A Hole in One

Author: Steven Black

In the reaches of deep space, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, one asteroid collided with another and set into motion of chain of events that would forever change the course of life on Earth. Depending upon where you sat within American society, the fate that was sealed that day, was one of great horror or one of great fortune. Through the void of space the asteroid accelerated sunward, drawn as it was by the gravitational force of the Sun and then, even more so, as its path took it through the gravity well of Earth and her moon.

The asteroid was small relative to many others whence it came, and when it came close enough to Earth to be detected, it passed unobserved, obscured by the moon as she passed between herself and the Earth during that short window when time for a useful warning could have been issued. The people of Earth, with no warning of the coming collision, went about their lives as they did every day, killing one another, cheating one another, planning the destruction of their enemies, and all of the other things that humans do on a daily basis. At the center of the buzz of human politics, Washington D.C., the future epicenter of a cosmic impact, extended, metaphorically off course, its tentacles of hate, manipulation, deceit, and violence across the world upon which it fed, as it always had done, blithely ignorant of its fate. The king of evil himself, the white man in the White House, enjoyed his creature comfort and gorged himself on the fine foods bought from taxes extorted from working Americans. Protected as he was by an army of Secret Service agents, and the full force of the U.S. Military; the king of evil felt secure and confident.

After finishing his meal, the king of evil took a stroll on the White House grounds. Had he looked up, he would have seen the asteroid, now past the Moon and on its way to Pennsylvania Avenue, looming in the sky above. While he did not notice it, the astronomers did. The king’s tranquility was shattered only moments before impact as the call came into the Secret Service who instructed the President to take cover in the bunker below the White House. While listening to the warnings of the Secret Service, the President looked up and saw the expanding stone, now larger than the moon and growing ever larger. Before he could utter a word, the entire sky was obscured and the Earth beneath his feet liquefied. If he had a last thought, I would be surprised, not only because he was not known to be a thinking man, but because there wasn’t time enough for a thought to formulate.

The asteroid, one mile in diameter, impacted Washington D.C., centered upon the White House, transforming the surrounding land, as far as the eye could see, into a violent ocean of liquid rock with enormous waves expanding outward and flinging back into space globs of glowing matter which before completely cooling, plunged back into the atmosphere, returning once again for secondary impacts. While it was a great fortune that the White House would be the epicenter of such an impact, what defies explanation is the highly improbable distribution of secondary impacts. Not a single federal building in the United States escaped the secondary impacts. Not a single US Military base was spared. Not a single US Embassy remained standing after the impacts. Where Washington D.C. had once been there now was a large inland bay. The area surrounding each federal building of each American city was largely intact save the great hole where Washington’s presence had once been. It was as if the asteroid had chosen to wipe the American Government off of the face of the Earth. If I were a religious man, I would believe that God had taken revenge upon America for its misdeeds, but I am not a religious man and I must say that this was just a very odd case of improbable happenstance. In any case, within the span of minutes, every vestige of the federal government evaporated, leaving Americans to fend for themselves.

It took a while for Americans to realize that anything had happened. Those living far from Washington D.C. felt the Earth shake, experienced a cosmic lightshow, and that was about it. The first indication that something profound had happened was the lack of news. Without Washington D.C. to direct the days’ news programs, the news agencies didn’t know what to report and began replaying old programs about Viagra, the threat of terrorism, and any other thing that might bring ratings. The next sign that something had happened was the drop in online trolling. Radical online publications suddenly found themselves left in peace. Passengers traveling by air found their passage unblocked by members of the Transportation Security Agency and their pernicious and lying databases. Threatening letters from the IRS stopped arriving in mailboxes. Highway traffic immediately reduced and every work day took on the appearance of a one of those days when government workers have the day off and no one else does.

After two weeks, without a federal government to pay taxes to, paychecks became larger. Suddenly, many Americans had more cash than they had before. News from Iraq came to a stand still. The absence of American troops achieved peace and there was nothing to report. Without a Department of Homeland Security to issue terror warnings, everyone forgot the war on terrorism. Apparently the terrorists forgot too because there were no more terror attacks (come to think of it, there weren’t any between 9/11 and the day the asteroid hit anyway). All of the FBI-run kiddy porn websites came down and along with them, all traces of kiddy porn disappeared from the web. If it were not for the great faith in the FBI that I, the author have, I would suspect that the only perverts on the web had been FBI agents, for all solicitations for vile and degrading material nearly disappeared with the FBI. Of course, this must have been a coincidence.  More remarkable was the decline in online rightwing vigilante websites.  Within a month of the impact, ProtestWarrior.com vanished, starved from funds in the wake of the vaporization of the CIA.  Half the membership of the FreeRepublic disappeared and, for reasons no one can explain, each and every Jihadist website vanished.

At the non-federal level, the local police began to focus their energies on criminals rather than political dissidents. Grass began to grow in those spots where they had parked their cars since 9/11 and many a dissident found himself trimming grass he had long forgotten. With cops on the move, rather than parked uselessly in front of the houses of people with IQs over 120, Duncan Donuts experienced an enormous reduction in donut sales and had to lay off countless slaves who no longer had the pleasure of deciding just what body fluid to sneak into Officer Friendly’s cup of Joe.

This, however, was only the beginning. With no one to man the borders, the price of drugs dropped precipitously, along with the income of the family members of the Border Patrol, and this dramatic drop was followed with an even more dramatic drop in the level of crime. After all, no one is willing to shoot anyone over a bag of cocaine that costs only a dollar a gram. Farm owners and factory owners no longer had to outsource their labor south of the border as plenty of immigrant workers were now available. Americans discovered, to their amazement, that they could, in all reality, manufacture things. This reverse the trade deficit and the economy began to boom.

Despite threats from Miami’s Cuban population who were determined to dictate to others what they should or should not do, all in the name of freedom, many Americans, free of fines and penalties from the US Government, began to visit and trade with Cuba. Cuba’s economy turned around dramatically. Moreover, without the threat of invasion from the US and without the endless campaign of PsyOps upon the Island of Cuba, the Cuban Government relaxed for the first time since the Revolution. Democracy took root and Cuba slowly transformed itself into the Caribbean paradise it once was, only this time without the influence of the mob and the CIA.

Perhaps the most dramatic change was in the Middle East. Within one year, Israel had used up all of the funds it had been siphoning from the US taxpayer and faced a major financial crisis. With no new funds in sight, Israel was forced to take radical steps to ensure its safety. These included such outlandish ideas such as making peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbors. Israelis discovered, much to their shock, that the Arabs really just wanted to be their friends. All it took to transform the once hostile relationship was a little mutual respect, something unachievable so long as Israel behaved like an irresponsible son spending his father’s cash. Defense spending in the Middle East declined, Israel and Iran put away their nukes, and Jew and Muslim learned that they each worshiped the same God after all.

Without interference from the United States, North and South Korea sorted out their differences and reunited, saving North Koreans from starvation and South Koreans from a nuclear holocaust. With the reduction in US manufacturing overseas, China could no longer afford to employ slave labor from its pool of political prisoners and had to join the modern world.

Despite all of these changes, most Americans remained clueless that anything at all had changed. In fact, several election dates had gone by before anyone noticed that there had been no elections for a decade. No one knows for sure why Americans did not notice when their government evaporated, but there are those who speculate that so long as an American has cash in her pocket and mall near her home, she would fail to notice anything else, even a falling sky.