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ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Seven was being carefully tracked by Professor Martin Darby of Northwestern University, father of the famous and/or infamous Shade Darby. Shade’s father had had his security clearance reinstated, despite the fact that his daughter had used his data to locate and steal one of the earlier ASOs and had then used the rock—its universal shorthand name—to become Rockborn, a mutant with a power—the power, in Shade’s case, to move at speeds just over Mach 1.

ASO-7 had passed the orbit of the moon and was now spinning around the Earth in a decaying elliptical, an orbit that Professor Darby and counterparts at universities all over the world had calculated and recalculated with growing alarm.

ASO-7 was a large piece, roughly eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) long and sixteen meters (fifty-two feet) wide. Estimated mass, assuming the composition matched earlier ASOs, was 1600 tons, about the weight of 550 Toyota Land Cruisers.

The size of the rock and the fact that it seemed to be moving erratically had left Professor Darby able to calculate only probabilities. He’d turned those probabilities into a simplified map, which he’d forwarded along with his calculations, to Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense.

The map showed the likely strike zone as a pink crosshatched area. That pink cross-hatching extended from just north of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Long Island Sound around Bayville.

But it was what occupied the middle of that strike zone that had sent alarm bells ringing throughout the US government. Because in the middle of that zone stood New York City.

The odds of a relatively safe splashdown in the water of Long Island Sound were 40 percent, which left smaller likelihoods of strikes near Elizabeth, or in Manhattan proper, which had only a 20 percent likelihood of being the bull’s-eye.

But that was a one-in-five chance of utterly annihilating the greatest of American cities, because this much was certain: if ASO-7 hit land, it would release energy equivalent to thirty-five kilotons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons. If ASO-7 was intact and hit, say, Rockefeller Center, it would obliterate sixty square blocks, and severely damage buildings and toss cars and buses around from Thirty-Ninth Street to Fifty-Seventh Street, and from Ninth Avenue almost to Lexington Avenue. If it landed on a weekday, the estimates were that it would kill as many as a million people instantly and another quarter million from fires and related injuries.

ASO-7 had the potential to be the greatest disaster ever to strike the United States.

Department of Homeland Security

Memo: 19-00475

Top Secret (HSTF-66)

Re: ASO-7

DoD, NASA, and university assessments suggest a likelihood that ASO-7 will impact in or near New York City. Likelihood 20 percent low estimate (Northwestern University), 40 percent highest estimate (Oxford University).

Potential Countermeasures:

THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). THAAD uses KKV technology (Kinetic Kill Vehicle) and would be ineffective.

GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense). No units are within range.

Aegis-capable ships. Aegis RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) uses KKV technology and would be ineffective.

DoD assesses likelihood of any of these systems being effective at zero percent.

The only option we have to present at this time is to launch one or more ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads to intercept and either divert or break up the ASO. Such an application is theoretical and untested.

Preliminary estimates of effective destruction of ASO-7 by a single warhead are 5 percent. Preliminary estimates show a 30 percent likelihood of altering the ASO’s course, with that new course being almost entirely unpredictable. The most likely result appears to be fracturing of ASO-7 resulting in multiple smaller meteorites with impact zones and damage impossible to predict.

Embassy of the People’s Republic of China—Washington

ALERT

Top Secret

Ambassador Gao has been informed by US State Department that two ICBMs (Type: LGM-30) enhanced by additional solid-fuel boosters and carrying single warheads (Type: W87) with yields estimated at 475 kilotons will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on an intercept course with ASO-7.

US Defense Department liaisons have offered reassurance as to angle and flight time. Recommend People’s Army track but otherwise treat as nonhostile.

The Rachel Maddow Show—Interview Transcript.

RACHEL MADDOW: I want to thank you for joining us by Skype from Las Vegas. It has been a very intense few weeks, and an especially intense forty-eight hours for all of you. So thank you for agreeing to this interview.

SHADE DARBY: You’re welcome.

MADDOW: Would you mind . . . using Skype can be awkward . . . would you mind if we go around to each member of the group?

SHADE: No problem. Dekka?

DEKKA TALENT: I’m Dekka Talent.

MADDOW: You are a survivor of the Perdido Beach Anomaly—what you, I assume, call the FAYZ?

DEKKA: Yep.

MADDOW: How is this situation different from life in the PBA dome, in the FAYZ?

DEKKA: No dome. And the rock mutation is more physical. We change. Physically. Also we have food now, so that’s different.

MADDOW: Is that transformation, that morphing, is that painful?

DEKKA: No. More creepy and disturbing than painful.

MADDOW: Can you give us a sense of how that feels? It must be just . . . well, let me just ask: What is it like? How does it feel?

DEKKA: (Shrugs.) You should probably ask Cruz or Shade or . . . (pushes Cruz forward)

CRUZ: Hi.

MADDOW: Cruz, you have become the face of the Rockborn Gang. In fact, we’re going to put up the iconic photo of you carrying a baby away from the flames that engulfed hundreds of people in that just unspeakably awful moment in Las Vegas. I wonder if you see your new status as, well, like I said, the face of the Rockborn Gang, I wonder if you see this perhaps as an ironic twist, given that you are transgender and your ability, your superpower, is to alter your appearance at will.

CRUZ: I guess. I mean, yeah, it’s like, I don’t know. Like the rock has a weird sense of humor. Or else the media does. But I’m not the hero here. It wasn’t me that stopped Dillon Po

MADDOW: The so-called Charmer. Dillon Poe, who had the power to compel absolute obedience with just the sound of his voice.

CRUZ: Yeah, him. It wasn’t me that stopped him. It was Malik and Francs. I just happened to be in that picture.

MADDOW: The story is that you were recruited, in a way, by Shade Darby, who was your friend from school. Is that correct?

CRUZ: More or less. You should talk to Shade. Shade and Dekka are sort of the . . . I don’t know. I mean, I’m just this chameleon person. Or talk to Malik, he’s the one who . . .

MADDOW: Did you want to say something more about Malik?

CRUZ: Malik, come here, your turn.

MALIK: Good evening, Ms. Maddow.

MADDOW: Welcome to the show, and thanks for coming on. Your story is perhaps the most tragic. You were very badly burned in the battle that took place at the Port of Los Angeles.

MALIK: Yes.

MADDOW: Doctors did not expect you to survive. Is it true, as some reports have it, that the Malik you are now, the person we are seeing, is actually a morph?

MALIK: Yes, that’s true. I am in morph now. If I de-morph, I revert back to the condition I was in the hospital. Which, as you said, is . . . intolerable.

MADDOW: And the power you have is the ability to essentially project that pain onto others. That’s how you prepared the ground for the raid on the so-called Ranch, the Homeland Security facility people are comparing to Dr. Mengele’s Auschwitz.

MALIK: Yes. That is my power. The ability to project excruciating pain. It’s not . . . It’s not something I wanted.

MADDOW: Survivors from the Ranch, survivors—and there were very few—say the pain you projected was so awful that in some cases they attempted suicide rather than endure it.

MALIK: (Nods)

MADDOW: And Dillon Poe did in fact kill himself rather than endure it.

MALIK: Yes.

MADDOW: Does it concern you at all that this power is in the hands of . . . well, in your hands and in the hands of the others in the group? And then I wonder if you would talk about how you see all of this playing out.

MALIK: Does it concern me? (Laughs) Of course it concerns me. We have six people here who have extreme power. No one elected us. No one said, ‘Let’s give all this power to these kids.’ The problem is that the rock gives power to the good and the bad alike, people like Justin DeVeere—

MADDOW: Knightmare.

MALIK: Yeah, him. And Tom Peaks—

MADDOW: Napalm or Dragon, as people are calling him.

MALIK: And Dillon Poe, yeah. The only thing the people in charge could do to stop Poe was send a tank brigade into the city, and, I’m sorry, but that wasn’t going to stop him, either. Look, I don’t want to be doing this; none of us wants to be doing this. But Dillon Poe had to die; there’s no question about that. He had to die. He was a mass murderer. He killed—

MADDOW: The official death toll is currently 3,102 people. And may rise as more bodies are found.

MALIK: Yeah, he had to be stopped, and the only way to do it was by killing him. But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be the one who . . . None of us likes doing this, Ms. Maddow. You know?

MADDOW: Shade Darby? Is that true for all of you? I ask because—and please correct me if any of this is wrong—but you actually chose this path. You actually obtained a piece of the rock and became a mutant deliberately.

SHADE: Yes. And I have to live with that. Not just what I did to myself, that’s on me, but I dragged Cruz into it, and Malik. You could say I chose this for myself, although . . . Did I know this was how it would turn out? No, of course not.

MADDOW: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I sense, and again, correct me, but I sense that you feel some guilt.

SHADE: Some guilt? (Laughs) I saw my father thrown to the ground and arrested for something I did. I convinced Cruz to help me, and now she’s in the middle of all this, living this life. And Malik . . . Do I feel guilty that someone I care about is haunted night and day by voices in his head? That he’s defined by pain? People are calling him M-Pain and Screamer and, you know, Malik is the smartest, kindest . . . Yeah. Yes, Rachel, I feel guilt.

MADDOW: Is Aristotle Adamo there with you?

ARMO: Call me Armo.

MADDOW: I want to run a piece of tape we have obtained. I’ll warn the audience that it is shaky and poor quality and . . . well, I was going to say it may disturb some viewers, but given what everyone has seen in recent days and weeks . . . Let’s roll the tape. That is you, in morph, attacking an Apache helicopter, a military helicopter, as it hovers over the ground.

ARMO: Huh. Cool, I actually haven’t seen that before.

MADDOW: You were a prisoner at the Ranch where—

ARMO: Can you run that tape again? That was way cool.

MADDOW: Actually, if you could answer my question and—

ARMO: Nah, first run the tape.

MADDOW: (Pause.) All right, ummmmm, control room?