Number Crunchers

The Number Crunchers, referred to as simply #C's in social virtual media, are a multiracial group of renegade, socially conscious astrophysics professors and grad students from MIT, USC, Cambridge, Tsinghua, Sorbonne, Moscow State, and Todai (comprised approximately of 51% women, 41% men, and 8% trans/non-binary) who become victims of a rare joint capture mission coordinated by TAP "Chevista" and SFC "Religious Patriot" military forces, which had everything to lose if the Impact Hypothesis was categorically refuted, something the brilliant researchers were uniquely qualified to do.  The rumor on the intranet is that the Number Crunchers had all be caught and sentenced to cryogenic prison for plotting to "overthrow" America (and other industrialized nations) with scientific counternarratives, even though according to numerous v-polls and other interactive advertising campaigns paid for by metadata analysis companies, most Firsters rejected both the rumor and the accusation. 

Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to verify the CIS (Cryogenic Incarceration Status) of the Number Crunchers.  Ever since President Trump rescinded a series of laws clustering governmental transparency, environmental/consumer protection, and drug decriminalization together while codifying mandatory minimums for White House leaks, tripling mandatory minimums for minor drug possession, and attempting to repeal both the War Powers Resolution (and simultaneously abolish the First, Fifth, Thirteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Second Amendments under the guise of federal martial law), since that point in history, all American presidents in the 2020's and early 30's have all been ineffectual at completely restoring governmental transparency and overturning executive overreach, even though a majority of Americans supported such measures, for the simple reason that complete transparency would have given the public access to a treasure trove of damning evidence validating GC's worst nightmares about the Trump and Pence presidencies (including their incompetence, nepotism, psychopathic, homophobic, and ecocidal tendencies, their delusions of grandeur and classic cishet male overconfidence, obsessive need for approval, social media pugnaciousness, nativist xenophobia, blatant Nazi self-mirroring, auto-pilot dishonesty, unquestioned Islamophobia, narcissism, and homophobia, white male victimization narratives, entrenched misogyny, lack of impulse control, theocratic/authoritarian instincts, political amateurism, and systematic dataphobia, traits that became part of an unofficial purity test within their administrations). 

Furthermore, complete transparency would have revealed the shocking number of times the USA had been on the brink of nuclear war with other irrational actors since the Kennedy administration, indicting Democratic, Republican, and later, third-party administrations (saying nothing about warehouses of sealed and classified documents detailing the US's long history of corruption, military interventionism, soft assassinations, and foreign interference in C1-C29 national affairs and also executive overreach in all three American administrations).  In other words, Americans will never know what they don't know about their own government, which was probably useful in containing mass hysteria, denting global protest movements, and preventing armed revolution, but also counterproductive in terms of helping guerilla journalism in the post-digital world capture the complex truth and more to the point, figure out who the Number Crunchers were and what they knew about the Asteroid Apocalypse.