Robert Osmark watched his death approaching in vivid ultra-high definition on a 90-inch holotable display. Only a handful of people on the planet could see what Osmark saw, and most of them didn’t understand what they were looking at. Not even the smart ones. He zoomed in as close as the satellite’s telescopic lens would allow. He wanted to get a good look at his nemesis, 213 Astraea. A nine-mile wide rock shot through by twisting veins of ice like burrowing worms, the whole thing wreathed in a halo of burning gas. When it filled the entire display, Osmark walked up to it and stared at its pitted surface.

“Never before has something so uninteresting held so many in awe,” Osmark whispered to himself.

It was a shame, really. But he wasn’t surprised. Humans weren’t impressed by the amazing and awesome things happening all around them—unless it was burning, naked, or life-threatening, most people wouldn’t notice a miracle if it bit them on the nose.

Osmark Technologies had revolutionized life in every corner of the world, but that hunk of rock in the sky had eclipsed all of its achievements the second it revealed itself to the Arecibo Observatory, down in Puerto Rico. In the end, the people of the world would be more impressed by an unfeeling, unthinking, hunk of stone hurled at their planet by an indifferent universe than by the countless technological miracles Robert Osmark had brought into their lives. Ingrates.

“Let’s go check on the New World,” he said to the empty room. Osmark left the asteroid behind. It didn’t care about him, or the billions of others it would kill along with him, so why should he care about it?

Besides, in many ways, the asteroid was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He turned, heels click-clacking on the gray stone floors, hands neatly folded behind his back, and beelined for the gigantic, steel blast door separating his private quarters from the rest of the sprawling, underground facility. Leaving the comforts of his suite behind was always a shock and more than a little disorienting.

His room was a work of art: old gray stone walls, polished dark wood floorboards underfoot, a massive fireplace with a mocha-brown leather sofa sitting close by. Arched windows littered the room, overlooking a forest filled with an assortment of pines and firs. They were holo-projections, of course, but the most convincing kind. Built in nooks and crannies held priceless sculptures—the L’Homme au Doigt by Alberto Giacometti here, the Tete de Femme by Picasso there—or world-changing paintings. Just over his fireplace hung a Nymphéas, by Monet.

All works of art the world couldn’t stand to lose.

Testaments to human brilliance.

But one step took him from the luxurious and into a bland white tunnel lined with naked pipes and exposed conduits. At first glance, the walls appeared to be painted concrete, as was the floor and ceiling. A closer examination revealed the truth.

Salt.

When Astraea plowed into Central America and ended life as humans knew it, this bunker, carved into the world’s largest salt deposit, would preserve some of the earth’s wealthiest inhabitants.

Or, it would preserve their minds, at least.

He whistled as he walked down the tunnel, pointedly ignoring the mute and immobile weapon emplacements mounted at regular intervals in the walls and ceiling. Once the largest and deepest salt mine in the world, Osmark’s new home had also been a military installation of last resort before it found its way into his hands. He couldn’t help but wonder how the architects of this place, who’d built it to stand up to a nuclear assault that paled in comparison to the disaster heading toward earth, would feel about the improvements he’d made.

His first stop was the ventilation and cooling plant. Though there were technicians and engineers tasked with making sure every vital piece of the bunker’s machinery was in perfect order, Osmark wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. If he’d learned one thing as the head of Osmark Technology, it was that someone always missed something. Always. It was as inevitable as the turning of the seasons. If he wanted to be sure something was done correctly, he’d have to check it himself.

“How’s it going, Harry?” He asked the security guard stationed inside the clean room leading to the plant. Names were such a little thing in the grand scheme, but he’d found they held a tremendous power. He knew the name of every subordinate—he even knew the names of their family members—because those small details cemented loyalty better than anything else.

The guard, a former Marine with beef-slab arms, stood a little straighter when he addressed Osmark. “Boring, which I guess is an improvement over what’s going on topside”—he jabbed a finger toward the roof.

A broadcast monitor mounted near the ceiling inside the clean room showed Osmark scenes of rising anarchy. With the literal end of life on earth approaching at an alarming rate, things were breaking down. With so little time left, people were doing exactly what they wanted, when they wanted, to whom they wanted. When you had no future, maybe the best you could hope for was to enjoy your present to the fullest.

Unfortunately, that meant your good day could turn into someone else’s very, very bad day.

Rioters rampaged across the monitor, weapons raised in mindless defiance. Fires burned in blackened storefronts. The wounded ran screaming, their mouths carved into black circles beneath the horrified caverns of their dark eyes.

An overhead view erased the individual rioters and pulled back to show the scope of the insanity. “Where is this?” Osmark asked.

“Dallas,” Harry said flatly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The scary thing is what’s missing.”

Osmark zipped into his white Tyvek suit and raised his mask to his face. Before he strapped it on, he asked, “What’s that?”

Harry’s eyes narrowed as he watched the chaos dance across the monitor. “Cops. Firemen. Ambulances. No one’s trying to stop it. No one’s trying to help.”

I am, Osmark thought as he fastened his mask in place. “Show me Osmark Stadium.”

Frank nodded, hands quickly working at the control panel. The chaos in Dallas was replaced by an interior view of a massive football stadium in San Diego. The difference was immediate. Ashen faced people milled around in orderly pockets, each clutching a lone suitcase with the last of their earthly belongings. Soldiers patrolled the perimeter and weaved their way through the crowd; their boxy, matte-black assault rifles kept the masses in check. These were the survivors. Well, potential survivors. The few lucky enough or wealthy enough to win A.R.C. lottery tickets, and a place in one of the deep-earth bunkers scattered around the globe.

The whole set-up was nice, neat, and orderly.

“And the Silicon Valley facility?” Osmark said, leaning forward as he inspected the monitor.

Once more the holo-screen flickered and morphed. A giant warehouse with concrete walls and harsh halogen lighting appeared. The space was filled wall to wall with state-of-the-art NexGenVR capsules—a sea of glossy, black plastic coffins. Here too, order reigned. Nurses, orderlies, guards, and tech service support personnel loaded people into capsules or carted bodies away for incineration. Five-thousand capsules per facility, and five-hundred facilities operating at max capacity worldwide. The greatest evacuation the world had ever seen.

I am, Osmark thought again as he waved to Harry and stepped into the plant.

The noise inside was incredible, deafening even. Even with the state-of-the-art earplugs, Osmark could hear the plant’s unearthly racket. A steady bass drone underlined rhythmic hissing and an oscillating rumble. The bunker was close to 2 miles beneath the surface, hidden below the sleepy town of Independence, Missouri. Getting air that deep into the earth required a staggering number of powerful fans, which constantly buzzed in the background like never-ending white noise. And each one of those fans added heat to the air passing through its whirling blades.

The mine’s engineers had dealt with the heat by adding enormous cooling chambers between the fans. Exhaust vents dissipated the heat through narrow channels leading back to the surface. It was an impressive feat of engineering, and if it ever failed, everyone in the bunker would die through a painful combination of suffocation and slow broiling. There was no chance of it failing anytime in the next hundred years, however. Osmark had seen to that personally. He’d hired the best engineers on the planet to improve the system, pushing it far beyond the capacity its creators ever imagined. Standing on the catwalk overlooking his End of the World air conditioning system, Osmark couldn’t help but smile.

Everything was working precisely as he’d planned, and it would keep on working, long after he died.

“Perfect,” he whispered, leaving the plant behind for the last time.

Briskly, he marched down a dozen different hallways after he left the cooling and ventilation plant—left, right, left, left, straight, right—taking each turn without the least hesitation. The broadcast monitors scattered around the mine kept him apprised of the situation on the surface. He did his best to tune it out because it pained him to see people behaving like animals. He was living proof that they didn’t have to be that way. A little effort, a little luck, some brains, and one man could move the world.

Several levels down from the ventilation plant, Osmark reached his next stop. With a wave of his hand, another steel blast door swung open on silent hinges, revealing a stark white hallway, which connected to a darkened chamber. The security guard was half out of his chair before he recognized Osmark.

“I didn’t know you are coming today, sir.” The man said with a sheepish grin.

“Relax, John,” Osmark said. “I’m just making the rounds.”

His last stop had been all about cooling things down, but this room was for heating things up. OLED panels lined the walls, each displaying information about a critical subsystem. The center of the far wall was what drew Osmark’s attention, though, because it gave a readout of the whole system at a glance.

That display had a tiny pictogram representing the salt mine at its top. A thick tube led from the mine down to the earth’s vast darkness. The mine’s geothermal well. It descended more than 10 miles below the earth’s surface to a vast lake of superheated, pressurized water. That water, almost 500°F temperature, was pumped up to the power plant under intense pressure. The steam generated turned turbines, which generated electricity. As the water cooled, it flowed back to the lake that provided it. The closed-loop was efficient, nearly perfect. It would keep electricity flowing until the end of time, powering the Overmind servers which ruled Viridian Gate Online

The central display was a solid shade of blue, telling Osmark everything was running as expected.

“Of course it is,” he whispered to himself, “I made it.”

Satisfied, he turned and left, waving goodbye to John for the last time, as he headed deeper into the earthen bunker, past the food stores and clean water wells, the housing quarters for the transition team, and the drone vaults. The drones were Osmark’s final project. After Astraea did its dirty work and debris stopped falling from the sky, the bunker’s artificial intelligence units would direct the drones to the surface. There, they’d clear away rubble and debris from the entrance just in case one of the mine’s residents needed to head outside. But, more importantly, the drones would be able to deploy a sophisticated solar cell system once the atmosphere shed the worst of Astraea’s pollution. Those cells would allow the drones to recharge on the surface so they could continue exploring the dead world left behind.

Osmark paused, then, rubbing his suddenly sweat-slicked hands over his pants. There was only one last area to check before he made the plunge: the servers themselves, buried in an area the staff jokingly referred to as the Underworld. No one liked to go down there. Not the techs. Not the engineers. Not the guards. And if Osmark were honest, he’d include himself on that list. Still, this was the most important check—the one the whole world of Viridian Gate Online rode on—and he couldn’t put it off any longer. Reluctantly, he made his way down the catwalk to a stainless-steel elevator, which plunged even deeper into the earth.

When the elevator door dinged opened, the trio of guards standing at attention didn’t apologize for pointing their weapons in Osmark’s direction. It wasn’t until the lead guard recognized Robert that he motioned for the others to relax. “One last check, Sir?” The guard, a whip-thin man with a crew cut named Marcus, asked.

“Better safe than sorry,” Osmark said, giving the men each a nod as he passed them.

The black door they were guarding had no handle or lock. A single glowing green panel marked its center. Osmark placed his palm on it and spread his fingers wide to give the sensor a clear view of his prints. Red light flashed in each of his eyes, scanning his retinas and confirming his identity. Without a sound, the door vanished into the wall.

Osmark licked his lips. He wasn’t afraid, not of a machine he’d helped create, but he couldn’t hide his apprehension. What he’d accomplished here wasn’t just a feat of technology. It was miraculous.

And that made him just a little nervous.

The black box was 10 yards on a side, and 5 yards tall. It looked like a chunk of polished obsidian resting on the salt floor. Thick cooling tubes descended from the ceiling to connect to the box’s sides and top like metallic umbilical cords. The faint whooshing of forced air was the only sound inside the sacred chamber.

Osmark approached the room’s only other object: a black monitor resting on top of a short pillar. When he stopped in front of it, a low, mechanical voice droned, “Hello, Robert.”

The monitor flickered to life, displaying a dizzying array of charts and graphs. None of them were labeled because no one would ever see this screen other than Robert. He knew what each line and bar graph meant; he understood intimately what every colored pixel was telling him. This was an overview of the world he’d created. The virtual reality realm where close to 4 million men, women and children would live after Astraea wiped out the rest of humanity—not to mention the other 8 million or so NPCs, generated by the Overminds. Like everything else, it was close to perfect.

So close that the imperfections rose to the surface like jarring notes struck in an otherwise melodious orchestra. “Damn it,” Robert snarled.

The Chinese had assured him their donation would work flawlessly. And it had, until recently. There was something off with the Thanatos Overmind. There were no severe anomalies, but almost constant fluctuations above and below normal operating thresholds disturbed Robert’s otherwise flawless system.

“Maybe it’s the reflection core, I could just tweak —” Robert muttered absently, then bit his tongue. With only a little more than eight days remaining before Astraea plowed into the earth, there was no point in tinkering with the arcade built. It would be more than good enough.

It had to be.