“How many people would go?” she said, louder than she normally spoke.
Instructor Asano raised an eyebrow, then tried to hide that he had just raised an eyebrow.
“Are you volunteering, Shiraishi?”
“No one else is more qualified,” Aki answered.
“You would be saturated with radiation. The acute radiation syndrome would kill you even if the Builders did not.”
“Acceptable. Where do I sign up?”
Asano shook his head. “We are in a classroom discussing a hypothetical solution to the worst problem this planet has ever faced. Any real ‘Space Force,’” he said, his fingers in the air to make quotation marks, “is still a long way off. I hear that the governments are developing, well, more accurately, restarting work on a nuclear propulsion system in Nevada. If they are using atomic engines, then I bet that they are planning to send people along with the reactors.”
ACT V: JUNE 2017
THE ROUNDABOUT IN front of Fuchinobe Station was overflowing with water from the rain and gusting wind. Aki considered taking a taxi but decided to walk after remembering how prohibitively expensive taxis had become. Her umbrella proved useless. She covered her head with the hood of her raincoat as best she could and walked. The overflowing water ran across the sidewalk, carrying pink petals in its wake. The cherry trees had bloomed over two months late because of the darkness and pollution.
The wind blowing on Aki’s face was warm and moist, like the vanguard of a typhoon. Swept by the whistling gust, the streets were as empty as the morning of New Year’s Day. The shuttered windows of the shops had nothing to do with the weather. The world was in turmoil. Though she was too focused to spend much time worrying, Aki could not help but pause and admit that the last few years looked like the beginning of the end of the world.
Economies that had seemed too big to topple had toppled. Food and basic necessities were either strictly rationed or too expensive for regular use. In less than a decade, global weather patterns had changed irrevocably. Average temperatures had dropped. The resultant “global cooling” created environmental chaos. Indonesia was suffering a devastating drought, and over a million people had drowned or been washed away in floods in northern China. Glaciers had crushed entire populations around the globe, and Japan was trapped in sweltering heat. Locusts swarmed just north of Tokyo, beetles infested Hokkaido, and southern Japan reported cases of malaria. Farmers had to grow crops inside retractable plastic greenhouses so growers could adjust the amount of sunlight and temperature. The farmers were barely producing enough food even though the world’s population was dwindling.
Aki’s favorite professor was waiting for her when she entered the research lab. She was embarrassed that she looked like a drowned rat.
“Shiraishi, I hear you’ve applied to join the Vulcan Mission.”
“Oh, uh…Yes, I did.” Aki had forgotten that the names of those who passed the second round of the selection process were announced to the public.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you about it first.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not often that we have the honor of one of our students being chosen as a protector of the solar system.”
“They’re only in the second round of selections,” Aki said. “Besides, I don’t think I have what it takes to be a…” she hesitated, the words surreal, “‘protector of the solar system,’ anyway.”
“If you ask me, your nerves of steel would make you a perfect candidate for the job.”
“I’m not sure I agree, but thanks for the encouragement,” replied Aki.
“There’s, uh, just one thing, though,” her professor added hesitantly, looking for the right words. “You do know that the Vulcan Mission is going to be unlike any other manned mission ever launched, right?” Asano hesitated and looked away.
Aki knew all about it. The Apollo Missions had sent astronauts to the moon and returned them safely, but the Vulcan Mission was a UNSDF military attack. Destroying the Ring was more important than the lives of the crew. For a ship and group of people to destroy an object with sixty thousand times more surface area than planet Earth’s sounded impossible. But sixty thousand was also the number of additional casualties dying every day from the encroaching darkness. It was not about research anymore. It was about survival of the species.
The nuclear-powered warship needed so much power and propellant that safety and human comforts were not going to be priorities. One designer had quit the project because the solar radiation shields were not strong enough and she did not want to be involved in creating a deathtrap for the astronaut soldiers.
Aki knew enough to help the Vulcan Mission, even if it meant that she might never set foot on her home planet again. Someone had to try to save the world. It was her duty.
ACT VI: OCTOBER 2017
THE INTERVIEWERS SAT in high-backed chairs, making the three men and one woman appear farther away and shorter than they really were. The jowly bearded man in the second seat on the left asked Aki to stop looking nervous.
“You make an excellent first impression,” he said, then ran his thumb and forefinger along the corners of his mouth. “Judging from your size, you would eat less food and take up less space than the other candidates.”
Aki was unsure whether he was joking at her expense or trying to make her comfortable and doing a bad job of it. The other three interviewers laughed. Waiting her turn outside in the sterile lobby, another candidate had told Aki that he aimed to look relaxed but keep his guard up. It had passed silently that they were far from relaxed, no matter how hard they tried to appear otherwise.
After covering a few general topics—how her family and loved ones were enduring the solar crisis, what it had been like to see the tower from her school’s telescope—the interviewers moved to more probing questions.
“Your Eastern views. Do you believe in the transmigration of souls and animism? Given your background, I’m curious to hear your opinion on the Life-Form Theory,” said the other man, the one with gray hair.
Aki answered carefully, “I think it is a possibility.”
None of the probes had found traces of life, nor any clues as to where the Builders were from, what the Builders looked like, or why they were constructing a Ring. The question floated as an amorphous unknown over all humanity. In the absence of knowledge, theories that nearly bordered on superstition reigned supreme, at least from Aki’s point of view.
The Life-Form Theory was one of the dominant explanations. It suggested that the Ring itself was a living organism. Seeds fell upon the planet, constructing the mass drivers; mineral resources were launched into space around the star; and the Ring was built. With sufficient detachment from the crisis it spawned, the Ring looked like an artifact of beavers building a dam. When the time came to leave the nest, the Ring would scatter into countless seeds, each with a solar sail, flying off to other solar systems. Consciousness was not necessarily guiding the process. But with no evidence of consciousness or even a definition of “life” that could account for the Ring, the Life-Form Theory was hardly a theory at all.
Aki responded with what she hoped was the safest answer. “Despite the fascinating theory, humanity’s number-one priority has to be to dismantle the Ring as quickly as possible.”
“I’d like to know what fascinates you about the Life-Form Theory,” the woman asked.
“If we find an organism that has adapted to the vacuum of space, our views of the universe would be turned upside down,” Aki said, speaking with the same polite tone the woman had used. “Presented with a life-form that possesses the power to alter an entire solar system, we would have no choice but to consider the possibility that everything we have observed in the universe until now, every single star, every nebulae, all the way to dark matter and galaxies, could be alive in ways we have never even imagined. Organic beings such as ourselves could have been created out of molds of these cosmobiological organisms when the organisms came to Earth in the distant past. Suddenly, we would not be who we think we are.”