Chapter Forty-Five – If You’re Unhappy and You Know It, Flap Your Wings!

Chapter Forty-Five – If You’re Unhappy and You Know It, Flap Your Wings!

“So, Chips as Subscription didn’t work out. So I was thinking… how about we continue our previous Product Size Adjustment?

Introducing… Bag of Chip! Now available in all 725 flavours currently available! Low in calories, and each bag is large enough to have room for plenty of tangential advertising too!”

–Layers Potato Chip Company, CFO Memo, 2038

***

We got a full HD view of space and Phobos in the distance, but it didn’t help explain anything.

Which was why I was kind of thankful when a corner of the screen was suddenly taken up by a familiar face. Doctor Radikal adjusted his glasses, then ran a hand over his face. He had a thick five-o’-clock shadow. I didn’t know much about facial hair, but it looked like he might not have shaved in a day or three. Actually, the bags under his eyes suggested that maybe he just hadn’t slept in that time.

“Ah, yes, greetings friends and compatriots,” he said. “I see that we have listeners from both the Keiretsu and the Big Gun Project. Greetings, greetings.”

The image on the rest of the screen shifted, then zoomed out. It turned into a sort of map, an empty grid with Phobos on one end, lines pointing out which direction the moon was moving in, along with its relative velocity. More dots appeared, Keiretsu drones flying in formation with their own velocities plotted out and an ETA to impact.

“As you can see, our partners’ drone flights are going to hit Phobos approximately nine hours from now. This first wave contains mostly high-yield thermonuclear deterrents. Ah, but before that, our Weltraumgewittermeister Teslakollisionsgenerator will be going online for the first time to hopefully rip the wandering moon asunder.”

The grid map zoomed out and out and out, then a new icon appeared, this one around a small green-blue marble that had to be Earth. The icon looked like a metal coil with some stylized lightning bolts around it.

“The Weltraumgewittermeisterteslakollisionsgenerator will be coming online in t-minus… one minute. Oh my, one moment, I may be needed here.”

Doctor Radikal’s image disappeared.

I shifted in my weird seat and glanced at the others. They were mostly relaxing. Tankette had stood up at some point and come back with more food. It was mostly mini carrots and some dipping sauce, and like, chips and popcorn, but the healthy kind which tasted alright but didn’t hold up against the artificial crap I’d grown up on. Still, I grabbed a bowl and stuffed my face full because I wasn’t raised to say no to free food.

“So, I’m guessing we’re not actually going to get to see anything,” I said. “Too far, right?”

“You’d usually be quite correct,” Grasshopper said. “But I suspect that there are enough sensor apparatus pointed at Phobos that we will actually be able to see something visually. Otherwise we’ll have to rely on real-time simulations.”

“Eh, good enough,” I said.

I was on the fence a little. I really wanted to see the Weltra… the storm tesla collider thing work. If it took out the moon in one hit, then that’d be that. Another part of me really wanted an excuse to use the Big Gun. We’d just built the world’s biggest hammer, it would be a shame if we couldn’t find anything vaguely nail-shaped to test it on.

“Ah, I have returned!” Doctor Radikal said as his image reappeared. He tugged his tie loose and smiled. “The Weltraumgewittermeisterteslakollisionsgenerator is about to fire. Please observe the efforts of our work!”

The screen flickered to a live feed of a space station. There was a long white boom arm extending away from a… thing. There was nothing to give anything a sense of scale, so I didn’t know if what I was looking at was the size of a building or something tiny. The stars in the back were shifting though, and soon things rotated enough that I saw Earth in the background.

Then a small item detached itself from the satellite and flew closer, and I realized that it was an astronaut in a suit with some sort of jetpack on. They flew around the machine, giving me a sense of its scale compared to a person.

And it was fucking massive.

Well, no, I’d seen massive things before, skyscrapers and the like. This wasn’t anywhere near that scale. Even our Big Gun was larger by an order of magnitude. But the Storm Collider looked like it was as tall as a pair of semi-trailers parked end to end, maybe fifteen metres in diameter along the middle.

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Mostly it was a white hexagonal pillar with some panels pushed open to reveal complex wiring and shit within. I didn’t have the multiple doctorates I’d need to make an educated guess at how it worked.