of fertilizer from Earth via the lunar launcher, we will also need huge soil and fertilizer factories on Mars, as well as millions of horses, cattle, buffalo, elephants, chickens, deer, turkeys, birds, ducks, rabbits, rodents, fish, and lots of insects. I’d love to introduce whales. Hell, maybe we could clone mammoth or herbivore dinosaurs for the manure.

“80% of Earth is covered by liquid or frozen water. Mars would be best served by reversing that ratio, while still using water to transport goods and people cheaply around the planet. Waterways are low-friction mediums that are far cheaper to transport goods than land or air. We should optimize the oceans, seas, and rivers to navigate as much of the planet as possible to boost trade, exploration, and settlement. What we don’t want is huge inland continents like Africa with few navigable rivers.

“We need millions of young, healthy workers to terraform the surface. Among other things, we need to grow trillions of leafy carbon dioxide-eating trees, lumbar trees, and fruit trees. The tallest trees on Earth are almost 400 feet high, so trees on Mars may reach an amazing 600 feet.

“Mars today has scientific, but no economic, value because no one can live there independently. In contrast, a bulked up and terraformed Mars may be worth $100 quadrillion within a century.

“And if we are the only ones who can send people to Mars, then we could send only those people we want. Like genetically screened, westernized English speakers. We could have one global government, with one dollar-based economy, one system of metrics, systems, and processes, and virtually no violent crime, poverty, deadly disease, unemployment, poor people, or wars.”

“Utopia.” Cooper finally looked impressed.

“Or at least the closest we can come to Utopia.

“And that’s just Mars.

“My dad wants to bulk up Ceres to several times its current size as we pass through the Asteroid Belt to give Venus a moon. Factories on Ceres would then build a sunscreen made of solar panels 13,000 kilometers wide by 13,000 kilometers long to shade Venus. Venus is now so hot that it could melt lead. Once less hot, up to one quadrillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide will rain down and eventually turn solid, which we will later bury under regolith. With enough solar power and fusion power plants on Ceres, we could make bulk antimatter affordable enough for interstellar travel.

“After Mars, we could crash thousands of large iceteroids and comets into Venus to cool it down, hydrate it, and smack it hard along its equator to give it some spin. A Venus day lasts longer than a Venus year and Venus spins the wrong way. Venus needs one quadrillion tons of water, which means lots of large comets. Once cool and hydrated enough, we seed its surface with bioengineered plants to fix its carbon dioxide atmosphere.

“Once we have enough fusion ships, my dad wants to use them as mass thrusters to re-orbit Mercury equidistant between Venus and Earth. He wants to start pushing Mercury just after dawn on its equator, when Mercury is farthest from the Sun, though the temperature may be 300 degrees below zero. By midmorning, 22 Earth days later, the temperature will have risen to 80 degrees. The trick is to move Mercury far enough away from the Sun because at noon, 44 Earth days from dawn, the temperature rises to 800 degrees, which melts most astronauts.

“Then we give it an atmosphere by importing comets and presto! -- a habitable planet. People may prefer to live on Mercury because for decades Mars will retain a carbon dioxide atmosphere that requires wearing masks, while Mercury could have an ideal atmosphere and gravity if we do it right. Like on Mars, millions of workers will optimize it, like by creating navigable waterways.

“Later, we could re-orbit the larger moons of the gas planets into the habitable zone between Venus and just past Mars – the so-called Goldilocks orbits. The gas planets have six moons larger than Pluto and fourteen larger than 1000 kilometers. We bulk them up as much as possible as they go through the Main Asteroid Belt. Venus, Mercury, Earth, and Mars could each have bulked up moons in their five Lagrange points, with enough mass to retain an atmosphere. We could take trillions of tons of nitrogen gas from Titan to use as filler on Mars and Mercury, for example.

“And that’s why we want hundreds of spaceships,” Jackson concluded. “To maximize the habitability of the solar system.”

Cooper tried his best to hide his true reaction because only as president could he stop this lunatic.

27

“Jesus, Henry, how much money are you going to make? What makes you think you could own the fucking solar system?”

“The real issue is how much you make. What will it take to get your full and unconditional support? Give me a number.”

Cooper leaned over the card table. “A billion dollars.”

Jackson looked at him with undisguised contempt.

“I’ll tell you what. If you win the nomination, I’ll give you $250 million if you make me your running mate; another $250 million if you let me appoint your chief of staff, the top three positions at the DNC, NASA, Energy and Defense; another $250 million if you help me implement everything we’ve talked about today; and a final $250 million if I’m actually elected president. You could be a billionaire within a decade.”

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 trucks 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.

By a weird coincidence, he also happened to make the world’s toughest metal. So in early October he modified his factories to make millions of plain sheets of amorphous metal.

Jackson looked for the world’s largest civilian cargo plane and found the Russian Antonov An-124, with a cargo space 36 meters long, 6.4 meters high, and 4.4 meters wide. Even Airbus’ new A400M, designed to replace Lockheed’s C-130, only has a height of 3.85 meters and a width of 4 meters. He would have preferred to buy American, but only the government was allowed to use Lockheed’s C-5 Galaxy, C-17 Globemaster, and the C-130 Hercules. Fortunately, the Russians leased him two dozen An-124’s until the end of January. Not appreciating the danger, they even fully insured him against natural disasters and “acts of God”.

The cargo hold of the An-124 determined the size he could make his amorphous sheet metal. The sheet metal would roll off his factory line directly onto a flatbed trailer, which would drive into the Antonov. That meant he could make them 30 meters long and 4 meters wide, or the size of a house.

As he modified his factories to make millions of them, he now needed to sell them. So he first sold Wal-Mart on the idea of covering their roofs, who then scored a public relations coup by inviting their customers to wait out the meteorite storm from the relative safety of their stores. Other retail chains like Target, Kmart, Home Depot, and Loews then wanted them. Jackson sold them on the condition that they let the public pass the shit storm inside. Next he tried to sell them to owners of enclosed stadiums, malls, and multi-story office, apartment, and condo buildings, also on the condition that they shelter people at capacity. Local and state governments bought millions of them to shelter people in their largest buildings, such as high school and university buildings, as well as public clinics and hospitals.

That left only 110 million homes and 5 million commercial buildings in the United States likely to be damaged or destroyed.

By coincidence, he made 20,000 amorphous metal homes in China that he placed in clean energy communities in the Inland Empire in Southern California over the last several years. Like his sheds and ship hulls, these homes were poured and cooled at the same time, so they had great structural integrity. If he could get permission, he could fill them with Democratic voters. Fifty people per home, including the garage, sheltered a million people. And all he had to do was get his local field teams on the case.

It surprised him how many lives he could save with one fucking email. And several thousand field workers. And tens of thousands of their family and friends working around the clock. And a willingness to spend billions from his own wallet.

By another coincidence, he spent the last several years making apartment buildings out of a few hundred thousand used shipping containers. Instant asteroid shelters! By not requiring a lease, he kicked his tenants out and send them via rail to Canada.

With 17 million containers worldwide, he contracted out shipping agents around the world to buy them all. As the world’s biggest destination for containers, the United States had several million of them, so he instructed his field teams to buy them all.

He contacted railroads to rent railway land far from coastlines, protected from blasts by mountains, ridges, or canyons. Cranes laid them two stories tall along both sides of the train tracks, which left just two defendable entrances. As more came in, the line of containers just got longer. He had the containers placed less than thirty meters across from each other so that they could secure his amorphous sheet metal between the two lines. This covered the tracks and provide space for more people. The rail companies now had miles of shelter for their trains, which held up the long sheet metal right in the middle to support the weight of tons of regolith.

By December, people and corporations were paying several thousand dollars a head for the privilege of waiting out Judgment Day in these railway container cities. All that money went to a non-profit Jackson called the Survivor’s fund. Demand was so great that Jackson denied entry to anyone who voted for McCain, while making it free for anyone who voted for Obama.

This was simply the fastest way to shelter the most people. The containers found in America went to either these inland survival shelters or by train to Canada. His agents in Latin America sent all the containers they could find to Patagonia, either in Chile or Argentina, while his agents in Europe and the former Soviet Union sent them by rail to Scandinavia.

Unfortunately, the Canadian rail network doesn’t connect with Alaskan rail so Jackson convinced the four major American railroads, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, and BNSF to send their best trains by barge to Alaska. There he built more container cities. Alaska Railroad’s northern track ends at Delta Junction, where the Delta River intersects with the Richardson Highway and the end of the Alaska Highway. Another area he favored was the railway between Talkeetna and Hurricane because it had no roads for the uninvited to get in. Most of the rest of the containers lined the railway to Fairbanks, near the Artic Circle. Because it traversed so many mountains, it took twelve hours for the train to go the 356 miles from Anchorage to Fairbanks.

It wasn’t, however, enough because most containers were owned by shipping companies. Fortunately, insurers dropped coverage as quickly as they could send out amendments, leaving shipping companies completely exposed. Since few people expected ships to survive tsunamis taller than football fields, much less the world’s ports, their share prices dropped dead.

So Jackson bought every single container ship and every shipping company as possible. Buying a few thousand ships enabled him to move millions of containers much faster to his asteroid survival camps. Whenever possible, he filled them with food, clothes, construction materials, medicine, and supplies like car batteries, blankets, thermal underwear, and electric heaters.

His amorphous metal sheds, although the size of a 20 foot standard shipping container, were in greater demand. He kept them separate by sending them from the Alaskan port of Skagway by rail to Whitehouse, the capital city of Canada’s Yukon Territory. This isolated track has no links to other railways. Then he held a press conference and offered his indestructible sheds to any American who joined the Millionaire’s Club, or to non-Americans who donate a million to either his Survivor Fund or the Jackson Space Foundation. Hysteria-fueled demand was so great that he later set up similar “survival camps” throughout Asia, the Middle East, South America and Europe.

Just a year before, when he bragged that one thousand donors would join his Millionaire’s Club, he was laughed at. So when the millionth member joined, he boasted at another press conference that several thousand Democrats received a fucking trillion dollars in early, hard money campaign contributions.

Once he decided to lend his sheds to those who joined the Club, he knew he needed to expand the list as much as possible. So he added virtually every non-incumbent Democratic candidate for mayor or statewide office. When two or more Democrats waited to fight it out in a primary, Jackson let his local field office choose the candidate to put on the list.

But Jackson went farther. The DC Establishment didn’t like him anyways, so he let his district field offices add the names of a primary opponent if they didn’t like their own congressman or senator. Not since 1980 has more than one sitting senator lost a primary fight, but now Democratic senators were looking at the largest primary season in memory. And those primary challengers were very well funded.

Tsunamis would doom any ship on the high seas, so he leased an icebreaker and sent his fleet up the Yukon in Alaska. Fortunately, the Yukon is over 3000 kilometers because in just two months he bought a few thousand large ships that he anchored over several hundred miles in Yukon tributaries. Then he covered them with shipping containers to protect their decks, covered the glass windows, and maximized the number of people they could shelter.

Then there were the nearly 150 cruise ships. When insurers dropped coverage of Carnival Cruises and Royal Caribbean Cruises, the two largest cruise lines, their shares essentially died since investors assumed that all of their ships would be destroyed, along with the ports they used and the islands they visited. Given their heavy debt loads, investors had every right to assume that these companies would go belly up. Like his cargo ships, he covered their decks with containers for people to stay in, then auctioned off the cabins to the richest Democrats, with the money going to the Survival Fund charity so they could write it off of their taxes. The media, naturally, loved it. A few thousand ships, their decks covered with container-homes, as thousands of Democrats cheered from riverbanks or on board, was quite a sight.

So Jackson expected space scientists like Kowalski, who appreciated the dangers better than most, to accept his free fucking asteroid shelter. Like Voltaire, Jackson prayed that God save him from his friends. His enemies he could take care of himself.

31

“When is Dennis leaving Kitt Peak?”

“No time soon,” his father replied. “He’s repositioning every possible scope on Kitt Peak to gather as much data as possible before they are destroyed.”

“Well, he better leave soon.”

“It’s a monster of a job to do with just his pregnant wife. I would have gone and helped him if these uninvited dip shits with the cameras didn’t show up. Besides, every freeway is packed, even though Governor Naples has the police directing both sides of the freeway away from here. The police are even telling motorcyclists and those driving 4X4s to drive off-road, parallel to the freeways. Thank God Naples listened to you and set up offices in Montana.”

“Then we have to send a helicopter after him.”

“Ain’t any. Palin gave the military authority to borrow all aircraft, which forced me to order your fleets home. Palin is putting soldiers in the cockpits of private and commercial planes. You would have lost the heloplane if they found anyone who could fly it. David flew Monique, Lina, the general, and the twins to our base in Wyoming while they had the chance. I tried to get Lisa to go, but the little bitch out-ran me. We could have all left together if you weren’t so busy with Cooper. I sure hope he was worth it. It’ll take David several hours to come back to pick us up.”

Well that complicated things, since he owned several thousand aircraft.

In October, Jackson and his father sought out experts to game out the most likely disaster scenarios, and it dawned on Jackson that airlines would have nowhere to put their fleets. American, Delta, Southwest, United, and Continental each have several hundred large planes, and the ability to shelter few of them. Which meant that each of them were looking at $200-$300 billion in replacement costs, plus lost revenue. A scene in their movie showed regolith punching holes in passenger jets, many exploding, so they rightly concluded that share prices of airliners would basically drop dead once the movie came out.

So he started building what looked like very long tunnels, 15 meters tall and 60 meters wide, on well-paved private roads in Alaska, northern Canada, Patagonia, Scandinavia, and Australia with poured concrete and rebar for walls and his 30 X 4 amorphous sheet metal for roofs. No windows, plumbing, or electricity. Most of these aircraft shelters were miles long in order to protect over 3000 large planes. After hundreds of planes parked inside them nose to tail, many thousands of people could wait out Judgment Day inside insulated tents under and around the planes. Because his field teams sent so many Democratic voters north by rail, which was easiest, cheapest, and fastest, Jackson was forced to build hundreds of miles of aircraft tunnels as close as possible to Canadian railways to shelter both planes and people.

Jackson knew from the beginning that Canada and Alaska couldn’t possibly provide heated shelter for 100 million people so, if they had passports, they were pushed to take Jackson’s free charter planes to Patagonia, Scandinavia, or Australia.

Stock markets plunged after the Regolith 3D movie came out, but airlines suffered much more because Jackson pointed out that domestic airlines have 19,000 commercial airliners, with 170,000 private planes competing with them for shelter. So Jackson gradually accumulated a majority position in American, Delta, United, Southwest, and Continental, replaced top management, then sold the planes dirt cheap to a newly formed company, Jackson Airlines, which started airlifting Democratic voters to Australia, Scandinavia, and Patagonia. He would also have bought British Airways, but their fifty 747-400s are both too high at nearly 20 meters, and too wide at 65 meters, to fit into his very long hanger-tunnels. After regolith destroyed most of the world’s large cargo and passenger planes, Jackson would own a big chunk of what survived. Which would multiply their value.

He needed to send a lot of people to Australia because he bought several million shipping containers from Asia and his Alaskan and Canadian ports were so busy they couldn’t accommodate any more. Australia was also closer, so he set up a few dozen large container cities to shelter Democratic voters and anyone who wanted to pay his Survivor’s Fund to stay in them.

“Then Dennis can fly out with us in the heloplane.”

“I told him.” The tone of his father’s grunt said he was not optimistic. “So what the hell was so important with Cooper?”

“He asked me to be his VP.”

The room went silent. The overalls guy stopped swigging Jackson’s wine from the bottle like a beer. Even Lisa looked up.

The professor looked at his son impatiently.

“And what did you say?”

“That I had to ask Lorena.”

His father leaned forward, peering into his face, as if trying to decide if his son cracked a joke he didn’t get. Then his face turned into an expression of disgust.

“You dumb ass! Cooper asked you to be the vice-president of the United States and you told him you had to ask the wife?”

“What?”

“You think Lorena would say no? You got the best damn wife in the world, and you let Cooper leave here without a firm ‘hell yeah’? Who else can do half as good a job at cleaning up the mess this damn asteroid is going to make?”

Actually, until Cooper did so well in Iowa and New Hampshire, everyone assumed he was just auditioning for VP himself. So for him to offer that slot to Jackson instead of Obama or Hillary, if he won the nomination, was actually huge news. And showed a lot of balls. Reporters would kill to film the facial expressions of Obama or Hillary when they first hear of this.

Jackson noticed the camera crews angling for better views of his face. A boomer almost dropped a mike on his head. For the first time he regretted his high ceilings.

“So why are all you idiots still here?” he asked the camera crews. “You’re filming without reporters? Have the major networks been reduced to reality TV? I’ll bet Cooper is leaving in his press plane right now. You can catch him if you hurry.”

“I told them to leave as soon as they got here,” the professor said, clicking away on the computer.

A stocky black cameraman spoke up. “There wasn’t enough room on the jet, so they sent us here. The highways look like parking lots, so they promised to send a helicopter after us.”

“And you believed them?” Jackson said contemptuously. “Helicopters can only fly a few hundred miles. That won’t even get you out of the state unless you go to Mexico. What you need to do is get to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The attached AMARG facility is a long term storage and reclamation facility for excess U.S. government aircraft. They have hundreds of planes.”

“The Air Force already took them to move troops and equipment, and the line at the airport is miles long. The National Guard are authorized to use lethal force, and have. Even though they cram as many people in each plane as possible, there’s no way all those people are getting flown out.”

Hands on his hips, Jackson stared at them like dead men. He looked at each of them now, man to man, and saw that they knew their fate long before he entered the room.

“So you’re the band on the Titanic,” he quipped.

“Look, if it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to stay here. It’s better than that damn hotel.”

The black cameraman seemed to be taking this rather well. The rest of them looked scared shitless. As part of the press pool, they were here to cover Governor Cooper, not come here to die. Ironically, Tombstone, of Wyatt Earp fame, was not far from here.

“Governor Jackson?” the guy by the fridge asked. “I don’t suppose you got any beer…”

“Sheeee-it. I can do better than that. No hard liquor, but you’ll find some expensive wine that we’re not gonna have time to drink. Help yourself to food, too. A bathroom is down the hall. Mi casa es tu casa.”

A fat white guy went down the hall, probably looking for a bathroom, while three others took off for the garage to get them some fucking liquor.

“So, dad, what else can we do?”

“Well, I emailed again every news organization in your database, the emergency management offices of all fifty states, the National Emergency Management Association, the International Association of Emergency Managers, all fifty governors, every state’s National Guard, FEMA, Homeland Security, NASA, the military branches, etc. I blogged it earlier, but when these guys got here, I hit all the basics again: all power plants, refineries, chemical plants, factories, oil and gas pipelines need to be shut down. Offshore oil platforms must be bottled up. Those on small islands, along coastlines, and beneath dams need to find higher ground far inland. Satellites need to be closed up. A lot of people are waiting it out in mountain tunnels or under America’s 600,000 bridges, but some of those may collapse.

“Henry, the White House still says the Rock may miss us. Conservative media are accusing us of spinning this story for partisan gain, even though I have emailed every news organization with links to the latest IAU notices. The ability of conservatives to spin everything to fit their preconceived narrative is truly mind blowing. JPL and the Minor Planet Center are 100% certain that the main body will hit us. Anyone who believes the Palin Administration over them deserves to die.”

An “IAU Notice” referred to the global notification system used by the International Astronomical Union. If the media tried to look fair and balanced by saying the IAU says this, but the White House Science Advisor says that, then they were going to get people killed. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Sentry system calculates the orbits of near-Earth objects while the Minor Planet Center, run by Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution, collects all NEO information.

A lot of people were going to die before sunrise.

32

Cooper couldn’t believe all the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Even the lane going south looked like a parking lot inching north. He could have walked faster. On both sides of the road, 4X4s, motorcycles, and even people on horses passed him driving off road, parallel to the narrow highway. And it didn’t escape him that it must all be coming from Mexico, since that was the only thing south of Green Valley. And not a traffic cop or border patrol agent in sight.

He sure didn’t feel presidential. He mentally kicked himself for seeing Jackson right before the asteroid fragments hit. Ann told him to stay home in the governor’s mansion in Austin.

Crawling north on Highway 19, he finally noticed the portable DVD player sitting in the passenger seat. A note facing the driver’s seat warned, “PULL OVER BEFORE READING.”

Something chilled him, and it wasn’t his failure to lock his car. His heart seemed to stop beating, but he was only holding his breath. He learned long ago to face bad news quickly. Still driving, his right hand ripped the paper from the DVD player, unfolded it, and his worst fears were realized.

“Give him what he wants or else.”

He immediately pulled the green land yacht over to the side of the freeway, nearly killing some Mexican kid on a horse, and drove behind some tall sagebrush for privacy. He slammed on the brakes, resulting in a quick fishtail move which raised a cloud of dust that choked him through the open window. He tore at his tie and top shirt buttons. Not that he would have been breathing easy anyways. He clutched his chest in fear of a heart attack. Wouldn’t that suck? To die of a heart attack right before winning the presidency and, more importantly, becoming a billionaire?

It’s all over, Cooper told himself. He pissed away everything he spent a lifetime working for. Just to finger some pussy. At least Clinton won re-election before getting caught. His father warned him to never do anything he couldn’t justify on Oprah. Tears started flowing and would not stop.

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

He started head-butted the steering wheel and found he couldn’t stop. Just when he was about to have it all, he could feel it all slipping away. He would be an outcast, a Gary Hart-meets-Paris Hilton comedy target. Imagining what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would say made him nearly wet himself.

At 62, Cooper couldn’t blame his inexcusable lack of self-control on his age. On his wife, maybe, who couldn’t suck cock if his life depended on it. And explaining how he preferred to masturbate over fucking his old, dried-out, unimaginative wife would not win him any points. Not even KY, axle grease, and WD-40 could juice Ann up enough to make fucking her more than a hard chore. Fucking his wife was like jack-hammering a concrete sidewalk. No wonder she insisted on waiting until their honeymoon before having sex.

Who did this to him?

Jackson certainly would not have offered $1 billion if he held a porn movie staring Daniel Cooper. Shit, their meeting would have lasted ten minutes, with Jackson simply dictating what Cooper was going to do or else.

Cooper reached over and gently handled the portable DVD player as if it were a dirty diaper that someone forgot to close. Sure enough, Cooper found himself staring at a porn movie starring himself. His blackmailer put a few clips from the end of the encounter at the beginning, so viewers would have no idea that they had just met. Monique’s face was digitally blurred and there was no sign of that damn beast that Jackson passed off as a dog.

His Hummer blocked the Landshark sitting in its shadow. Cooper’s face, however, showed up very clearly. The cameraman made him fill up the screen. Yep, there he was grinning like a schoolboy as Monique humped his finger. He was fucked. Yet he couldn’t stop watching. Like the movie Titanic, knowing how it ended didn’t make it any less compelling.

Right when he sucked her finger, at the bottom of the tiny screen words scrolled across like breaking news on TV. He had to squint his eyes because of the small screen, but he clearly made out the large, bold print, all in capital letters.

“THE CAMERAMAN JUST CAME INSIDE HER, SO GOVERNOR COOPER IS NOW CLEARLY ENJOYING THE TASTE OF ANOTHER GUY’S HOT CUM.”

His head snapped back like a bullet tapped his forehead. He tried to deny it, but deep inside he knew the truth. The taste was unforgettable, like leftover clam chowder. It reminded him of the time he went down on his ex not knowing her husband had came inside her an hour before.

Hot vile bubbled up deep inside him. Through the open window he barely managed to turn and lift his head before he threw up like a damn drunk. Most of it landed on the outside of the car door, but some of it drooled onto his tie, shirt, and jacket. He even spotted some of that tasty whale. A part of him wondered why he never asked what kind of whale it was. He spit and spit until he got dry heaves. Goose bumps covered his arms and the opposite of a thrill fell down his spine. He could not get the taste out of his mouth. He was going to have nightmares over this, he just knew it.

A joke from his college days sprang up at him: a guy walks into a bar and orders six shots of whisky. The bartenders pours them while asking what he is celebrating. “My first blow job,” he says after pounding all six shots back to back. Impressed, the bartender then offers him another shot on the house as congratulations, but the guy turns him down, saying, “if six shots can’t get the taste out of my mouth, another one won’t help.”

Cooper roomed with a guy back in college who thought blow jobs were better than sex. Instead of a girlfriend, he paid chicks to suck him off. Swallowers only. Virtually every morning a girl would show up just to get him off. He said it helped him concentrate. Over many years, this guy spewed his seed into thousands of different mouths. Man, that guy was loaded.

Cooper once asked his rich roommate to borrow $500 because he didn’t have money for tuition. Which would force him to return to his tiny town looking like a total failure. He couldn’t even afford a girlfriend. Not even with his mother’s bake sales at his father’s church.

His preacher father always told him that life isn’t fair.

His roommate, however, refused, explaining that it is better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same. But he did offer to pay him a record $500 for a blow job.

Cooper remembered trying to figure out if he was shitting him or not, as the ceiling fan squeaked and the Munsters show laughed on the boob tube. He had just opened a letter from his dear mother, God rest her soul, that contained a check for $47.47. The roommate didn’t appear to be joking. The girl scheduled for that morning no-showed, and he wanted his fucking blow job. To show he was serious, he held out five $100 bills, pulled down his pants, opened his favorite porno mag, sat down in his plush Lay-Z-Boy blow job chair, and started jacking it.

“But I ain’t gay,” Cooper remembered saying.

“I ain’t either,” the guy replied. “But you need money and I need a blow job. You ain’t gay if you suck a cock. You’re gay if you fall in love with another man. Straight men cannot fall in love with each other. Guys in prison have sex, but because they’re horny, not gay. You never heard of situational homosexuality?”

Yeah, like that would fly with his family if they ever found out: “I’m not gay, I’m just too lazy to live within my means.”

Swallowing a guy’s seed was not worth $500, but not having to return home a total loser, after so recently escaping a town his father dominated, was worth killing for. And so he got on his knees and sucked the guy’s cock. Or, more accurately, the guy grabbed his head with both hands and forced his mouth down repeatedly until he shot his wad and forced Cooper to swallow.

Afterwards, one part of him said, “fucking disgusting!” The other part said, “that’s a lot of money for five minutes work.” After tax, that was three months pay washing dishes and taking crap from friends.

And that’s when it hit him: with easy money, he could afford a girlfriend. He wouldn’t have to listen to his old man bitch about how hard his mother worked selling cookies every fucking Sunday. He could be free. Not in any Jeffersonian sense, but in the oldest economic sense. The poor are not free -- they’re just not enslaved. Only those with money are free. He could be his own man, finally. Becoming a man-whore could set him free!

And all he had to do was swallow his roommate for $20 whenever some bitch no-showed, or when he wanted seconds, although that cost $50 because it took several times as long. He bought knee pads for those. More unexpected, once he made his decision, he quickly grew accustomed to the taste, just like he did broccoli. Of course, not every time he sucked while on his hands and knees. He sometimes woke up to find his roommate forcing his mouth open to fuck it until he came. Or he would force Cooper to his knees, tie his hands behind his back, and fuck his mouth.

After forty years, he could still vividly remember how it tasted. The sensation of the penis head inflating in his mouth like a blow fish right before it exploded would stay with him til the day he died. Sperm wasn’t something he would choose on a menu, but it was still better than asparagus. The experience horrified him, but did not in the least traumatize him.

Someone finding out -- that would traumatize him.

He made more money sucking cock than he could working full time. Giving blow jobs allowed him to afford a girlfriend, who ironically had no aptitude for giving head. He ended up going through dozens of girls until he found one who sucked cock better than he did. Then he fucking married her.

Once, when financially desperate, Cooper even offered him anal, but played if off as a joke when the roommate turned him down, saying, “I told you, cocksucker, I ain’t no fag”.

Out of morbid curiosity, after watching his girlfriend do yoga, Cooper began stretching exercises until he could suck his own cock. He learned that a man who could suck his own dick saved a lot of money on dating. What bothered him was that he gave himself head more and better than his fucking girlfriend. The taste shocked him, though. Not just bad, but fucking disgusting. Much worse than his roommate’s. He tried changing his diet, drinking gallons of milk -- nothing worked. His cum simply tasted nasty, although his girlfriend liked it well enough until six months into their marriage. Not that the disgusting taste stopped him. Only growing back pain ended this form of self-satisfaction.

Given his intense stress and inept wife, he’d probably blow himself every day if he could. Orgasms clear the mind.

Over the next four years, Cooper figured he made several thousand dollars, back in the 1960s when that was a lot of money. He kicked himself for never tracking it because he remained curious how much he totaled from prostituting himself. And the roommate never tried to rub it in or make fun of him. Partly because he was a good guy, and partly because this all started in 1968, right after Dr. King and Malcolm X got assassinated, and so he got his anger out by having a redneck suck his big black cock.

Sucking dick for a living taught Cooper everything he needed to know about politics. Politicians are just prostitutes who fuck people for money. Ironically, he felt dirtier as a politician kissing ass than a prostitute sucking cock.

His dream after graduation was to make a fortune selling a device that gave the equivalent of a blow job. The idea of getting blow jobs on demand from a machine obsessed him for years. Unfortunately, he was a terrible inventor who couldn’t find anything that worked better than his left hand.

What kind of sick creep would pull a stunt like this?

His head pounded, his stomach rumbled, and his skin felt flush. Cars raced by, playing hurry-up-and-wait, oblivious that the next possible president of the United States sat like a drugged out, bumbling moron along the side of a minor freeway, desperately trying to get the taste of sperm out of his mouth. Again.

Cooper knew it would be a huge hit on the porn equivalent of YouTube. If Henry Fucking Jackson knew of this, he would have gleefully dictated his demands. The cameraman was certainly a man, so that eliminated virtually the entire Jackson household.

He groaned as it hit him like a cruise missile.

David. The fucking son did this to him. David would have the time and technical skill, and giving his father this leverage probably scored him a lot of points.

What to do now? David was always a weird one, left widowed while still a teenager. Obsessive-compulsive. Emotionally detached. Anger issues. Used to be the unofficial Arizona cage-fighting champion. Still lives with his mommy and daddy so someone else takes care of his children.

Jackson once showed him a best-of video of David’s dozen cage fights that caught fire on YouTube after the media discovered the governor’s son kicked the fucking shit out of the state champion. What Coopered remembered most was how much David seemed to relish giving and taking pain, like he was trying to punish himself as well as his opponent. It was unnerving. Besides, David had probably already uploaded it as a password-protected file on some obscure website and hid a backup copy somewhere.

And he doubted that he could sweet-talk David into destroying all copies. David didn’t even want anything for himself. All he wanted was for his father to get whatever he asked for.

That thought surprised him.

It dawned on Cooper that David would not even have done this if his father was not so afraid of losing access. The irony was that he was already giving Jackson everything he asked for. That thought finally calmed him. There was no need for blackmail because he was giving Jackson everything he wanted anyways.

Having regained his composure, Cooper got out and buried the disk down a snake hole. Then he peed over it, before collapsing the hole with his foot.

He turned on his Blackberry, and sure enough, he found several messages from his campaign manager. The oldest subject title read, “Where the F are you?”, followed by “Must leave now to escape impact!” Finally, “Plane Gone. Meet U at Butlers.”

He opened that last one and discovered that the Air Force jacked his ride. With highways swamped, they couldn’t get far by car, and Butler insisted his log cabin, shielded in a ravine in the mountains, was the best place to wait out any meteorites. It had a solid log roof and was well provisioned. Or they could take Butler’s helicopter to safety. Safer than fucking Austin.

He was glad Ann left Austin for Alaska, but a part of him wondered how many sympathy votes he would win if, like LBJ after the assassination of President Kennedy, she didn’t make it. Despite himself, he briefly imagined all the pussy he could get as a single president. Kennedy-class tail, in both quantity and quality. And she did promise to do everything possible to elect him president…

As he marched back to his borrowed car, he realized he needed serious time to strategize. Everything changed since yesterday. How was he going to convince his staff that Jackson should be on the ticket? After bad-mouthing him so much.

Well, Butler’s was as good a place as any to ride out the meteorite shower. What decided it was that he just passed Ajo Highway (AZ-86). From there he could take Mission Road south through the San Xavier del Bac mission site to get to Butler’s place near Keystone Peak in the Sierritas Mountains. The Sierritas had public, state, and private land all mixed together. Butler’s cabin supposedly offered a stunning view west towards Babo. After all, as the professor reminded the public a million times, you can be too close to an asteroid impact, but you can’t be too far away.

33

Someone had moved two televisions from the bedrooms and turned them on MSNBC and Fox News. Because, really, who watches CNN anymore? The professor had hooked up a computer to the main television, a three meter tall 3D monster by Sharp, which showed a chat room on, with lines of dialogue flowing quickly down it. David had an even newer, bigger model in his bedroom to watch high definition 3D porn, but it was too heavy to move downstairs. Everyone seemed to be “talking” at the same time. His father had enlarged the letters – otherwise it would have been impossible to read in real time. Thankfully, everyone had a different color to instantly distinguish between the “speakers.”

Jackson scanned the wall screen, but couldn’t make sense of it. Numbers and equations were interspersed with arc-seconds of resolution, Janskys of measurement, and Doppler shifts.

“How big is it now?” Jackson wanted to know.

“Five kilometers, but it could lose another kilometer before it impacts us.”

“Five?” a cameraman asked. “I thought it was twelve.”

“Originally, when discovering passing Mars, but every out-gassing cost it some mass. Every time it changed course after circling the Sun probably cost it a cubic kilometer. It was shaped like a potato. Now, radar imaging shows its shape is more like a bowling pin flying head first towards us.”

“So it’s only a third as big! That’s great news.”

“Yes. The rock that finished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was around ten kilometers. It all depends on its speed, angle, and composition. Given the same crushing strength, a slow asteroid can penetrate deeper into our atmosphere than a faster one. Iron-rich rocks naturally hurt more than water-rich ones.”

“That’s great, right?”

“Sure. But we will also be hit by several kilometer’s worth that’s broken off of the main body. This crater will probably be bigger than the 53 mile one in Chesapeake Bay, yet smaller than the 110 mile crater in the Yucatan Peninsula, the 155 mile one in Ontario, and the 236 mile crater in South Africa.”

“So we got a shot? Some of us are gonna make it?”

Jackson cut in. “Look, if you’re gonna ask questions like a reporter, you should introduce yourself.”

The black cameraman suddenly didn’t look too sure.

“I’m not dressed for it,” he answered weakly.

Jackson waved his hands in front of his body. “We’re both in blue jeans and t-shirts. You should at least tell me your name.”

With that, he walked over to shake Jackson’s hand.

“Bond. Larry Bond.”

“Ah jeez. You’re not related to that British spy, are you?”

“Uh, nobody has confused me with Pierce Bronson so far.”

The professor broke the awkwardness.

“Hey, y’all wanna see it?”

Wow, that woke everyone up. Even Lisa abandoned the couch. The professor put up a series of radar images on the wall TV that looked like an embryo in a sonogram, with jerky movements and artificial colors. They didn’t have pictures or video because it only faced Earth’s surface during the day. Which really pissed off everyone who bought an optical telescope. Sure enough, Bond saw that it looked like a pencil with an eraser head, rotating on its long axis like a thrown football instead of tumbling head over tail like most asteroids.

It was beautiful, in an unsettling way.

“How different will it be from the movie?” Bond asked.

The Jackson Space Foundation funded a 3D disaster movie made by Brave New Films called “Regolith” as soon as astronomers discovered Gabrielle over a year ago. Their script, unlike other end-of-the-world stories, emphasized the weeks immediately after the impact, when governments collapsed, civil society broke down, borders became meaningless, and armed gangs fought over control and limited resources within ruined cities.

Because astronomers projected Gabrielle would become visible to the naked eye, Hollywood knew they had a blockbuster on their hands. It was free publicity guaranteed to literally catch the eye of every sentient being in the world. And a few Teabaggers. While fully funding it guaranteed it would be made, Tom Hanks signing on early ensured its success.

Hollywood has a saying: making a movie is easy -- it’s making a movie that people pay $10 bucks to see that is hard.

To give it added credibility, they showed a mini-documentary before the movie where the director of Spacewatch used computer animation to illustrate several variations of what would happen if Gabrielle actually impacted Earth, and what they should do to best prepare themselves. On a gut level, this made their fictional movie far more “real”. Instead of just another disaster move, this was what could happen if the Rock hit us.

They wrote the script for a global audience, with an ancient Mayan prophet declaring the end of the world in 2012. They even stole from Titanic by killing the protagonist, the Spacewatch director played by Tom Hanks, after he selflessly saved so many and suffered so much. The real tearjerker was the asteroid killing the director’s granddaughter, played by no other than Lisa, the real director’s granddaughter, as she sang the national anthem at the SuperBowl, which she actually did in 2008. As Voltaire once put it, it isn’t a tragedy if you don’t kill the most likeable character.

Ostensibly, this role was the excuse Lorena used to get Lisa breast implants. Lisa was also the one who came up with the winning tag line: “This time, we’re the dinosaurs.”

Riding a tsunami of rising hysteria, Regolith 3D quickly became the highest grossing movie of all time, sinking Titanic. Only five films had ever broke the billion dollar barrier, and the hype leading up to its world-wide release helped the movie smash that barrier in just nine days. Everyone in the world wanted to see what they were up against and, upon leaving the theater, freaked the fuck out. It wasn’t until the movie came out that hundreds of millions of people started fleeing coastlines and heading towards the poles. Hundreds of millions more reinforced their homes or build concrete shelters in their backyard.

The villain in the movie? A wink-a-holic president who claimed Democrats were anti-Christian, terrorist-sympathizing, traitorous fake Americans who hated their country -- in other words, who looked and sounded just like clueless Sarah Palin.

The movie accurately summarized how Republicans gutted our planetary defenses. Nixon slashed NASA’s funding by 60% as soon as he entered office to boost funding for the war in Vietnam. Half a century later, President Kennedy’s Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket ever launched -- sad testament to the political leadership of space exploration. The trillion wasted on Vietnam would have funded bases on the Moon and settlements on Mars.

In all, America alone spent $250 billion on the shuttle and the ISS, and got very little in return. During W’s presidency, the shuttle program cost $5 billion anually and averaged just one launch a year. If Bush shifted funding from the shuttle to its replacement, the Orion, the $50 billion saved would have funded its development and deployment. Instead, Bush left us with no replacement for the space shuttle.

In the end, the movie Regolith did more to help people prepare than anything else. Yet Jackson didn’t yet get the irony of having a similar scenario actually come true.

“The real rock is smaller, so it won’t be quite as bad.”

“Well,” Bond replied, “it killed six billion people in the movie, so that’s not comforting.”

“This one will probably only kill half that many,” the professor predicted, on fucking camera, not knowing that billions of people would soon freak out at hearing his estimate.

34

A burst of laughter shut everyone up.

“The Tea Baggers in Key West can’t leave,” Lisa suddenly interjected. She apparently thought this was hilarious as she turned up the TVs. Any group that names itself after a slang term for sucking balls deserves ridicule. “A trailer truck full of gravel flipped over on the airport runway.”

Fox News ridiculed Jackson so much that he went on Glenn Beck’s show after the movie’s debut to announce that he would pay $1 million for every Republican congressman who spent January 8th in Key West, and $3 million for every sitting senator. Beck, pointing out Republicans could raise a billion, naturally asked him if he was serious.

“Get me a Bible,” he commanded, which sent staffers scrambling. After the break, he put his hand on the Bible and swore it, plus $1000 for every Teabagger and $10 million in hard money contributions if Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter stayed as well. Beck, like most of his viewership, eagerly accepted.

For months Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the Palin Administration made light of the asteroid danger, ridiculing Jackson and Democrats for scaring people for partisan profit. Now Jackson challenged their biggest mouth pieces to put up or shut up.

January 7th saw millions of Teabaggers partying like there was no tomorrow, even while news networks filmed long lines of Key West natives fleeing up the Overseas Highway to the Florida peninsula. Even those who stayed for Hurricane Wilma in 2005 left. The military already evacuated the Naval Air Station.

Americans love Key West because it is the Caribbean without the Caribbean-ers. The Caribbean suffers from extreme poverty, too many of whom get by via crime and begging in bad Creole English. So Key West is like the Caribbean without non-Americans. Shit works, from telephones to Internet, and you don’t have to fear beggars and thieves. Only 2 miles by 4 miles, and closer to Havana than Miami, Key West is like the American Virgin Islands without the poor Virgin Islanders.

While millions of Teabaggers in Florida seemed oblivious to the danger, their elected leaders were not. First, they took over the National Weather Forecasting building on White Street which was designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Then they came in small airplanes, which they had refueled and ready for takeoff.

So they were able to talk smack on Rush Limbaugh’s three hour radio program, and look brave to Fox News viewers. But, as soon as Limbaugh’s show was over, at 3:00 p.m. local time, they were out of there. So the sight of the GOP leadership in the House and Senate looking dumbfounded at the overturned gravel truck in the middle of the runway was simply priceless.

Definitely worth the million bucks.

Jackson carefully hid his satisfaction. He didn’t know he would get their reaction on live TV. How fucking awesome! This was the best million bucks he ever spent. If his truck driver got away, that is. If so, then he was hauling ass on a Ninja motorcycle to a hidden plane he had waiting along Alligator Alley.

Jackson knew they couldn’t leave before Rush Limbaugh, and he knew Rush wasn’t going to fucking stay. He would have driven his Maybach 57S from Palm Beach instead of flying his Gulfstream if he was going to stay til Tuesday and score $10 million for Republicans. Sure enough, there was Limbaugh getting out of his Gulfstream G550, a bunch of bewildered Republican congressmen behind him, a look of sheer disbelief on his face.

“Jackson!” he yelled into the cameras, fist raised.

Jackson laughed and turned to his own cameras.

“Is that thrice-divorced fat drug addict actually blaming me? I’m out $10 million if he stays. Go, fat-ass, go! Hell,” he said, checking his watch, “they have 15 hours if they want to welsh on our bet. Even someone as fat and doped up as Limbaugh can reach the Miami airport by then.”

Which, fortunately, wasn’t true, since thousands of Teabaggers were holding a tailgate party up and down the Overseas Highway, effectively blocking it. In their minds, anyone who left cost their candidates money. Other Teabaggers partied on other islands, and some even invaded the Naval Air Station. Because they could. They apparently believed that a large meteorite striking nearby was just a liberal media conspiracy.

Just because there are no laws against stupidity doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished.

“They have lots of ways to get out. Move that damn truck and fly out, call for helicopters, take a boat to Miami, or just drive north like everyone else. In five hours they could drive to Orlando, or go a little farther to Ocala or Gainesville. It’s not like there are cops who will give them tickets. You have enough time to ride bicycles to Miami, you bunch of dumb ignorant wussies!”

Jackson smiled broadly at the Fox News camera, knowing that his message would soon be delivered. Shit, he wouldn’t mind arguing with Rush all day long if Fox permitted it. They weren’t going to get away anyways. None of them thought to take a yacht, and any boat worth stealing was already up the Mississippi River.

Sure enough, Fox played his response on the air. Jackson laughed as Rush and a bunch of Republican congressmen started yelling at their Fox camera. Lisa thankfully muted the TV, so all they heard was Lisa laughing hysterically on the couch, which Fox would probably air as well. They are all going to die, and Lisa found that funny.

Jackson happily watched Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, and Limbaugh go berserk on TV. All those years justifying whatever Bush did was now going to bite them in the ass. Republicans were finally going to suffer from promoting incompetence, cronyism, and ignorance.

Progressives believe you can’t have freedom without government (anarchy isn’t freedom), and conservatives believe you can’t have freedom with government. Conservatives believe larger government comes at the expense of individual freedom, while progressives believe effective government is the prerequisite for individual freedom. You cannot have individual rights without a government that punishes those who violate those rights. A market isn’t “free” without government regulations that ensure a level playing field. Individuals can only be free in a system that is fair -- how free were women and minorities when they couldn’t vote, hold elective office, or work in prosperous professions? A responsive government is not the enemy of freedom, but the prerequisite of freedom.

In the chaos this asteroid was likely to bring, conservatives were finally gonna get the small, weak government they say they have always wanted. And without government protection, the Haves were probably gonna lose their stuff to the armed, angry Have-nots.

35

If the world wasn’t going to end, this could have been fun, Lorena thought to herself as she maneuvered around another rock. She slammed the brakes and straightened the Suburban as she descended almost straight down another slope. Then she raced down a dry gully and up an embankment. Oddly, she was far more aggressive in the huge Suburban than she ever was on Lisa’s dirt bike. And she didn’t even have to get dirty.

But, no matter how fast she drove, Chava kept out-pacing her. It wasn’t a race. They were just trying to get home as quickly as possible. What was more humbling is that he drove the professor’s old F-150 hauling a flatbed trailer full of mattresses.

She couldn’t believe the faggot was out-driving her.

She rose over a hilltop that gave her a great view of Highway 19, the one-lane road with four lanes crawling north. Even using both shoulders, they still drove slower than the Mexicans flying past them on horseback.

“Hijo de su madre!” she yelped out loud as she skidded downhill. Chava materialized far to her right, so she inched her way towards him. Like war and sex, it was both exhilarating and exhausting. Well, if a space mountain wasn’t about to strike forty miles away on Kitt Peak, it would have been exhilarating.

Concentrating to avoid flipping over as she descended the slope, she nearly pissed herself when she heard a horn honk to her left. Startled, she turned her head to see Rance lift his motorcycle helmet visor up and smile that sexy smile of his.

“Morning, Mrs. J! You rob a pillow store?”

She laughed, despite the stress, because her car was full of hundreds of pillows. The professor ordered her to buy as many as possible and, like a good soldier, she did as she was told. The scared look in her father-in-law’s face was all the explanation she needed. And she did offer to do something useful, not knowing he would send her to fucking Tucson when every road was clogged by illegals fleeing death.

The entire vehicle was packed tight, up to the ceiling, including the passenger seat. So, yeah, it must have looked like she robbed a pillow store. Desperately trying to control her descent without rolling, she watched Rance laugh again, then fly past her on his dirt bike, as she slammed the brake.

God that fucker was hot. Really. Maybe it was true that men fantasize about celebrities while women fantasize about acquaintances because Lorena memorized how he looked in Speedos in their pool. He was just so much better looking than her husband ever was. That didn’t mean she regretted her choice of husband because Henry was really good to her.

But still. That fucker was hot.

Rance and Lisa were perfect together, which worried her, as she watched him fly past Chava, who immediately sped up. The dirt path finally reached a paved road she recognized. She floored it with glee, surprising herself by burning rubber for the first time in her life. But by the time she reached home, Chava had already backed up the trailer into the open garage. The boxes that filled the garage were gone. Rance and Lisa were making out like bandits, while a black fellow followed them with a camera.

Where the hell was the Landshark?

She noticed the camera swing on her, which made her feel underdressed. She entered her home, only to find her husband and his father both silently working on computers in the dining room.

“Mi amor, where’s your car?”

Jackson got up as soon as he saw her and enveloped her in his world famous bear hug. He sat her down as Lisa and Rance, followed closely by the cameraman, walked in.

“I lent it to four cameramen who got stuck here. The Landshark is the only car that can drive a thousand miles. A fifth cameraman took David’s dirt bike, carrying two gas cans so he can make it home to Apple Valley, California.

“Mi amor, I have bad news. David can’t pick us up. His heloplane is leaking. They can fix it at our base in Chugwater, but it will take several hours. We’re gonna have to ride it out here.”

Lorena stared at him in shock. For four months he worked around the clock to move 100 million people, spending tens of billions of dollars. Only to be stuck next door to Ground Zero? “Are you fucking kidding me?” she wanted to scream.

“What’s the worst case scenario?” she asked, very scared.

Uh, ummm, errr. “Worse case scenario? We end up in a better place than this,” he euphemistically put it.

“Better than Arizona?” Lisa joked, then shut up when both parents glared at her.

Jackson never felt stupider. He had failed in his primary mission, protecting his family. He wouldn’t be in this situation if he hadn’t talked to Cooper so long. They’d have left yesterday.

Hey…

“Cooper went to Butler’s place near Keystone Peak. Butler always flies there from L.A. I bet his Bell 430 is still there.”

“I could go,” Rance volunteered. “Butler lives just a few miles from that big water tank in town. It can carry ten people. On my dirt bike I could get there in an hour.”

This could work!

“Dad. What do you think?” Jackson asked.

“It’s better than anything I’ve got. If the helicopter isn’t there, he can be back here long before the impact.”

“I’ll go with him!” Lisa offered.

“No, if the Bell isn’t there, I’ll need him to bring Cooper here on the back of the dirt bike. I called, emailed, and sent Cooper a text message, but he may be out of range. His wife is freaking out. Rance, we have several full gas cans. Fill up your bike and take a can with you in case their gas station is out.”

“I’m on it.” Rance raced out with Lisa.

“And give him a gun,” Jackson yelled. “Not that .38.”

Once they left, Jackson turned to his wife. “I quit my job.”

Lorena look bewildered. “Which job would that be?”

“I resigned from the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. I no longer chair the party.”

Lorena laughed in relief. “You should have quit three months ago when you started moving, housing, and feeding one hundred million Democratic voters. I’m also glad you sold your fish farms. Just how many full time jobs do you need?”

A workaholic without a job, Jackson had no answer.

An hour later, Rance cursed himself for not bringing a soda. His ass hurt from humping so many rocks and he cut his leg on brush. Right through his favorite blue jeans. And he could not find the fucking helicopter.

Just when he convinced himself that it couldn’t be in the ravine, because unpredictable wind off the walls would make it a bitch to land and take off, he found the damn thing. Perched on a sled pushed by a dualie truck sat the Bell 430 in a lean-to shack, protected on three sides and above from regolith. All he had to do was move the truck forward so the rotors cleared the shack.

Hiding the Honda dirt bike, he quietly sneaked his way to the copter. He knew if he asked for permission that Butler would say no. Why the hell would he say yes? As for Governor Cooper? He preferred Hillary anyways. Obama was too much of a pussy, all that post-partisan talk about finding common ground and looking for bipartisan solutions. Fuck the wingers. Politics is war, not business. You don’t accommodate the other side, you make the other side accommodate you. And you punish them every time they don’t, painting them in the worst possible light. Republicans would oppose anything he proposed regardless of how much it benefited the country. Republicans always put party before country. That’s what made McCain’s campaign slogan so great.

Rance bet that Butler would keep it fully fueled, so all he needed to do was fly it to Green Valley, pick up his fiancée and her rich family, then save their lives by flying them to safety.

Out of breath, he reached the helicopter and opened the door. He smiled as he recognized the cockpit. It was even a newer model. Then an unseen pilot leaned forward from the rows of seats behind the cockpit and shot him in the gut.

Rance stared at the gun forever before the shock wore off enough to look at the hole in his stomach. It was such a tiny hole. He tried to plug it with his left index finger to reduce the bleeding. Then he fell on his back with a hard thud. He must have landed on a rock because something poked his lower back.

A cowboy stepped in front of him. At least, he had the boots and hat. He put his gun back in its shoulder holster.

“Shit, sorry,” he said almost sincerely. “I meant to get you in the chest. Those gutshot wounds take forever to die from.”

The fucker smiled as if this was fucking funny.

“Mr. Butler promised me a million dollars if I had to kill anyone to keep him alive, so I guess I should thank you.”

As the pilot turned to walk to the cabin a bullet cut his spine. Rance didn’t even remember pulling the Kimber .38 Super from the small of his back. Didn’t remember firing. He looked at Lisa’s gun in his hands with surprise. She liked it because it had so little recoil. He did remember Lisa loading it with CorBon 130-grain jacketed hollow point. God he loved that woman!

“Fuck! I can’t move my legs! I can’t move my fucking legs!” the cowboy cried, thrashing about in sagebrush.

“Ain’t so funny now, is it, motherfucker?”

“Fucker! I’m gonna kill you,” the cowboy promised.

“Really? What are you going to do? End my suffering sooner? There’s no doctors around, so I’m already dead.”

With that, Rance decided to kill the cowboy again. His gun was already pointed towards the helicopter’s fuel tank, so he shot until he saw fuel begin to leak. He put down the gun and opened his cell phone to say goodbye to Lisa, only to see that he was out of range of a cell tower. Not being able to say goodbye to Lisa really depressed him. He desperately wanted to say he was sorry. The thought of her dying because of him hurt more than the gunshot.

He heard the cowboy thrashing about trying to change position, groaning and cussing like crazy. In a moment they would both be in too much a world of hurt to do anything more than cry like babies. His father told him to stay in Fairbanks. But, no, he wanted to throw Lisa in Cari’s face, knowing it would piss her off.

He should have stayed faithful. Adultery killed him.

Several men raced from the cabin. The only one he recognized was Governor Cooper, the dumb fuck who didn’t answer email, phone calls, or text messages. And who apparently didn’t watch the news, read the Internet, or call his wife.

That Texas dickhead got him killed. The realization shook Rance from his growing stupor. He was never going to fuck Lisa because Cooper was an idiot. Rage possessed him. As Cooper ignored the wounded cowboy to fall to his knees by the leaking fuel tank, Rance thought he heard him cry. A Texan! Texans are only suppose to cry at weddings and movies. What a pussy!

Now completely without pity, Rance emptied the last two rounds into Cooper. The first smashed into his upper back, turning him around, and the second one apparently shot his dick off, because Cooper grabbed his crotch and began howling. Which was lousy shooting because Rance aimed for the guy’s head.

His other head, the one on his shoulders.

The satisfaction from hearing Cooper scream like a baby was a welcome respite from the growing agony. He laid back and thought of Lisa, who had the tightest skin of anyone he ever knew. She told him she would make him happy, and he believed her.

Bathed in memories of the woman he loved, someone picked up the cowboy’s revolver and emptied it into him.

36

When Lisa heard her father scream invectives into the phone, her knee-jerk reaction was to either run to him or away from him. But, being Lisa, she spied on him from the hallway.

“No, you wait just a damn minute. The only way I can agree is if you make sure I survive. Only if I survive do you get paid. Yeah? Well fuck you. too, you damn extortionist. I own a thousand earthmovers. I don’t need you. You’re only losing warheads you can’t sell, while you’ll make a mint if I survive. With three billion people dead and another billion homeless, your biggest worry is getting arrested? I could have turned you in years ago. I even gave you a free asteroid shelter! Where would you have stored your ammo if it wasn’t for me? The feds would have found out, you ungrateful bastard. Fuck it! I’ll just kick out your family from their shed in Canada and make sure my surviving family hunts you down like a rabid dog. You sure? You’re not gonna renege again? Yeah, well, you better get it done before the main body’s tail finishes impacting.”

He listened a moment, pacing loudly.

“Uh-huh. Listen, just in case you fuck me, I’m gonna tell my cousin in charge of that survival camp to kill your family if I don’t survive. Yeah? You better program it right. And make sure you do my home with airbursts, motherfucker, airbursts.”

The loud silence as he closed the phone dominated the room. Lisa didn’t know whether to silently disappear or rush to reassure him. Then she heard her grandfather speak.

“Think he’ll follow through?”

“Yeah,” she heard her father reply, totally cool, calm, and collected, his anger apparently manufactured. “For a genius, that guy’s a fucking idiot. For a few billion, he’d sacrifice his wife and kids. Still, I’ll give David a heads up.”

Pissed at having been misled, Lisa marched into the master bedroom to demand to know what the hell was going on. Father and son exchanged glances, then her father shrugged.

“Honey,” her father said in his birds-and-the-bees voice, “the underground shed protects us from getting cooked by the heat, swatted by the pressure blast, and crushed by the impact itself. It doesn’t, unfortunately, save us from getting buried under hundreds of feet of regolith.”

“But regolith is just loose dirt. You have hundreds of bulldozers.”

“Except there will probably be a lot of dust and ash in the air. Dust is bad enough, but if the Yellowstone super-volcano blows, much less the volcanoes in Washington, then that ash will shut down the engines, killing or stranding the crews. Our rescue teams will themselves need rescue. We will become the modern equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits.”

“Why can’t we just wait a few day for the ash to settle? We have enough food and water. What’s the problem?”

“Oxygen. The ash may take weeks to fall. And the more people we have, the quicker we run out.”

“Oh, by the way, Director Kowalski and his very pregnant wife just arrived from Kitt Peak.”

“You see what I mean? It could take weeks to move that much dirt. If they can find us in the first place since Arizona may look like the surface of Mars.”

We’re gonna die? she thought to herself. After all we did for so many other people? That can’t be right.

“So what the hell are you geniuses doing about this?”

Her father, not liking her tone, stepped closer to tower over her.

“Several years ago I invested in a tiny defense start-up that made gamma-ray warheads, which have one thousand times the power of conventional explosives, but, if exploded correctly, emit no radioactivity like nukes. Rumsfeld gave this company billions. The neo-cons love gamma-rays.

“Anyways, he’s going to send a drone from his headquarters in Las Vegas to detonate a gamma-ray just above us to blow away the regolith. GPS may not work, but he has the exact latitude and longitude of our garage. If necessary, the drone will detonate another two warheads. So even if we are buried a thousand feet deep, three air bursts should uncover us.”

“All righty, then.” Lisa scrutinized their faces. “So what’s the catch?” Because there is always a catch.

The men exchanged a long look.

“Well, I for one never imagined calling artillery on my own home,” grandpa answered. “The concrete floor in the garage will probably melt. Like the meteorite impact itself, it’s gonna feel like King Kong is rattling us in a metal shoebox.”

“But you’re not gonna kill us?” Lisa asked them, which immediately made them squirm. It only now dawned on her that she had never seen them squirm before.

“We’re threading the needle as best we can.”

Well, that was less comforting than learning that your own father was going to explode three micro-nukes on you.

“Then there are the legal issues. Which is why I took this call away from the cameras. We obviously don’t have permission, which is why the owner wants me to buy him out, for many times what the company is worth. I asked the guy to explode the gamma-rays as soon as possible after the main body impacts so that the military’s detection system will dismiss them as meteorites. They will even produce a meteorite-like crater. It wouldn’t fool a professional, but not even a professional would guess the truth.”

“So we’re good then?”

Lisa desperately needed to know they were going to survive. She’s getting married this summer, for Christ’s sake!

“Unless the drone gets smacked down in flight by falling regolith. Or if it misses us and blows up our neighbors. Or unless ash gums up its engine. Or if the laser ranger doesn’t work and it explodes on the ground.”

“But, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?” Lisa asked sarcastically. “So you’re gonna pay this jerk a few billion just to un-bury us?”

“No. He actually has a busy morning bombing several states and a foreign country. The impact is going to bury the Southwest under hundreds of feet of regolith for several hundred miles in every direction. From San Diego through Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, over Las Vegas and Albuquerque, all the way to the middle of Texas. Everything between San Diego, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Denver and San Antonio will be wasteland, including nearly all of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. And because you can’t build on loose dirt, a million square kilometers will basically be uninhabitable. To rebuild highways, I need to blast corridors down to solid bedrock from California through Arizona and New Mexico to Texas.

“I have written agreements with those governors to use high explosives to uncover Highways 8 and 10. They just have no idea we’re gonna use gamma-rays. California gave me a contract to repave Highways 8 from San Diego to Yuma. Arizona will let me continue on the 8 until it hits the 10, and New Mexico and Texas will let me rebuild the 10 all the way to Houston. It’s about 1500 miles and roughly parallels the Mexican border.

“They agreed because I will do it out of my own pocket, and their states only have to pay me the interest every quarter and defer the principal for a decade. And in return I have permission to put a high speed maglev railway in the middle of the freeway, which ensures that animals and idiots don’t walk onto my tracks. Even better, I told them that the impact and regolith may alter the terrain, so they agreed to indemnify me if I have to modify the highways. That means I can straighten and level them out as much as possible so that my maglevs can go as fast as possible. With gamma-rays, I can go through hills instead of around them.

“I may not have mentioned this, but I am accumulating a majority share of the four major railroads, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, BNSF, and CSX, to get their land and right-of-ways. Union Pacific is the largest landowner west of the Mississippi, other than the federal government itself.

“What I really want to do is get the states to pay me to rebuild the 10 highway the 2500 miles from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida, then up the I-95 to Maine, and from San Diego up the 101 or Route 1 to Seattle. Regolith, earthquakes, and mega-tsunamis are almost certainly going to destroy those freeways. They have to be rebuilt, and I’ll do it on credit, in exchange for them letting me straighten and level them out, and put my railway in the center. They won’t pay for the maglev railway itself, but my costs will be much less if I’m constructing both the highway and railway at the same time. Naturally, I’ll cost-shift as much as I can. Their freeways won’t be as congested if people can take a fast train, or suffer from as much air pollution. L.A. to San Francisco takes 12 hours by car, but only a few hours by fast rail. I also want to build the maglev on railway land straight north from Houston through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, to the Dakotas, and eventually from Seattle and Portland to Boston and New York.”

“That’s gonna cost hundreds of billions. How are you going to get a return on your investment?” his father asked.

“After the impact, I’ll be buying lots of manufacturing, retail, metal workers, energy, construction, and distribution companies. I’ve already bought airliners, FedEx, and Uhaul. I plan on accumulating a majority share of big retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, AutoZone, Petsmart, and defense contractors. If I get a friendly president in office, I’ll completely rebuild the military using amorphous metal vehicles, ships, and aircraft since I hope to dominate civilian auto making, shipbuilding, and aircraft making anyways. The military and the government would be huge customers of a fast maglev network. In Europe, airline traffic fell in half as they finished fast rail service between major cities. Plus, I’ll string superconducting cable to transmit my clean energy electricity and fiber optic if I can get control over Butler’s OmniNet communications company.

“But I’m also building the maglev north to get my hands on the 1.5 trillion barrels of shale oil in the Green River basin where Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming meet. That’s more than the entire Middle fucking East. At $100 a barrel, that’s $1.5 quadrillion dollars. 70% of it lies on federal land, so I need Cooper to win, although I bought as much of the private and commercial land as possible this past month.

“Electrical grids now are organized by regions, and today’s technology makes it difficult to move bulk electricity between regions. By laying second generation superconducting cable along these freeways and railway land, I could conceivable provide solar, wind, and geothermal power to most of the country. Owning all that railroad land also gives me millions of locations to install solar thermal towers and industrial windmills. Diamond drill bits set in amorphous metal makes deep geothermal suddenly feasible across the country. And I’ll cover every roof with organic solar. Most of America’s power plants will be severely damaged by the impact, so if powering America is gonna cost a few hundred billion, we may as well spend it on clean energy instead of the usual coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. A decade from now I could provide most of America’s power.”

The professor did not look convinced.

“Arthur has thousands of gamma-ray warheads that he cannot sell. Palin won’t buy them because I’m a big minority shareholder. So I am buying the company to use drones to blast a corridor from the Gulf of Santa Clara, Mexico, the northernmost part of the Sea of Cortez, north to the Nevada border, and from Yuma west along Highway 8 to San Diego. From Yuma going east he will follow Highway 8 until it turns into the 10 and blast all the way to Texas. The drones are already being prepped in asteroid shelters in San Diego, Las Vegas, and San Antonio.

“And since there will only be one road or highway through this regolith, I bought all the large tracks of land near it and near Gila’s tributaries, the Verde, Agua Fria, Salt, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Pedro. Thank God Ted Turner died, cuz his estate sold me almost everything he owned, a couple million acres, or about 2% of Arizona

“The Colorado and Gila rivers dry up only because we divert most of their volume to irrigation. Just one canal to California has more volume than New York’s Hudson River. With the Southwest depopulated and the dams destroyed, they will flow once again. Regolith is just loose dirt, so it shouldn’t change the course of the rivers and tributaries.

“Arthur is going to do more than clear the highway. He is going to blast away the regolith so I can build entire cities. Mexico’s Santa Clara will be my first big city in order to service the port. The gulf there is three kilometers deep. The Baja California Peninsula will protect Santa Clara from mega-tsunamis. With tsunamis destroying the west coast, Santa Clara will be the only port within a couple thousand miles for several years.

“I bought a large track of land in California just south of Yuma and Highway 8, where the Gila River used to flow into the Colorado. I not only want to build luxury homes, golf courses, and fancy restaurants along the Colorado there, but divert water into canals and man-made lakes to maximize the riverfront. With the coast a disaster area, a big river city should not just keep California’s senators Democratic, but receptive to my concerns.

“I’ll build another city on land I bought in Nevada, north of Needles, where Nevada, Arizona, and California intersect. Yuma will be the third river city, one in each state, and Santa Clara, Mexico, the fourth. I bought several large tracks of land north and south of Yuma, and north and south of where the Gila River should flow again into the Colorado. A drone from Vegas will clear land for all four cities.”

“America is likely to lose a quarter of its population. I expect the impact to kill 50 to 100 million Americans. Where you gonna get people to live in all these cities?” his father wanted to know.

Jackson just laughed. “Ah, hell, I have the opposite problem: how am I gonna transport, feed, and house 150 million Americans before they starve or freeze to death?”

“150 million?” Lisa asked. “I thought it was 100.”

“Oh, I am sheltering about 50 millions reliable Democratic voters, and another 50 million of their spouses and children, but another 50 million or so paid several thousand each to be flown to my survival camps in Australia, Patagonia, and Scandinavia. I deliberately kept my Democratic voters close by giving them free transportation, food, and shelter in northern Canada and Alaska, while sending everyone else far away. Since most of their homes will be destroyed, the question becomes, where the hell do I put them all? Every city will be reduced to rubble. And since I will be spending billions keeping them alive, how can I get something out of it?

“Well, everyone expects Democrats to lose the senate since we have to defend 25 seats, compared to only 10 Republican seats. So I pre-positioned heavy construction equipment, huge tents, and bulk food in my amorphous metal hangers in each of those states: Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Tennessee. I plan to dismantle the thousands of big hangers I still have and re-assemble them to house millions of loyal voters. If I only transport those who agree to vote my way, I can not only pick up all ten Republican seats, but a bunch of the 25 Democratic ones by having a loyalist beat them in a primary.

“Most Democrats took my offer and fled north, most independents paid me for shelter overseas, yet most Republicans stayed home because I wouldn’t shelter them for any price, and because Palin, Fox News, and conservative pundits ridiculed those who left, accusing them of abandoning America. Many of those Republicans are going to die, most of those independents won’t be back before November unless they agree to vote a straight Democratic ticket, and the first Democrats I bring back will promise to vote for my primary candidates. So I could have up to 35 senators who owe me their jobs. That may not seem like much, but I should get something for my time and money.

“Long term, I plan to build other clean energy cities in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, as well as Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming to work on shale oil. Each state should be lightly populated after getting buried by the impact, so just a few hundred thousand voters in each could determine their representatives. Salt Lake City is only 800 miles from Kitt Peak, so it’s gonna get hit hard, and 80% of Utah’s population lives there. 85% of Nevada’s three million residents live in or near Las Vegas, which is less than 500 miles from Ground Zero and unlikely to survive. Much of California and Texas live near the coast, so a million voters there could determine their senators.

“If I can later extend things to Idaho and Montana, two more lightly populated states, I could have as many as 30 senators and nearly a hundred congressmen. With Oregon and Washington, that means the entire west would be solidly blue. That much political support could shave off years of our space projects.”

Jackson sounded finished, but just as the professor was about to criticize him, Lisa cut him off.

“Wait! He’s holding something back.”

Which unnerved Jackson. Was he that obvious? He checked the hallway like a teenager, then closed the door.

“The government doesn’t know this, but Arthur wanted to find out how large these gamma-ray warheads scaled up. So he kept building bigger and bigger ones. He was suppose to keep them under one kiloton, but…” Jackson looked away from his father. “What he did wasn’t even illegal. His contract with the military simply specified nothing over one kiloton. But if word got out, boy, it would become illegal in a heartbeat, and the government sure as hell would take them away. So Arthur wants to sell his company to wash himself of liability, but he has a few dozen warheads as big as five kilotons. If a terrorist stole one, he could obliterate an entire American city. But decommissioning them is tricky, dangerous, and expensive.”

Jackson coughed uncomfortably.

“Anyways, Arthur is going to drop them where I want to build my river and shale oil cities. The Plain States and Texas won’t be buried under enough regolith to justify this. The small ones are great for clearing freeways, but not enough for an entire city. He’s never even been able to test the 5-toners, but an optimum airburst shouldn’t leave much of a crater according to his computer models.

“Any-hoot, by sunrise, they will have dropped a few dozen big bombs to clear land to build my cities, and several thousand smaller ones to clear the roads and highways, so that my construction crews can start road building. Without the gamma rays, it would take decades to build across 1500 miles of deep regolith.”

The professor snorted in disgust at this end-justifying-the-means reasoning, but Lisa really liked it. What balls! Her dad is basically going to nuke California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Mexico, a foreign fucking country. No wonder he looked so stressed out. Outstanding!

37

After having sex, showering, and sleeping, Jackson and Lorena went downstairs only to find Lisa sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, staring at her cell phone. After half a day, Rance would have called or returned if he could. Which meant he was already dead, or would soon be. Lisa wanted to go look for him, even threw a hissy fit for the cameras, but her dirt bike had a busted axle from doing too many high jumps. So she sat depressed, without talking or moving. It was so un-Lisa-like. Lorena silently embraced her til Lisa started crying uncontrollably.

Jackson couldn’t believe both of his kids were widowed while still teenagers. Feeling useless, he looked for Chucha. Lost in thought, he reached the side yard to find the dog missing.

“Chucha!” he yelled impatiently.

Nothing. Jackson had a large side yard, with a line of orange trees along the fence that were finally producing. By the garage, however, it was pretty messed up from the heavy equipment that dug out the hole that he put his two sheds in. Good thing his paranoia made him put the sheds in, too, because otherwise he, his wife, father, and daughter would soon die. They may still die, but possible death still beat certain death. He climbed the mound of dirt that used to be under his garage and instantly saw the hole in the wooden fence, where a bulldozer must have backed into it. Jackson deflated like a balloon.

Chucha escaped. Jackson no longer had body odor.

Suddenly frantic because he really liked that fucking mutt, he called him over and over, down the driveway and into the street. He never expected to care this much.

“Goodbye, Chucha,” he finally said to his favorite pet.

Jackson descended the ladder to his basement for perhaps the last time, helmet and neck supporter in hand. He would soon discover if the shed was his salvation or his coffin.

The professor had already started lecturing in front of the porta-potty between the two sheds. The professor didn’t just speak, he lectured, the tone of his voice telling his students to pay fucking attention because they may soon be tested on it. Everyone packed into the tight space forced Jackson to stay on the ladder. Chava stood on a box to film their last moments for posterity. What is it with kids, and their need to record everything?

“So down in here, unlike everyone else in the Southwest, we don’t need to worry about the heat cooking the surface, the pressure wave swatting everything away, the sonic boom blasting ear drums, the blinding light burning eyes, or even the regolith since my grandson is going to get us out. Thank God my son had the sense to bury his amorphous metal asteroid shelters down here instead of used shipping containers because they would probably have collapsed under the weight of thousands of tons of regolith. Our door is not 100% airtight, so everyone must wear helmets and ear plugs or risk their ear drums exploding.

“The nearby impact is going to make solid rock behave like a pebble thrown into a pond. The land will rise up, then fall back down like a blanket when making a bed. So we are going to be thrown up hard into the ceiling, then hard against the far wall, before dropping fast to the floor again. Because a sizable trail follows the main body, we may have more than one earthquake, so stay flat between the mattresses, don’t sit up, and try to sleep.”

Someone snorted in derision, and when the professor looked up, Jackson discovered with surprise that it was him.

“To maximize the likelihood that we survive this threat, we have stacked mattresses nearly to the ceiling, only allowing room for us to squeeze flat into the middle of the stack. We will face towards Ground Zero, like the bow of a ship towards a wave. The far wall is lined with mattresses so we are less likely to break our legs or sprain our ankles. By laying flat, with our arms and legs spread out, we actually will not be thrown up or down very much. The entire shed will be thrown, sure, but within the shed there just isn’t much space. Imagine a shoebox with one pack of cigarettes versus a shoebox packed tight with cigarette packs. It matters less how much the shed moves than how far we are thrown within the shed. We have just a foot of space along the wall so we can get to the door after all this is over. And, one way or another, it will be over soon.

“To avoid breaking our necks or crushing our heads, we will wear helmets and neck supports while laying horizontal. To avoid twisting ankles, everyone is wearing hiking boots with ankle supports. Our guests can thank Chava for going to Tucson to buy them boots, helmets, and neck supports.

“Everything in the storage shed is packed as tight as possible. No one can stay in there because its impossible to tell what stuff will move, despite hundreds of pillows, sheets, curtains, towels, and clothes. Anyone staying there could be smacked alongside the head by a canister of compressed gas.”

“Dr. Jackson, what are our odds?” the white cameraman asked nervously from behind his camera.

“I’d say 50-50, but it’s possible to scare yourself to death, or the stress triggering a heart attack. Which is why I gave each of you a bottle of our best wine,” he said, taking another swig from his own half empty bottle.

“This sheets da bomb!” called out Lisa drunkenly, recklessly waving her empty Chateau Petrus around, until her mother impatiently took it away.

“You just drank $10,000 worth of wine, young lady!”

“Worth every penny!” her daughter replied, swaying like a skyscraper in an earthquake. “We got any million dollar bottles? My fiancée is dead and I want to mourn him.”

Which shut her mother up.

“Listen carefully,” the professor continued. “Your neck support may not help much if your neck muscles are all tensed up. I know this won’t be easy, but the more relaxed you are, the more likely you will survive this. The more stressed out you are, the more likely you’ll have a heart attack or brain embolism.”

“Emblowism!” repeated his drunk granddaughter.

“We have 15 minutes. I hope you all took my advice and emailed your last will and testament to your loved ones and said goodbye to everyone who will miss you. If you use Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace, then let your friends and family know where you are. You should prepare yourself by coming to terms with your life, the good and the bad. Forgive those who did you wrong, and pray for forgiveness for those you did wrong.”

The professor glanced up at his son hanging on the ladder to see if he wanted to add anything.

“Hey, don’t look at me!” Jackson protested half-jokingly. “I’m sorry I crashed your pickup, but I was only 12. Give it a rest, already, you hater.”

The professor shook his head, disappointed that his son chose to joke in such a serious moment. Although he was still pissed about losing his favorite quarter ton truck.

“Mom, I took the Landshark to Vegas with Rance on New Year’s Eve,” Lisa confessed, bordering on tears. “Y’all blessed the marriage, I had my ring, and I couldn’t wait til summer, so I forged a letter from you guys.”

“You got married without me?” her mother demanded.

“We never got there.” Now she was in tears. “A cop pulled us over and gave me a ticket for going 89. Which was cool since I was going 160 when I passed him. I thought he was going to impound the car.”

“Why didn’t he?” his father asked, correctly assuming she drove so fast because she needed to get laid. Teenagers act like they have more hormones than neurons.

“He said a billion people were going to die because you weren’t president, and arresting me would only kill more people by distracting you.”

Well, now. That was the best damn compliment that anyone, anywhere, ever gave him. Jackson liked this cop.

“But he still gave you a ticket.”

“He said bad behavior shouldn’t be rewarded. Then he followed us home.”

Wow! Jackson really liked this cop.

“I can’t believe you were going to get married without me,” Lorena said, still furious.

“I can’t believe I’m gonna die a virgin!” Lisa retorted angrily. “And it’s all your fault, mother! All that guilt and shame you threw on me when you weren’t even a virgin when you got married. I can’t believe you demand of me what you yourself could not do. You were pregnant and unmarried when you turned 16. How dare you! How fucking dare you!”

Damn! Lisa dropped the F-bomb on her own mama.

“I’ll have you know that I’ve only been with one man my entire life!” Lorena screamed back.

“And when I find the bastard,” Jackson joked, making a fist to punch the palm of his other hand. “For the record, I’m the best she’s ever had.”

Well, that didn’t ease the tension, and nobody but the millions of web viewers wanted to hear about their sex life. Despite her black belt, Lisa was incapable of hitting her mother. Her father, sure, but not her mother, but Lorena had no qualms smacking her kids if they disrespected her. Even David, who infamously kicked the shit out of the state cage fighting champion, preferred to run than fight his mother.

Jackson squeezed into the bodies below him to hold back Lisa while his father calmed Lorena down. He was tempted to tell Lisa that they were keeping her from fucking her fiancée because he cheated on her with astonishing regularity. A private investigator documented his infidelity in exhaustive detail. He even hid a tiny camera in his bedroom that sent back video over a Wi-Fi signal. Which is how he found out that Lisa was giving the guy blow jobs. Sometimes twice a day. Which made him feel older than Methuselah.

“The Landshark can really go 160?” he instead asked.

“Faster!” his daughter said, face flush with liquor.

“You really a virgin?” her father asked astonished.

Lisa turned around furious and Jackson was suddenly glad that Lorena had taken away her bottle. Jackson quickly climbed the ladder so she didn’t kick his ass since he was incapable of hitting her back. Which annoyed him for years.

“Mi amor,” Jackson said to his wife to stop Lisa from beating him up. “Remember when I proposed marriage and you pointed out that there were better looking women out there, so I said I wasn’t marrying you because you were the most beautiful woman in the world?”

Lorena turned shock-white. Mierda, here it comes.

“I lied,” Jackson boasted with a grand smile, meaning he did marry her because she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Lorena, however, waited for the other shoe to drop, and Jackson realized he was being too clever for his own good. Again.

“When you agreed to marry me, you made me promise only one thing. You said you would always stand by me as long as I remained yours, only yours, and yours forever.”

Lorena looked like someone bleached her face. She didn’t like where this was heading. Waiting for death was bad enough.

“Well, except for drinking games when I drank water while you got drunk off of aguardiente, I have never cheated on you. Taken advantage of you, then gotten you drunk, yes, but I have never broken my promise. Since the day we became novios, I swear on the lives of our children, I have been faithfully yours, only yours, and I will be only yours forever, so help me God. Til death do us part.”

Statue-like, his wife reacted as if he just quoted Shakespeare in Cantonese. Not knowing how to respond, she started gulping her wine down like Lisa.

“But you need to understand something,” he ominously continued rather than leave well enough alone. “It was easy! It’s not that I never had opportunities. I just never had temptation. You promised to take care of me, and you kept your promise. If we are going to die soon, I want you to know that I kept my promise as well.”

Half expecting a shoe to drop, Lorena burst into tears. She looked ready to collapse. Jackson quickly dropped down next to her, picked her up, and gave her one of his bear hugs. She weighed so little that he could carry her forever.

“Anyone else have anything to get off their chest?” the professor asked. “Before you air your laundry, however, please remember that we may just survive this mess and everything is being recorded. So speak now or forever hold your piece.”

“Dad,” Lisa mumbled. “Chava isn’t gay.”

“What the hell? I ain’t gay!” the flamboyantly good looking guy with colorful clothes, an obsession with his appearance, and hair fucked up just like kids like it insisted.

“I just said that,” Lisa answered reasonably.

“What do you mean, he isn’t gay?” her father demanded.

“You told your father I was gay?” Chava looked horrified.

“Well,” Lisa considered, “not exactly. I told him you weren’t interested in girls so he would hire you as his personal blogger and tech guy. If he thought you were straight, you couldn’t spend so much time alone with me.”

“So you told him I was gay?”

“No,” Lisa corrected him. “I told him you weren’t interested in girls, which was true. How long since Stacy left you? How long since you’ve had a girlfriend? Since you got laid? Not counting the hookers in Mexicali.”

“I’m going to school full time and working full time. You know how I obsess over politics. I don’t have the time or money to subsidize the materialistic lifestyle of some superficial bitch.”

“Lucy liked you, but you didn’t ask her out.”

“She’s a fricking model!” Chava really couldn’t believe this. “She drives a Ferrari, her brother plays professional football, and her parents are loaded. They’re like a talented version of the Kardasians. She’s totally smoking hot! Way out of my league.”

“I once overheard some guys say Lorena was smoking, so I lectured her on the dangers of cigarettes,” Jackson joked to liven up the dead silence and, apparently, show why he wasn’t a comedian.

“Yet Lucy still wanted to go out with you.” Lisa insisted.

“You never told me that,” Chava argued.

“Dude, she listened to you babble about politics for frickin’ hours, and it’s not because you’re so brilliant.”

“So you thought I was gay?” Chava asked Jackson.

“You think you could otherwise sleep over when I’m not home? And you do look in the mirror a lot. And wear a lot of jewelry for a guy who isn’t a rapper. And flashy clothes. And hair gel. And your Volkswagen Beetle is a little gay. And you like to say an entire sentence as if it’s a single word. Do-you-hear-what-I’m-saying? Do-you-know-what-I-mean? Wha-sup-wi-dat? But, for what it’s worth, I trust you more than I trust her.”

Well, fuck, Chava didn’t know what to make of that. All this time his boss thought he was gay?

“Don’t worry, dad. The faggot never tried anything.”

Lisa sounded disappointed, which Jackson didn’t like.

“Your boyfriend threatened to kick my ass if I tried anything!” Chava said in defense. “He threw me up against your bedroom wall while you were taking a shower.”

“For real?” Lisa seemed pleased. “When?”

“Right after the boob job.”

Lisa knew instantly what that meant. “Rance caught you checking me out! Admit it.”

“You were throwing them,” meaning her new titties, “into everyone’s faces. I’d have to be blind not to notice.”

That, too, pleased her. You didn’t go through fucking surgery to get big tits to go unnoticed. Besides, just because a girl doesn’t want to fuck you does not mean that she doesn’t want you to fuck her. Girls may be simple, but women are fucking complicated.

“Kids, kids,” the professor interrupted them. “As important as these things are in the big scheme of things, a few billion people are about to die, and maybe humanity itself. We may face a nuclear winter that lasts for centuries. The world may end with a bang rather than a whimper after all. So may I continue?”

“The world is going to end on a Monday?” Lisa asked.

“One last thing. We are all scared. Please do not cry, lose control, or fall apart. I can’t stand basket cases.” The professor looked directly at the guests. The pregnant lady was already whispering hysterically to herself. “The last thing I want to do in life is die well. Dying is literally the ultimate experience. If life is a school, then death is the final exam. As Montaigne put it, it takes greater moral courage to die well than live well. So don’t fuck it up by whining. Please don’t make me knock you the fuck out. Life is hard, not fair. These are the cards we have been dealt. All you can do is play them as best you can. Complaining won’t make you feel better and it will really piss me off. Any questions?”

The professor glared at Lisa who wisely held her tongue. No one seemed to doubt that a thin, 70 year old great-grandfather could kick their asses. Chava wasn’t drinking his bottle, so Lisa borrowed and downed it before her mother could take it away.

“Is everyone ready for the Great Perhaps?”

“Maybe,” Lisa answered.

“All right, then,” the professor said, pleased to end his last lecture. Months of work was about to be judged by Mother Nature, who does not grade on a fucking curve. “I’d like to say a group prayer to thank God for all of his blessings. Feel free to add your own, then I want to lead you in some stretching and relaxation exercises because the slower you breathe, the faster time will pass.”

Lisa unexpectedly burped loudly.

“I bet $20 that Lisa pees herself,” Jackson offered.

“You’re on, man!” Lisa roared back.

38

The trillion-ton space mountain spinned on its long axis like a football going long, while leaving an exhaust of dirt, gas, and rock thousands of miles behind it. While most asteroids turn head over tail several times a day, this one spun several times as fast, but never head over tail. The Sun boiled the hydrogen off its head, leaving mostly hard rock. Asteroid means “starlike” while disaster means “bad star”, so it should not be surprising that an asteroid would cause so much damage.

Beyond it followed thousands of boulders, millions of rocks, and billions of pebbles, mostly hidden inside a cloud of dust and gas. It would have been beautiful if it didn’t threaten to kill several billion people. Other asteroid “farts” trailed this one, like the white lines of a one-lane road at night. Because Earth travels 2.5 million kilometers every day, most of them would not intercept the planet this orbit. From Earth, the debris made the Sun look like it had bad acne.

The slingshot around the Sun gave it a big burst of speed. Because space is a vacuum, nothing slowed it down. Now, with its beautiful blue-and-white target tantalizing close, the Rock increased speed, firing off the largest fart yet. Much of that exhaust would soon bitch-slap the Moon, adding a few thousand more craters to the millions it already had, while the rest would pound Earth. While the meteorite that exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago had a similar mass as the swarm, this one approached Earth nearly twice as fast.

In just three seconds it punched through Earth’s atmosphere like a brick thrown into a bucket of water. A white-hot ball briefly shined several times brighter than the Sun, turning night into day, and blinding anyone dumb enough to look at it. The afterglow from atmospheric heat transfer could be seen around the world, just like Europeans could read newspapers at midnight after the 1908 Tunguska airburst several thousand miles away in Siberia. The friction from so much mass pushing aside so much air heated up the stratosphere and generated an ear-drum-popping pressure wave that pounded everything below it. Surface water boiled into steam while dry forests burst into flames.

It squashed Kitt Peak and buried itself within the mountain in just a blink of the eye, expanding down and out at several miles per second. The mountain itself turned into a liquid, like a fat guy getting stomach punched. A big zit grew in the center of the crater, only to collapse upon itself, just like the upper walls did all around the rim. The nearly perfect circle that swallowed Kitt Peak became 25 kilometers deep and nearly 100 wide, surrounded by a mountain range to its southwest and relatively flat desert to its northeast. The rim rose several thousand feet high and a few hundred feet wide. A second after the impact the asteroid itself vaporized, either painting the inside of the still-growing crater or shooting hundreds of miles into the sky. Asteroid-dust would soon blanket the planet like cocaine traces on a Benjamin.

The pressure wave pulverized Tucson, before broiling it at temperatures that melted steel and cement. The heat exploded the gas tanks of the thousands of vehicles fleeing up the freeways, the mother of all IED’s. The land itself rose dozens of feet like a ripple in a pond before collapsing as rock temporarily behaved like a fluid. Millions of people in Maricopa County were thrown against their ceilings, then fell hard to the floors before being buried by their roofs and walls. Then the impact buried Tucson, Phoenix, and Green Valley a thousand feet deep in regolith, totally obliterating them from the surface of the planet. It would be easier to find a needle in a haystack than Tucson under a mountain’s worth of earth.

The explosion was many times greater than all the nuclear weapons possessed in the world. A plume of superheated gases, dirt and vaporized rock shot up and outward in a mushroom cloud, picking up and throwing trillions of tons of earth into the atmosphere. Pulverized limestone rocks turned into carbon dioxide gas that billowed upward. For the second time in seconds, something alien roughly pushed aside many cubic miles of atmosphere, triggering another pressure wave that cooked thousands of square miles of Earth’s surface to thousands of degrees. Nothing on the surface survived. Even cockroaches, which can tolerate a million RAMs of radiation, roasted like the people around them.

Of the 100,000 cubic kilometers of earth that the main body excavated, most fell within a thousand miles. Phoenix, continuously inhabited for 1500 years, was instantly depopulated at a cost of a million lives. Biosphere 2 became uninhabitable too. Paradise Valley was a hell hole, Tombstone a graveyard. Ironically, the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona got buried by an alien rock. Finding Surprise, Arizona, northeast of Phoenix, would now be surprising. The largest stand of Ponderosa pine in the United States burned briefly before getting toss like toothpicks by a pressure wave thousands of times greater than the one that devastated Hiroshima.

Ejecta covered Arizona, New Mexico, northern Mexico, eastern California, western Texas, and southern Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The Sonoran Desert covers 100,000 square miles in America and Mexico, and regolith basically buried it all. Around 10%, or 10,000 cubic kilometers, however, attained suborbital ballistic trajectories and traveled several thousand or more miles to strike Asia, Africa, and Europe. And a few thousand cubic kilometers reached orbit, sparking a global meteor shower that blanketed the planet with Arizona.

The impact’s kinetic energy rippled as a deafening shock wave through air, land, and water, triggering earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes. The thousands of people fleeing on the freeways were first blinded, then deafened before the impact squashed, burned, and/or vaporized them. An earthquake hundreds of times stronger than anything ever recorded would soon be felt worldwide, messing up every animal, from ants to birds to elephants, that used Earth’s electromagnetic field to navigate. Every earthquake California would have had over the next millennium took place all at once, collapsing buildings and sparking urban infernos. On the bright side, California would not have another major earthquake for centuries.

Volcanoes in Alaska, Iceland, and Washington State exploded, sending billions of tons of smoke, soot, and ash towards Europe. This kept European aircraft grounded for weeks since ash is nearly invisible to a pilot, hard to detect on radar when spread out, and re-solidifies inside jet engines, shutting them down.

The sonic boom deafened everyone above ground within a few thousand miles. Racing out from Ground Zero at eighteen miles per second, it compressed the air before it into an expanding wall of fire. It lifted up everything above hard bedrock -- like Tucson and Phoenix-- and threw it hard. Entire mountains crumbled and collapsed before being buried and disfigured. The Chiricahuas, Tucson, Santa Catalina, Santa Rita, Rincon, Santa Cruz, McDowell, White Tank, Superstition, Phoenix, and the South Mountains shook like sand castles that stripped them of height and weight. The doomsday fools celebrating on top of Humphreys Peak, at 12,633 feet the highest point in Arizona, were smacked, burned, and blown, before the peak lost a few thousand feet of altitude. The vaporized remains of millions of people would be blown to kingdom come for the survivors to later inhale.

Several seconds after impact, the gaseous plume punctured the cold, hard vacuum of space, destroying precious ozone. It quickly grew thousands of miles across, the mother of all burps, as if Earth was a freezer that sprung a leak. Its outer shell froze into smooth ice crystals which fell into orbit like hail freezing over. Millions of cubic kilometers of vaporized seawater filled the skies. A cloud of gases larger than the planet engulfed Earth. From the Moon it must have looked like Earth swallowed a smoke grenade.

Over the next few hours, falling dust, dirt, and rock turned the blue sky blood red. Gravity pulled the trillions of tons of dirt and molten rock back to Earth with a vengeance. Friction from falling at several miles per second heated up the atmosphere around the globe. The fire in the sky radiated down, cooking the surface and boiling surface water into steam. The billions of fools who ignored expert advice to watch the meteor shower outdoors cooked like kabobs. The molten rocks started forest fires and burned billions of homes. And the people in them.

The meteors and ejecta broiled the atmosphere, forming nitric acid which mixed with water vapor to fall as acid rain. Sulfur from vaporized rocks and water vapor baked in the atmospheric oven to form giant clouds of sulfuric acid that circled the Earth, blocking sunlight like on Venus. The planet would be cold for years until the sudden doubling of greenhouse gases released from vaporized limestone, volcanoes, water vapor, and fires more than made up for the blocked sunlight.

The fragments that struck open water vaporized millions of cubic kilometers of water, enough to cover the continental United States a few hundred feet deep. Within a day they would form rain clouds that circled the world, much like dust storms cover Mars for months. Like a monsoon that wouldn’t stop, the constant rain would eventually overwhelm dams while rivers flooded their banks. Dirt started falling as mud. Raindrops collected all the dirt and dust they hit, becoming a hail of acidic mud pellets and dirty, salty slush water. Worse, in the sun-less sky, it became impossible to distinguish between the mud pellets that just hurt from the pebbles that killed.

Months of rain would clear much of the dust and ash and put out most fires. Much of that moisture fell as snow, reversing decades of melt from global warming. The next several winters would grow ever colder as more snow and ice reflected more sunlight. So much seawater falling as snow temporarily rebuilt glaciers and the poles. Snow and ice reflect sunlight, which reduces temperatures, which increases snowfall, which grows glaciers, which reflect more sunlight in a vicious cycle. Mean temperatures would soon drop thirty degrees as the atmospheric thermal radiation dissipated.

The super-heated atmosphere would warm up the planet for a few weeks before it dissipated. Then Earth would grow colder for a decade or two, before gradually warming up as the increase in greenhouse gases overwhelmed the reduced sunlight. Then a vicious greenhouse gas cycle would increasingly trap more radiant heat for the next several thousand years, the poles would melt, and coastline would disappear.

Much of the outer main body broke off entering the atmosphere and, like the exhaust that trailed it, followed the main body across the southern United States. No other region in the world would suffer from so many impacts as southern America. Adding insult to injury, no sooner did trillions of tons of earth from Kitt Peak land across America than hundreds of home-size rocks smacked into it. The South, Southwest, and Midwest took the brunt of it, while the far north, from Seattle to Maine, suffered the least. Many exploded several kilometers above land, sending shock waves that devastated the areas beneath them. Hundreds of others created their own craters, sending billions of tons of earth for many miles around them. Forests burned like Hell.

A few hours after the main body impacted, the swarm arrived to punish the survivors. Thousands of boulders the size of homes survived the atmosphere to wipe out cities. Larger ones devastated entire countries. The largest, the Fidel Fragment at one kilometer, sent a tsunami a few kilometers tall that swept over the Caribbean and crossed over the Florida peninsula to the Gulf of Mexico. It washed away everything from Fort Lauderdale to Fort Myers. Much of Havana ended up floating to Miami while much of Miami washed up in Cuba. Eastern Mexico, Central America, and northern South America were wiped clean. Not thirty kilometers above the Panama Canal landed a space hill large enough to create a crater that re-united the Atlantic with the Pacific in a weird inter-ocean lake. The impact not only destroyed the Panama Canal, but made it irrelevant. For the third time in sixty million years, North and South America physically disconnected.

Thousands of rocks rained down upon Asia, from Indonesia to China, then the various “stans” of Central Asia. A big one struck Kashmir, between India and Pakistan, before the Middle East, northern Africa, and southern Europe got their asses kicked. Israel, along with its neighbors, was wiped from the face of the Earth by a big direct hit. The nations around the Mediterranean up to France got pelted. Oddly enough, Russia, the largest country in the world, suffered little by virtue of being so far north. Like Russia, the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland escaped direct bombardment, as did northern Canada and Alaska. Ironically, if it weren’t for the main body and its immediate exhaust trail, America would have been largely spared.

Sea levels dropped a few meters because so much seawater was lost to space, rained down into inland lakes, or washed ashore as tsunamis, soaked up by coastal deserts, valleys, and Antarctica. Without so much blocked sunlight, the doubling of greenhouse gases would have raised temperatures to disastrous levels several decades earlier. As it was, humanity had a generation or two before global warming reached a tipping point, followed by several thousand years of escalating heat. Sea levels would rise 300 feet within a few centuries, ironically returning to where they were 65 million years ago.

This asteroid strike differed from the one that killed the dinosaurs in several important ways. Gabrielle’s main body struck land, so much of its energy radiated quickly out into space. Although it triggered volcanoes, they were far fewer than before. And Earth had far less brush and trees to burn. Every forest in the world burned 65 million years ago, when Earth had several times as many trees. The K/t Boundary had enough soot to suggest that 90% of the planet’s biomass burned all at once. Plus, today’s meteorites vaporized far less sulfur, so the nuclear-like winter would not last as long.

This would prove crucial because it was the sulfuric clouds and the smoke, not the dust, that caused the nuclear winter that exterminated 65% of all species 65 million years ago. And a planet-wide rainstorm quickly extinguished most fires before their smoke blocked off all sunlight. A fraction of the poisonous ash, soot, and gases from volcanoes meant less sunlight got through, and only a fraction of the acid rain fell.

Still, with a few billion people dead, and another billion soon to die, the end was just beginning.

39

“Full speed ahead!” Captain Wili, wearing a ridiculous pirate’s hat, yelled into the ear of the helmsman who visibly winced. “Between the two aircraft carriers. Make sure you hit the swell dead on or we’re dead.” Wili put the fingertips of one hand against the palm of the other like the letter “T” to signify a perpendicular course. The navigator at first thought he was calling a time out before realizing that one hand was the wave and the other the ship.

Wili took little comfort that his ship was only three in the world of its size designed to practically fly over the ocean rather than cut through it. His ship, the Lina, was half a kilometer in front of their sister ship, the Lorena. At full speed, minimal ballast, and lightly loaded, it skimmed over the surface water rather than bogart its way through. Until Jackson, nobody ever designed a surface-effects ship this large for commercial trade.

“More to port,” the captain insisted after studying the scariest radar return of his life. He grabbed the wall mike. “Attention all hands. This is the captain. We are about to drive up a hill of water a couple hundred meters high. Not a wall of water, and not a cresting wave, but a giant swell like a big speed bump, and we are going to 4x4 our way up and over it. All hands to their stations,” which better be redundant given the circumstances.

The Southern Ocean is freezing, so they all wore wet suits over thermal underwear. Wili also wore his good luck hat, which he knew must look funny, which is why he didn’t put it on until the vet left on the heloplane. He looked like an otter, right down to his bushy mustache. Still, better safe than dead. He even made sure everyone had a water bottle and several protein bars in zip lock bags. As his boss frequently put it, the best way to survive is to prepare for the worst.

The Fidel Fragment actually hit several hours ago. Even moving faster than a passenger jet, the tsunami still took a while to travel from the Caribbean to the Southern Ocean where they sat on top of six kilometers of water. Like an iceberg, most of the tsunami would stay underwater. They had already survived dozens of smaller waves from other rocks that hit closer, which gave them a good idea of what to expect.

Unfortunately, those waves toppled dozens of ships.

Some expert on the news even claimed they were relatively lucky the Fidel Fragment didn’t hit deeper water because then there would have been that much more water flying at them. The Caribbean is relatively shallow, so Fidel displaced relatively little water, and much of that water was immediately corralled by North, Central, and South American coastlines. A strike in the middle of the Atlantic would have sent a wall of water several times taller across coastlines around the world. It would have washed away the American eastern seaboard all the way to the mountains. 250 years earlier, it would have basically wiped out the thirteen colonies. As it was, a series of mega-tsunamis wiped coastlines around the world clean, including Wall Street on Manhattan Island, the White House, and America’s capital.

Wili figured that various waves colliding in mid-ocean probably made his job easier by sapping each other of strength. By the time the Big One reached him, it had to overcome dozens of smaller tsunamis flowing against it. Smashing against so many islands and coastlines helped. Yet it was still pretty fucking big.

“Hijo de puta,” he whispered when it came into view.

Like dozens of other ships that survived, Wili traveled in circles to have some speed when it arrived. He not only had the smallest surviving ship, but also the fastest. Plus, he didn’t have to worry about his fuel supply since he could split seawater into hydrogen gas. Quite literally, he sat on an ocean of fuel.

All non-essential crewmembers flew on the heloplane, which had enough fuel to reach New Zealand if they capsized, in which case it would drop them inflatable rafts with motors. That foxy veterinarian was filming them, in any case.

The two of them spent hours searching for that fucking baby raptor. He was shocked as she explained the danger so matter-of-factly. They put on a Kevlar vest, a helmet, and then more Kevlar around their legs because the little ones will sink all four claws into them, then quickly go for the throat or eyes once the person falls to the ground. Her tone of voice didn’t even change as she described previous “episodes” where the little vicious fuckers attacked full grown people like ninjas.

Wili felt comfortable with weapons, but it quickly became obvious that she knew a lot more than he did. He offered, but she insisted on taking the lead. Being smaller, she fit into tighter spaces. Being apparently fearless, she ventured into much darker spaces as well. He never knew a woman with such balls. Scared shitless, he nevertheless followed her, egged on by her great booty. He wished she had granny panties instead of a tiny thong because it distracted him like hell.

They never did find the damn thing. Wili nearly blew away his first mate with a 12-guage when he surprised him. God knows where that dinosaur hid.

Searching in small spaces in this freezing cold made them both sweat, so Wili invited her to shower in his cabin while he made them some fresh coffee. He turned up the temperature, and sure enough, she was lightly dressed after her shower. Just shorts and a t-shirt as she fixed her fair. Thinking they may not survive, she finally talked to him without open contempt or outright hostility, which was refreshing. All while he got to check out her little booty and small titties. Again, she wasn’t any better looking than most of the whores who often accompanied him, and certainly had smaller breasts, but she had something extra. Something fucking sexy.

Wili usually wasn’t attracted to women so obviously smarter, especially highly educated professionals, but she was an exception to many rules. As they shared his sofa, knees lightly touching, her eyes came alive as she told him about her amazing “kids” and how they were going to revolutionize paleontology and genetics. He had never seen her so animated. She liked to gesture as she described them, often touching his arm to emphasize something, barely touching her kick-ass Colombian coffee. Then she showed him her scars, pulling up her shirt to show how a raptor tried to disembowel her, and pulling up her shorts so he could see how one dug all four claws into her.

It was all he could do to hide his raging boner. This little PhD girl spent hours searching for a deadly monster, even after suffering traumatic attacks in the past. Thank God she and his non-essential crew had to board the heloplane to search for the super-tsunami. No sooner was she in the air than he masturbated in his shower because a man can’t think clearly with his balls full.

40

The professor was the first to recover. Jackson had no idea how long he had been knocked out. Head pounding and ears ringing, Jackson could still hear his dad frantically calling Lisa’s name in the darkness. Not calling to check on his firstborn son, but his granddaughter. Not that Jackson was surprised by his father’s priorities. Everyone preferred Lisa to him.

Even with earplugs, he could hear a battle raging above. He could even tell the difference between smaller explosions close by and larger ones far away. The shelter shook differently. It sounded like King Kong and Godzilla duking it out to the death. The main body already hit, so this barrage must be pieces that broke off upon the main body’s entry.

It seemed to take him forever to get his head on straight. Claustrophobic, Jackson tore off his helmet and, breathing heavily, tried to orient himself. Through squinted eyes he saw his wife’s flashlight. The mattresses on top of him suddenly weighed him down like slabs of concrete. He burrowed towards his wife and carefully took off her helmet. Jackson tried calling her name, but found his mouth and throat inexplicably scratchy. Why the hell didn’t he pocket some gum? She looked asleep. Impatiently he shook her awake, willing her to live.

Chava came over with his ever-present light and camera. At least, Jackson assumed it was Chava. With the motorcycle helmet still on, it could have been a bald alien.

Lorena opened her eyes with a yelp, totally disoriented. The first thing she saw was the bald faceless alien blinding her with a bright lamp. Jackson moved his head into her line of sight so they could at least make eye contact. She tried to sit up, but didn’t have the room. Jackson could see the panic building inside her. He quickly pulled her towards the wall so they could stand up like normal people. He sensed others moving under the mattresses and someone, a voice he didn’t recognize, screamed in terror.

Once his feet planted themselves on the floor, he wrapped his wife in his strong arms and whispered that everything was okay. Lorena hugged him back and he heard her call his name. Then he saw Lisa’s foot stick out between the mattresses and squeezed his way forward. He lifted the mattresses to see his father holding terrified Lisa and patting her hair like a dog. Chava then got there and killed any sense of privacy. With his helmet on but the face plate up, the professor gave his son a relieved thumbs up, then pointed his finger so Lisa would turn her head. It seemed to take a lot of effort, but she slowly adjusted her position to reach out to her parents who dove at her in a fierce group embrace.

Jackson felt water on his arm. At first he thought someone was peeing on him, but after frantically jerking his head around, he discovered it was only his own tears. Someone kissed his forehead and he was shocked to see it was his own father, who was kissing the top of Lisa and Lorena’s head. To his knowledge, his father hadn’t kissed him since he was a baby. Jackson was shocked to see the professor fight back his own tears. He had not even cried over the death of his wife of fifty years, as far as Jackson knew. The girls, in contrast, were going to flood them.

Even through his earplugs he could hear someone yelling for help. Disentangling himself from his family hug, he crawled through the mattresses, Chava trailing him, passing the white cameraman who apparently wet himself. Jackson’s ears were plugged, his eyes still glazed over, but his nose worked just fine as the stench of urine gave him yet another reason to feel sick.

He felt for a pulse and found none. He lifted the guy’s visor up and saw a look of sheer terror. Jackson looked up at Chava’s camera and sadly shook his head in sorrow. He couldn’t even remember the chubby guy’s name.

Jackson continued toward the screaming, fighting his claustrophobia as he crawled between the mattresses.

He found Larry filming the Kitt Peak director hunching over his wife, who was screaming bloody murder. None of them wore their helmets. Between her legs was a mess of what must have been their baby. Ah, hell, he didn’t want to see that. He was going to have enough nightmares as it was.

Another light investigated the mess, which Jackson assumed was Chava. Horror filled Jackson’s face as he carefully crept closer to see if there was anything he could do. Both cameras turned into him. That woman needs a hospital, was his first thought. And she ain’t gonna get one, was his second. He and Dennis shared eye contract and Jackson felt for the man. They both knew she should not have been here, or previously on Kitt Peak, especially since she had free transportation and shelter up north. Her stubbornness just cost them their baby.

Although he barely knew the man, Jackson hugged him for way longer than he wanted to. Only when he sensed Kowalski mentally pull himself together, did he break off. He motioned for the cameramen to leave them alone. Kowalski was clearly devastated and in no mood to grieve on camera.

Little Chava scrambled away into the mattresses while Jackson escaped to the side where he could stand upright and not feel like a sardine in a can. He breathed deep a few times in the absolute darkness to relax himself as he side-stepped over to his family. He couldn’t shake the smell of urine, the sight of a bloody embryo, or that woman’s screaming which still echoed in his ears. Jackson needed to see his family again, just to be sure. This whole experience was just too much. Even for him.

Lisa was missing, as was his wife, so he crawled back between the mattresses to look for them. Like a near-death experience, he moved to the light. Which turned out to be Chava’s, who had a kick ass lamp on his camera. His father was putting Lorena’s helmet back on, over her neck support, while Lisa took a swig from a water bottle through her visor. Boy did that water look good. Better than that $10,000 bottle of wine Lisa downed a little earlier. In the back of his mind he noticed she had not yet peed herself, despite drinking so much. There goes $20. Because she would collect.

Lisa offered him her bottle and, smiling through a pained expression, quipped, “Worst hangover ever!”

God he loved his little girl!

Then thunder struck from above, shaking the shed like a matchbox. Through the mattresses Jackson felt his head slam against the ceiling. Someone’s flashlight spliced open his left cheek and smacked his left eye, which immediately got puffy and teary. He was now as ugly as his mood.

The gamma-rays! No bullshit, Jackson thought he peed himself, until he saw Lisa’s empty water bottle. His father motioned with his hands for everyone to get flat under the mattresses. Jackson, throat parched, stared at the water on his clothes for a second too long before his father literally kicked him in the butt. Fear only dried his throat that much more.

Jackson dived deep into his claustrophobia until he found his helmet. His brand new helmet, with its new car smell, saved him from vomiting, but drops from his cheek wound started bloodying his visor.

Then fucking nothing. Either the silence was deafening, or wearing ear plugs under the best motorcycle helmet money can buy really can cut off all sound. The world was suppose to end in either a bang or a whimper, not in a people sandwich. Damn he needed gum or some hard candy to un-sandpaper his throat. All Jackson could hear was a persistent ringing like someone surgically inserted a phone in his head that he couldn’t answer. All he could see were helmets and gloved hands. All he could smell was piss, vomit, and blood. And all he could feel was fear and anxiety.

Chava’s camera propped up the mattress between them so that he could film the Jacksons. Jackson didn’t see the point, given you couldn’t even see anyone’s facial expression. Laying there motionless like that, they looked like dummies in a dumpster. And felt even dumber.

With a camera on her, Lisa felt compelled to perform, so her gloved hand signaled rock, paper, scissors. Jackson gamed up, naturally going to rock. Lisa, anticipating his obviousness, beat him with paper. That bitch kept getting the best of him.

Then it came, smashing them like a hammer. Whereas the first detonation just violently shook the shed, this threw it around within the confines of the hole in every direction. Thank God they accidentally made the hole too big and he decided to ring it with used tires to function like shock absorbers.

Jackson expected to spend Judgment Day inside one of his sheds with his family. He just assumed it would be in Fairbanks, where he set up his headquarters. They planned to leave on Saturday, but noooooo, Cooper finally agreed to meet him on Sunday at sunrise. Was that really just this morning?

The next explosion was going to hurt. Even waiting for it was a real bitch. Which made him think of Sarah Palin. Knowing the White House was not safe from mega-tsunamis, she took her family with her to Belgium to convince the Europeans to join America in stopping the evil communist Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Belgium was probably far enough north to avoid big meteorites and falling regolith, so Jackson Twittered his approval because America needed a president during a crisis. Not that she, in particular, was any good, but even she was better than nothing. She deliberately scheduled this Belgium meeting for Judgment Day because, after months of downplaying the danger, she couldn’t just stay home and drown. She may be a hypocrite, but not a fool. And Jackson knew she only recently woke up to the danger because her family were not originally suppose to go with her.

He checked his glow-in-the-dark watch and saw that it was just twenty-three hours ago that his cameras caught that prick Cooper finger-fucking his future daughter-in-law in his driveway. That sure took a lot of balls for a presidential candidate. Lisa knew he had access to the cameras. That was why she tried to distract him, in case he had a window open on his computer screen that showed Cooper driving up. Which, looking back, he should have had. But no, he had to fast forward the muted video of his main camera while talking Cooper to death after they switched positions around the card table. It took all of his self-control to hide this discovery because there was nothing he would have enjoyed more than using the video to smack that arrogant grin off Cooper’s face. He even over-compensated by offering Cooper a billion dollars.

He inched forward and reached for his wife’s hand, who squeezed back to let him know she was okay. Chava the faceless alien, obsessed with his own reality show, crept closer with his camera. The whole situation seemed so ridiculous that a part of Jackson wanted to laugh. However, his mouth hurt too much to do more than grimace in pain. Just then he discovered that his low back was killing him. Every time he tensed up too much, his back betrayed him. The shrapnel in his left shoulder also bothered him more than usual. He began progressive relaxation exercises to let go of the tension. Maybe focusing on his breathing would distract him from the awful smells nauseating him. It would really suck to vomit in his helmet while being filmed.

His father and daughter, also holding hands, crept closer between the mattresses so the five of them formed a ring. Like metal to a magnet, his daughter probably sensed a video camera turned on. They looked kind of silly, the five of them with helmets on, not being able to see or hear each other. Yet getting it all on tape. The age of reality TV had finally gone too far. Again.

You know a show is reality TV when it’s completely scripted. Jackson would prefer an honest sitcom to a reality show.

Then a third hammer dropped and their world exploded. King Kong shook their little box like a tambourine. Good thing they were all laying flat with their arms and legs spread wide, or they would be been thrown against the hard metal wall like crouching Chava, flying Latino. As it was, his wife sailed into him, her knee smacking his side and her big titties window-wiping his helmet. He tackled her like a quarterback.

That one felt worse than the damn asteroid impact. The concrete floor above them must have collapse because Jackson sensed a pressure wave push hard against their shed door. For the first time, the shed was on tilt. Unfortunately, it tilted away from their only escape hatch.

The professor motioned with his gloved hand for them all to stay put. At least that was Jackson’s first interpretation. His head was ringing so loudly, his eyesight so suspicious, that his father could be flipping him the bird for all he knew. Not that it mattered. He didn’t have the energy to do anything more than pee. Which he had to concentrate not to do. Shit, not with Chava to record it. His family would never let him hear the end of it.

Lisa, lifting her visor, was the first to speak.

“Woo-hoo,” she whispered. “Someone call Disney!”

Normally Jackson would have bettered her, saying something totally fucking wicked that made her look lame. Or so he assured himself. But concentrating on not peeing left him with no energy to think clearly. If that were at all possible in the first place. Dead tired, he faded out of consciousness. Again.

Jackson woke up completely confused. Someone was snoring and it turned out to be Lisa. The mall was open, but nobody was shopping. He looked around -- where the hell was Chava when he finally wanted to film something? Five flashlights beamed around him, but failed to illuminate. He lifted his head, only to hit a mattress. As everything quickly came back to him, he barely avoided emptying his bladder into his blue jeans.

There! He heard it again.

“Open the fucking door!”

Jackson watched his father slither like a pro, the old man besting them all. Someone kicking the door now became impossible not to hear. Their nightmare nearly over, they stampeded out of their mattress sandwich.

In the one foot of space along the wall by the door Jackson saw his family step over what must be Larry Bond. Without his helmet, he smashed his head against the low ceiling, popping his head like a zit. Now that’s just fucked up, Jackson thought. The guy survives the fucking asteroid impact, a trillion tons of space rock landing not forty miles away, only to die from the gamma-ray warheads meant to un-bury them. That’s just not right.

Then Chava popped up, so Jackson pretended to check the guy’s pulse and gave a sad shake of his head, hoping this wouldn’t become a damn habit. No sooner did he think this than Chava motioned to where the Kitt Peak director and his wife should be. Exhausted beyond imagination, Jackson slowly crawled back into the mattresses, losing his battle against claustrophobia, passed the dead white cameraman who peed himself, then found Dr. Kowalski laying dead next to his wife. Fuck. With barely concealed impatience, he checked both of their pulses, then looked into the camera, and sadly shook his head again. Jackson tried not to look at what used to be a baby, but really, how can that be avoided? These horrible images will have to compete with each other before turning into nightmares. He quickly slithered out of the mattresses so he could stand up like a normal person.

This really was too much. Not while sick, claustrophobic, and nauseous. He had enough of dead bodies for one morning. Five of the ten people who stayed in this shed died. Thank God his wife and daughter didn’t have to see them.

His father was right when he gave them 50/50 odds.

Someone must have opened the door because a bunch of dust invade their coffin. The professor dug out a filter mask that went over the nose and mouth and held it up so everyone else would put theirs on. Then he put his helmet back on to avoid vaporized people clogging his ears, eyes, and throat. Putting their masks and motorcycle helmets on, his family looked like a surgical team lining up to enter a motorcross race.

Then his father disappeared through the doorway and a yell of victory went up. His hand then re-entered to help Lisa through. Lisa and Lorena each carried a portable computer wrapped in bags that they hid between the mattresses. Their cell phones, cameras, and small electronics were placed in socks, then folded in towels. Jackson hated waiting in lines, and now, nauseous, claustrophobic, and needing to pee, it was especially bad, but he couldn’t go before his wife and daughter. Literally, they were blocking his way forward and there was nowhere to push them aside. So he closed his eyes and concentrated on slowing down his breathing.

After doing Kegel exercises to not pee himself, Jackson finally went through the doorway only to nearly get killed by a canister of gas that his father was tossing from the other shed into a basket tied to a rope. He immediately understood: his hydrogen-fueled heloplanes were the only vertical takeoff aircraft with the range to reach them. It didn’t, however, have enough fuel to return the thousand miles back to civilization, so they stockpiled a ton of compressed hydrogen gas to refuel.

Jackson looked straight up into Hell. At least, that’s what Hell usually looked like in movies. No blue or white. Falling dust and dirt painted the sky various reds, oranges, and yellows against a dark gray background, while he heard the sonic booms of rocks exploding beyond the clouds.

It looked like the sky was falling. On Mars.

“Help me with this,” his father ordered.

Together they manhandled an amorphous metal safe (another global business he was quickly dominating) that contained a million dollars in cold, hard cash. Fuck-in-a! That money will come in handy. He had over $100 million cash in safes buried in Fairbanks and Chugwater, on the assumption that buying stuff using credit or debit cards may not work for a while. They tied it to a rope and pulled twice so those above could pull it up.

Chava just finished scampering up a very long hill, somehow carrying Larry’s camera in addition to his own, to join the bald aliens pulling him up with a rope tied to a rescue vest. Jackson turned around slowly 360 degrees, and discovered that he was in the middle of ant hill. He sure as hell didn’t see any evidence of his home. Not even the concrete foundation.

He somehow got nearly a hundred insurance companies to over-insure his home in October. He would be up a few hundred million if they all paid up.

Wow, getting those sheds out is going to be a bitch.

The three gamma-rays indeed saved their lives, and left a crater of loose dirt in their wake. That’s about the length of a football field to the top, he estimated, starting at a 45 degree angle before leveling off. Thank God his son evidently brought a lot of rope. This cone will funnel a lot of rain into the sheds.

He poked his head into the second shed and helped his father with the last of the canisters. The rope with the vest descended and he motioned for his father to go next. Not out of chivalry, but because he had to take a massive piss.

The porta-potty was fucking gone. That’s when he noticed the top edge of the sheds blackened by intense heat. Unlike metals, amorphous metal (which is technically a glass) has such a high temperature threshold that it must be cut by a high powered laser. A welding torch simply isn’t hot enough. Yet something melted the fuck out of it. If he put standard shipping containers instead of amorphous metal sheds, they wouldn’t have survived.

He unzipped as soon as his father started getting slapped against the rising slope and the relief from urinating was immediate, profound, and intense. He pissed away not only urine, but stress. It may not be therapy, but it sure felt therapeutic.

“Urine the money,” he sang to himself, enjoying the flow.

It never failed to dismay him how often he needed to empty his bladder since he turned forty. Diet and exercise kept most of his body’s betrayals at bay, but not his need to pee several times a day. He couldn’t even get through the night anymore without having to get up to go. And if he drank late, then he would be up at least twice. His father used a urine bottle so he wouldn’t have to leave the bed, but Jackson just couldn’t get himself to pee in a bottle. Not with his beautiful wife lying next to him. He may be fifty, but he didn’t feel his age. At least, he didn’t want to.

His Zen-like trance deepened with the urine flow when something struck his head. Good thing he wore a helmet. He saw the rope with the vest and wondered how the hell his father got up so fast. How long had he been peeing? He shook off the remaining drops, tucked it in, then strapped on the vest. He pulled twice, then nearly lost a boot when the rope rapidly pulled him up. He must have kissed the slope a dozen times before he got to the top. His left knee smashed into something that made him see stars.

Ahh! Halfway up a rock sliced open his shirt and chest. A slash the other way would have put an “X” on his chest. He bled on the regolith the rest of the way up. He saw several tired people pulling the rope far faster than he could scramble his arms and legs. His neck hurt more now than before the climb. He prayed they wouldn’t kill him, now of all times.

When he reached the surface, Jackson saw his beautiful heloplane caked with dirt, and what looked like another planet. Wow! Arizona looked more Martian than Mars. Even the blood red sky looked extraterrestrial. In the distance, sonic booms overlapped like several thunder storms converging. Although not yet morning, there was enough light to read.

Although people associate Arizona with hot desert, it actually had a lot of mountains, and those mountains had a lot of forests. Which burned now like smoldering giants. The result looked like millions of chimneys doing their best to offend Al Gore. Millions of trails of smoke floated up while millions of trails of smoke shot down. The sky had no sky in it. Just billowing clouds, streaks of paint, and an opaque gray that Jackson assumed was water vapor teasing the stratosphere.

Art! That’s what the sky looked like. That impressionist shit where you threw colors on canvas then sold it for millions. A 3D video version of shitty art! Finally art that he could appreciate.

Then he saw a curtain of smoke and dust that blocked the entire northwest. It looked like the place where the hobbit ventured in that last Lord of the Rings movie. With even better special effects. He tried to take it all in, but it was just too much. It dominated the landscape like nothing he ever experienced. And he knew that he needed to see it. Now.

41

“The Lorena is at full speed and running a parallel path a nautical mile behind us,” the radar operator informed him.

“Wish them luck,” Wili instructed the communications operator, then brought up his binoculars. “What the hell is that idiot Bush doing?”

Not that anyone could answer. The Lina was speeding past the USS Enterprise, a 51 year old carrier scheduled for decommissioning in 2013, itself going at maximum speed. The $6.2 billion USS George Bush, the newest supercarrier, was officially delivered to the Navy in 2009. The Enterprise was the first Nimitz class carrier, and Bush the tenth and last. The redesigned Ford-class carrier was suppose to begin replacing the Nimitz-class ones in 2015, but President McCain canceled it in favor of smaller, amorphous metal versions.

The Lorena, Jackson’s first 200-meter cargo ship, blew President-elect McCain away. Standing at the bow of a ship doing 60 knots was like driving a convertible going 200 MPH. Jackson’s designers showed McCain and Pentagon experts how the design could be optimized for 1) a stealth mini-carrier carrying vertical liftoff F-35s; 2) a stealth heloplane carrier; 3) a destroyer that carried two F-35s and two heloplanes; and 4) cargo ships that doubled as an amphibious assault mothership that accommodated hundreds of small, fast, amphibious assault hovercraft. All armed with a speed-of-light laser, a railgun firing target-optimized gamma-ray shells, gamma-ray missiles, and armed drones.

In a media blitz, Jackson used animation to show small heloplanes providing close air support to thousands of small armed hovercraft, jumbos airlifting battalions of amorphous metal “tanks” behind enemy lines, as ships fired lasers and railguns while F-35s cleared the skies of enemy aircraft.

Jackson’s 100 and 50 meter long versions could be optimized as icebreakers, minesweepers, hospital ships, tugboats, bulk or container cargo, heavy transport, Coast Guard duty, as well as a laser railgun version without aircraft. All with just three hulls several times harder to penetrate, fireproof, corrosion proof, faster, stealthier, more seaworthy, and which would last over a century.

Jackson offered to make ten amorphous metal submarines (with pop-up railguns), twenty 200-meter ships, thirty 100-meter ships, and forty 50-meter long ships for just $100 billion if McCain would pre-pay 10% to cover factory setup costs and produce three prototypes. Which President McCain did. After all, the first Ford-class carrier cost $9 billion, and the Zumwalt destroyers and the latest subs cost $3 billion each. And Jackson’s ships would save billions every year on fuel, labor, and maintenance. So McCain figured he was saving taxpayers money, multiplying America’s naval power, and would get credit for a next-generation Navy. Not a bad legacy for the son and grandson of admirals.

In return, Jackson would classify the stealth mini-carriers as “McCain-class” (since McCain served aboard carriers) and the Navy could recoup their investment by selling their oldest ships to allies as Jackson delivered the newest ones. Just adding a heloplane and drones multiplied each ship’s usefulness.

Over the next several years, Jackson planned on making 300, 400, and 500-meter long bulk and container mega-ships that the government could contract out as needed. Since super oil tankers, the largest ships afloat, max out at 450 meters, Jackson’s plans rocked the shipbuilding industry.

Then McCain died and President Palin tried to renege on the deal. Jackson only qualified for the rest of the contract if he produced three good prototypes, so Palin counter-sued to get the $10 billion back, which forced Jackson to spend the $10 billion as quickly as possible. Then, right when they were ready to begin their first ships, asteroid fragments threatened to swamp coastlines, prompting Jackson to dismantle and relocate the factories, at great expense.

Wili therefore captained one of the best ships in the world. In fact, except for the yet-to-be-made laser railgun version, the only ship in the world he would rather captain was Jackson’s billion dollar, 100-meter yacht.

Most motorized cabin cruisers or luxury boats max out around 17 knots, but his double-M design skimmed over the ocean at over 60 knots. Because it split seawater to run on hydrogen gas, it was a true deep water craft capable of circling the globe. The yacht had two helicopter pads, 100 guest cabins, 1000 square meters of living space on five decks, three swimming pools (a large one, a lap pool, and a kiddie pool), a hot tub, sauna, steam room, three recreational rooms, a 3D movie theater, two gyms, a disco, three launch boats, a mini-submarine, a master suit larger than most homes, and a large array of non-lethal weapons to repel pursuers and paparazzi. Joggers could even do laps around the deck.

All for just $1 billion USD. Not including the heloplane.

Jackson was the first to ever offer a billion dollar luxury yacht. Sure, the 165 meter long yacht Eclipse reportedly cost $1.2 billion, but that was over twice its initial cost estimate. No, by deliberately marketing a yacht that cost a billion, Jackson was making a statement. Because the super-rich who buy the most expensive yachts want to make a statement with their purchases. And nothing states “I’m richer than you” than a billion dollar boat. The more exclusive the club, the more people wanted to get in. And what could be more exclusive than owning one of the world’s billion dollar yachts? Demand for his competitors dried up.

What blew Wili away is that Jackson had sold over one hundred of them in just a few years, and he reportedly even had a year-long waiting list. Every big company, Internet millionaire, third-world dictatorship, Wall Street trader, Hollywood celebrity, and oil sheik wanted one. And they paid a billion, even though the hull and superstructure cost a small fraction of what conventional ones cost since he churned them out in a mass-production factory. Un-fucking-believable.

The super-rich paid so much because the hull would last virtually forever; it was extremely fast; its free fuel gave it unlimited range; it was not just really long at 328 feet, but four times wider than conventional hulls; its low draft made it possible to go up more rivers and dock at more piers; and its greater width made it safer, more stable, and more seaworthy. The wider the ship, the harder it was to capsize and the less it made guests seasick.

A billion dollar state-of-the-art ship made Wili think of the Bush. The carrier was brand new. The crew had three years to break her in. So what the fuck was the captain doing?

They all had been circling at high speed while waiting for the mega-tsunami. Wili’s heloplane informed all the few dozen ships in the area when and where it found the wave, its size and speed. Both carriers then launched their helicopters rigged for rescuing people out of the water. Maybe the Bush had the bad luck to have its back completely to the swell and turning around to face it was taking too long. Or maybe the Bush was not listening to their emergency channel. Maybe Bush attracted catastrophe.

“Keep the starboard camera on the Enterprise and track the Bush with forward cameras. Engineering, give me all you’ve got!”

Wili blasted his horn in greeting as they passed the Enterprise like a sprinter out-pacing an old marathon runner. The USS Bush was a few nautical miles ahead of them and heroically trying to turn around in time. But Wili knew immediately that they would not make it. He ordered the helmsman to steer well away from the looming disaster.

“Lorena, Lorena,” Wili called to his sister ship. “The USS Bush is going to capsize in front of us. We are turning to starboard, but we will soon turn back to face the swell head on. Recommend you do the same.” He knew the captain of the Lorena was trying to make sense of his radar screen. With that heads-up and with more room to maneuver, the Lorena should be fine. He, however, had to avoid a fucking aircraft carrier like an overturned tracker-trailer on the freeway.

“Lorena, the Bush is turning into the swell, but is getting hit at a 45 degree angle. Ay, Dios mio, instead of turning more into the wave, the wave is pushing away its bow. Oh mierda, the wave is lifting the whole ship up. It’s now getting hit broadside. It’s tilting. The ship is now a hundred meters higher than we are.”

Which gave the 2D ocean a weird third dimension.

“Turn to port! Lorena, we’re heading into the swell.”

Then Wili saw movement out of the corner of his left eye. What crazy idiot would be out on deck at a time like this? Incredulous, Wili turned his head just enough to see that fucking baby raptor. He stared through his window, suddenly oblivious of the swell and the carrier, his total attention dangerously captured by the non-extinct dinosaur on his weather deck.

Wili never was much of a mind reader, but he could tell the raptor was scared shitless and thinking, “What the fuck is going on?” His body language screamed anxiety as he chicken-walked past the bridge to the bow. Wili assumed it was a he. He really had no idea and certainly wasn’t about to radio the vet to ask how to tell the difference between male and female raptors. Not with the fucking Navy listening in. It had balls, whatever sex it was.

“Five seconds to the swell, captain.”

Those were the longest five seconds of his life. Even longer than losing his virginity. It seemed to stretch out as the baby hurried forward, curiosity winning over terror. Wili had to admire its courage. Not even a day old and already brave enough to watch a tsunami capsize a fucking aircraft carrier. It may run like a chicken, but it was no coward.

It looked more like a turkey than a chicken. With arms. With a much bigger tail. The vet told him that some fully grown dinosaurs were no bigger than chickens, but he could tell it was a baby. The tentative way it moved, the way it looked at everything around it, the innocent vib the monster gave off.

The baby reached the bow and looked up at the giant swell. Tiny figures were flying across the deck of the carrier and some of them, as they were thrown towards in the air, obviously saw the raptor before plummeting to their deaths in the freezing water. Through his binoculars, Wili watched the reactions of several of them as they recognized the dinosaur having a Titanic moment.

“3. 2. 1.”

“Brace yourself,” Wili yelled into the ship intercom while strapping himself into his chair.

The nose of the ship dipped into the swell and for a moment Wili feared the rest of the ship would disappear as well. Tons of water washed over the deck before the nose turned up and their momentum carried them forward. The rush of water swatted the tiny raptor, sending it airborne a hundred feet until it smacked hard against the bridge’s Plexiglas window, cracking it. As the ship righted itself and began to climb, gravity must have pinned the dinosaur there, just a few meters in front of Wili, obviously in agony and begging for help.

Past the dinosaur plastered to his window, Wili noticed several helicopters hovering above in the orange-yellow sky.

Violating his own safety rules, Wili unbuckled and approached the window. Only a centimeter separated them as they shared eye contact, a day-old baby raptor and a hairy Honduran in a wetsuit and pirate hat. Over the pounding waves Wili could hear the baby squeak through the cracked glass, very un-chicken-like, pleading with Wili to do something, anything. Wili put his hands where the dinosaur had his claws, trying vainly to comfort him. And Wili instinctively knew the raptor was a him. They communicated volumes in that brief moment of eye contact. The raptor understood his sympathy and stopped crying. The noise he made next sounded more like a duckling calling for his mother.

Holy crap, Wili thought. I’ve just been adopted by a dinosaur! I’m the proud mommy of a vicious raptor who snacks on Guatemalans. He suddenly tasted salt water that leaked through the growing crack. Feeling the rest of the bridge staring at his back, the captain searched for something soothing to say that wasn’t total fucking bullshit. He racked his brain, but all he could think of was, “I’m sorry.” Why he should be sorry didn’t occur to him. After all, Wili spent hours hunting him down with a shotgun.

Then something else caught his eye. Which, at 1092 feet in length, was understandable. The swell was hitting the USS Bush broadside even as it lifted the entire ship up. Because the heavy carrier sat so low in the ocean, the water level rose on one side and fell on the other. The imbalance quickly grew acute. The more the water rose on its port side, the more it pushed the ship over. First a 30 degree angle, then 60, then 90. The core of the tsunami then hit and flipped the aircraft carrier over onto its back. Even the raptor sensed something big as it shifted his head to look to his right.

One part of Wili felt horror at the thought of five thousand sailors being thrown into the freezing Southern Ocean with 100,000 tons of steel on top of them. Another part, however, realized that the carrier was going to miss the Lina. His last minute maneuver saved their sorry asses.

Hoo-rah!

The Lina passed the Bush right as it landed on its back, less than 100 meters away. However, the water displaced by this crash fell behind them. They were clear! As the carrier disappeared from view and as the raptor slipped back onto the empty deck, Wili looked around and saw that he was on top of a hill of water in the middle of the ocean. For a guy who spent his entire adult life at sea, this was really weird. But this was a day full of weird.

Even over the roar of the ocean, Wili could hear the groan of steel under stress. He looked at a monitor and saw the carrier floating upside down. For a moment it looked like the tsunami was going to turn it right side up again. But the strength of the wave ebbed and, like the Treasury, it remained under water.

Wili looked at the raptor which appeared pleasantly surprised he was still alive. The baby got up like he fell off a ladder and did what looked like a fucking dance, shaking off the water like a dog. He shrieked in joy at being not extinct.

Then the ship started going down the hill. Aww, fuck.

“Reverse engines! Full power. Keep us straight on! Prepare for submersion.”

The back of the wave was fortunately not nearly as steep as the front. Wili guessed it was twice as long and half as steep, which saved them. Speed was the last thing they wanted now. You want speed when driving up a long, steep hill, but driving down you need to keep a foot on the brake to avoid losing control. And you certainly don’t want to make a radical turn because that could flip you over.

Their hill of water was collapsing even as the ship descended the tsunami’s back going way too fast. Instead of a propeller, they had maneuverable water jets which gave them tremendous flexibility. They could turn far tighter than ships half their size. And now their water jets were in full reverse. Their momentum was still too great and the hill collapsing too fast. Still, it helped, and possibly saved them.

The baby dinosaur saw what was coming and understood what it meant . After staring down past the bow, he turned to Wili one last time. The damn thing looked sad! His face was far more expressive than any bird he ever saw. And more intelligent. He clutched his left arm next to his body, as if it was broken, but with his right arm it looked like he waved to Wili, saying “bye” and “thanks” and “sorry about the Guatemalan” all at the same time. At least so it seemed to Wili, who had an emotional roller coaster of a day. In any case, Wili tearfully waved back.

Then the bow dived into the ocean, the front deck was instantly underwater, and the poor baby dinosaur was washed away in the blink of the eye. He didn’t even look at what was coming, instead preferring to share his last moment alive saying goodbye to his mommy, a hairy Honduran cargo ship captain ridiculously dressed in a wetsuit and pirate’s hat.

“All engines stop! Initiate station-keeping.”

The natural buoyancy of the ship slowly lifted it out of the water, like a dog shaking off the rain. In vain Wili searched for his baby dinosaur. It startled Wili to sympathize with these vicious beasts like that crazy sexy vet. He better get a hold of himself or he may start empathizing with his neglected wife.

As they rose to their normal height, Wili ordered the ship forward again, surprised at how calm the ocean was now. Then the Lorena splashed down to their right. Wili had the helmsman turn the ship to face the Lorena, which rose out of the ocean and turned to face the Lina. Which was fortunate because the Enterprise crashed behind them, its bow sinking hundreds of feet deep before righting itself. The wave this created may have toppled them if it hit them broadside, but the Lina was facing the wave and the Lorena was facing directly away, so they both sliced through the wave, wondering when the fuck this ride is ever going to end.

The USS Enterprise apparently landed at an angle, as it listed around 30 degrees to starboard before returning to an upright position. That was sure to clear their shelves. Hope they locked their cabinets. Wili saw through his binoculars that its entire bow was fucked up all to hell, like King Kong used it as a punching bag, whereas the Lina’s amorphous metal bow was fine. But it floated. 51 years old and it looked like it was going to live long enough to be scrapped. Thank goodness both carriers flew off all their planes before the impact, then put all their helicopters into the air right before the mega-tsunami hit. Ironic that the oldest carrier survived while the newest perished.

But their work wasn’t over yet.

“Lorena, we are commencing rescue operations.”

The Lina and Lorena raced to the Bush to see how many sailors they could save. Amid all the debris, this was going to take awhile. But they were alive! Well, except for the baby dinosaur and the Bush, they were alive.

Then his entire crew heard the unmistakable sound of a roaring T-rex, following by shrieks from the raptors and ratites.

Great. That’s just fucking great. Wili couldn’t believe his lousy luck. The fucking dinosaurs have woken up!

42

Jackson looked for the tallest among them because, at 6 and a half feet, that was always his son. With his heat resistant outfit and florescent helmet, his thin son looked as alien as the landscape. Jackson motioned for his father to follow him. They met at the side of the heloplane where his son was emptying canisters of compressed hydrogen gas into the aircraft. Jackson opened his visor and they did the same.

“I want to see the hole.”

Sure, he pointed his thumb back at the wall of smoke that rose to the heavens, but they knew instantly what he was talking about. And they both knew lots of reasons why it was a bad idea. Like dust killing their engine in mid-flight, or falling regolith knocking them out of the sky. Instead, they nodded their heads and waved everyone into the heloplane.

With everybody aboard, David flew high around the wall of smoke. They passed around three sets of binoculars, stunned at their state’s transformation.

“It looks like Mercury,” the professor concluded, pointing to all the craters they saw.

David flew carefully around the billowing hole where they could get the best view of it. Not that you could see much, past the dust, smoke, and gases. Jackson looked around for where Highway 10 used to be, but could not see it. He sure as hell hoped Arthur blasted the regolith clear.

The crater hole looked alive, like Godzilla was about to leap out and fuck up Tokyo. Chava naturally filmed the hell out of it. Not wanting to waste fuel, Jackson pointed to the mountain ridge that towered over the crater, where David battled cross-winds to carefully land on what he hoped was stable land.

As they stampeded out of the heloplane, the first thing that confronted them was the intense heat, like the mother of all bon fires. Steam rose from the ground at their feet. Everywhere they heard the sound of popcorn popping. Getting out of the aircraft was like opening an oven door and climbing inside. Unlike a rose, it looked like a volcano, smelled like a volcano, and burned like a volcano. It even had the billowing smoke coughing up burps of gases. The many background noises merged into one constant rumble. What couldn’t be heard were normal noise -- the chirping of a bird, the hum of street traffic, someone blasting Beyonce.

The sight of a smoldering hole one hundred kilometers wide and twenty-five deep captured the senses and drew them nearer like a magnet. Jackson couldn’t even see the bottom of the damn thing. It looked big enough to fit the Moon. Nobody seemed to mind the dust and smoke enveloping them. Dirt balls pelted them like hail. Even from their vantage high on the mountain overlooking it, they could not see past the crater. The view was simply stunning. The crater looked perfectly round, with a small ring in the exact middle, inside a larger ring around it. To the crater’s north stood a high plain that extended to both the east and west as far as the eye could see. Which, admittedly, wasn’t far. Even at this height.

Then, suddenly, Jackson heard another big meteorite strike over the northern horizon. They all stopped to look up to see if anything was coming down at them. Like lightning striking twice, it would really suck to get killed by a meteorite while standing alongside the newest mega-crater in the world. Then they heard another rumble, exactly like the first one. Chava took off north to see what he could film. Jackson and his father removed their helmets to hear better. Sure enough, they heard another explosion just like the first two. Same size and distance, and coming at regular intervals.

Ah! Jackson relaxed. While one drone started dropping gamma-ray bombs from San Diego going east, another started at Yuma going towards San Diego. While one started at Santa Clara going north, another started at the Nevada border going south down the California side of the Colorado River. While one went from New Mexico to San Antonio, another started from San Antonio towards New Mexico. And, lastly, while one went from Yuma to New Mexico, another blasted from New Mexico towards Yuma.

To hide behind the meteorites, the first ones were the biggest bombs, which the computer models said would clear a circle several kilometers in diameter with an optimum airburst. They needed to detonate those big ones right after the main impact and before the asteroid’s immediate trail crashed into Earth. The highway farthest from survivors would be cleared last.

Holy crap! He was going to have a corridor 1500 miles long, from San Diego to San Antonio, right through the thickest regolith. As the distant explosions continued with regularity, Jackson felt his anus unpucker. He gestured to everyone that everything was okay.

Lorena took her helmet off and motioned for the rest of them to do the same. They huddled together to hear what she had to say through the filter mask covering her mouth and nose. Never in a million years would Jackson have guessed what was on her mind. His anus re-puckered in anticipation.

“Henry Frances Jackson, thirty years ago you promised to build me the home of my dreams. Ever since I have lived where you wanted me to live. Now it’s my turn. This is where I want to live. Build me my dream home right here.”

Jackson could easily tell she wasn’t kidding. Lorena had that don’t-you-dare-fuck-with-me tone of voice that her kids were so wary of. Beneath her filthy hair, dirty clothes, and dust for makeup, Lorena never looked better. Lots of practical objections immediately rose up, like the nearest grocery store is a thousand miles away, or bringing material will be really fucking expensive. Or there is no water. Or electricity. Or roads.

But none of that really mattered. He did indeed promise her a dream home, and apparently what he built in Green Valley wasn’t it. And money really wasn’t a concern. They could get here by heloplane. The ridge was big enough, and it sloped down before the mountain rose up and away from them. Hell, there was enough room for several thousand homes on this ridge. He could even custom-build Lorena’s out of amorphous metal, then airlift it here. And he could generate his own electricity with solar panels and wind turbines. He could get TV and phone service through OmniNet, if he could wrestle control of Butler’s company. If Butler stayed at his log cabin, then Jackson would have to talk to his heirs, who would probably be happy to sell.

“Dad, all this land belongs to the main Tohono O’Odham Indian Reservation. Without infrastructure, they can’t live here now, and they lost their three Desert Diamond casinos, so they’re gonna be hurting for money. And I did save their fucking lives by flying them out of here. You and the chairman are old buddies. Do you think you can get the council to sell me their main reservation and the San Xavier District near Tucson?”

“That’s like 4500 square miles. Where would they live? How much you gonna pay them?”

“The government isn’t gonna let them keep Ground Zero. There will be intense pressure to turn it into a national park, so they’re gonna lose it anyways. They might as well make some money from it. Start my offer at $10 million, but I’ll go up to $100 million. With that, they could build themselves several thousand McMansions in the San Lucy District near Gila Bend.”

“A hundred million! Dollars?” Lorena seemed shocked. “You don’t need to spend a hundred million just to make me a home. I’ll live anywhere you want.”

Both Jackson’s father and son laughed.

“He can afford it,” the professor assured her.

“Dad, how much you gonna make? Several trillion?”

“At least,” his grandfather agreed. “The markets dropped dead, so he stands to make trillions once he covers those shorts and triggers them derivative contracts.”

Jackson desperately tried to hide his surprise. He had a pretty good chunk of the world’s $500 trillion in derivative contracts, most of which would soon trade for a tiny fraction of their former value. Before the impact he collected several trillion from thousands of smaller financial institutions, hoped to collect several trillion more from the world’s blue chips, and assumed he would be owed several trillion more that he would never be paid.

“What the hell are you all talking about?” Not knowing what was going on enraged Lisa.

“Dad made a fortune. If everyone pays him, he’s looking at several trillion. Hey, dad, can I have a billion for every trillion you make?”

“Sure.”

David stared, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

Instead of answering, Jackson was lost in thought.

“David, how much longer can Sally stay on Henderson?” Sally was the most dinosaur-like creation, a sauropod that grew astonishingly fast. “She’s gonna be ready to lay eggs soon. No way Henderson can support a dozen or more sauropods.”

Which David knew better than anyone.

“I always assumed that your dinosaurs had to stay on an island for containment purposes. Yet these craters are surrounded by very sheer walls. Even without adding barriers around the rim, those sauropods couldn’t possibly get out.”

“You’re not serious!” David bellowed.

“Well, I need compelling reasons for tourism. The world’s only dinosaur park would sure as hell be compelling. We could put all the herbivores in a big, nearby crater, after we cultivate the necessary bushes and trees, of course. Customers could look at them with binoculars from the rim and from various towers near watering holes.

“Hell, there are so many craters nearby, we might even be able to put theropods, raptors, and ratites into separate craters, after fortifying the rim. We could feed them pigs, cattle, deer, etc, via tunnels cut in the crater walls. I bet people would pay a pretty penny to see dinosaurs with their own eyes. Who knows? Maybe we could have a petting zoo with the smaller ones.”

David was stunned into silence, but Monique clearly wanted to know what the fuck they were talking about.

Jackson continued. “There’s something else you should know. I started two insurance companies. The non-profit handles healthcare, and the other everything else.”

“But you said every insurer will go bankrupt.”

“Exactly. And I’ll have everything to myself. Property, auto, mortgage, commercial, life, disability, professional liability, etc. With everyone else facing huge losses and little revenue, I’ll have almost no competition. I’ve been headhunting for months.

“Anyways, I’m telling you this because the non-profit, JacksonCare, will cover pre-conception genetic screening and in vitro fertilization so couples can make their next baby with their healthiest egg and sperm, all screened of genetic diseases. Future generations will live longer and healthier, which we need for interstellar travel, and a separate for-profit will delve into life extension medicine.”

David was speechless. This was a dream come true.

“I’m also rethinking your idea of expanding the Pitcairn Islands since I unexpectedly have a few thousand ships to utilize. Until they rebuild the world’s major ports, I won’t need most of them. You could cement thick amorphous metal walls around the shallowest areas around each island, capturing the surrounding islets, then use our fleet to transport rocks and rubble as filler. For the next few years you could have virtually all the ships that don’t have roll-on/roll-off capabilities. Within a decade or two you could probably multiply that shallow area from under 50 square kilometers to over 1000. Oh, and I may try to buy Easter Island from Chile since the locals refused to leave and are now all dead.”

David looked magically stunned by Harry Potter.

“What else am I going to do with trillions?”

“Trillions? Trillions!” Lisa literally jumped up and down, finally finding something she liked more than shoes.

Lorena’s eyes looked glazed over. “Are you really gonna spend $100 million to give me my dream home?”

“If I can. Dad, do you think they will sell?”

The professor carefully considered it.

“Only several thousand took up your offer to fly to Alaska. The rest were too stubborn to move and are probably dead, including the several thousand living in Mexico. The survivors will have to elect a new council, then that council can take a full tribal vote. Several thousand Indians splitting $50 million? Given current events, I’m sure they’ll take your cash. And they have several other districts they can move to like San Lucy. But don’t you think it’s a lot of money for barren desert wasteland? I mean, there’s nothing here.”

“Oh, but there will be. Look, when it rains, that crater is going to have a pretty big lake, and I’ll dig canals to maximize waterfront properties. Plus, the Santa Cruz river should flow nearby, and even the Gila River isn’t too far north. I could farm and ranch the hell out of this area, now that it has some decent organics on top.

“Inside this crater I could build a whole city, with casinos to attract tourists. That earthquake probably knocked Las Vegas down before burying it under regolith anyways, so Crater City will become the new Vegas. With Lake Mead full of regolith and Hoover Dam destroyed, Vegas lost its only water supply. People from around the world will flock to Ground Zero to experience it for themselves.”

He turned to his wife.

“Mi amor, it may cost $100 billion instead of $100 million, but I’d love to build the home of your dreams. I’ll hook you up with some architects so you can design it just the way you want.”

Lorena, in tears of joy mixed with dust, hugged him like an alien on Sigourney Weaver.

“Can we live here, too?” Monique asked an astonished David, who just remembered he was getting fucking married.

“Building on that tall out-cropping where Chava is shooting would probably give you a great view of everything north of this mountain,” the professor suggested. “Hell, I wouldn’t mind a slice of that pie myself. You mind me staying with you? I could help with the twins.”

Like David was going to refuse his grandfather, a man he treated more as his dad than his actual father.

“Hell yeah you can stay with us. The homes would only be several hundred meters apart.”

“Well then I want my own pad to the south,” Lisa insisted, hands on hips, dying to be treated like an adult.

“Sold!” her mother immediately agreed, stunning Jackson more than the asteroid impact itself. “The three of us,” apparently referring only to the women, “will design our own homes. After all, we’re gonna be neighbors.”

“Are you freakin’ serious?” Lisa could not believe this, her depression temporarily gone. This was not like her mother. She must have a concussion. A home of her own? That she designed? At 16? Kiss my booty, Britney!

Her father, however, understood. Lisa just lost her fiancée and she needed something to look forward to. And giving her a home next door would tie her to them and prevent her from starting a new life far away. In the corporate world, this was called a golden handcuff: you are free as long as you stay right fucking here! What Lorena wanted most was to keep her family together. This sealed it.

“Congratulations, mi amor,” Jackson offered his only daughter as he hugged her tight. Then everyone else hugged the two of them, happy to be alive and together.

Then Chava returned, smelling news like wolves scent blood. He filmed the family hugging with the smoking crater in the background. Jackson shushed everyone quiet as Chava approached through clouds of smoke and dust. With his helmet, gloves, and camera, Chava could pass for an alien with a ray gun.

“What’s going on?” Chava asked suspiciously.

“Just finishing a group prayer,” Jackson lied. “A family that prays together, stays together.”

“What about Governor Cooper’s offer?” Lisa wanted to know. “Are you still gonna run for vice-president?”

“What?” Lorena’s shocked look reminded Jackson how busy he has been. Since he assumed Cooper wasn’t going to survive, he hadn’t given it any thought.

“Right on, dad!”

At least David liked the idea, since he rarely called him dad. Monique looked at him like some alien bug.

“Cooper offered me the VP slot,” Jackson sadly informed them. “But Palin unconstitutionally ordered the Air Force to steal everyone’s planes, which left Cooper stranded at Ground Zero. In effect, Palin indirectly killed Governor Cooper, along with a million others that we were flying out of harm’s way. And, if I didn’t have the foresight to bury sheds under the garage, she would have killed us as well.”

“So you’re not going to be vice-president?” Lisa asked, totally bummed out.

“Sorry. I also resigned as chair of the Democratic Party so they wouldn’t be leaderless if I didn’t make it.”

“Ah shit,” David suddenly remembered. “What about Governor Naples?”

“What about her?” his father wanted to know.

“Well, I sort of promised to get her. She’s in one of your asteroid shelters in the Grand Canyon, along with thousands of state workers, police, and national guard. The Arizona Air Guard are in Fairbanks, so I prepared a dozen of our heloplanes to go after Naples. I told them I’d go first to discover how dangerous it was to fly. By the time we get there, the heloplanes should be ready to leave our base in Chugwater.”

Talk about buzz kill. He spent countless hours conferring with Naples and her staff on preparing for the Worst Case Scenario, which was why she was suppose to be at Arizona’s alternate headquarters safely in Montana. He quickly worked through several emotional responses like denial until he found something constructive to do.

“Dad, they’re 400 miles away. How bad will it be?”

“Well, the heat and the pressure wave won’t be too bad with them inside your hangers within the canyon. The earthquake probably threw them pretty bad, causing internal bleeding, but there’s no way regolith is going to collapse your roofs. They could be buried, though. Not just from regolith, but the canyon walls could have collapsed around them.”

That certainly left them no choice.

Jackson felt so weary. His exhaustion kept finding new depths. Will this day never end? This was the longest day of his life.

“Is that the Sun?” Jackson asked, pointing east.

Everyone looked because, really, how do you mistake the fucking Sun?

“Well, you don’t see that everyday,” Lisa quipped, which melted her father’s heart as if she just woke from a long coma. His little girl was back, baby!

Sure enough, the clouds of dust, gas, and smoke to the east were getting much brighter compared to those to the north or south. As one, they checked their watches. Jackson was amazed to find it was exactly 24 hours ago that he and Cooper started their epic battle. It seemed so long ago. Whatever they talked about felt trivial now.

He was now dead, of course. Stupid fuck went to Butler’s instead of staying with them in his underground shed.

Crap. Now he needed another candidate. Maybe Naples would consider running. She was a natural politician, dynamic and polished, although short for a president. Hillary Clinton wasn’t exactly an Amazon, but nobody perceived her as short. Could Naples even win the nomination or the general election with his full backing? She probably didn’t even want to run.

Of course, he himself could run for president. He certainly had the money and organization. But the idea was laughable. Running for president is an 80 hour-a-week job, he was months too late, and he was planning to rebuild the Southwest, buy hundreds of large companies, dominate entire industries, force thousands of foreign financial institutions to pay what they owed him, as well as start a dozen clean energy cities to employ millions of Democratic voters. And no one can do two 80 hour-a-week jobs at the same time. Not even Henry Fucking Jackson. Which left Governor Naples, if she was even alive. Well, time to find out.

“Hey, everyone. Let’s go rescue our governor!”

A shout went up as they rushed back to the heloplane.

One long day finally ended, but another just began.

THE END

The paperback version is available direct from the author at www.BrentReilly.com. He welcomes feedback. You can also find the author at Twitter.com and Facebook.

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