I'm the lone astronomer at a remote observatory. I can't…
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I'm the lone astronomer at a remote observatory. I can't stop looking at this star.
The greatest astronomical discovery of all time was made by Edwin Hubble between 1925 and 1929, when he discovered redshift. Redshift occurs when a celestial body producing light is accelerating away from the point of observation, in our case, Earth. The light is shifted/stretched to a lower energy level on the electromagnetic spectrum, towards the red end and away from the blue end. This may seem trivial, but it was this theory that led to the discovery of an expanding universe, all pointing to one thing: a beginning. The big bang.
Every distant celestial body in the night sky is redshifted. At least, it’s supposed to be. If not, then I’ve discovered the first blueshifted deep space object. That, if you hadn’t guessed, means it’s accelerating toward us.
I had been observing the object in question for a week. It was a star far beyond the Angel Nebula that I hadn’t found anywhere on the star charts I had consulted, nor the national database.
It was the seventh day of observation when I went over to the computer terminal and pulled up the chat log. I work at a remote observatory in the American Southwest and the only connection with the outside world is a wire to another observatory twenty miles away and a satellite phone for emergencies.
The previous six chats in green text remained unanswered. I typed another time, the mechanical keyboard clacks echoing in the observation dome.
“Echo Base, do you read me?”
A message in red text replied. “Loud and clear, rogue leader.”
“Hey I love Star Wars!”
“Me too. Sorry I haven’t replied yet. I just started my time here. The grant money finally came through.”
“Congrats. Glad to finally have a friend out here.”
“Glad I can be your friend. I’m Angela.”
“Nice to meet you Angela. I’m Edwin.”
“Don’t tell me your last name is Hubble.”
“Yeah I get that a lot.”
“Cool. You sound like you’re already cut out for this job.”
“Thanks. It’s nice to have someone on here to talk to. Feel like I’m going crazy out here by myself.”
"Yeah I was wondering what that’s like.”
“Just wait until the lizards start talking to you.”
“Oh yeah I found one in my fridge.”
“Ha that’s funny.”
“Maybe for you. It was dead.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah I finally got it cleaned up.”
“Hey do you have anything at the following coordinates? I’m seeing something weird and I want to know if you see it too.”
“What kind of weird?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I think it’s blueshifted.”
“Woah. It’s not a comet or a planet or a nearby galaxy?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where those are.”
“Just making sure. Give me a minute to finish this up, then I’ll get back to you.”
“Sounds good.”
I wheeled my chair over to the newer computer that controlled the telescope. I punched in the coordinates of the blue star and listened as the motors ground to life, servos clicking and steel groaning as the dome overhead rotated to match the correct positioning in the western sky. The giant steel tube moved like a giant grey tree trunk around several axes, tilting and groaning without branches to shake in the wind.
I walked into the only other room that served as my living quarters and grabbed a diet Mountain Dew from the fridge and two Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. The first was a nightly ritual that helped me stay awake through the early hours of the morning, the second was for the headache I had been unsuccessfully ignoring.
The grinding of steel had stopped when I reentered the telescope room. I re-positioned the stairs and climbed them to the eyepiece. I set my Dew on the railing and took a look through the eyepiece, focusing the lens into the blackness until a ball of blue light appeared in the center of my view. Faint tendrils trailed around it, remnants of an ancient formation. I wondered if it notated possible rotation, and my mind swelled with the desire to continue looking for planets and other celestial bodies orbiting it.
I stared at the sphere of blue. The colors morphed through shades. The surface looked like an octopus trying to blend into a Picasso. I stepped back and rubbed my eyes, then looked again. Its same brilliance met me at the lens, and I was mesmerized.
The terminal pinged. I stepped back and walked down the stairs to read the red text.
“I see it!”
“You do?”
“Yeah this is amazing!”
“It looks cool.”
“Congrats! This is so cool! What are you gonna name it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You discovered a new star, maybe a solar system! This is huge!”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Aren’t you excited?”
“I just thought something that visible would have been mapped already.”
“Maybe it’s new.”
“Like a white hole?”
“You said it was blue shifted.”
“So it entered the visible universe?”
“I don’t know, but this could change astronomy as we know it. We could be studying the formation of a new star in real time. Please tell me you’ve been taking pictures of this thing.”
“Of course I have. For the past week.”
“Keep photographing it! Once you have enough evidence you can send your findings in and get credit!”
“Ok.”
“Be excited! This is amazing!”
“Ok, ok, I will be. I just want to make sure.”
“Don’t trust your eyes?”
“I guess I’m just skeptical.”
“What’s it feel like to be a famous astronomer?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t feel different.”
“Playing it cool, then? I like that. Have you done any spectroscopy on it yet?”
“No, I was trying to do the calculations for the blue shift.”
“I can help with that!”
“Ok, thanks. I’ll start setting up my stuff.”
Spectroscopy involves separating the colors of light coming from a star through a prism. Different elements give off distinctly different wavelengths of light. That can be used to determine the elements a star is made of, as well as determining the atmospheric and surface makeups of any celestial bodies orbiting the stars. There’s more to it than that, including a whole equipment setup that involves projecting the starlight onto the dome of the observatory and then comparing it with the light from sample vacuum tubes with a specific element or gas in them.
I took the rest of the hour to get the spectroscopy setup. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find the mercury vacuum tube. I figured I must have misplaced it somewhere in the storage closet. Hopefully it wouldn’t come out of my paycheck.
With the set up complete, I started comparing the distinctly colored lines of the star to a few tubes from the periodic table. All of them checked out, fairly normal things for a star: Hydrogen, Helium, Neon.
The terminal pinged. Angela got back to me.
“Hey it’s gonna take me a little while on these calculations.”
“That’s ok. I’m just starting on spectroscopy.”
“Cool. What have you checked so far?”
“Hydrogen, Helium, Argon, Neon. We’ll see if I can get any more done before the sunrise.”
“Sounds awesome. I’m so excited to watch my first sunrise here.”
“Really? That’s cool.”
“Yeah, we could watch it together!”
“Not sure how that’d work, but ok.”
“Well just watch it and know I’ll be there in spirit.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“See you at sunrise.”
I went back to the computer and finished writing up my notes before I sent them off to some cybernetic wasteland to languish where no one would read them. I shut down the computer for the day, put away the vacuum tubes, and stepped outside into the quiet desert as the light in the east began to grow. The stars winked out one by one. The blue turned to pink and then orange as the mountains started to blaze. As the golden glow of the sun peaked over the horizon and bid the milky way good morning, I felt like there was something different. I looked twenty miles across the flat desert to the north and imagined Angela watching the sunrise. It felt good to not be alone.
I hopped in my beat up Jeep and drove on the bumpy one lane path into town. I was running low on microwave meals and diet Mountain Dew, and I still had a lingering headache that the sunlight was making worse.
I got to the nearest paved road in half an hour, then crossed the mountain range to the west. After thirty minutes, I pulled into a general store that was the only thing in miles. The lady in her late 50s who ran the place gave me a somewhat friendly expression as the bell over the door rang out my entrance.
“What are you smiling about?” she said, as I put a case of soda and a bunch of microwave meals on the the counter.
“There’s another researcher at the other observatory north of me.”
“The empty one?”
“Yeah a new girl.”
“Haven’t seen her yet.”
“I’m sure she’ll be around. It’s nice to have someone to talk to while I’m on the job.”
“I bet. Want these in a bag?”
By the end of the drive back, my eyelids were creeping downwards in protest of the warm morning sun. I threw my food in the fridge, took a quick shower, and popped some painkillers before drawing the blackout curtains and falling asleep.
The spectroscopy investigation continued for the next four weeks. Angela and I did calculations. We did them over and over and over and over until I felt like my head was going to explode. We posited theories about why the light was blue shifted. We postulated everything from comets to the Northern lights to aliens, and none of it stuck.
One morning, I was drawn out of dreams of swirling galaxies and planets by the grinding of metal on metal. I stumbled out of my living quarters to see that the telescope had moved. I must have left the tracking software on again, making the telescope follow the rotation of the earth. I probably fat-fingered the keyboard and it moved the wrong way all at once.
I still had my spectroscopy equipment set up, and before getting out the next tube, I took a peak at the star. I could have sworn it was bigger and brighter than it had been the day before.
“Hey, does it look closer to you?” I typed into the terminal.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry, just thought it looks brighter.”
“Want me to run some distance calculations? Again?”
“Sure, why not?”
I continued my spectroscopy analysis. Neon, Carbon Dioxide, Chlorine. I hadn’t expected Chlorine. More noble gases. Maybe those were the leftovers of the nebula that had formed it.
The terminal pinged.
“I think I did my calculations wrong last time” is what Angela had written.
“What?” was my reply.
“It’s closer than I thought.”
“Well I guess by the definition of blue shift, sure, but it shouldn’t be noticeable, unless it’s close, like in the Milky Way.”
“Maybe I just did them wrong. Maybe we’ve just been staring at this for too long.”
“Something feels off about this. I’m still not sure what’s going on.”
“Any spectroscopy results?”
“I mean, normal stuff, plus noble gases. No signs of planets or gas clouds or asteroid belts.”
“Have you tried mercury?”
I spent the next thirty minutes checking the various vacuum tubes, but it seemed that mercury was missing.
“Can’t find mercury. Must have left it somewhere.”
All at once, a more intense headache washed over me. Trying to focus through the telescope eyepiece was nearly impossible.
I figured I had better let Angela know. “Hey I’m going to take a break. My head is killing me.”
“Oh no! Hope you feel better.”
I went to my room and popped some more Advil before laying down. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep.
I dreamed. I was standing in the desert looking up at the stars. The constellations were bright across the visible Milky Way. I could actually see all the planets. Or at least I thought I did.
Venus was the wrong color, now blue in hue. Mars had streaks of blue light swirling around it. Jupiter looked like it had been sucked into a whirlwind, Saturn was in the asteroid belt. Uranus and Neptune had switched places, long strands of asteroid belt connecting them. Mercury was missing.
I looked directly above me. The sun was like a dark pupil eclipsed by the brilliant blue light from the blue shifted star behind it, now gargantuan, residing in our solar system. It was turning at an incredible speed. Flares of blue shot off into space. As one of them passed over the sun, it smeared it like orange paint on a black canvas. The remains of the sun dimmed, and the blue flares grew more frequent. Massive waves of light flew into space and struck the planets, burning and cracking their surfaces, shattering them to pieces.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The ground started to shake. Grains of sand on the desert floor around me started to float. The blue light of the star grew brighter. The moon rose up over the horizon, as if shielding earth, and the wave of light washed over it. It was smashed and pulverized, burning into space dust. Another wave of light followed it, carrying the remaining chunks of the moon into earth’s atmosphere. They burned blue on one side and yellow on the other. The atmosphere burned blue as I watched the light wave wash over the ground. It shattered the mountains on the horizon. It raced over the desert, turning sand to molten stone, then plasma, then nothing.
The light covered me, engulfed me, and burned me away.
I woke up gasping for air, covered in sweat.
I got up and chugged a mountain dew to parch the desert in my throat. My head felt better, but not right. Not like the pain was gone, but like the part that felt the pain was gone.
The sound of metal on concrete ground behind my eyes as I heard the telescope adjust. I left the tracking software on again.
A message blinked on the terminal in blue: “You should see this.”
“Hey sorry, what’s going on?”
“You were asleep for a long time.”
“Yeah sorry.” I looked at the telescope computer.
I had been asleep for two days.
More blue text. “The spectroscopy came back. I did some of my own work and it seems like something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“These elements, I didn’t have the tubes to check them so I used digital copies. Cesium, Uranium, Iron.”
“Those don’t exist in stars. Something’s got to be wrong with our equipment.”
I turned around. I could have sworn the telescope was five degrees towards the vertical when I last checked, not twenty five degrees.
I fiddled with the spectroscopy prism, cleaning it with a microfiber cloth. As I put it back in place, the sharp edge caught my fingertip. Blood immediately sprang from it, dripping on the prism. I held my finger in a fist as I tried to wipe the blood off the prism’s surface, but it kept spreading and wouldn’t soak into the cloth.
Blood was gushing from my hand. I retreated to my living quarters for the first aid kit.
I finally got my hand to stop bleeding and returned to the spectroscopy equipment. As much as I wiped the blood on the prism, I only succeeded in smearing it around. I set about searching for the replacement. I was sure there was an extra one in the case when I set it up. It baffled me that I couldn’t find it now. I shuffled through the box, putting the prism down. Why was it so dark? I went to my room to grab a flashlight, popped two Advil for good measure, then found the red flashlight next to my bed. Glass clinked from the other room. Why was my fridge running so loud? The terminal dinged.
I went back to the observatory dome. There wasn’t a message on the terminal screen. I clicked the flashlight off. The spectroscopy tube for helium lit up the room. And why was the prism...no, I had put it back in the machine, but why was it showing so much blue light? It glowed brighter and brighter the closer I stepped. My feet tripped over the case of vacuum tubes. My knee crunched into broken glass. One of the tubes. The label on the box said Hg. Mercury.
I bolted to the terminal. There was a blank red message from Angela. My fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Angela, something is very wrong.”
“What?” came a reply in blue.
“I just found the broken mercury tube, and the telescope is moving on its own.”
“Don’t worry, it will all be ok.”
“What should I do?”
“Look at the light.”
I stumbled over to the telescope and hastily removed the spectroscopy equipment. Blue light emanated from the eyepiece.
The star was strangely brighter. I could see flares of blue branching to other stars in the sky. The light drew me in. My eyes fixated on it, but my brain peeled my gaze away.
“We’ve got to do something,” I typed into the terminal.
“What could you do to resist it?” came the reply.
Metallic tapping sounded from somewhere in the observatory. It echoed off the dome and pressed on the base of my skull. I looked around for some loose piece of sheet metal hanging from the dome, some piece of equipment swaying in the non-existent wind. Tap tap tap. Where was it? Tap tap tap. I needed to wake up. Tap tap tap. The maintenance hatch on the telescope slightly moved.
I rotated the telescope so I could get to the hatch. The tapping reverberated into banging. Something in there wanted out.
Through labored breathing, I undid the latches, but the door wouldn’t fall open. I pulled at the edge of the door as the vibrations coursed through my fingertips through each consecutive knock. The noise echoed in the dome like a drum beat. My ears started to ring. The door wouldn’t budge. Pushing and pulling, straining with every muscle in my body, each adjustment of my grip made the noise louder and more frantic.
The door shifted, the hinge moving a fraction of an inch. In a flash of blue light, the hinge came unglued. The door smacked me in the forehead. Falling backwards, I hit my head on the solid floor. Blackness engulfed the blue stars above me as I lost consciousness.
I woke up an hour ago. I don’t know how long I’ve been unconscious. The telescope is back in its upright position, the maintenance hatch hanging open toward me. Strange blue light is reflecting off the mirror. It plays like mist across the surface of a pond in the dust in the air.
Angela won’t answer anything on the terminal.
I looked through the eyepiece one last time. The sky is completely black except for the blue shifted star. It’s getting brighter by the second. It’s coming for earth. For me.
I won’t keep it waiting. There’s nothing left in the night sky anymore. I only have one star left to study.
I will climb into the telescope. I will bathe in the beautiful blue light. I will wait for it to come get me. When it comes, I will let the light in.
Look for me in the stars. Don’t worry. You’ll join me there soon enough.
#entertainment
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The greatest astronomical discovery of all time was made by Edwin Hubble between 1925 and 1929, when he discovered redshift. Redshift occurs when a celestial body producing light is accelerating away from the point of observation, in our case, Earth. The light is shifted/stretched to a lower energy level on the electromagnetic spectrum, towards the red end and away from the blue end. This may seem trivial, but it was this theory that led to the discovery of an expanding universe, all pointing to one thing: a beginning. The big bang.
Every distant celestial body in the night sky is redshifted. At least, it’s supposed to be. If not, then I’ve discovered the first blueshifted deep space object. That, if you hadn’t guessed, means it’s accelerating toward us.
I had been observing the object in question for a week. It was a star far beyond the Angel Nebula that I hadn’t found anywhere on the star charts I had consulted, nor the national database.
It was the seventh day of observation when I went over to the computer terminal and pulled up the chat log. I work at a remote observatory in the American Southwest and the only connection with the outside world is a wire to another observatory twenty miles away and a satellite phone for emergencies.
The previous six chats in green text remained unanswered. I typed another time, the mechanical keyboard clacks echoing in the observation dome.
“Echo Base, do you read me?”
A message in red text replied. “Loud and clear, rogue leader.”
“Hey I love Star Wars!”
“Me too. Sorry I haven’t replied yet. I just started my time here. The grant money finally came through.”
“Congrats. Glad to finally have a friend out here.”
“Glad I can be your friend. I’m Angela.”
“Nice to meet you Angela. I’m Edwin.”
“Don’t tell me your last name is Hubble.”
“Yeah I get that a lot.”
“Cool. You sound like you’re already cut out for this job.”
“Thanks. It’s nice to have someone on here to talk to. Feel like I’m going crazy out here by myself.”
"Yeah I was wondering what that’s like.”
“Just wait until the lizards start talking to you.”
“Oh yeah I found one in my fridge.”
“Ha that’s funny.”
“Maybe for you. It was dead.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah I finally got it cleaned up.”
“Hey do you have anything at the following coordinates? I’m seeing something weird and I want to know if you see it too.”
“What kind of weird?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I think it’s blueshifted.”
“Woah. It’s not a comet or a planet or a nearby galaxy?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where those are.”
“Just making sure. Give me a minute to finish this up, then I’ll get back to you.”
“Sounds good.”
I wheeled my chair over to the newer computer that controlled the telescope. I punched in the coordinates of the blue star and listened as the motors ground to life, servos clicking and steel groaning as the dome overhead rotated to match the correct positioning in the western sky. The giant steel tube moved like a giant grey tree trunk around several axes, tilting and groaning without branches to shake in the wind.
I walked into the only other room that served as my living quarters and grabbed a diet Mountain Dew from the fridge and two Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. The first was a nightly ritual that helped me stay awake through the early hours of the morning, the second was for the headache I had been unsuccessfully ignoring.
The grinding of steel had stopped when I reentered the telescope room. I re-positioned the stairs and climbed them to the eyepiece. I set my Dew on the railing and took a look through the eyepiece, focusing the lens into the blackness until a ball of blue light appeared in the center of my view. Faint tendrils trailed around it, remnants of an ancient formation. I wondered if it notated possible rotation, and my mind swelled with the desire to continue looking for planets and other celestial bodies orbiting it.
I stared at the sphere of blue. The colors morphed through shades. The surface looked like an octopus trying to blend into a Picasso. I stepped back and rubbed my eyes, then looked again. Its same brilliance met me at the lens, and I was mesmerized.
The terminal pinged. I stepped back and walked down the stairs to read the red text.
“I see it!”
“You do?”
“Yeah this is amazing!”
“It looks cool.”
“Congrats! This is so cool! What are you gonna name it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You discovered a new star, maybe a solar system! This is huge!”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Aren’t you excited?”
“I just thought something that visible would have been mapped already.”
“Maybe it’s new.”
“Like a white hole?”
“You said it was blue shifted.”
“So it entered the visible universe?”
“I don’t know, but this could change astronomy as we know it. We could be studying the formation of a new star in real time. Please tell me you’ve been taking pictures of this thing.”
“Of course I have. For the past week.”
“Keep photographing it! Once you have enough evidence you can send your findings in and get credit!”
“Ok.”
“Be excited! This is amazing!”
“Ok, ok, I will be. I just want to make sure.”
“Don’t trust your eyes?”
“I guess I’m just skeptical.”
“What’s it feel like to be a famous astronomer?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t feel different.”
“Playing it cool, then? I like that. Have you done any spectroscopy on it yet?”
“No, I was trying to do the calculations for the blue shift.”
“I can help with that!”
“Ok, thanks. I’ll start setting up my stuff.”
Spectroscopy involves separating the colors of light coming from a star through a prism. Different elements give off distinctly different wavelengths of light. That can be used to determine the elements a star is made of, as well as determining the atmospheric and surface makeups of any celestial bodies orbiting the stars. There’s more to it than that, including a whole equipment setup that involves projecting the starlight onto the dome of the observatory and then comparing it with the light from sample vacuum tubes with a specific element or gas in them.
I took the rest of the hour to get the spectroscopy setup. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find the mercury vacuum tube. I figured I must have misplaced it somewhere in the storage closet. Hopefully it wouldn’t come out of my paycheck.
With the set up complete, I started comparing the distinctly colored lines of the star to a few tubes from the periodic table. All of them checked out, fairly normal things for a star: Hydrogen, Helium, Neon.
The terminal pinged. Angela got back to me.
“Hey it’s gonna take me a little while on these calculations.”
“That’s ok. I’m just starting on spectroscopy.”
“Cool. What have you checked so far?”
“Hydrogen, Helium, Argon, Neon. We’ll see if I can get any more done before the sunrise.”
“Sounds awesome. I’m so excited to watch my first sunrise here.”
“Really? That’s cool.”
“Yeah, we could watch it together!”
“Not sure how that’d work, but ok.”
“Well just watch it and know I’ll be there in spirit.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“See you at sunrise.”
I went back to the computer and finished writing up my notes before I sent them off to some cybernetic wasteland to languish where no one would read them. I shut down the computer for the day, put away the vacuum tubes, and stepped outside into the quiet desert as the light in the east began to grow. The stars winked out one by one. The blue turned to pink and then orange as the mountains started to blaze. As the golden glow of the sun peaked over the horizon and bid the milky way good morning, I felt like there was something different. I looked twenty miles across the flat desert to the north and imagined Angela watching the sunrise. It felt good to not be alone.
I hopped in my beat up Jeep and drove on the bumpy one lane path into town. I was running low on microwave meals and diet Mountain Dew, and I still had a lingering headache that the sunlight was making worse.
I got to the nearest paved road in half an hour, then crossed the mountain range to the west. After thirty minutes, I pulled into a general store that was the only thing in miles. The lady in her late 50s who ran the place gave me a somewhat friendly expression as the bell over the door rang out my entrance.
“What are you smiling about?” she said, as I put a case of soda and a bunch of microwave meals on the the counter.
“There’s another researcher at the other observatory north of me.”
“The empty one?”
“Yeah a new girl.”
“Haven’t seen her yet.”
“I’m sure she’ll be around. It’s nice to have someone to talk to while I’m on the job.”
“I bet. Want these in a bag?”
By the end of the drive back, my eyelids were creeping downwards in protest of the warm morning sun. I threw my food in the fridge, took a quick shower, and popped some painkillers before drawing the blackout curtains and falling asleep.
The spectroscopy investigation continued for the next four weeks. Angela and I did calculations. We did them over and over and over and over until I felt like my head was going to explode. We posited theories about why the light was blue shifted. We postulated everything from comets to the Northern lights to aliens, and none of it stuck.
One morning, I was drawn out of dreams of swirling galaxies and planets by the grinding of metal on metal. I stumbled out of my living quarters to see that the telescope had moved. I must have left the tracking software on again, making the telescope follow the rotation of the earth. I probably fat-fingered the keyboard and it moved the wrong way all at once.
I still had my spectroscopy equipment set up, and before getting out the next tube, I took a peak at the star. I could have sworn it was bigger and brighter than it had been the day before.
“Hey, does it look closer to you?” I typed into the terminal.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry, just thought it looks brighter.”
“Want me to run some distance calculations? Again?”
“Sure, why not?”
I continued my spectroscopy analysis. Neon, Carbon Dioxide, Chlorine. I hadn’t expected Chlorine. More noble gases. Maybe those were the leftovers of the nebula that had formed it.
The terminal pinged.
“I think I did my calculations wrong last time” is what Angela had written.
“What?” was my reply.
“It’s closer than I thought.”
“Well I guess by the definition of blue shift, sure, but it shouldn’t be noticeable, unless it’s close, like in the Milky Way.”
“Maybe I just did them wrong. Maybe we’ve just been staring at this for too long.”
“Something feels off about this. I’m still not sure what’s going on.”
“Any spectroscopy results?”
“I mean, normal stuff, plus noble gases. No signs of planets or gas clouds or asteroid belts.”
“Have you tried mercury?”
I spent the next thirty minutes checking the various vacuum tubes, but it seemed that mercury was missing.
“Can’t find mercury. Must have left it somewhere.”
All at once, a more intense headache washed over me. Trying to focus through the telescope eyepiece was nearly impossible.
I figured I had better let Angela know. “Hey I’m going to take a break. My head is killing me.”
“Oh no! Hope you feel better.”
I went to my room and popped some more Advil before laying down. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep.
I dreamed. I was standing in the desert looking up at the stars. The constellations were bright across the visible Milky Way. I could actually see all the planets. Or at least I thought I did.
Venus was the wrong color, now blue in hue. Mars had streaks of blue light swirling around it. Jupiter looked like it had been sucked into a whirlwind, Saturn was in the asteroid belt. Uranus and Neptune had switched places, long strands of asteroid belt connecting them. Mercury was missing.
I looked directly above me. The sun was like a dark pupil eclipsed by the brilliant blue light from the blue shifted star behind it, now gargantuan, residing in our solar system. It was turning at an incredible speed. Flares of blue shot off into space. As one of them passed over the sun, it smeared it like orange paint on a black canvas. The remains of the sun dimmed, and the blue flares grew more frequent. Massive waves of light flew into space and struck the planets, burning and cracking their surfaces, shattering them to pieces.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The ground started to shake. Grains of sand on the desert floor around me started to float. The blue light of the star grew brighter. The moon rose up over the horizon, as if shielding earth, and the wave of light washed over it. It was smashed and pulverized, burning into space dust. Another wave of light followed it, carrying the remaining chunks of the moon into earth’s atmosphere. They burned blue on one side and yellow on the other. The atmosphere burned blue as I watched the light wave wash over the ground. It shattered the mountains on the horizon. It raced over the desert, turning sand to molten stone, then plasma, then nothing.
The light covered me, engulfed me, and burned me away.
I woke up gasping for air, covered in sweat.
I got up and chugged a mountain dew to parch the desert in my throat. My head felt better, but not right. Not like the pain was gone, but like the part that felt the pain was gone.
The sound of metal on concrete ground behind my eyes as I heard the telescope adjust. I left the tracking software on again.
A message blinked on the terminal in blue: “You should see this.”
“Hey sorry, what’s going on?”
“You were asleep for a long time.”
“Yeah sorry.” I looked at the telescope computer.
I had been asleep for two days.
More blue text. “The spectroscopy came back. I did some of my own work and it seems like something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“These elements, I didn’t have the tubes to check them so I used digital copies. Cesium, Uranium, Iron.”
“Those don’t exist in stars. Something’s got to be wrong with our equipment.”
I turned around. I could have sworn the telescope was five degrees towards the vertical when I last checked, not twenty five degrees.
I fiddled with the spectroscopy prism, cleaning it with a microfiber cloth. As I put it back in place, the sharp edge caught my fingertip. Blood immediately sprang from it, dripping on the prism. I held my finger in a fist as I tried to wipe the blood off the prism’s surface, but it kept spreading and wouldn’t soak into the cloth.
Blood was gushing from my hand. I retreated to my living quarters for the first aid kit.
I finally got my hand to stop bleeding and returned to the spectroscopy equipment. As much as I wiped the blood on the prism, I only succeeded in smearing it around. I set about searching for the replacement. I was sure there was an extra one in the case when I set it up. It baffled me that I couldn’t find it now. I shuffled through the box, putting the prism down. Why was it so dark? I went to my room to grab a flashlight, popped two Advil for good measure, then found the red flashlight next to my bed. Glass clinked from the other room. Why was my fridge running so loud? The terminal dinged.
I went back to the observatory dome. There wasn’t a message on the terminal screen. I clicked the flashlight off. The spectroscopy tube for helium lit up the room. And why was the prism...no, I had put it back in the machine, but why was it showing so much blue light? It glowed brighter and brighter the closer I stepped. My feet tripped over the case of vacuum tubes. My knee crunched into broken glass. One of the tubes. The label on the box said Hg. Mercury.
I bolted to the terminal. There was a blank red message from Angela. My fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Angela, something is very wrong.”
“What?” came a reply in blue.
“I just found the broken mercury tube, and the telescope is moving on its own.”
“Don’t worry, it will all be ok.”
“What should I do?”
“Look at the light.”
I stumbled over to the telescope and hastily removed the spectroscopy equipment. Blue light emanated from the eyepiece.
The star was strangely brighter. I could see flares of blue branching to other stars in the sky. The light drew me in. My eyes fixated on it, but my brain peeled my gaze away.
“We’ve got to do something,” I typed into the terminal.
“What could you do to resist it?” came the reply.
Metallic tapping sounded from somewhere in the observatory. It echoed off the dome and pressed on the base of my skull. I looked around for some loose piece of sheet metal hanging from the dome, some piece of equipment swaying in the non-existent wind. Tap tap tap. Where was it? Tap tap tap. I needed to wake up. Tap tap tap. The maintenance hatch on the telescope slightly moved.
I rotated the telescope so I could get to the hatch. The tapping reverberated into banging. Something in there wanted out.
Through labored breathing, I undid the latches, but the door wouldn’t fall open. I pulled at the edge of the door as the vibrations coursed through my fingertips through each consecutive knock. The noise echoed in the dome like a drum beat. My ears started to ring. The door wouldn’t budge. Pushing and pulling, straining with every muscle in my body, each adjustment of my grip made the noise louder and more frantic.
The door shifted, the hinge moving a fraction of an inch. In a flash of blue light, the hinge came unglued. The door smacked me in the forehead. Falling backwards, I hit my head on the solid floor. Blackness engulfed the blue stars above me as I lost consciousness.
I woke up an hour ago. I don’t know how long I’ve been unconscious. The telescope is back in its upright position, the maintenance hatch hanging open toward me. Strange blue light is reflecting off the mirror. It plays like mist across the surface of a pond in the dust in the air.
Angela won’t answer anything on the terminal.
I looked through the eyepiece one last time. The sky is completely black except for the blue shifted star. It’s getting brighter by the second. It’s coming for earth. For me.
I won’t keep it waiting. There’s nothing left in the night sky anymore. I only have one star left to study.
I will climb into the telescope. I will bathe in the beautiful blue light. I will wait for it to come get me. When it comes, I will let the light in.
Look for me in the stars. Don’t worry. You’ll join me there soon enough.
#entertainment
source
| 4,000 mlx | |
| 8 | |
| 0 |