Misfortune interrupted the Earths peaceful stroll around the nn sun causing a disaster of cosmological proportions. It hap-pened on the twenty-fourth of June 2049, midsummer, at a time of magic for all the Earths cultures and religions, the shortest night, became the longest night that humanity would ever live. Some called it the Big Smash, others the Catastrophe, some the Apocalypse, the Cataclysm. But almost all ended up calling it the night of the fucking comet, even though it was a fucking asteroid. Just one year earlier, asteroid AST2038ZF had been caught between the gravities of Jupiter and Saturn (a chance in a trillion), it left its orbit and slipped slowly towards the Sun. A few days later, as the asteroid was accelerating, the worlds scientists measured its trajectory to a few metres accuracy. The result: IMPACT. A desperate defence of the planet was organised. Minute calculations indicated that the correct amount of fusion explosions dropped onto a certain point of the killer asteroid would alter its course slightly and avoid the tragedy. On the twentieth of June 2049, everyone knew that that the attempt to save the planet had failed. The catastrophe was even worse than the darkest predictions. The asteroid struck the Pacific Ocean near Japan and within a few hours a thick cloud of dust and steam darkened the whole planet. The big coastal cities were inundated by the subsequent tidal waves, the energy supplies were rendered useless and communications were destroyed. It was a horrifying massacre. Humanity as it had been known before the impact disappeared and with it its social organisation, its law and order and its government. The survivors organised themselves into savage tribes and survived on the remains of the annihilated civilisation.
The law of the jungle ruled. The nuclear winter that followed made things worse, decimating the few survivors, but little by little and as the dust settled back onto the planets surface, the greenhouse effect took over and the temperature rose sharply causing fires and drying out the sparse vegetation that was left. Only one group of humans survived the disaster intact, a group who also continued to enjoy all the technological advances of the twentyfirst century. It was a Martian penal colony, generally known as Copernicus. Here the most hardened criminals had been banished sin years previously and condemned to hard labour in the worst penitentiary that human minds had ever conceived. Their mission, almost finished by that time, was to build humanitys first home off the Earth. A true dream city under a huge protective dome, where the future colonists would live and exploit the infinite riches of Mars.