Silent Sun: Hard Science Fiction Read online

  The man with the blue eyes laughed out loud and the other two chimed in obediently.

  March 24, 2074, Paris

  “Damn doorstep!” Alain Petit held on to the doorframe and complained loudly. Not in spite of being alone in his apartment, but because of it. If his wife were here—instead of resting at the Passy Cemetery—she’d reprimand him. She would tell him to lower his voice because of the neighbors, and because loud rants are improper in the first place. Alain smiled. It had been hard losing her a year and a half ago, but by now he was starting to appreciate his new-found freedom.

  That included fried noodles from the Asian fast-food place, which he had just eaten with a healthy appetite. And it included his hobby, astronomy, for which he no longer had to endure cold nights. He owned a good telescope that had been on the expensive side, and he had even gotten the permission of the landlord to position it under a skylight, but the nights in Paris had become too bright to see any useful details.

  Last year his son had shown him how to move his hobby to the computer. Professional astronomers worldwide had too much on their plates with millions of high-res pictures streaming in from probes all across the solar system. Astronomers were often still busy with a given set of pictures years after the particular probe had already shut down. They had tried to train AIs but the results were far from perfect, especially when it was not clear what one was looking for in the first place. So, astronomers were glad to have the help of hobbyist-researchers.

  Alain dedicated every afternoon to this task, starting after lunch and continuing until it got dark. He would only interrupt his routine for visitors, and grudgingly at that. The software he was using had awarded him with a virtual prize—apparently he was the participant who had analyzed the most images to date.

  His computer greeted him with the familiar startup chime while he settled down. He launched the app developed by an American university and followed the instructions. Some scientists were trying to learn how small sunspots moved across the surface of the sun. To that end, the app kept showing him time-lapsed photography of a particular location.

  His task was to track a specific spot with the mouse. The spot was defined in a first shot of the series at hand. The same set was also shown to other users since the spot was not always clearly defined. Although Alain knew that others were repeating his work, and that he worked on photos others had already processed, his work felt rewarding. In a few months, once the voluntary scientific aides finished their processing, the professional astronomers would use their results in a research report and his work would be part of that. Humanity would have learned something new about the sun.

  Alain leaned back after 30 minutes. It was time to close the curtains a bit to avoid glare on his screen from the afternoon sun. This particular spring was unusually warm, necessitating extra trips to the cemetery to water the flowers he had planted on his wife’s grave. But today he had a day off. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling the pain of rusty joints. Fortunately his eyes were still good except that he needed reading glasses.

  Then he pressed ‘Start.’ Some youngster’s stats had been catching up on him over the past weeks so he couldn’t afford long breaks. His daughter had given him an odd look when he had explained why he could not take his bothersome grandchildren over the weekend. His competitor had to be young judging by the smiley and newfangled codes in his alias. Alain wondered where he might be from. Was it a man, or a woman? A Frenchman like himself? Or maybe an Australian, or even from China or India? Since India had overtaken China in population, that was the most likely answer, he mused.

  Wait. Where did the spot go? Alain squinted. A moment ago it was all clear. To keep conditions constant it was not permitted to zoom into the picture. But his son had installed a software loupe. “So you can read the fine print!” he had said. Alain had laughed at that. He didn’t think he needed a loupe. Now he was glad it was there since he could zoom even although the software lacked the function. He was cheating, that was clear enough, but he felt comfortable because his competitor certainly was at least 30 years younger and so much more efficient.

  The spot remained lost. Alain checked the picture line-by-line and sector-by-sector. He tried to picture how the spot would look under the loupe, but there wasn’t anything even remotely like it. What he did notice was a fine line. He moved the entire window with the picture just to make sure it wasn’t something on his monitor—the line moved along just fine. Was there a scale somewhere? He didn’t find anything on the solar image itself. He rummaged around for the instructions that he had printed out for moments like this. It was in the drawer of his desk. And the number was right there: Every pixel of the image corresponded to ten kilometers in reality. Alain stared at the screen again. Then he used the loupe one more time. It was crystal clear—the line was exactly one pixel thick and if he zoomed in it grew into little blocks.

  Alain had been an engineer all his life. Sometimes, he knew, there were faults in pictures, so-called artefacts, especially if computers had processed the image. Was this an artefact? He flipped forward a few times and stopped at a different picture of the series. He zoomed in again. Any thin lines? He concentrated, squinting again. Nothing. He was disappointed.

  But he wouldn’t give up so quickly. He randomly selected yet another image from the series, enlarged it as far as possible, and then scrutinized it for lines. Nothing. Alain straightened his back, which was letting him know his age once again. One more photo, quick! If he didn’t find anything now he would return to his actual task, the solar spots. No lines in that photo either. It was time to give up. On the other hand… he thought. No. He… had been reasonable all his life. Today he’d give in to folly and look at one more picture. Just one!

  And, there it was—a line, one pixel strong, parallel to the sun’s equator! He had two hits now. That might not be enough to bother a scientist, but it was enough to nudge him to keep looking for more evidence. The sunspots would have to wait, even if his smiley-faced competitor would be overtaking his spot in the rankings.

  Three hours later Alain noticed that he was cold. Small surprise with the window open all that time. He got up and closed it. Night was falling outside so he closed the curtain, too. Then he turned around and looked at his desk, dimly lit by the pale screen light. His wife would have called him to dinner around this time. They would sit opposite each other, facing each other and exchanging thoughts in silence. Alain missed her.

  He shook his head to drive out the memories and returned to his desk. Twelve pictures with lines—a dozen out of maybe 300 pictures he had assessed. That should be enough to get a scientist interested. He opened his email account and dropped a note to the lead scientist of the sunspot project. Before shutting down he quickly checked the leaderboard. His competitor now led him by one point. Alain smiled in recognition of good work. Someday he wanted to meet that man—or was it a woman?

  He powered down his computer. It was time for his evening walk around the block.

  Little could he imagine how that one-pixel-wide line would change his life.

  March 31, 2074, Mercury

  Artem carefully opened the heavy lid of the hatch and climbed up the ladder. Helmet comms transmitted a bark. Sobachka was being lazy. She had turned into an old lady. He climbed back down to fetch her. The short ladder shouldn’t have been a problem with gravity at just a third of Earth’s pull. Artem stepped out onto the dusty Mercury soil and set Sobachka down. They wore matching garb—spacesuits with a special silvery coating to reflect the sunlight.

  However, the sun wasn’t visible despite Artem climbing to the surface to see it. The sun had yet to creep over the steep walls of the Kandinsky Crater. The station was on the edge of the formation that measured about 60 kilometers in diameter, torn into the planetary crust by a meteorite some three billion years ago. The reason for the station was some two kilometers south. Artem put a hand to his visor as though he had to shield himself from too much light, but of course that didn’t help hi
m to see the ice reserves on the crater walls. They formed where the sun never shone—obviously not in the 88 earth days of night, but neither in the equally long mercurial day.

  Sobachka prodded her helmet against his knee in lieu of her nose, then ran off. She returned just to run away once more. She seemed to enjoy their stay on the surface a great deal despite having had to squeeze into the spacesuit first. Space inside the station was cramped, and the wide landscape let Artem breathe more freely, too, despite the air being compressed inside a bottle on his back.

  They had a few kilometers to walk. On the right there were two space vessels—a fast courier ship, and a transporter to ferry the resources extracted here. Extracting metals alone would be far too expensive, but there was a side benefit. Helium-3, still one of the most expensive resources of all, changed the game. It was easier to obtain on the moon, but those licenses had been sold out for a long time.

  Where had Sobachka gone? He didn’t see her anymore. She had probably run ahead. Artem activated the searchlight. The horizon was bright enough but the atmosphere was too thin to illuminate the shadows from pitch black. Suddenly Sobachka leapt at him from behind. Artem got a shock—and laughed. Sobachka whined. She had probably scared herself, too, by jumping higher than expected in the light gravity.

  He called out, “With me!” and his companion came alongside.

  They slowly strolled by the spaceships. Sobachka lifted her head as if to sniff. Of course, she couldn’t sniff anything. There was no danger on Mercury. No food, no other animal to mark its territory. This world was incredibly old and just as dead. As long as one didn’t stay in the sunlight—at 430 degrees Celsius—so long that cooling failed, or take off one’s helmet on the surface, nothing could happen.

  As chief of security, it was Artem’s job to inspect the spacecraft regularly. If ever there was an emergency of the kind that nobody wanted to imagine, or that nobody was able to imagine, the ships had to be ready for take-off. But today was his day off. The stroll was solely to satisfy his curiosity. He had wanted to see one of the rare sights that Mercury had to offer: the moment when the sun moved backward. He had been on Mercury for more than two years now but he had missed the moment every time so far.

  “Boring,” the others had warned him.

  Even station chief Vladislav had opined, “Less than spectacular!” and he had studied astronomy in an earlier life. He had also explained how the phenomenon came about. Every so often there was a time when Mercury would move faster along its trajectory around the sun than the speed of its rotation around its own axis. During those times the sun appeared to move backward in the mercurial sky.

  He was going to form his own opinion, but for that he and Sobachka would have to leave the shadows.

  An hour and a half later they were looking at an unbearably bright stone desert ahead. Shadows perfectly traced the crater walls. There was no transition, just hard lines. The thermometer jumped from minus 160 degrees to 430 degrees in twenty seconds. Life support droned in Artem’s ears. Sobachka returned of her own accord. Presumably the noise was bothering her, too. He checked the watch on his wrist display. Ten minutes to go. Artem decided to step back into the shadows to ease the load on life support. Sobachka joined him.

  13:55 UTC. Another minute to go. He motioned to Sobachka. Then he looked at the sun. The visor darkened instantly. The glaring white disk was impressive. It appeared twice as large as on Earth and it moved on a backdrop of deepest black. Artem concentrated. Was it moving forward or had the reverse motion started already? He tapped on his wrist display and guiding lines appeared inside his visor while the sun was darkened out. Now it became obvious: The sun was moving backward. Artem looked down on the ground. The long shadows cast by the sun now moved forward, the reverse of their just-previous direction. The sun would now stay on this course for a few Earth days before resuming the journey to her highest point. Simple celestial mechanics, but he was awed just the same.

  “Come, Sobachka,” he called out. “Let’s walk back to the station.”

  He bent down to pick up a stone. Then he reached out and hurled it into the night.

  April 2, 2074, Paris

  “Dear Alain Petit,” began the email that he had just opened. “We appreciate your great interest in our Citizen-Science-Project. Congratulations on reaching the top rank once again. I would like to comment on your questions as follows.”

  Alain nudged his glasses back in place.

  “Topic 1. You are not our oldest participant. This title goes to a lady from New Zealand whose name I can’t provide for privacy reasons. If you would like to get in touch, I’ll be more than happy to pass along your message.”

  No way. A woman from New Zealand! He certainly did not plan to exchange emails.

  “Topic 2. We have done lengthy investigations into the anomalies you submitted. We concluded that they were formed when stitching individual exposures. The images taken with different cameras at different wavelengths are superimposed with specialized software. As the various instruments sit at slightly different angles, their perspective on the target is not fully identical. You can get a feeling for the issue by covering your eyes alternately while looking at the same picture. The composing issue grows more significant toward the edges, like the linear artefacts you observed.”

  Okay, so they believed he had seen artefacts—technical errors.

  “Based on your message we have checked our processes. Unfortunately the primary processing can’t be reversed with a reasonable amount of work. You will therefore keep finding such lines. We have no reason to change methods, as the primary mission goal is to catalog sunspot movement.”

  I got that, he thought, you were busy enough and didn’t want any additional work. Publishing deadlines were bad enough already.

  “Regardless, we are proud to have such attentive volunteers in our team and thank you in advance for your continued support. Best regards…”

  Alain sat up to stretch. The back of his seat squeaked. Spring smells wafted through the window, which he had opened halfway again. A little walk was due. His tube of toothpaste was empty, and if he passed by the convenience store on the corner he would save a trip to the supermarket. On the other hand… Alain drummed on the table with his fingers. That message had left him with an odd feeling, one he had almost forgotten. It felt like getting turned down by a beautiful woman. I really seem to be getting quaint now.

  Should he resign himself to that answer? That had never been his way. He never would have married Marie if he had given up on her first refusal. Later it had turned out that she liked him very much, but her best friend warned her about this ‘weird guy.’ Alain smiled. Eventually that friend had married his brother. They, too, had died…

  But he was alive, and he would not let the rejection stand.

  His computer had just crashed for the third time. Alain was prepared for that. He had taken notes of all he had found. In Hawaii, or—to be more precise—on the Haleakalā volcano on the island of Maui, was the DKIST, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. It had been put into service more than 50 years ago, but its 4-meter mirror was still the worldwide leader. If anybody could help with his problem it would be somebody on their team. He had also found the source for the raw data of his probe, the very data that shaped the images he was investigating for sunspot movement. If he followed the official message, the lines would not be in the raw data. Unfortunately the raw data was inaccessible, protected by the login/password of some large astronomical research organization. He had to find a scientist who would give him access, or at least provide him with the relevant part of the raw data. Ideally he could get someone from DKIST to help.

  It was the middle of the night in Hawaii, so a call wouldn’t work. Besides, scientists there had better things to do than to chat about lines on the sun. So he started to prepare the evidence. He pulled together the twelve snapshots with the lines, zoomed in, and took screenshots of the critical areas. Alain was proud of himself for remembering the
keyboard shortcut for doing this. His daughter had taught him two or three years ago, and he had not forgotten despite that much time having passed.

  Then he typed out his message. As an engineer, he was used to reading foreign literature, so laying things out in English came together readily. He had looked up the addresses of three scientists who didn’t have staff of their own. Heads of teams rarely had time for such issues—people doing real work were more likely to be sympathetic.

  “Dear Mr. XYZ,” he started out. He would paste in the surname later on.

  “While studying images from the NASA sun probe, I came across thin lines parallel to the solar equator. Their width is close to image resolution itself. I must add that the project lead considers them artefacts secondary to the combination of data sources.”

  Would that ruin his chances? On the other hand, the probe team would be their first stop if he did get their attention. He was going to save everyone time by laying out all the facts.

  “However, the argument did not convince me. This is why I am asking you for a second opinion, in best scientific tradition.”

  That sounded good. He hadn’t mentioned anywhere that he was a retired mechanical engineer.

  “The original probe images are available at… Unfortunately I do not have access due to my external status. I would appreciate it very much if you could make object numbers,” he’d insert the list of images here later, “available to me as digital files. I am attaching the results of my research for your reference.”

  He tried adding his screenshots to the message but he was unable to add any after the sixth one. Alain counted the attachments and noted six screenshots were indicated. That had to be enough to illustrate the issue. Images were too easily manipulated to prove anything, anyway.