Free Titanborn by Rhett C. Bruno

apocalypse compelled most people to forget about faith and cling instead to the tangible things that helped them survive, and to those with enough wealth and power to provide it all in our shattered world.
    That was how the USF and its corporations came into being in the first place, but there were still factions of people who believed the Meteorite served as cosmic punishment for our transgressions. The preacher we had passed belonged to the most prevalent of those groups—the Church of the Three Messiahs—which took the texts of what I’m told used to be Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and blended them into what became known as the Final Testament. Somewhere along the line those ancient teachings became a warning against traveling into space lest God complete the job he started with the Meteorite. It sounded silly to me, but I have to admit I was envious of anybody who could have such unshakable faith in something beyond themselves.
    “But I understand the appeal,” I added.
    “It is foolish to believe another meteorite that size will strike Earth,” Zhaff stated. “It was a scientific anomaly that will likely not occur again for many millions of years, if it ever does. At the current rate of human expansion, a similar instance in the future would barely dent the population.”
    “You know what I believe in? Getting sleep whenever I have the chance. If you’re going to be a collector you might want to consider adopting that policy.”
    Before Zhaff could reply I turned away, leaned my head against the window, and closed my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep right away since my mind was churning, but I was tired of conversing with the Cogent. I already missed working alone.
    Zhaff was right, though. The chances of another sizable meteorite hitting Earth were definitely minuscule, yet the fear of it happening again was all that drove us
.
Everything the people who remained on Earth had done since recovering from the Meteorite was done under the creed that humanity’s extinction was being made impossible. The expansion into Sol. The way the Earth’s settlements were reconstructed. How Earthers reproduced. Even the train I sat on.
    Cities once expanded endlessly in every direction and rose to scrape the clouds, but in my time everyone on Earth lived along strings of conurbation that stretched for hundreds of kilometers but rarely exceeded a kilometer in width. Six tracks of high-speed maglev trains ran down their centers like spines, and along them nodes of residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural infrastructure alternated. This way the areas remained spread apart, but if one segment of a string were to be cut off from the rest, it, and they, could survive independently. Like an earthworm growing two heads after being sliced in half.
    New London was the largest bulge in any string, but even it only spread to nearly two kilometers in width. It also housed the USF Assembly Building, which at fifty stories was actually the tallest building on the planet that wasn’t a half-sunken ruin from the last age. The city fell along the Euro-String—the longest of the strings—which ran from the center of the European continent to the heart of Old Russia. Being that the aftereffects from the Meteorite had drowned half of Earth’s habitable land, and billions of people with it, settling along the middle ridges of continents was the best way to ensure that it didn’t repeat.
    Every policy I could think of made perfect sense by that line of thinking. It was the world I’d always known: one of a people locked in constant vigil. Earthers weren’t even allowed to reproduce without clearance from doctors that the genes of the parents didn’t have any chance of resulting in disease. Most of us grew up in clan-families that numbered into the hundreds, mine being a family centered a few dozen kilometers outside New London. Matching candidates for parenthood would join together to reproduce in phases and