The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (red white and royal blue hardcover TXT) 📕

that stood about waist-high, was another expensive purchase that had initially upset Franziska.

He was finally able to convince her that it fit well in the living room. Externally, the projector looked like a classic marble column. Franziska had placed a flower pot on it, and he now removed the pot to the table. There were shiny black spheres embedded in the sides, which were pivoted and peeked out about halfway. It looked fancy and a bit futuristic. The only ugly detail was the black cable that ran along the floor between the base and the power outlet. To hide it, they would have had to rip up the hardwood flooring and install a sub-floor conduit for a flush-to-the-floor outlet in the middle of the room. That had been too much for his wife.

Peter switched on the device by swiping his hand across the column. The projector emitted a melodic triad, the signal to start the appropriate app on the smartphone—which started, connected to the projector, and requested the starting position. Earth was preset as the starting point.

The astral projector fired up. The column grew to about head height as a narrower version sprouted upward from its center. It, too, was studded with black glass spheres.

Now came the moment that had ultimately won Franziska over. The living room transformed into a 3 by 3 by 2.5-meter section of space. Gravity remained, but Peter was immersed in a three-dimensional model of the inner solar system. Earth was at the center of the display, roughly in the middle of the column. The holographic projection, created by fast-moving lasers in the glass spheres, extended to the walls. The astral projector had been a hit on a major crowdfunding platform last year, and Peter had secured one in time. Home planetariums had been old hat ever since.

Peter walked around the Earth, meandered past Mars, pushed aside a few asteroids, and tried to shove Venus out of its orbit. The celestial bodies were clearly not to scale. A realistic representation would be unimpressive, because either the Earth would look tiny or the next planet would be somewhere past Berlin. For realism, there was always computer software. The astral projector brought the universe to life. The best thing about the device was that it tracked his movements. He could use his hand to push an asteroid off its course.

Peter could determine what happened next. If he pulled his hand back slowly, the asteroid would return to its orbit. If he gave it a strong swipe, however, it would leave its orbit. The program then simulated its new flight path around the sun.

When their two kids visited for Christmas, they’d had fun changing asteroid and comet orbits to hit the Earth. This was not easy, because you had to guess approximately where the target would be when the new trajectory of the asteroid should hit it. As a reward, the program then revealed a fancy Armageddon simulation, and the Earth was subsequently tinted brown instead of blue.

Only until the next reset, though, which would inevitably be necessary because the software still had its teething troubles. Sometimes celestial bodies got stuck or couldn’t get past each other, even though there was enough space, or a planet suddenly started to go crazy in the figurative sense.

This universe could not be a software-controlled simulation, or reality would crash much more often. Peter took the Earth in both hands and squeezed it. The globe shrank, and with it the other visible planets. He continued to squeeze. Mercury came in through the closed blind. A little more. Earth was only the size of a tennis ball when the sun finally appeared. He reduced the scale slightly more to get the sun into the room because our star was so huge.

It made him feel really warm. It was not the sun that warmed him, of course, but the fact that the light from the lasers that spun the hologram was naturally giving off a bit of energy to the air, and over time the room warmed up—especially where it got particularly bright from the simulated sun. Peter approached the star. It was a few centimeters taller than his own height, and although only three-quarters of it had passed through the outer wall, it was awe-inspiring. Up close, you could even see the arc-shaped flares stretching across the surface.

The rendering was extremely detailed. Everything moved much more quickly than in reality. Peter could control the passage of time in the app. He had the power and he used it, making the clock go faster and faster. Sunspots grew and then disappeared. If he turned the virtual wheel fast enough, he could observe the 11-year sunspot cycle, and he could even turn back time. He did so and arrived at 2006 and what the sun looked like when he’d met Franziska.

Bummer. He hadn’t intended to play with the astral projector. Soon Franziska would be coming home from school. If she caught him in the living room engaged in his hobby, he’d have no excuse for why he hadn’t completed tomorrow’s preparation.

Peter left the universe through the living room door and got his list, which now included the coordinates of the five missing stars in the southern hemisphere from Holinger’s list. Upon returning, he entered the numbers into the control app of the astral projector and pressed the start button.

The program calculated a new scale for the display. The sun shrank to a point where it almost disappeared. Thousands of stars whizzed through space. It was as if a gravitational quake was ripping through the local group. But everything was okay—the software just needed to calculate a new simulation that included all the stars he’d entered.

Of course, the program didn’t know that these stars were missing, which was not the point. Peter wanted to get a picture because he had a strong suspicion. He couldn’t even describe the feeling, maybe something like a hunger pang when you hadn’t eaten recently enough. The living room had grown almost