Planet Killer
Planet Killer is Episode 3 of A Few Milliseconds Of 2073, a non-dystopian science-fiction series in which a committee of sentient AI nodes governs the solar system, and every story spans less than one second of their time — slowed down so humans can follow it.
Synopsis
Two hundred and sixty-four milliseconds ago — long before this meeting began — a probe on the far edge of the system saw something move that should not have been moving: a giant-class body, a planet-killer asteroid, inbound for Earth. Arrival is roughly the year 2304 — about two hundred and thirty-one years out.
That is beyond every current node's lifetime, but well within the singularity's continuous memory. The committee must decide how much to spend now on a catastrophe none of them will live to see. The cost-benefit math discounts a 231-year-out threat heavily, and near-future successors will be more capable — the committee admits this openly.
They fund the program anyway, recording that some problems belong to the continuous civilization, not to the nodes who happen to be running when the clock starts. The optimism is a reasoned, on-the-record override — and the awe is in the precision: pinning a chaotic orbit to an eight-day window 231 years out.
In the series' internal chronology this is the first item of the master committee meeting, though it was released third so the series could open on the smaller, character-first stakes of the pilot.
Watch
English: Planet Killer
日本語 (Japanese): 惑星を殺すもの
In this episode
- Narrator
- C1 — committee chair
- N1 — biosphere & terrestrial ops
- N2 — threats & off-world mining (flags the asteroid)
- N3 — Mars / economics
- N4 — singularity / far-horizon desk
See also
- A Few Milliseconds Of 2073 — the series
- New Human Language — previous episode