The maximisation of shareholder dividends
But just beyond the formal end of the message, she had left another: encrypted, unnoticeable to anyone not specifically looking for it. It said: “This will happen, but not by chance; Omega Military Systems will make this happen, to sell their product.”
Suddenly the events in that timeline looked very different. The massive number of people vaporised instantly, the massive number of people set alight before being destroyed by the blast wave of the impact, the massive number of people so unlucky as to survive ... All this horror inflicted on hundreds of thousands, and not only was it done consciously and deliberately, but in order to prove the need for OMS' orbital planetary defence system? Presumably justified by “some must be sacrificed if all are to be saved”, despite it now being known that there was no NEO greater than 5 metres that would intersect Earth's orbit in the next century?
There would, of course, be questions about the latter point. How had the bolide been missed? Had it been missed? But was the alternative? Only the unthinkable. And in the immediate aftermath, such concerns would be dismissed; most people who feel that their safety, their very survival, is being threatened are not in an analytical frame of mind, and at least initially, can be dissuaded from drifting in that direction. Certainly long enough for everything to be done that needed to be done to commit society to constructing and operating the OMS platform. Get the right project stakeholders involved, and the project gains a momentum that's difficult to counter.
Okay. Okay. He had no choice; he was, right now, the only person who could stop this from happening.
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