“We don’t need to wait the fifty years,” a famous astrophysicist, Harrison Godwin, explained. “Reducing the amount of sunlight will increase the ice and snow enough to raise the earth’s total reflectance ratio, and we will be robbed of even more sunlight. This will start a chain reaction of cold spells around the world. In three to five years, we will have entered a new ice age.”
ACT III: SEPTEMBER 2007
“WOW, AKI. NOTHING is stopping you these days,” said Hiromi with some bitterness, looking at the results of their exams.
“Yeah, I guess. The grades are not why I do it.”
“You have been a different person since 5/9.”
“I found my heart’s deepest desire, something that drives me…”
“Really? My parents said it was fine to skip college and stay with them since the world is coming to an end.”
“You do not want to end up one of those girls that live with their parents well into their thirties, Hiromi,” Aki said.
“Maybe I do. Thirty sounds far enough away that it will never happen.”
“I cannot believe you would waste your life at a time like this.”
“Nobody cares anymore,” Hiromi said. She clenched her teeth. “It’s easier.” Aki shook her head as Hiromi stalked out of the room.
The astronomy club observed the Ring through the school’s new telescopes as often as they could. Aki had trained some juniors to watch for her and call her if there were new developments. She left school and walked to the subway. A man standing on top of a van parked near the entrance to the station shouted doomsday rants into a megaphone. Aki tried to tune him out. There was always someone talking about the destruction the Ring was bringing; if you tuned one rant out, another arrived within fifteen minutes:
“Glaciers are coming back! Glaciers are going to crush us all!”
“Do not let the government put you on a starvation diet! Rationing is coming! Horde food now!”
“Extraterrestrials are going to enslave the strong and use the weak for food!”
“Everyone is wrong and will regret their negativity when humanity is invited to join the Intergalactic Age. Bliss will be delivered upon us all!”
As hard as Aki tried, the level of concern among everyone she knew was as frightening as the wall around the sun. The ignorance and fear were inescapable. She could not help but notice. People stockpiled food and fuel. New nuclear power plants were built rapidly. New Age cults and doomsday religions flourished. People who could afford it moved to warmer climates or built underground bomb shelters. For a while, the stock markets fluctuated violently, then the markets flatlined. Nobody knew how to prepare for a tomorrow of unknowns that might never even come. Aki, on the other hand, never considered resigning from life. She was frustrated by how most people gave up easily. Through it all, her focus remained on astronomy.
In astronomical time, human society consists of a ten thousand– year blip on a 4.5 billion-year history. Aki knew that human civilization was not special in the grand scheme of astronomical time. From her perspective, the blooming of the human race and all its grand civilizations, from the perspective of the universe as a whole, was the light from a beat-up flashlight with a cracked bulb and dead batteries that only work for a few seconds if you shake the flashlight really hard before pressing the button, even at the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night. To Aki Shiraishi, the insignificance of humans in the eyes of the universe meant that she, as a human, was responsible for her species’ fate no matter how bad the situation became.
If Mercury and the Ring were the work of intelligent life, it was startling to ponder a civilization advanced enough to cross the nearly infinite gap between their sun and Earth’s and then change the surface of an entire planet. Aki could not get over it and thought of the extrasolars all the time. What other people saw as terrifying only tantalized her. She wanted to solve the mysteries of the Ring, of its builders. The Builders—that was what media outlets had started calling them. It became the popular descriptor, replacing extrasolars. The Builders might soon be the only ones left alive in the solar system. The fact that everyone she knew might die did not bother Aki. They would all be dead in a hundred years, and even that was merely a sunspot or a solar flare in terms of astronomical time. Her only fear was dying before her questions got answered. Responsibility and answering questions were the fire that drove her.
Graduation came and went, and Aki was offered full scholarships to colleges and universities that she had never even heard of, let alone applied to. She was more interested in the space probe—Ikaros—that had been launched toward the Ring and the astronomical developments of the past year and a half. To many, her discovery seemed like the end of everything, but to Aki, it still looked like just the beginning.
Sending a space probe close to the sun was a historical first and an amazing feat of engineering in its own right. The distance from Earth to the Ring was farther than the distance from Earth to Mars. The solar radiation around Mercury was hot enough to melt lead. There was no atmosphere on Mercury that could be used to decelerate the probe upon arrival. The stakes were too high to fail though, and the combined scientific and economic might of the world came together to build Ikaros. Compared to the Ring though, it is nothing, Aki thought on more than one occasion.
The mission of the first probe was a high-speed flyby past the Ring’s outer surface, which appeared smooth and metallic. The only surefire method to get detailed observations was to launch a probe that could maneuver itself into a static position relative to the Ring. The spacecraft would need the ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly. Engines fueled with chemical propellants would lack the fine control necessary for such maneuverability. An ultralightweight probe with solar sails, like the collectors on the Ring, was designed and deployed.
The first images, taken from less than two meters from the earthside face of the Ring, were finally obtained the year Aki entered graduate school. All she had done during the interim was study. She could have graduated early, but there was too much to do in the lab, and precious little that interested her outside of it. Other than the Ring there was little else. People frayed and developed haunted looks, jails grew overcrowded, and people would just leave their life one day without a moment’s notice, but she followed her love of astronomy, knowing that it would lead her where she wanted to go.
The images from Ikaros 1 were compared to mold growing on carbon paper. Although the surface appeared shiny and silver from a distance, a closer look revealed a black substrate covered with countless cilia. The cilia caught particles being flung up from the surface of Mercury and then added them to the Ring to expand its height, like a daisy chain of minuscule centipedes handing grains of sand to each other.
Although the Ring appeared durable, a blast from Ikaros 1’s positioning jet accidentally burned a hole in it. The hole was repaired immediately—like cells replicating to fix broken skin, growing back without even a scab or scar. Because of that discovery, Ikaros 2 was sent to collect samples of the Ring’s surface to discover how the regenerative process worked. This mission failed miserably. After collecting its sample, the container corroded, then the probe itself was eaten away until nothing was left.
But the death of Ikaros 2 was not in vain. It reminded scientists of K. Eric Drexler’s conceptions of molecular nanotechnology, a disputed idea that suddenly burst back into vogue. The destructive energy must have come from the sun, which meant that there had to be a dense array of solar energy storage inside the material, because the corrosion had continued after the ring material was separated from the Ring and sealed in a container that prevented the material from receiving any additional air or light.