Sun Setting

The rising sun painted beautiful purples and reds against the fleeing summertime clouds. I could just make out the colors through the trees on my neighbor’s property. Evidence of dawn lit the distant tramway and bounced off the hover traffic beneath it, where people raced about their busy morning rituals. I sipped my coffee as the sun inched higher in the sky. It stood burning in the heavens in moments, eons of energy waiting to awaken each new day.

I reached for my novel, nothing fancy, but something worth reading at dawn in the half-light of newness and half-dark of fleeing night made longer by my shade-offering trees. The clouds had already darted away in fear of the sun, but the trees were thick around my home, and it would take a little longer for the majesty of Morning to fully grace me. Until then, the kitchen light offered enough auxiliary illumination for me to continue reading unchecked while surrounded by the luxurious waft of fresh coffee. Two pages into my own morning reverie, the light flickered in seconds-long slowness.

It wasn’t the twinkling of my nearby light, though.

It wasn’t the quick dim-bright-dim flutter as if something had startled the lightbulb.

It was a sky-spanning, world-embracing blackness.

Deep.

Dark.

Primal.

The heat traveling with the light waxed toward chilly, and I shuddered as if something had wrapped a taloned hand around my heart. My book slipped through my fingers and fell.

Halfway to the floor, it stopped. More than that, it started coming back toward me as if it had bounced on some unforeseen trampoline. My mind screamed in confusion as other items began to float. They cast ghastly shadows behind them in the dancing light of my home’s interior illumination.

And then the sun was back on, and everything seemed normal.

Or mostly normal.

Sirens all across town wailed, and the tram shuttered to a stop, its mag-lev locking everything to the track. Hover cars careened in utter disarray, their engines whining in protest in the too-light gravity.

I forgot my book, grabbed my phone, logged in, and searched for news. I went straight to the video feeds and talking heads to get up-to-date information as close to live reporting as I could.

“…what we are being told is that an Entity—that’s all we have for the moment, folks, when we get more, we will share it—This Entity approached our sun from nearly perpendicular to our solar ecliptic. People had been talking about a celestial comment in journals, but until yesterday, it wasn’t a problem. Sometime last night, it shifted course and ran full-steam toward the sun. It is huge, an order of magnitude bigger than the Earth that is inconceivable. Jupiter just became the third largest object in our solar system, folks, and it’s a very distant third at that. Further, the Entity is circling the sun, and its size and mass are altering the solar system’s gravitational field.”

I gawked and began channel hopping through my phone, linking it to my home theater display and pushing the sound up to combat the horns and cacophony from outside. Every channel had the same story about an Entity, its mass, and the sun, and they all followed it with their theory on what it might be here for. I settled for NASA to pass me information.

“…theory about the Entity is conjecture only. We don’t know and are quickly losing the ability to measure. Its mass is pulling our satellites out of orbit. It’s pulling the moon, too. For now, expect regional flooding as the moon oscillates in orbit. The flooding will be intense and tidally associated, though large rivers may also flood their banks as the moon’s orbit shifts. The longer the Entity stays between us and our sun, the more damaging the flooding will be. Its mass is staggering.”

I tried to wrap my head around events, but I couldn’t grasp the changing reality of our quiet corner of the galaxy and its momentous shift toward an extinction-level event.

The talking head at NASA continued, “We are readying a live-action intervention using the Omicron star cruiser. She will be under power within the hour. Please be patient. The gravitational shift has created a lot of debris in orbit, with satellites no longer in their appropriate flight paths. Once Omicron clears the debris field, she will accelerate toward the Entity. Once on station, we will get a more complete picture. Our best estimates at the moment have its size to be roughly half of the sun’s and its mass at almost a third. We don’t know why it’s here.”

Fun fact, the sun accounts for more than 99.8% of the mass of our solar system. Jupiter accounts for most of the rest. An Entity with a mass of about a third of the sun is a significant problem for planetary orbits. It’s a problem for all the other stuff that make life on Earth such a jubilant jaunt through eternity.

Time stood still for several hours. No new news, but lots of quacking figureheads about what we can do, how we can remove such a challenge, and how long will the heat death of Earth take if the thing settles between us and the sun. You know, standard hyper-reactionary fearmongering.

I just adapted to a lighter load and a slight bounce in my step. It’s not that the Earth no longer exerted her standard pull; it was just a bit wonky with something so massive juking about near the sun. For instance, pouring water was a challenge. It floated a little. Running the faucet was fine, but water splashing in the sink, not so much. It bounced and swam in the air a little before local gravity won out and hauled it into the drain.

The sun flared as NASA began prepping for its first post-contact news conference. Not a regular little bounce of light or storms, but a raw, undulating wave of gasses exploding toward the surface. The corona extended, and our atmosphere danced with the brilliance of a full Northern Light spectacle.

Except it was a touch past noon, and the colors slashed bright and haunting.

“Good afternoon,” the NASA spokeswoman said hesitantly. There was an air of queasiness about her, and despite the best makeup wizardry available in the studio, she was pale as a ghost with eyes wide in terror. “Today, at 11:45 AM local time, the Omicron made contact with the Entity. In shape and appearance, the Entity resembles nothing like what lives here on Earth. Not now, anyhow. Our science team on board likens it to a dinosaur or a dragon. Mammoth in size with wings that stretch from one side of the sun to the other, its tail is its primary feeding tool. Again, best guess.”

I sat transfixed, the hum of traffic dim and dying as the announcement continued.

“It appears the Entity uses its tail as a dagger of sorts, plunging it into the sun. Clumps of gold, iron, and magnesium atoms glob around spikes, webbing, or something in the tail when the Entity retracts it from the sun. Our spectrographic analysis indicates these elements are in the sun, probably from early in its growth cycle when it consumed many of the original planets. To make those elements by themselves, stars need to be considerably bigger than our sun.”

“Huh,” I stammered, now well outside my knowledge base. There was a whole lot of new in the day, and it kept getting stranger.

“Our analysis shows that the Entity consumes these elements for food. How much it needs and how long it takes to feed are mysteries. Conjecture says it will leave when there’s no honey left in the pot. That is to say; when its tail can no longer bring significant nutrients to the surface, it will move on.”

Questions erupted from the gallery.

“Where did it come from?”

“What can you do?”

“How did it arrive undetected?”

And the follow-up, “Would detection have mattered?”

“Will our sun survive?”

The one thing on everybody’s mind ended the litany of questions. A small figure with a strong voice cut through the rampant shouting, “Are we going to die?” The drone camera-pods pivoted to perfectly frame the speaker for the news feed.

Silence stormed through the room, hushing the other voices. It didn’t help that a couple of papers fluttered, not-quite falling in the air. The NASA representative collected her stack of documents and straightened them, bouncing them on the podium quickly to ensure everything stayed precise and orderly. She pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose before continuing. “Well, we don’t know where it came from or how long it will be here. It is consuming a lot of mass from the sun, but it’s only interested in the heavy elements. There aren’t that many in our sun. It’s kind of small on the galactic scale. Our sun, I mean.”

She set her papers down before continuing, “As far as tracking or notice of its arrival or existence? We saw something well above the ecliptic and have been tracking it for some time, but it is dark and only shows when illuminated by other stars or crosses in front of them. Our best guess is that when it changed trajectory, we lost it and couldn’t pick it up again. Looking for the change in space wouldn’t have been considered. Items don’t change vector unless acted on by an outside force. Unless they’re living, anyway. We didn’t know something else lived,” she waved absently, “out there in the stars, and there was no gravitational anomaly or collision that would indicate such a sudden and dramatic change in direction.”

The room sat quietly for several moments, contemplating the newness this Entity had thrown at us. I couldn’t blame them. I wondered, too. Life, of an unbelievable scale, from outside of Earth, seemed like the thing stories were made of, not real-world events.

Timidly, an intrepid reporter asked, “What will be left after it leaves?”

The lady from NASA squared her shoulders, “Well, we aren’t sure. We are trying to measure the mass it’s eating from the sun, but there is a problem with the mass of the Entity messing up our calculations. We figure there isn’t enough,” she paused searching for the right word before continuing, “food present in the sun for the Entity to cause any irreparable harm. Our best guess is that the minuscule percentage removed may, and I emphasize may, lead to a slightly reduced gravitational pull on all planets. Such a change would see us move further away from the sun. I’ll leave the math out of it for now. Such a change in distance from the Earth to the sun probably increases our year from a few weeks to a few months. Correspondingly, being further from the sun means less heat arriving on our planet. Things will get cooler. Seasons will change. Ice age? Probably not. We might get far more excited about generating greenhouse gasses, though. Gonna’ need them to keep us warm.”

She chuckled a little at her macabre comment. The audience didn’t. They typed, spoke quietly into personal recording devices, or recorded the statements and began sharing their new insights to social media, news outlets, and loved ones. The news logo replaced the feed on my screen, and the standard emergency notification tones pulsed through my small home.

The shadow came back then—an all-encompassing black like the deep of night or a world without a sun. Cold came with it, but neither lasted very long. I shivered, fearful of what would happen next. If the creature took too much solar mass, the gravitational forces holding the solar system together would fracture and send the planets spinning out into the void between stars. Even if it left us whole as a system, a more distant sun would create world-spanning chaos and upheaval. My reverie unraveled.

As my mind wandered along the dark and fearful paths of societal and species collapse, gravity returned to normal. I checked back in with NASA, and as I watched, the speaker’s complexion softened. She spoke in a too-soft voice, “It’s leaving. It is already rushing back the way it came. Omicron has asked permission to pursue, but we recalled her to orbit.”

Above me, the fire in the skies from the midday Northern Lights faded, too. I watched the replay go for several minutes while life started rearranging all around me. Work seemed forgotten as people rushed home to wrap themselves in the importance of loved ones. Me, I brewed a new pot and let the familiar warmth and aroma wash over me. Perhaps I’ll get an extra blanket for the bed, too, if the temperature slides toward cold.