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

The only problem was that he had to merge all four databases—X-ray, gamma, infrared, and radio—in such a way that the astral projector displayed their entries as distinct objects. Peter read up on the documentation. Apparently there was an interface that allowed him to feed any data into the system. Very convenient. He downloaded, as far as available, the data of the northern sky, and copied them one by one into the online memory of the astral projector. For the different objects, he also uploaded four different 3D models that the projector could use.

He was ready to go! Peter ran down the stairs. It was quite cold in the living room, as it was already getting dark outside. His stomach was growling because he’d skipped lunch. Still, he hadn’t felt a burst of energy quite like this in a long time. It seemed to him that he was onto something, as if something was about to reveal itself that would surprise him. If Franziska had told him about having such a feeling, he would have thought she was crazy.

He first turned up the heat. Franziska preferred the house to be warm and, if he let it cool down too much, it would take a few hours to get it back up to her comfortable zone. He himself only sought warmth when he’d been outside behind the telescope for a few hours. And then he preferred to take a hot bath.

The astral projector still stood in the middle of the room. All he’d had to do was switch it on and, shortly after startup, he was drawn into space, surrounded by Earth, Mars, and Venus, as always. The sun hung on the terrace outside the window. Unlike last time, he had forgotten to lower the blinds. The window glass reflected some of the lasers that created the hologram. As a result, a translucent version of the sun also formed inside the living room, just below the ceiling. It looked as if the ghost of a star was approaching the solar system from above the ecliptic.

That was not particularly disturbing, so Peter left it. He wasn’t interested in the solar system. Using the projector’s control app, he first called up the yellow dwarfs from his list. By pointing his finger, he forced the universe to change its shape. That was how God must feel. The planets shrank and disappeared, and many new stars revealed themselves in an irregular pattern.

Then he released the X-ray sources. A few violet spheres mingled with the yellow dwarfs, which respectfully kept their distance. There were hardly any objects radiating intensely in the X-ray range—apart from the stars themselves—in the immediate vicinity of the solar system. Their coronas were so hot that light particles with X-ray energies were emitted by thermal means, i.e., by excitation of the atoms. However, he refrained from letting the software color the stars violet as well.

The jump to the infrared was already providing much more information. A whole series of small red balls materialized around him. They were brown dwarfs and giant planets without their own suns. The difference quickly blurred. Some also kept the yellow dwarfs company by orbiting them. However, that was the exception rather than the rule, and in no way qualified as the great commonality of the surviving yellow dwarfs.

From the beginning, he did not expect anything from the gamma radiation. It simply emanated from the wrong sources. It was more than 20,000 light-years to the nearest galactic nucleus, and ordinary stars emitted gamma rays only when they were undergoing some kind of eruption. The astral projector automatically increased the scale to show the center of the Milky Way as well. Peter was caught in a whirlpool and pulled along. He realized too late that he was to blame for it, because he had stored the gamma objects.

Back to square one. Changing the scale by hand in precisely the right way was not so easy. Peter preferred to press the reset button, and when Mars and Venus were back, he faded in his yellow dwarfs again and then brought in the radio sources. A few green balls spread out in space, and a few more joined the existing stars. The effect was like the infrared, only a bit more sparing. Did this mean anything?

In any case, the radio signals were no sign of any civilization—the scientists who conducted the survey would have already determined that. So, they had some natural cause and there were many possibilities. The radio telescope that conducted the WENSS was listening at 325 MHz. Radio waves in that part of the spectrum often emanated from galactic nuclei, but that wouldn’t be true in this case.

Was that perhaps the common ground he was looking for? Peter started the spherical shell via the control app. The glittering depiction pushed its way through the living room. He stood directly in front of it. Some of the yellow dwarfs lined up perfectly on the shell. Peter examined them all individually. They didn’t look as nice and shiny yellow as they had before. He pulled one out of the shell by hand. Its color had changed because it coincided with a radio source.

Carefully he released it again, as if he held a sensitive animal in front of him. The next dwarf was also discolored, and the one after that. That could be it! Peter searched the entire shell, and in the end he had tracked down three yellow dwarfs that glowed just as golden as before. He marked them by virtually rotating them with his hand. Now they glowed red. One of the three was the sun.

What did that mean? Was our system doomed?

Take it easy, Peter. First, he had to rule out a mistake. He went through the other yellow dwarfs outside the spherical shell. About one-third were also a radio source, while the rest were not. On the spherical shell, however, the distribution was quite different—98.5 percent were active