1.01.01

It all began the day I died. The first time.

Look, I’m not a writer, but everyone’s been telling me that’s it’s important to go back and write it all down from the start, from my perspective. Hopefully, before this ends up in anyone’s hands, an actual writer with skill will have fixed all my mistakes.

It was an ordinary and boring Sunday afternoon. I had just moved out of the home I had shared with my ex Genevieve for close to two decades, into a cheap one-bedroom apartment not far away. Like everyone else, I had no idea how much life was about to change.

My actual name is Maxwell Grey, by the way, but I usually just went by Maxx. I had just turned fifty, and although my body was starting to feel older, my spirit certainly wasn’t. Maybe I’m one of those guys who never really grows up all the way – or maybe we’re all like that to some extent, I don’t know.

I made my living as an independent tech consultant – a fancy way of saying that I preferred to work for myself and my tech skills made it so that I could. But because I was better working in my business than on my business, I seemed to always earn enough to get by, and not a lot more.

To me, the greatest irony was that before it all went down, I had just started to take conscious and active control of my life. I had been dieting, successfully taking off the pounds the years had put on. I was pursuing finding a mate – although with little luck so far. I was even making plans to finally see if I could push my consultancy into the next gear, to gain a little more financial flexibility.

It was around noon that the alert went out. A rogue asteroid had come from out of the plane of the ecliptic from a direction no one had been watching. We all found out later what happened: the world powers couldn’t nuke it because it was too close and that would just spread newly irradiated debris and dust all over the globe. So they hastily retrofit an ICBM with the strongest explosive they could come up with – using a small quantity of antimatter requisitioned from a science lab, sent it up, and hoped for the best. By the time the alert went out, the asteroid had already been largely vaporized.

As I understand it, the movie “Extinction Event” gets most of the details right, except I saw a picture of the actual project leader, and he was no Russell Crowe.

Now I’m obsessing over whether or not I’m supposed to write the titles of movies in quotes, or underlined, or something else – no idea. Forget it – like I said before, I’m not a writer.

The first alert the world got was anticlimactic. I didn’t have the television on, but I was surfing the net when I saw the articles begin appearing in my feed, so I turned on the TV.

The emergency alert was saying that the planet had just avoided a massive meteor strike, that it was now successfully destroyed, and the main danger was past. They were advising everyone to take shelter within the next hour as the remaining debris would pepper much of North America. Although some of the remaining fragments were as large as a small couch, they reassured us that the chance of anyone actually being hit by any meteors was smaller than that of being struck by lightning. Nevertheless, they recommended that everyone take shelter until the rain of debris was over in a few hours.

Well, you know what happened next. All over America, people went outside to watch the sky for the coming meteor fall.

People are morons.

I, always one to take caution seriously, stayed in my apartment and watched it all on TV – not that I was seriously worried that if I went out I myself would be hit – I understood the chances were still slim to none – but why take the risk? I figured I was that much safer in my first floor apartment, with three other floors above me.

But the announcers were largely right. As pieces of the asteroid fell all over North America, there were very few calamities to report. Most landed in non-populated areas. A fair number of epic potholes were created. Some did land in some cities and towns, and a few did some significant property damage. A handful of people were killed, not by being hit with a meteor, but due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time – like a couple in Oregon who drove at 50 mph into an unexpectedly felled tree, or a guy in Tennessee living in a ramshackle house that collapsed in on itself when it got hit. But almost no one got directly struck by the debris raining down that day.

Except me.