A Century-Old Airship

In May 1982, humanity first spotted Comet Norei in a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. At first, it was just a white dot. Later, it became a blurry mosaic a few pixels across.

Astronomers paid it little attention at first, assuming it was just one of the countless meteors in the Milky Way, eventually finding its orbit, approaching the solar system, and then moving away.

So forty years later, when astronomers told everyone that Comet Norei was 10,030 times as massive as the familiar Halley's Comet and 6,000 times as fast, most people looked confused and simply asked, "Wow, that's amazing. So what?"

The most important news did not come from the world's top astronomers. At nine in the morning in the UTC+8 time zone and nine in the evening in the UTC-12 time zone, government officials from countries around the world simultaneously announced a story that had long been circulating underground: Comet AC1NO19, codenamed Norei, would collide head-on with Earth in fifty-one years.

Lin Zhezhi was among the last geology students to enroll before the Flying Ark Project began. On her first day, she heard a freshman from the mechanical engineering department next door mutter, "Why don't they just merge with the history department?"

At the first gathering of the new school year, she met Wei Qizhou from the mechanical engineering department.

Theme: People can protect their home.