Back in elementary school a ‘scientific theory’ hit the playground that blew my mind: if every person in China jumped at the same time, their impact would knock our planet off its axis and the world would end.

I was always a sort of gullible person. I think I just liked to believe things, and in them. But this idea really captured me. It was the frightening image of it first, every single person in a country doing the same thing, at the same time. I didn’t even feel comfortable in Catholic Mass when the monotonous, somber group prayer started. But at the scale of a billion people? I used to watch a lot of Star Trek with my dad, and this was Borg shit. It was also just confusing on a practical level because the billion jumpers weren’t drones. They were people, just like me, and I didn’t want to die. Why would they? Naturally, I assumed, they’d have to be fooled into doing it by a megalomaniacal supervillain. But how could he pull it off?

Information traveled differently in the nineties, and more slowly. To succeed at a scam so spectacular as the Jump, the time and place of the apocalyptic act would have to be announced by broadcast days in advance, and it would have to be framed as something not only beneficial, but essential. This would be the only way for the instructions to make it to the billion people required, and for them to go through with it. But by the time the information reached them, there would be an enormous media reaction. There would be counter information. There would be experts on planet stuff, probably, and they would tell people this was dangerous. If the megalomaniacal Jump enthusiast pirated a television signal (supervillains loved to do this), he could trick as many people as were watching a single, live broadcast. But hundreds of millions of people? Billions? Instantaneous, global mass hysteria was just not possible, let alone the direction of that hysteria to some particular end. I could rest easy, I decided, and it was back to my dreams of the Starship Enterprise.