Noah’s A.R.C.
The guys with cardboard signs called it “divine judgment”. The news called it “potentially catastrophic”. The world’s richest man called it “a powerful reminder to keep innovating”. And my dad called it a big fuck-off asteroid.
For the next few months, it was all anyone could talk about. It’ll hit the Earth! We’re all going to die! No, it’ll pass us by. We’re all going to be fine. No, it’ll hit the moon and distort the Earth’s gravitational field and we’re all going to die! I watched everything on the TV in my father’s hospital room, fiddling absent-mindedly with his IV tubes and picturing the clear fluid running through them as the last dregs of my savings, until he woke up and grumbled at me to keep my fucking hands to myself.
Dad watched the news too. He wasn’t surprised at how many people tried to flee to the Mars colony, and he wasn’t surprised when the Martian parliament closed all points of entry, apparently to prevent resource shortages from the influx of immigrants. As pundits and commentators twittered on about interplanetary asylum laws and cooperation treaties, he just shrugged and told me to get him a clean bedpan. I suppose a lump of space rock that could kill you isn’t that scary, when you’ve already got a different kind of lump on your lymph nodes that’s been killing you for the past six years.
The first thing that did surprise him was when Noah Skape announced that he had a solution. That actually got Dad sitting up in his bed: a multitrillionaire had a way of getting off-planet, that wouldn’t involve illegally migrating to Mars? Remarkable. Dad wouldn’t be able to go, of course, neither would I, but we stayed up half the night talking about it. For the first time in months, I thought I saw a familiar twinkle in his eye, although it might have just been the flickering light in the back corner of the ceiling. When the night-shift nurse told him it was time to get some rest, he knocked his pillow onto the floor in protest, and told me to bring him tomorrow’s newspaper.
It was called the A.R.C.: the Andromeda Relocation Capsule. I’m no scientist, but with his talk of hydrogen-based superfuel, solar gravity slingshots and cryogenically-induced catatonia, it really sounded like Noah could start life anew in another galaxy. The cost, according to multiple newspaper writers all apparently trying to be comedians, would be astronomical. Given that, he and his family would be the only ones in the first capsule. Once they arrived safely on their new planet, his corporation would begin mass production, and maybe a few hundred thousand more people would be saved. If we were lucky, they might even bring some of us along to mop their floors and clean their toilets.
The day of the first launch was historic. News networks jostled for space near the site, preparing hyper-range lenses, to catch the capsule leaving the atmosphere. Parents gathered their children on the sofa. Pub patrons urged the bartender to change the channel away from the football. My dad sat up in his bed and choked down lumpy tomato soup as Noah’s A.R.C. blasted into space, suffered a critical navigation failure, collided with the asteroid and exploded.
It wasn’t a total waste. Astronomers calculated that the hydrogen explosion pushed the asteroid fractionally off course, so instead of missing the Earth by two thousand miles, per its original path, it ended up missing by two thousand and twenty miles. Noah’s cousin took over his corporation, dissolved it and donated most of the money to charities, one of which used its new funding to, among other things, pay for my dad’s treatment. He walked out of the hospital, in remission, three months to the day after Noah’s A.R.C. exploded.
People who were at the launch that day said they saw a rainbow.