Prologue - Karis
Prologue - Karis
Gliese one sixty-three c, Upper Orbit eighty-nine Years Ago
What use is fear to a being that measures time in eons? Such emotions are trivial to a Mind that inhabits thousands of worlds; a shared consciousness spanning the breadth of the galaxy. The last time Karis knew fear, humanity had yet to master the art of fire. Today, fear would find Karis and never let go.
Twelve solar cycles spent hurtling through the interstellar void had led to this moment. First contact with a new space-faring species was a rare occurrence, especially in the past few millenia. As their delegation fleet hurtled towards the newly discovered star system at nearly the speed of light, Karis analyzed radio transmissions from the fledgling species who called themselves the Tsiri.
Karis learned that the Tsiri population was divided into hundreds of separate chaotic nation states, each possessing a loosely structured hive mind. It was strikingly similar to the early days on their homeworld of Maeia, before Karis and the other Minds were forced to forge an alliance.
From the command center at the top of the Node palace ship, Karis watched the hologram at the center of the room. The massive pyramidal starship that housed the Nodes gleamed brightly, a shining beacon that connected the delegation fleet to the greater Karis Mind. Karis watched as a tiny blinking dot rose from the surface of the planet, slowing as it reached the base of the Node ship. As the docking clamps engaged to grip the Tsiri's envoy frigate, Karis shifted their focus to the group of ambassadors assembling to greet the Tsiri.
The airlock doors slid open with a sharp hiss. An intense metallic odor filled the air, seeping in from the darkness of the corridor beyond. Karis could hear a low humming noise, punctuated by the staccato sound of chitinous tapping against a metal floor.
Through the open airlock, the shadows came into focus as three towering creatures stepped through into Karis's ship. Each of their twelve spindly legs supported a round, beetle-like thorax. Thick torsos rose vertically from their bulbous abdomens, covered in black carapace that was decorated with ornate golden carvings. Powerful mandibles framed a small chitinous head, which was adorned with four short eye stalks. The low hum grew to a crescendo as the insectoid aliens crowded into the corridor, and Karis could feel the vibration in every cell of the six ambassadors standing in the corridor.
The middle Tsiri spoke first, humming at a higher pitch that warbled slightly. It harmonized with the lower hum, but subtle shifts in frequency created harmonics that added grammatical context to the complex language.
{Your ship is very ... bright}. The Tsiri clicked its mandibles together in annoyance and pulled its eye stalks in towards its carapace. Karis lowered the brightness of the corridor to a muted glow.
The ship's speakers hummed as Karis replied, {it is an honor to greet you, emissaries of the Tsiri. We are grateful for your visit and hope to make you comfortable. Please, follow me}. Karis directed their delegation to turn and lead the Tsiri down the hallway.
A few moments later, the odd assortment of creatures entered a dimly-lit room decorated with treasures from all across the galaxy. At the center of the room sat a round table, where a bright hologram of the Tsiri's desert planet painted the walls in hues of blue and beige. Above the planet orbited a massive starship, gleaming in brilliant gold as a sign of the prosperity Karis hoped to bring to these people.
The flagship of the delegation fleet was the glorious Node palace ship. Shaped like a pyramid and wrapped in a gold alloy that was nearly impervious to electromagnetic radiation, the Node ship dwarfed every other starship in the fleet by several orders of magnitude. Hundreds of miles across, the ship was the size of a small moon and contained an entire city within its hull. Receiving guests aboard the Node ship was among the highest honors Karis could bestow, both due to the elegance of the ship as well as the vulnerability it granted. The Tsiri's docked envoy frigate appeared like a tiny speck at the Node ship's base.
Before Karis could begin their introductory speech, the Tsiri made a flute-like harmonic tone.
{It is customary for a Tsiri to provide a gift when entering another clan's home}, said the middle creature. The carapace on its back seemed to split down the middle, opening to reveal a dark compartment. {May this tribute bring worthy blessings to your people}, the creature hummed.
One of the Tsiri's powerful pincers rotated backwards, reaching into the hole in its carapace to reveal a small, metallic sphere. It gripped the orb gently as it slowly extended its pincer towards Karis. The creature's intimidating claws gripped the sphere delicately, as if it were holding something precious and fragile.
Carefully, Karis cupped their hands and reached to accept the tribute from the Tsiri. Despite the orb's small size, it seemed to be made from an incredibly dense material. Far too dense. The weight of the sphere dragged Karis down to the floor and the orb hit the deck with a loud clang. The Tsiri's hum rose in pitch to a hiss, and the three creatures jumped backwards with a start.
Karis's skin paled to a sickly green with shame. Disrespecting an emissary's culture like this was a terrible way to begin a diplomatic exchange. Karis directed two of their ambassadors to pick up the metal orb and carry it to a nearby table. Seizing control of the ambassador who dropped the orb, Karis tried to smooth things over.
{I apologize, great emissary}, Karis said, bowing low in a sign of deference. {Clearly our strength pales in comparison to the might of the Tsiri}. Karis held the bow for several seconds, hoping that would be enough to avoid offending their guests. Straightening, Karis walked over to the hologram and began the speech that had appeased thousands of civilizations.
{Ten of your years ago, we detected a sequence of radio signals coming from this star system that were evidence of an advanced civilization. I am Karis, and we are ambassadors of the Maeian Empire, a peaceful coalition of star systems under the protection of a powerful and prosperous civilization}. The Tsiri remained unmoving and silent, their beady eyes focused on the speaker. Karis touched a button on the hologram's control panel, and the planet was replaced with a map of nearby stars.
{Resources in any one solar system are limited}, said Karis, {and without the ability to trade with other systems most species never make it past your current level of advancement}. Another button was pressed, and the red dwarf at the heart of the Tsiri system began to flash. Thin lines spread from the Tsiri's sun to more than a dozen nearby stars.
Karis continued, {what we offer your people is access to our trade network. These are a few of the nearest inhabited systems to your world. By joining our coalition, you would have access to technology and resources far beyond those you could produce here}. They pressed another button, and the hologram once again displayed the Tsiri home world.
{All we ask in return}, Karis concluded, {is that you allow us to colonize an uninhabited rocky planet, mine a percentage of the system's asteroids for metals, and that you follow simple laws that allow us to keep the peace}. They stepped back from the hologram and gestured for the Tsiri to reply.
The silence stretched for an uncomfortable length of time, permeated by the clicking of mandibles and the deep, droning hum. Finally, the Tsiri spoke.
Throughout our history, we Tsiri have known many clans that called themselves 'empire'. Every single one claimed that they stood for peace and prosperity. By the end, every would-be empire drowned in blood and fire. The hum of the Tsiri grew louder, and the sharp clicking of their mandibles put Karis on edge. The Tsiri understand that an Empire leaves only two choices: to fight, or to submit. The intensity of their hum rose to a volume that shook the walls of the room, causing trophies to fall from the shelves. We will not submit.
Abruptly, an alarm klaxon started to blare throughout the room and down the corridor. The pattern of flashing lights told Karis that a radiation spike had been detected. They scanned the room and quickly found the source, resting where it was placed on a table earlier. The dense metal sphere given to Karis by the Tsiri started glowing reddish-orange with heat. A horizontal band around the sphere's center began to liquify, and the molten band quickly spread out to cover the orb.
The largest of the Tsiri shoved Karis to the side with a claw the size of their torso, and the ambassador fell roughly to the floor. Stunned, they watched as the insectoid alien's large pincers lifted the glowing orb gently. A white trail of smoke rose from the orb, and Karis could hear the alien's exoskeleton sizzling from the heat. The Tsiri's four eyes locked on to the Karis ambassador as it hissed its final words of defiance.
The Tsiri will never join your empire. Let this be an example of what awaits any who follow. It raised the orb high above its head, then threw the molten sphere to the floor with all of the creature's immense strength. In a flash of light, the ambassadors disappeared from Karis's Mind.
Trailing behind the orbit of the massive Node ship, one of Karis's attack frigates waited at the ready in case the diplomatic mission went wrong. Through the perspective of the frigate's captain, Karis watched as the lower section of the immense Node ship exploded into a ball of superheated gas and plasma. The Tsiri's small nuclear device blew a sizable chunk out of the hull and vaporized hundreds of Karis's people in an instant. A searing wave of agony rippled across the stars as so many were torn from the Mind at once.
Karis carefully shielded the Maeians on the attack frigate from the pain felt by the rest of their Mind, then directed the pilot to engage. Rescue, defend, attack, Karis had to do something.
Hundreds of floors above the explosion on the Node palace ship, one of Karis's Nodes writhed in pain on the floor. The deafening sound of alarm klaxons gave a voice to the scream painted on their skin. So many lives had been lost, but at least the Nodes were still alive. Karis pushed off of the floor and surveyed their surroundings. A thin stream of black smoke trickled out of the air vents lining the ceiling, so Karis closed them with a thought.
Another one of the Nodes coughed and sputtered on the floor a few feet away, a thin line of bluish blood tracing down their cheek. Karis leaned down to help the other Maeian into a sitting position, and its skin flashed with a quick sequence of encoded shapes.
How could you allow this to happen? You are supposed to be the best of us, Karis. Karis flushed with shame, then flashed even brighter with anger.
They deceived us, Keeper. We cannot reason with these ... creatures. Karis dropped to the floor again, convulsing briefly as a new wave of pain engulfed them. The ship groaned as the melted beams supporting a large section of the hull gave way.
The heat of the blast had liquified hundreds of metal struts that bound the hull to the inner structure of the Node ship. Slowly, a corner of the hull began to peel away from the innards of the ship to expose miles of the interior to the vacuum of space. Thousands of Karis's people began to suffocate as the atmosphere leaked into the void. Karis could feel each one of them gasping for breath, their shared Mind drowning in panic, desperation, and terror.
Over and over again, Karis died. Each individual that perished held a living part of Karis's Mind, which was violently ripped away. Torn and jagged, those frayed ends of broken consciousness burned with an excruciating phantom pain.
Aboard the attack frigate, Karis watched in horror as the dislodged panel of hull broke away from the Node ship, revealing carnage within. A glowing red circle in the bottom right of the exposed interior showed where the Tsiri's bomb had detonated. Spidery cracks extended out from the center of the powerful shockwave, which twisted and severed support beams through hundreds of miles of corridors. Dark specks could be seen floating away from the interior, and Karis felt the agony of each one of them as they drifted into the vacuum. The Captain's skin glowed faintly with the deep blue of sorrow.
A sensor pinged, detecting movement from the planet's surface. A live video feed appeared on the wall in front of the Captain, showing thousands of white smoke trails rising from the surface. Karis calculated the trajectories of the new rockets in a fraction of a second, then directed the frigate's navigation officer to key in an aggressive maneuver. The engines roared as the ship raced ahead on an intercept course.
The thin lines of smoke grew as they rose from the planet, arcing into low orbit and racing towards the remains of the Node ship. Karis angled the frigate perpendicular to the barrage of missiles, firing everything in the ship's expansive arsenal. Tungsten pellets tore through the incoming swarm of weaponry, and thousands of small explosions littered the field ahead.
Karis surveyed the damage for several seconds, but the cloud of dust was too dense for their sensors to see through. Their hopes of success died when the sensors pinged again. One lone missile exited from the debris field and streaked towards the crippled Node ship, trailed by a stream of dust. Fear gripped the Karis Mind like a vice.
The Node ship shuddered with a loud crash, and Karis looked up from the body they held reverently as it coughed up blue blood. Karis cradled the smooth head of the other Maeian, trying to keep the limp figure conscious.
A missile just impacted the port side of the ship near our chamber, but it did not detonate ... they trailed off as a new sound pierced through the remains of the ship. The grinding of metal on metal shook the thick beams of their protective cage. The sound grew louder still, metal screaming and rending just outside the Node's shielded chamber. Karis watched with terror as a pulsing red light broke through the wall. It twisted as the drill behind it spun, cutting deeper into the chamber with each rotation. Suddenly, it stopped moving. The red light pulsed once, twice, then grew incredibly bright.
When the weapon detonated, there was no explosion. A concentrated electromagnetic pulse reverberated off the metal struts of the Faraday cage surrounding the Nodes, and the inside of the chamber rang like a bell. The Node connected to the Karis Mind fell to the floor, its body writhing in an intense seizure. Deep inside the Node's brain, a lattice of thin filaments surrounding the communication center began to unravel. Hydrogen bonds holding the quantum lattice together were severed, along with the entanglement that was held within them.
Almost instantly, the entire delegation fleet that Karis had sent to the Tsiri system disappeared from their Mind. Nearly ten thousand lives just ... gone. A tidal wave of unimaginable agony and sorrow swept across the galaxy, and Karis's scream echoed into the void.
After what felt like an eternity of torture, the frigate captain slowly picked themself up from the floor of the ship and stared out at devastation. Remnants from the explosion within the massive Node ship had spread out to form an expanding field of metallic debris. The dislodged chunk of the ship's outer hull had begun falling into the atmosphere, glowing red-hot as it picked up speed.
The remaining Maeians struggled to form a cohesive thought with the broken fragments of the Mind that remained.
The Nodes are ... dead, thought the fractured Mind. I am ... alone. The Captain looked down at their hands with morbid curiosity. A streak of light moved across their skin, independent from the rest of the Karis mind. I am ... free? It thought.
Looking back to the debris, the Captain saw the chunk of hull break into pieces as it fell towards the planet.
A pity, said the Captain, that would have done some damage if it remained intact. The Captain turned around to face their crew. Dozens of their brethren looked back and the sorrow painted across their bodies was overwhelming.
The Nodes are dead, the Captain said definitively. The Tsiri must pay for their crimes against the empire ... and against us. They started to walk down the stairs towards the crew gathered in the command center below, and reached out to rest a hand on the head of each crew member they passed. A calming light streamed from the Captain's hands into them, absorbed by the skin covering their crests.
The Tsiri told us that their empires have ended in fire and blood, said the Captain with a sneer. A deep red bloomed across their chest and spread the Captain's rage to every Maeian in sight.
We will show those creatures just how right they are.
Part One - The Discovery
Part One - The Discovery
Chapter One - Amari
At two fourteen in the morning on the first Friday of spring break, most of Amari's friends from Caltech were stumbling their way back home after a night of too many celebratory drinks. She, on the other hand, was drooling onto her lab notebook in front of the viewing terminal of the W.M. Keck Observatory. As she slept, the massive telescope scanned the night sky to the south and locked onto its next target. On the screen in front of her, an image came into focus showing a group of stars in the lower section of the Centaurus constellation. In the center of the screen, an alert notification popped up displaying the words: ANOMALOUS SIGNAL. The terminal's speakers produced a high-pitched beep, and Amari jolted awake.
God damn it, she muttered as a splash of cold coffee covered her left arm. Ugh, not again. She jumped up from the chair to save her notebook, picking it up as a stream of dark liquid cascaded from the crease in the binding. She groaned and grabbed the overturned travel mug, setting it forcefully back onto the desk. Scowling, she carried the notebook to the kitchen and left a trail of droplets in her wake. A pool of coffee slowly spread across the desk in front of the computer terminal, which flashed its alert in time with the beeping tone.
A few minutes later she returned with a roll of paper towels in one hand and the closed notebook pressed tightly against her leg. Paper towels stuck out between a few of the pages as she tried to squeeze out the last of the coffee that stained her carefully collected notes. Approaching the desk, Amari realized that the terminal was beeping and saw the message flashing in the center of the screen. She sighed wearily, but the prospect of adding another useful data point put a smile on her face.
How come you only ever see something interesting when I'm asleep? Amari asked the screen. She sat down at the terminal with a huff, flipping to the next unstained page of her notebook. As she began copying down the numbers lining the right side of the screen, her eyebrows furrowed with thought. She flipped back to her notes from a few nights ago.
That's odd ... she said, flipping between the two pages. Must be a solar flare or something ... The furrowing of her brows deepened as she flipped back and forth before looking up at the screen with a confused expression. That can't be right, she muttered, then clicked the X on the flashing message.
The notification window disappeared, revealing the image captured by the telescope. Her confusion very suddenly turned to shock. She stared dumbfounded at one of the best-studied star systems in the sky, our stellar neighbors that live a mere four light-years away. To make sure that exhaustion wasn't making her delirious, she slowly counted the points of light on the screen. Four. Four stars in a system that astronomers had studied extensively for the last thousand years. Four stars in a system that could only possibly have three.
What the hell are you? She said, squinting at the unfamiliar star. Shaking her head, she pressed the save icon at the top right of the window and manually input a code to pause the telescope's automated targeting program and rescan the same coordinates.
Click. The telescope switched from the current magnification to the widest view. The screen displayed most of the Centaurus constellation, her target being a point of light at the foot of the Centaur.
Click. An eyepiece lens was swapped for another with a shorter focal length, magnifying the image to just the leg of the Centaur. Two overlapping dots of light could be seen, the two larger stars of the system.
Click. The final magnification level displayed Alpha Centauri A and B in the center of the screen, and on the bottom right sat the faint red dot of Proxima Centauri. The gleaming white dot of light that had appeared below the ecliptic plane of the larger two stars was gone.
Amari let out a relieved breath and sat back in her chair.
Well, I guess all of the professors that told me I'd get bored with a PhD in astronomy can suck a fat one, she laughed, letting out all the nervous energy that had been building up for the last few minutes.
You trying to give me a heart attack, old girl? She asked, looking up at the large observatory telescope in the center of the dome. A fading insignia on the side once said W.M. Keck Observatory. With the launching of several new orbital and Lagrange telescopes over the last three decades, land-based observatories like this one were becoming more and more obsolete.
Nothing like hearing that the Webb telescope has passed its prime to make you rethink your entire career, she thought solemnly.
Oh well, I guess I'm not discovering a new star today, she said with a joking smirk, but now for due diligence.
She saved the latest data and pulled up the automated run she interrupted. Pressing enter, she sat back in the chair and did her best to ignore the run starting up again. Since the last image of the Centauri system had that unfortunate artifact, she had to start the run from the same point a third time.
Click. Click. Click.
Amari stared blankly at the alert notification. Do I really even need to look at it? She thought to herself, there's got to be something wrong with the telescope.
After a long pause to psych herself up for the mountain of administrative bullshit she would soon have to deal with, she looked at the values displayed on the right of the screen. The numbers were different from the normal run that just occurred, but also more unexpected than the last anomaly. The luminosity values were significantly higher than both runs.
Either someone's pulling a prank that could earn them a felony, she thought with dripping sarcasm, or I'm grabbing a drink because one of those gas balls just went supernova. She closed the alert notification and stared at the screen in disbelief once again. On the screen there weren't three, or even four bright spots.
"Six?" she asked the empty room incredulously.
The three known stars appeared exactly as she expected, centered in the viewing window. Two inches below and to the right of the bigger pair of stars was a large, irregularly shaped spot of brightness. She could have tried to find some justification if it were a perfect sphere or the long streak of a lens flare, but no. White specks seemed to emanate outwards from an irregular triangular shape. Half an inch to the right was a small oval, brighter than the first shape with a bluish tint at the center and a bright streak of pure white extending vertically on the screen. The third shape sat just above the other two, a nearly perfect circle with little bits of white fuzz around the edges.
Amari stared at the screen in a stunned silence, the tightness in her chest preventing her from even breathing. There were no words for the image in front of her. Her thoughts started to quickly spiral into panic.
Am I hallucinating? What's the protocol here? What do I do? Who do I call?
"What the actual fuck is going on," she groaned, dropping her head into her hands. She rubbed her temples, feeling a migraine building as her anxiety rose. With a frustrated sigh, she stood up and began pacing around the observation room, trying to collect her thoughts. After a minute of anxious pacing she was able to get her breathing under control, then forced herself to slow her walk.
"Okay Amari, first step's first," she said, "save and verify." She sat back down and hit the button to save the data before deleting the automated run yet again.
There's no way anything else is getting done tonight, she thought. But what do I do next?
After a few moments of contemplation, she pulled out her phone to open the app that tracked her project's funding. Considering that the grant allotment she had been provided for her research wasn't very large to begin with, she knew that the school wouldn't foot the bill if she went over budget. Amari weighed her options. She didn't have a standard protocol for an event of this magnitude, since as far as she knew there was nothing that could possibly explain both anomalies.
"Screw it," she said aloud, "I guess I'll be on a ramen noodle diet till I graduate." She opened the web browser on the computer terminal and navigated to the website of the VISION astronomy program. She looked at the schedule and was pleased to see that the telescope network was running only one other experiment tonight, with a marking of 'low priority'. Quickly, she filled out the request form for an urgent Target of Opportunity time block and input the coordinates for the largest of the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system.
While she waited for her request to be approved, Amari's heart started to race faster. She tried to think of anything that could explain the images, and was coming up with only one option.
No more reading sci-fi books in the lab, she thought to herself, it's affecting your judgement. Her anxiety spiked as she pulled up a contact on her phone and pressed the call button. After a few rings, someone picked up the phone.
"Hello?" the sleepy voice of an older man croaked through the speaker.
"Doctor Harlow, I need your help with something. It's urgent." She tried to take a calming breath, which came out just as shaky as she felt at the moment. "Like, really urgent, and I'm kinda freaking out here ... "
The line was silent for a moment, then Harlow said calmly, "I'm on my way. But Amari, if you woke me up at two thirty in the morning for nothing, I will personally tear up your doctoral dissertation in front of you after deleting your last copy."
Amari gulped, then replied, "I don't doubt it. I'll see you soon."
Two hours later Doctor Benjamin Harlow, the seventy-three-year-old world-renowned Caltech astrophysicist was grunting with effort as he clung to a handrail inside of the great Keck observatory telescope. His other hand held a silk cloth, which he was using to polish the ten-foot wide refractive mirror that captured light streaming in from the cosmos.
"Alrighty then, that should do it!" Harlow said with forced cheeriness, panting from the effort of righting himself on the platform beside the access hatch. "That mirror is so shiny, I'm pretty sure I could see my brain through my nose. I might just put the technician out of a bloody job!" He climbed down the ladder slowly, rubbing his lower back. "Shall we see how normal this data looks now?"
As Harlow reached the floor of the observation deck, Amari gave her mentor a nervous smile. Despite having just rolled out of bed, his tweed coat and neat combover gave him an air of British pomposity. She knew it was mostly an act, to those that knew him outside of research conferences he was kind-hearted and humble to a fault. To the rest of the world, though, he exuded the arrogant perfection that was to be expected in Nobel Laureates of his caliber.
Amari turned to look up into the early-morning air through the opening in the observatory dome. The sky was no longer the jet black that it was when Amari logged the first anomalous reading, but it would still be dark enough to get decent pictures for another half hour. Harlow entered the observation room, pulling up a chair to sit beside her at the terminal.
He rubbed his back methodically, "I am not exactly a spring chicken anymore, that stunt probably took a year or two off my life. Why didn't you tell me not to do that?"
"Well," Amari replied, "I did try to convince you about a dozen times to let me polish the mirrors myself, but no, you just had to be Mr. Macho Man." There was a twinkle of humor in Amari's eyes as she teased her mentor. Turning towards the terminal, her face dropped to a more serious expression. "You ready to see if it's still happening up there?" She Asked.
Harlow countered, "I think you mean, am I ready to see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary? Yes, I do believe I'm ready. Proceed."
Amari nodded and pressed enter on the VISION activation screen. Beside them, the Keck observatory began to snap pictures in perfect sync with the four powerful telescopes of the Visual and Infrared Spectrum Interferometry Orbital Network.
More than forty years ago, an international team of astronomers captured the first true glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk by creating the Event Horizon Telescope. This landmark accomplishment paved the way for a new era of astronomy. Following the project's success in twenty nineteen, the scientific community rallied around the idea of astronomical interferometry. The principle behind the technology was fairly simple. Using multiple telescopes arranged in a circle, pictures could be captured simultaneously and rendered together to create composite images with incredibly high resolution. The Event Horizon team used telescopes around the globe, which provided an effective aperture as wide as the Earth. The VISION telescope network used a similar principle, placing orbital telescopes at Lagrange points L three, L four, and L five over the forty years that followed. Synchronizing them with any telescope on Earth created a virtual telescope with an aperture the size of Earth's orbit. The resolution provided by this astronomical powerhouse enabled incredibly detailed images to be taken of any celestial body above or below the ecliptic plane of the solar system. Luckily, Alpha Centauri was positioned just inside the most effective area for VISION.
On the terminal's screen, images cycled through from the Keck telescope at a rate of roughly two pictures per second. The calculations required to synchronize with the atomic clocks aboard the orbital telescopes took time, and the requirement of microsecond precision meant that this was the fastest they could collect data.
Amari stared at the screen for several minutes, waiting to see extra bright spots on the screen. After ten minutes, nothing abnormal appeared.
It might be good for science, she thought, but my dissertation on the other hand ... She trembled as she remembered Harlow's words when she woke him up.
Amari looked at Harlow sheepishly and said, "so ... looks like you might have been right about it being nothing Dr. Harlow. Sorry to wake you up for no-"
ANOMALOUS SIGNAL flashed on the screen for a split second with a beep, and Amari's heart rate doubled. Harlow nodded at her to close the notification so he could see the image, but the screen flashed with another alert. Then it did it again. And again. There were a few clean pictures, but it seemed like more than half of them were throwing an alert. Roughly once every second, the telescope witnessed some event occurring in another solar system that was giving off enough light energy to be seen from ground-based telescopes on Earth. The two scientists looked at each other with bewilderment in their eyes, and a little fear. This was far more frequent than Amari had thought it would be.
They didn't touch anything. The alert obscured the center of the viewing window, so they couldn't see any of the anomalies until the run was over with. For five minutes, the screen flashed an alert every few images. There seemed to be no pattern, no rhyme or reason, just a confusing series of impossible circumstances happening four light years away.
After scribbling in his notebook for a couple minutes, Harlow put down his pen and broke the silence.
"It's not like this is happening right now," he said, "whatever we're observing in the Centauri system happened more than four years ago, so we've got nothing to worry about." His words were meant to be comforting, but his tone said that he didn't believe it for a second.
"Well, what's the worst that could happen?" Amari asked with a forced smile, "we get hit with a gamma ray burst and I don't have to defend my dissertation?" She tried to laugh like it was a joke, but they both knew there was nothing funny about any of it.
They shared another brief, awkward silence.
"Do you want to talk about the merits of your theory?" Harlow asked. When he had pressed her about what she thought the images could be if not simply an error with the telescope, she had spilled the truly idiotic idea that came to mind earlier.
Amari shook her head. Softly, she gave a simple "no."
For the next three minutes, every single picture was anomalous. And then suddenly, it was over. They waited until the sky lightened beyond the threshold where the telescope was usable. Wordlessly, Amari ended her session with the VISION network and the data began to compile. Harlow asked, "while we wait on the full images to render, shall we have a look at what we captured here?" Amari nodded and pulled up the folder where the images were kept. She filtered the images by ones marked 'anomalous', and opened them all into a collage.
"That's ... impossible," Harlow said softly, his eyes darting from picture to picture. He turned to Amari and she could swear there was a glint of fear in his eyes.
She shrugged and said, "yeah ... this isn't exactly covered in your textbook."
After a few minutes of looking at the images in front of them, a soft ding from her phone told Amari that she had an email from VISION. She pulled up the email on the computer terminal, and opened it to find a link to the high-resolution images on their server. The mouse hovered over the URL, and she hesitated like the button was too heavy to push.
Harlow put a hand gently on her shoulder. "Open it," he said decisively. Amari took a deep breath and clicked on the link. After a few seconds of load time, the images appeared one by one like a video with a slow frame rate. They watched as bright plumes of fire burst into existence, extinguishing just as quickly. Streaks of light crossed the screen over multiple frames, and portions of the starfield seemed to blink out of existence in patches before reappearing.
When they reached the final three minutes of anomalies, Amari's forehead creased with concern. She zoomed in on the largest of the three stars, the resolution of the interferometry network enabling a fairly clear view of the surface of Alpha Centauri A. She felt a chill run up her spine as her eyes locked onto the surface of the star, wide with terror.