The radical Islamic community started circulating that the asteroid was really God’s way of bringing justice to the heathens in the rest of the world, and that any Muslims killed during the apocalypse would be given 20 virgins and all that nonsense.
This idea, of course, led Al-Qaeda to threaten to bomb any mission launches to destroy the asteroid. To prove their seriousness, they bombed some other stuff as well, including the Kennedy Space Center. All of the bomb threats led to a series of security re-thinks on the mission, which caused the first of the delays.
China, annoyed by this delay in the United States, withdrew their support of the mission in favor of starting their own world-saving enterprise. The new competition put ever growing strain on the foreign markets supplying the goods to both missions. As a result, both became even further delayed.
The downward spiral led Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, to declare that the whole thing was just a fake, and a ploy by the “white devil” to cheat the Latino people of the world out of their hard earned money and resources. He actually began to get some support among the members of the United Nations, most notably North Korea, who began to threaten to launch nuclear attacks against any rocket launched to intercept the “fake” asteroid.
Thus began the widespread – and ultimately correct – notion that neither competing mission would ever get a chance to destroy the asteroid. The resulting panic caused chaos. Hoarders, murderers, rapists, and weirdos all had their time in the limelight. Goods were few and far between, but end of the world debauchery was in abundance.
A few people built underground shelters which wouldn’t have outlasted the effects of the asteroid, but they felt better about at least having tried. The extremely wealthy launched their own fleet of private space craft to be able to live in orbit until the earth started to look green again. Turns out it’s not hard to get into space when the government is in such shambles that no one can enforce the red tape that’s supposed to stop you from going up.
By the time the asteroid actually came, the world was already over, at least as far as what we knew it to be. At the rate we were going, we would have been extinct in a few years anyway.
Too bad the asteroid was near miss. Close enough that the tail made some pretty lights in the sky and killed the wealthy in orbit, but not close enough to kill anything on the surface. The world went on, but nobody was the same after that. We all still live with the consequences of the end times…and regret them every day.
