It’s not every day a planet killer enters the system, so understandably, people are celebrating.
We saw it coming hundreds of years ago, of course. It was kind of hard to miss, at over 800 kilometers across. It sneaked out of the Oort cloud maybe 1000 years ago and had gone unnoticed for a few decades until a mining probe spotted it. Some histories claim that this was a pirate probe, hacked by the LAVI kibbutz, but that sounds like wishful thinking to me. The true, and mostly verifiable history is just as impressive:
So as soon as the finding was leaked to the fact streams, the families went crazy. Between the three families and their extensive shareholder armies, they had mining operations anywhere with enough gravity to keep a digger from flying into space. But nothing had really changed for as long as the fact streams went back for.
The fact streams themselves seem to be the greatest feat the families pulled off. It was a jointly owned corp responsible for collecting and diseminating true observations, and was the only way shareholders knew what kind of money moves to make. There’s no way any of this would work without facts, so I think we probably had them before and lost them, but that’s pre-history so who actually knows.
(( Way too much exposition for a real story. I’m even boring myself, re-reading this. ))
So when this comet, this planet killer, appeared it threw the markets into a frenzy of speculation. Trading futures on futures on futures, it turns out that you can start betting on markets a hundred years from now pretty easily. But the effect of each tiny fact had an outsized effect on the markets. A new observation about a potential change in the comet’s rotation could cause a stock to drop by half, and others to spike seemingly at random - everyone trying to get ahead of the speculation, with their own wild predictions.
Unfortunately for the three families, they were each deadlocked to one of a few mining regions (Earth + Luna, Mars + moons (various), outer planets (various) + moons (various), and another comet (unrelated to our planet killer) which was on a short eliptical orbit with our system). They made plays at each others territories of course, and that was a good way for an everage person to earn some action shares, and maybe retire to a bunk of their own, but fundamentally nothing changed.
The effect of this was that depending on the predicted trajectory of our planet killer, the various families might lose (or gain) a lot. Earth and Mars, executed over by AAA and BBB families respectively had the most to lose, being locked to such small regions. Where CCC whose interests were spread out over most of the outer planets and their satelites was relatively safe.
CCC was the first family whose public relations outreach tried to undermine the other two. They downplayed the threat of the comet, flooding the media feeds with talkers who referred to it as “our little visitor,” and calls to invest in “millenial technology” that would pay off in the far future, when the “visitor” eventually did arrive. They were also the first of the families to frustrate attempts of the other two to fund an immediate solution.
***
So anyway, that was the first week since the comet made an appearance. What happened in the following centuries was even wilder, though.
(( sabotage changed markets, markets became focus over actually solving, so statements only ))
(( the comet needs a name ))
(( corp war and social crash and rise from time first spotted to solved to now visiting )) (( greet it as friend now because we solved our problems because had to unite to divert it ))