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

eyes. The projection beams could only be seen where they united and conjured up a three-dimensional image. The projector slowly calmed down. Carefully, it adjusted its output to the darkness. It was faster when making the adjustment from dark to light.

And now? Peter fetched a chair from the kitchen, placed it right next to the device, and sat down. He set the coordinates so that he was in the center of the universe. His view of the cosmos changed immediately. He no longer recognized a single constellation. Around him it was strangely empty. Shouldn’t the Big Bang have taken place here? Maybe that was why it was so barren. Everything that was once here had long since blown outward in all directions. The center of the universe was its loneliest place. But that was nothing compared to his sofa.

Peter hated himself when he was in this mood. It was, of course, astrophysical nonsense. The universe had no center from which it expanded. New space was constantly being generated at each of its coordinates. It was a gigantic leaven, which swelled in all directions. Besides, the Big Bang took place in the whole universe simultaneously, just as it existed then.

It would have been nice to be able to watch it. But the astral projector refused to take him traveling back to that time. He had already tried. Perhaps the manufacturer, whose home base was the United States, was afraid of how religious groups might react if the astral projector didn’t show their version of creation. The birth of the universe had been a brutal, violent process that didn’t fit into every worldview.

Whenever he was depressed, Peter started to philosophize, but that wasn’t getting him anywhere.

He loaded the saved data into the app. The spherical shell appeared again. He activated the stars that had disappeared. Because they appeared invisible in the spherical shell, he made them blink. Pulsating blue crosses appeared on the spherical shell, reminding him of gravestones. If the planets that orbited these stars had been inhabited, all of their living beings would have perished.

He added the data for the few remaining stars, those that lacked the 418-megahertz signal. Now they were all there.

He walked up and down along the spherical shell. What was geometry trying to tell him? Was there a time-lapse? The shell was about half a light-year thick, so the stars it hit were all the same distance from the source of the calamity, give or take a quarter of a light-year—minuscule in cosmic dimensions. But did that mean the catastrophe genuinely came from the center of the sphere? Not necessarily.

He tried to imagine how the calamitous process spread from the north pole of the sphere. A mysterious force could have spread across the shell, wiping out one star after another. He programmed such a sequence into the control app. Everything had to have started—at the earliest—after the last sky survey wherein the stars were still found. That gave him an approximate sequence of events, since the stars in the southern sky were detected at different times than those in the northern sky. He let the inexplicable force run over the spherical shell with these parameters, but something went wrong: The sun also went out, replaced by a blinking blue cross.

What was wrong with his reasoning? Maybe it was the north pole of the sphere. Why should the process start at this arbitrary point defined by humankind? He tried it at a randomly chosen point on the equator of the sphere, but this time another still-visible star disappeared.

He had to work on this systematically. He wrote a small optimization algorithm that searched for the exact point from which the mysterious force emanated. He connected the algorithm to the astral projector via the programming interface. That way, he could watch the program at work.

“Start.”

The universe flickered. The algorithm selected a point in the upper latitudes. Rapidly, a white, steamroller-like depiction moved across the spherical shell. Whenever it hit a star, the star became a blinking blue cross. Shortly before the end, the sun’s turn came. The implication: eight billion people die. Peter got goosebumps.

He replayed the simulation, and space flickered again. The roller raced. The sun died. Peter sped up the process. Flicker. Roller. Death. Flicker. Roller. The sun survived. Next time it died again. Death, survival, survival, death, death. Death had the upper hand here. That was reassuring to him, because the sun was still shining. Thus, a scenario in which it would’ve been extinguished by now could not be right. He could be wrong, and how he hoped he was.

Peter had to turn away. The roller raced over the spherical shell from different directions, and its rapid movement was making him nauseous. Then his smartphone vibrated. Done!

His little program had found a result—the most probable time sequence. He didn’t need to map reality. It all started about 20 degrees north of the equator of the spherical shell, at a single point. If the sphere were the Earth, an asteroid might have hit there, sending an earthquake around the globe. But it was not Earth. It was a virtual sphere in space whose dimensions he’d calculated himself. It could not be seen, nor was it present, and it was defined by a mere two-digit-number of stars.

But something hit this sphere, from the outside or maybe from the inside. The force of the hit created the white-hot roller, which now spread over the sphere. One star after the other went out. Then the simulation stopped. They had reached the present.

Peter wanted to know the future, so he pressed the start button again. The simulated roller continued to move. It first knocked out star number 1, whose radio spectrum they had evaluated, then star number 2. No, he was mistaken. That was the sun. The sun went out.

He went to it and carefully took it in his hand. The system showed it as a small, brown ball. Peter pressed it briefly, and the projector understood the command and showed