I caught my breath, an irrational wave of fear washing over me, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re on the cusp of forgetting.

All I could recall was my face burning before the dream faded like a sigh in a hurricane.

It took a moment to gather my bearings, but before long the Earth came back into focus, and I remembered where I was. Safely soaring high above the planet I’d sworn to protect with my life. To date, I hadn’t found anything that could even remotely harm me, except maybe old age. I do age, slowly, but eventually entropy even catches up with superheroes. Entropy is the real grim reaper.

The world’s beautiful from up here – just a big blue marble, with white swirls over odd-shaped patches of gray, brown, and green. I had a cat-eye marble that looked like it when I was a kid. Somewhere down there, it still existed. Maybe in a landfill, in the backyard of my old house, or even in the possession of some new lucky child, but it still existed. That’s the nature of matter and the law of conservation of mass. Entropy be damned. When I eventually cease being me, my molecules will become something else. Hopefully, something amazing.

But for now, and I expect for a very long time, I am the Golden Sentinel, sworn defender of Earth and her almost eight billion inhabitants.

I floated quietly, miles above the surface of the breathtaking blue planet, watching, listening. My pristine white cape floated loosely around me, as there was no atmosphere to disturb it, nor gravity to tug at its hem.

Let me tell you, when it rains, it most definitely pours. In my case, it usually hails, sleets, snows, and throws in some frogs and locusts for good measure. The world went from relatively quiet – you know, stuff the global police forces and militaries can safely deal with – to absolute hell in a handbasket in a matter of seconds. Only this handbasket is almost a hundred and ninety-seven million square miles. That’s a huge handbasket for Hell to eff-up.

You can plan and prepare, but much like the Spanish Inquisition, you can never actually expect the unexpected. That’s why it’s called the unexpected. Trust me, my life revolves around it.

As I was saying, the world went from quietly sleeping baby to colicky quintuplets in the blink of an eye.

It all started with a volcano erupting on the island of Nea Kameni, a tiny island in the cluster that makes up Santorini, Greece. Hundreds of tourists would be in the path of any resulting lava flow, and traditional evacuation processes would be too late, so it was a priority-one emergency.

Before I could fly in and save the day, though, the city of San Francisco, all the way over on the West Coast of the United States, began to shake like one of those tacky hula dancer figurines people put on the dashboard of their car. San Francisco’s car clearly had bad shocks and was driving through potholes.

To make matters worse, a massive sinkhole nearly a mile in diameter suddenly formed in the Sea of Japan. Midway between Japan and South Korea, the liquid black hole guzzled seawater like a beer drinker at a football game. Its gaping maw pulled in a luxury liner, the ship’s superstructure shuddering and groaning as it careened sideways.

As I formulated a plan of attack, yet another hero-sized event let down its unruly hair. A small, undetectable fragment of meteorite struck the JEM – Japanese Experimental Module – of the International Space Station. The damage was so minor, the naked eye could barely see it. However, in a very short time, that segment of the ISS’s artificial atmosphere would fail, and all the current residents of the JEM would suffer an unpleasant demise.

I could see