The Powerball

Sweat poured off the astronomer’s brow, the eyepiece of his telescope fogging up from his panicked breath. He was working overtime with the other observatories to recalculate its path and make sure there were no changes. He saw nuclear weapons, experimental orbital-range lasers and temporal asynchronicity weapons do nothing to it, not a scratch and no change in course.

Of course people were aware of the Powerball since the eighties. A bizarre comet that seemed to ignore normal gravitational physics and would cause random people to receive spikes of monetary energy in their possessions. Eventually some economists figured out that transferring monetary energy into tickets made of celestial paper would cause the Powerball to pass by more frequently, and would cause the random monetary spikes to focus around owners of those tickets. Despite some global security concerns, the lottery was officially adapted to increase the frequency of the Powerball’s required proximity for this phenomenon.

Then new findings came in a few years ago, stating that the Powerball is a celestial body of unknown composition that operates on value-based gravity instead of mass-based gravity, a physics concept originally thought to be impossible. The science community went into a panic, trying to determine the circumstance’s for such an objects existence. It was only a quarter of the size of the moon, but the impact alone would destroy all life if the world became wealthy enough to put it on a collision course. This amount of wealth was already achieved back in the late nineties.

Now the Powerball looms closer, a few orbits away from collision. There is still no visual sign confirming whether it came about via a natural phenomenon or if it was constructed by some unknown intelligence, and a small portion of the archeological world is now wondering whether the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs was actually another Powerball, striking the earth shortly after dinosaurs developed enough intelligence in order to put value on objects.

The public still frantically buys tickets, stubbornly sold by the manufacturers despite the sudden global ban on celestial paper manufacture. It seems the consensus is that if everyone is going to die, then they’d rather die rich.

(Originally written 1/13/2016)