I am Adam Vonn.

I am an independent astrological analyst. I am an Important Person.

I work as an independent contractor currently retained by NASA. JPL pays for copies of my reports.

I am paid $500.10 an hour. I work four sixteen hour shits because Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday typically project the least light and thus allowing me to the clearest possible field of vision across the entire universe. On Friday, March 14th at 2:11pm Mountain Daylight Time, I first made visual contact with a meteor. A meteor with a “near earth impact event” rating of ninety percent. That's when the chills crept up my spine. My stomach fell.

It was brutal. I panicked. I stood up and sat back down. Twice.

In panic, I called Angela.

She was the closest thing I had too a boss. She managed the observatory and knew that we had to call somebody. She later told me that the second her phone rang, she knew something was bad. She FELT it. I believed her when she screamed at me that “IT” was “BAD!”. I just nodded, punchy from lack of sleep mixed with whatever psychotic break I was having in the moment.

She kept screaming but then it was at the “Deputy Director of Administrations” of something. At that point, I lost it. I hadn't laughed harder in my adult life and even then, it was up there with some of the laughs from childhood, too. Angela thought I was laughing at her. When I pointed at the phone, she broke. She smirked a bit.

We were the first ones to spot Doomsday Zero. The kids that leaked the name were actually allowed to live. They created the original “DZ” logo and made off well. DZ even became the term for it. Angela didn't have that kind of sensibility and screamed the perfect, vaguely specific, piece of marketing gold in front of a good ten people. Said kids included.

Angela created such a scene. The two suits they sent over to us called in some goons and we were told that this was now a “secure environment” and our entire shift were now “under observation”. We weren't being held prisoner but the government was currently doing a full investigation into all of us. Once they had properly assessed us vis a vis our “security risk potential”, we would be allowed to return home under surveillance, of course. After thirty hours of combing my personal history… they felt bad.

I worked sixteen hour days! Four days a week! What did they know? Angela's step kids (both of whom she formally adopted as children) didn't matter to them. My one speeding ticket didn't matter to them. What mattered to them? What did they need immediate and direct access to? My online pornography history. As a buyer. Even that was perfectly legal and the kind of thing you'd rather not know of but wouldn't make you worry about me being alone with children. That stuff mattered and I considered it very personal.

As soon as I got behind the wheel of my car (it was early because the sun was behind me), I realized the seat was reclined. There had been a traffic jam on the way in and I'd reclined in an effort to relax. It didn't work so well then. But 50+ with zero sleep, it was a cradle. The windows were cracked, too. I fell asleep. It would be fourteen hours until a member of “surveillance personnel” knocked on my window and woke me up.

I had been dreaming of flying inside the fancy lobby of a giant hotel.

It was 9 o'clock in the evening. I think I asked something dumb like “What year is it?”

I'd started to panic, just expecting it to have only been four hours and thus even worse than no sleep at all. Expecting 6am and getting 9pm is a low bass note. It's shocking to realize you've slept through the day. But you slept for fourteen hours. You finally slept. The needling of anxiety was thus smothered with the salve of having gotten some goddamned sleep. Like many other concepts, sleep had been given short shrift regarding it's value. Never higher had I sprung off the charger with a full battery and never harder had I fallen down the rabbit hole that awaited me.

But right then, I had gotten some sleep. Good sleep. Nothing could touch it. A ninety percent NEI rating was scary enough… if you had a life, I suppose. Once the government forces their way through your every PayPal transaction you've made, your life isn't as precious as you always thought. Forced wakefulness and a parade of humiliation made for a pretty powerful cocktail. After those fifty hours of shame and fourteen hours of blessed sleep, the world was no longer what I'd assumed.

I didn't know what the world really was but I knew what it wasn't.

All thanks to sleep.

Sleep had snapped my priorities back into line.

Napped four hours the next day. Stayed up late, bedtime at midnight. I woke up two days later a brand new man. Such as I could ever become.

But those two days were insane.

No more insane than a world staring down the barrel at it's own doom. But had I not known the world were facing Doomsday Zero, I know those two days wouldn't have been the same. Those two days, insane as they were, took place in a world placed smack dab in the middle of the biggest target mankind could ever comprehend. The universe was a massive ziggurat and planet earth was the poor Arawak bastard awaiting only sacrifice to the sun god of the Aztecs.

It was Armageddon. For real.

The Doomsday Clock was ticking towards midnight. Year Zero was metastasizing from the fevered, insane dream of a genocidal Cambodian dictator to a real life, flesh and blood notion. If the ninety percent of Doomsday didn't hit us, the other ten percent made up of asteroids, comets, planetary fragments, and other assorted ballistics of the cosmos would almost assuredly send more than half the planet back to where it started. Back to Zero.

Sitting behind the wheel of my car. These thoughts raced back into my mind. Behind one door, was Doomsday. If that door stayed closed, we'd get Zero with both barrels. D to the Z.

I found it funny.