Deniers

The Deniers are an unorganized group of people believing the threat posed by 176 Antini was not real. Among them, some claimed it was a capitalist invention to make people buy houses inside the habitats, others thought it was another way the governments found to control people with fear, while others thought there was no malicious intent, that it was just another temporary insanity. They looked at the Believers in disbelief while they bought a place inside habitats for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of marks.

History

At first, deniers included people from a wide range of religious, economic and educational backgrounds. The possible threat was some hundred years far away, and only a few went ballistic upon discovery, calling upon the end of the world. Scientists started to investigate the problem to find possible solutions with the tools and technologies available. For them, it was an exercise more than a necessity, and many lost interest in it over time. The Chuch of the Holy Heaven preached God had chosen Ained has humanity's home, and if it was their destiny to face such a drastic change, they would do so in God's name. With the centuries, it became increasingly clear that Antini was very likely to eject Ained into space. Scientists invited people to help them prepare habitats to survive. They needed money for experiments and prototypes, and people thought that was their way to get huge fundings. Some of the richest people on Ained listened to them and funded colossal projects for underground habitats. At this point, people were divided into deniers and believers. The threat was no more imaginary, it was about a hundred years away, and many chose to believe in science, spending, in some cases, most of their savings to afford at least a small house in a habitat, even a faraway one. The deniers ranks shrank considerably but still included the majority of people. When the unimaginable happened, deniers quickly tried to find a safe place, now worth several million marks. At first, they fought among themselves, backstabbing friends and family to survive, stealing what they could find to buy a house they could not afford. The prices skyrocketed until, in the end, every and any habitat closed its door. They were all sold out. War ensued. Deniers organised themselves quickly and declared war against the closest habitats. The Apocalypse War commenced on a global scale. All the deniers lost the war, but some groups managed to bring the habitat they were fighting with them.

Modern Deniers

After the war, deniers seemed gone. Survivors were safe inside the habitats underground, warmed up and fed. However, the deniers feeling survived. Nowadays, a fraction of the population still believes it is in the Owners' interest to keep people inside habitats to control them, especially since their ownership of the habitats means most taxes enter their pockets. Deniers claim the emergency is over. Their basis is an old scientific paper pointing out that, after the Slingshot, it was still possible for the sun to "recapture" Ained, thus reverting the gravitational effect of Antini. The cited papers became obsolete with time and more rigorous computation, but people still hang on to them. An argument against deniers is that it is possible to exit the habitat, and some people regularly do so, to travel to other habitats (though rare), to work some essential maintenance jobs, to join scientific expeditions and to generally scout the overworld. Special spacesuits are necessary to venture onto the surface, however. Explorers and travellers come back with stories of a dark frozen landscape and a faraway star, the sun, one among many lights in the sky. To these witnesses, deniers oppose stubbornness. They claim these tales are either straight-up lies or fruit of some engineering miracle hiding lush forests and a habitable planet. Social studies estimate the deniers number at about 5% of the total population over 18 years of age.

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