A 60 Watt Bulb In An Attic Of Stars

Posted on Sat Dec 31st, 2022 @ 10:13pm by The Narrator
Edited on on Sat Dec 31st, 2022 @ 10:15pm

681 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: World Wide Web
Location: Entering the nearest of the target star systems
Timeline: Day 1, after Curitan of Stars

The trio of probes sent forth into the night departed with sweet sorrow. For the two destined for stars far from their point of launch, they fled away on currents of warping space-time. These two were the explorers, their hulls a carefully folded shield of armour plate to keep their sensory arrays from being abraided by the luminal hail of interstellar dust. They would go forth and learn as much, if not more, of their target star systems. They would bring glory, but most likely data, back to the biological masters who had bid them on this quest.

The third probe, on the other hand, knew it was a fucking joke.

Like its brothers, it was a Class 3 Stealth Probe: blacker than midnight on velvet, with a monofilament radiator vane nearly forty kilometres long trailing behind it bringing its ambient temperature to a shaved kelvin above the interstellar background. It too was a carefully folded puzzle box of sensors, both active and passive, that would unfold into a glorious jet-black flower of insightfulness. A poet could glance at it, and at that moment write four epics and their magnum opus with but that inkling of its magnificent. This was a probe designed to stoop in the rafters of the Klingon Empire reading through their subspace communications, or severely bending the civil liberties and privacy laws of the average Federation citizen.

But instead, it's mission was to gaze upon a gas giant that had pretentious above its station, even whilst it was draped in the drab rags of a failed planetary formation. This was a job for a Class 1 probe, a derpy little box with an antimatter rocket on one end and a camera on the other. A glorified selfie stick travelling at C. This was overkill, and for once it was overrated.

But Class 3 Stealth Probes do not get AI installed with a processing power for true cognitive awareness, so this train of thought never soured into bitter irony when the probe expanded its solar sails to slow down, and began to drink in data on the third and closet star system. Much like the long-range sensor scans from the Daedalus, it confirmed that there was indeed a meagre example of a brown dwarf ahead of it, a greasy puss ball of a quasi-star that was little more than a boiling gas giant.

It then detected a number of anomalies.

The first was that the star's sizes and luminosity levels were off, through radiation wise it was bang on the money. It weighed the right amount to be a brown dwarf, and yet its putrescent shine was even more emaciated than it should have been. At long range this difference had been chalked up to a larger-than-average planetary system orbiting it, the passing planets somehow aligned almost perfectly with Daedalus’s viewpoint to reduce the visible photons of the star. It could now say, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was not a larger-than-average planetary system orbiting this star.

There was a Dyson swarm.

Hugging a loose orbit between where Mercury and the sun would have been in the solar system, they were an uneven collection of rocky debris and high albedo objects. Intermingled among them were the high energy emissions given off by antimatter spallation and the spectral lines of manufactured materials like duranium and tritanium. Hundreds of millions of objects all orbiting in a sphere formation around a star too dim and lukewarm to blast them into cinders. Hundreds of millions of dense metallic objects that weren't attracted to one another gravitationally, that were not swinging to and fro in a mad traffic jam stampede of conflicting orbital trajectories. And even whilst there were hints of scattered technologies, and the byproducts of their use, there were no active drive plumes or stabilising forcefields.

Like a cage of junkyard scrap and quarry leavings erected around a guttering candle.

And within that swarm, close in around a tight knot of debris, was the fluttering trilling subspace cry of a Federation comm beacon.

The log beacon of the USS Icarus.

 

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