Usurper of the Sun Read online

  Finally, the U.N. hammered out an addendum to the PDP that said, simply, “Communication will be restricted until there is confirmation that the other party is an intelligent form of life.” In other words, the sanctioned dialogue with the extrasolars was limited to, “Greetings. We are intelligent beings. Are you?”

  Nevertheless, scientists began devising means of communication, since there was no point in deciding what to say otherwise. The first message composed at the SETI Institute at the University of California at Berkeley was a pulse that transmitted a series of prime numbers, followed by symbols indicating that the message was coming from the third planet from the sun. Inspired by the message that was included with the Pioneer plaques, the first human-made objects that ever left the solar system, the communiqué also included a schematic of the spin-flip transition of hydrogen. Prime numbers do not occur randomly in nature. A communication composed of them would be prima facie evidence of intelligence. The transmission used the Arecibo radio-telescope observatory and NASA’s global deep-space network. The transmission points were synchronized with the earth’s rotation. The message was always sent from the side of Earth facing Mercury. To avoid interference, global restrictions were placed on using radio waves and the signal was broadcast on every possible frequency. Given the size of the construction project the extrasolars were conducting on Mercury, it seemed logical that the extrasolars would have at least one communications receiver in place. Still, Mercury remained silent.

  MATERIAL CONTINUED TO seep from the planet’s surface. Before long it was visible even with consumer telescopes. Scientists observed particles entering a circular orbit around the sun with a radius of forty million kilometers. The behavior of the mass could not be explained by gravity or orbital dynamics. Scientists speculated that the floating particles were acting as planar mirrors, using light pressure to correct their orbit. That would require the production of eighty thousand tons of miniature space machines per second, a preposterous amount to Aki, but she knew that such a level of production was the only possible answer.

  Eighty-eight days of head-scratching passed on Earth—and a year passed on Mercury—before the shape became clear: a ring eighty million kilometers in diameter encircled the sun.

  News outlets scrambled to explain:

  “This light bulb, with a diameter of 16.5 inches, is the sun,” explained one newscaster, the camera following as he walked. Then, panning out, there was a circle twenty-six feet wide with the light bulb at its center, slightly tilted and not quite parallel to the floor.

  “This circle represents the enigmatic Ring that extrasolars on Mercury seem to have built, though perhaps this could still simply be a natural phenomenon never before seen by humanity. Our artists have made it thicker so you can see it, but if it were drawn to scale it would be as thin as a piece of dental floss. Magnified observations show that it’s about three kilometers tall and shaped like a ribbon standing on its side and wrapped around the sun like a wall. There are also reports of some kind of gas cloud, or particulate cloud, surrounding the Ring.”

  The anchorman jogged past the ring. A table placed near the edge of the large room had a small blue pellet resting on a white china plate.

  “I’m fifteen meters from the light bulb; the relative position of Earth. This little ball is our home planet.”

  Over time, the Ring became more and more pronounced until it was visible to the naked eye. When the sun set each evening, people gathered on rooftops, hillsides—any spot with a clear view of the horizon—and stared at the western sky, chanting, weeping, and sometimes just sitting in lawn chairs drinking beer or barbecuing. For an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise, the Ring could be seen in the dim sky, looming diagonally above the horizon like a glowing silk thread.

  At first glance, it looked like the fibrous rings of Saturn or Uranus. Closer observation revealed that it had no orbital movement and was stationary relative to the sun. People wondered what kept it from getting sucked into the sun’s gravity well, and the best theory was that the Ring was composed of solar sails, giving it the power to stay in orbit. The inner side of the Ring was black. By absorbing sunlight across the inner vertical face, one square meter of surface could hold 0.7 grams of material in position. By Aki’s calculation, the Ring was as thin as a sheet of aluminum foil.

  Then, a newly discovered fact shook the world. The height of the wall formed by the Ring was growing at the rate of fifty kilometers per day.

  There was no visible form of construction observed. At the current rate of expansion, most experts calculated that it would take fifty years for the height of the Ring to cause total solar eclipses twice a year in May and November, when the plane of the earth’s orbit intersected the plane of the Ring. Meteorologists and planetologists predicted a crisis; though the total eclipses would only last a day, the eclipses would be preceded and followed by partial eclipses that would last more than two months, thereby blocking 10 percent of the earth’s annual sunlight.

  “We don’t need to wait the fifty years,” a famous astrophysicist, Harrison Godwin, explained. “Reducing the amount of sunlight will increase the ice and snow enough to raise the earth’s total reflectance ratio, and we will be robbed of even more sunlight. This will start a chain reaction of cold spells around the world. In three to five years, we will have entered a new ice age.”

  ACT III: SEPTEMBER 2007

  “WOW, AKI. NOTHING is stopping you these days,” said Hiromi with some bitterness, looking at the results of their exams.

  “Yeah, I guess. The grades are not why I do it.”

  “You have been a different person since 5/9.”

  “I found my heart’s deepest desire, something that drives me…”

  “Really? My parents said it was fine to skip college and stay with them since the world is coming to an end.”

  “You do not want to end up one of those girls that live with their parents well into their thirties, Hiromi,” Aki said.

  “Maybe I do. Thirty sounds far enough away that it will never happen.”

  “I cannot believe you would waste your life at a time like this.”

  “Nobody cares anymore,” Hiromi said. She clenched her teeth. “It’s easier.” Aki shook her head as Hiromi stalked out of the room.

  The astronomy club observed the Ring through the school’s new telescopes as often as they could. Aki had trained some juniors to watch for her and call her if there were new developments. She left school and walked to the subway. A man standing on top of a van parked near the entrance to the station shouted doomsday rants into a megaphone. Aki tried to tune him out. There was always someone talking about the destruction the Ring was bringing; if you tuned one rant out, another arrived within fifteen minutes:

  “Glaciers are coming back! Glaciers are going to crush us all!”

  “Do not let the government put you on a starvation diet! Rationing is coming! Horde food now!”

  “Extraterrestrials are going to enslave the strong and use the weak for food!”

  “Everyone is wrong and will regret their negativity when humanity is invited to join the Intergalactic Age. Bliss will be delivered upon us all!”

  As hard as Aki tried, the level of concern among everyone she knew was as frightening as the wall around the sun. The ignorance and fear were inescapable. She could not help but notice. People stockpiled food and fuel. New nuclear power plants were built rapidly. New Age cults and doomsday religions flourished. People who could afford it moved to warmer climates or built underground bomb shelters. For a while, the stock markets fluctuated violently, then the markets flatlined. Nobody knew how to prepare for a tomorrow of unknowns that might never even come. Aki, on the other hand, never considered resigning from life. She was frustrated by how most people gave up easily. Through it all, her focus remained on astronomy.

  In astronomical time, human society consists of a ten thousand– year blip on a 4.5 billion-year history. Aki knew that human civilization was not special
in the grand scheme of astronomical time. From her perspective, the blooming of the human race and all its grand civilizations, from the perspective of the universe as a whole, was the light from a beat-up flashlight with a cracked bulb and dead batteries that only work for a few seconds if you shake the flashlight really hard before pressing the button, even at the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night. To Aki Shiraishi, the insignificance of humans in the eyes of the universe meant that she, as a human, was responsible for her species’ fate no matter how bad the situation became.

  If Mercury and the Ring were the work of intelligent life, it was startling to ponder a civilization advanced enough to cross the nearly infinite gap between their sun and Earth’s and then change the surface of an entire planet. Aki could not get over it and thought of the extrasolars all the time. What other people saw as terrifying only tantalized her. She wanted to solve the mysteries of the Ring, of its builders. The Builders—that was what media outlets had started calling them. It became the popular descriptor, replacing extrasolars. The Builders might soon be the only ones left alive in the solar system. The fact that everyone she knew might die did not bother Aki. They would all be dead in a hundred years, and even that was merely a sunspot or a solar flare in terms of astronomical time. Her only fear was dying before her questions got answered. Responsibility and answering questions were the fire that drove her.

  Graduation came and went, and Aki was offered full scholarships to colleges and universities that she had never even heard of, let alone applied to. She was more interested in the space probe—Ikaros—that had been launched toward the Ring and the astronomical developments of the past year and a half. To many, her discovery seemed like the end of everything, but to Aki, it still looked like just the beginning.

  Sending a space probe close to the sun was a historical first and an amazing feat of engineering in its own right. The distance from Earth to the Ring was farther than the distance from Earth to Mars. The solar radiation around Mercury was hot enough to melt lead. There was no atmosphere on Mercury that could be used to decelerate the probe upon arrival. The stakes were too high to fail though, and the combined scientific and economic might of the world came together to build Ikaros. Compared to the Ring though, it is nothing, Aki thought on more than one occasion.

  The mission of the first probe was a high-speed flyby past the Ring’s outer surface, which appeared smooth and metallic. The only surefire method to get detailed observations was to launch a probe that could maneuver itself into a static position relative to the Ring. The spacecraft would need the ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly. Engines fueled with chemical propellants would lack the fine control necessary for such maneuverability. An ultralightweight probe with solar sails, like the collectors on the Ring, was designed and deployed.

  The first images, taken from less than two meters from the earthside face of the Ring, were finally obtained the year Aki entered graduate school. All she had done during the interim was study. She could have graduated early, but there was too much to do in the lab, and precious little that interested her outside of it. Other than the Ring there was little else. People frayed and developed haunted looks, jails grew overcrowded, and people would just leave their life one day without a moment’s notice, but she followed her love of astronomy, knowing that it would lead her where she wanted to go.

  The images from Ikaros 1 were compared to mold growing on carbon paper. Although the surface appeared shiny and silver from a distance, a closer look revealed a black substrate covered with countless cilia. The cilia caught particles being flung up from the surface of Mercury and then added them to the Ring to expand its height, like a daisy chain of minuscule centipedes handing grains of sand to each other.

  Although the Ring appeared durable, a blast from Ikaros 1’s positioning jet accidentally burned a hole in it. The hole was repaired immediately—like cells replicating to fix broken skin, growing back without even a scab or scar. Because of that discovery, Ikaros 2 was sent to collect samples of the Ring’s surface to discover how the regenerative process worked. This mission failed miserably. After collecting its sample, the container corroded, then the probe itself was eaten away until nothing was left.

  But the death of Ikaros 2 was not in vain. It reminded scientists of K. Eric Drexler’s conceptions of molecular nanotechnology, a disputed idea that suddenly burst back into vogue. The destructive energy must have come from the sun, which meant that there had to be a dense array of solar energy storage inside the material, because the corrosion had continued after the ring material was separated from the Ring and sealed in a container that prevented the material from receiving any additional air or light.

  A third probe with more advanced collection technology that could withstand the corrosion was planned immediately. The decision-makers soon realized, however, that bringing such a deleterious substance back to Earth could be disastrous. The plans were canceled. If it had a taste for the probe, it was likely to find many other substances on Earth just as palatable.

  While no progress was made in understanding what the Ring was composed of, it became clear what kind of mechanism was at work behind maintaining its fixed position relative to the sun. Observations had revealed that the structure of the Ring’s surface could alter itself on a microscopic level to control the albedo and angle of reflection of sunlight.

  ACT IV: MAY 2014

  AKI CHOSE THE Comparative Planetary Research Department at the Sagamihara Astrophysical Science Center to continue her studies. The choice was arbitrary since her work was only nominally related to planetology. In fact, no department yet existed for her field of specialty: the Ring and the transformation of Mercury by an extrasolar intelligence. Her research mainly involved analyzing data received from the probes, though she also worked on developing the center’s own sensing devices to be used on future Ikaros missions.

  The center’s research budget increased each year, inversely proportionate to the declining global economy. There were also rumors that the center was going to become an independent organization. It was the perfect location for Aki to pursue elite studies in the field of ringology, as she and others began to call it.

  Young students, most too scared to get their hopes up but some dreaming of seeing something that would change their lives the way the Mercurial eclipse had for Aki, looked to the heavens. Every television showed real-time images of Ikaros 5. When Ikaros 5 passed the three million kilometer mark, it had to pass through an invisible barrier recently generated, it was presumed, by the Ring as a defense mechanism. Asano, one of the assistant instructors, was at the helm of a wall of monitors, arms folded and reading the countdown.

  “The distance to the Ring line of defense is fifteen thousand kilometers.”

  The line of defense hypothesis was in vogue as an explanation of why communication with previous probes had cut out at three million kilometers from Mercury. The instant before contact with Ikaros 3 and 4 were lost, the readings from the radiation counter jumped off the scale. Also, every observation point on Earth that was facing Mercury at that time detected an unprecedented burst of radio-wave activity. Even the largest nuclear explosion ever recorded was dwarfed by the energy released by the event.

  The probe was functioning normally and the telescopic camera provided by the Astrophysical Science Center showed a clear image of Mercury. It had the sharpest detail ever, clearly showing four mass drivers planetside. Material spewed from the four locations, arcing away from the surface and disappearing into space. At this resolution, the surface of the planet was unlike anything anyone had imagined, covered by a fantastic “highway network”—a term Professor Asano coined on the spot—that extended in all directions, a web of rails creating circular patterns like the canals on Mars.

  “Seven thousand kilometers to the line of defense. We are almost there…”

  Abruptly, the image stopped refreshing and updating, and the telemetric data came to a halt. A backup meter flashed red, showing that
the signal from the most advanced probe ever had suddenly stopped. Terrestrial data lines continued to function normally.

  “It can’t be gone. It can’t be. What about Hiraiso? Shiraishi, what are your readings?”

  Aki checked the data coming from the Hiraiso Space Environment Center.

  “A ninety-three decibel flux burst, sir.”

  “We have been shot down,” Aki said. “Again.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, the president of the United States, surrounded by many world leaders with forlorn faces, gave a solemn speech to announce the findings:

  “We are now certain that the creators of the Ring are in possession of a gamma-ray laser, or graser. These creators of the Ring appear to have secured Mercury as a fortified outpost. Over the past seven years, we have tried to initiate dialogue, using every method of communication that is known to humanity. We have not been able to obtain any response whatsoever. To protect our lives, our homes, our countries, and the existence of Earth itself, we have no other choice but to fight this unknown enemy.”

  It was then announced that a body known as the United Nations Space Defense Force, or UNSDF, was to be formed under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council. Since NASA was to oversee many of the working units of this new organization, the Johnson Space Center in Houston was selected as the location of its headquarters. However, the UNSDF differed greatly from the PKF, making it the first true military force created by the U.N. since its inception.