full image - Repost: Stars Don't do That Part 1/? (from Reddit.com, Stars Don't do That Part 1/?)
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A/N: First time putting my work out there in a while. Any constructive criticism is appreciated. Also, there's a Post Story Note.Coralis system:Tseet'r'wip sat at his terminal, lamenting his life choices. “I should’ve been an engineer,” he thought “maybe gone to grad school” He opened the next file, an admittedly large asteroid that had veered 12% off its predicted trajectory. Pulling the animation back to when the deviation reached >3% Tseet'r'wip froze the image and captured the vectors of the nearest bodies and ran the calculations again. Generating a new prediction. Within 2%, next file.Working at the Center for Extra Stellar Bodies Research had sounded exciting, and in theory it was. Tracking astral bodies going off course and determining the reasons and re-calculating, looking for anomalies. He shifted another image, the comet passed by a binary star system when the rotation was slightly higher than predicted, next file. In practice it was about as exciting as rebalancing your accounts when you spent too much on a night out. The next file had a rare heading, “Hyper Velocity Star”. There were only about 1500 known HVSs in the galaxy and a close watch was kept on all of them. He ran the stars’ name, EAMMS-2005, through the database and it wasn’t there. “Holy shit! A new HVS!”The rest of his shift was spent in some confusion, the back tracing of the trajectory showed the star originated in a part of the galaxy far from any black holes or any other source of gravitational slingshotting. 1500 light years away in fact. It hadn’t passed near any star clusters, there were no major energy bursts in it’s area that could have destabilized its orbit. ”What is happening?” he said aloud.“You got something Tseet'r'wip?”“I don't know, come look at this, it’s a new HVS but I can't figure out what imparted the momentum to sling it.”Cheet'r'tip rose from his perch and clacked his way across the lab, peering over Tseet'r'wips shoulder. “There’s nothing out that way…can I?” Cheet'r'tip said, reaching for the screen. “By all means, I'm stuck.” Tseet'r'wip slid back from his terminal giving Cheet'r'tip access. He scrolled through the data Tseet'r'wip had collected, frowning. He zoomed in on the origin of the deviation point, and played the animation from a local reference frame. The star just … took a left. Both technicians' brow ridges shot up and they looked at each other, “What..” “How…Stars don’t do that.” glancing back at his terminal Tseet'r'wip said “we gotta call the boss.”Sol System:“The final Caplan drive is connected to the network, power on your mark captain.”“Mark” The fusion reactors fire, the funneling of astral corona into the engines sparks to life and the screen goes white from radiation. The cameras correct and a vision of stellar awe presents itself on screen. Gigantic jets of mixed fusion product ejecting megameters from the surface of Sol dazzling the eyes and overwhelming the senses. If you could focus on the origin of the jets you could see the Caplan drive. A modified dyson sphere funneling coronal ejections into a fusion reactor and throwing out the other side as an engine, driving sol counter spinward and, eventually, sending it and everything gravitationally attached, out of the milky way and on to Andromeda. Humanity’s seed ship is on it’s way.Coralis systemSite Director Hee'swi'lip had been watching the looped animation from Tseet'r'wip's terminal for five minutes now. “It just...went left,” she said, her crest still quivering in confusion. “Contact the observation platform that captured this data and get me a full spectrum scan of the area, tell them to reposition if needed. We need to figure out what happened, stars don’t just suddenly change course and accelerate for no reason.”Tseet'r'wip hopped over to the comms terminal and initiated the connection.“Ostellion Arm Observation Platform, Kree'r'sip speaking.”“Hi, this is Tseet'r'wip from CESBoR. We need to do a full spectrum scan on the area in the attached file. The request comes from Site Director Hee'swi'lip. Reposition if needed, authorization code is in the attachment.”“Huh, that’s a lot. There’s nothing over there but sure I’ll get it initiated. Any idea why this is so important?”“Nothing going on eh, check this out.” replied Tseet'r'wip, sending the looped animation and waiting for the techs reaction.“It… just went left? They can’t do that.” Brow ridges and crest rising in confusion and pupils dilating with concern Kree'r'sip turned back to the screen asking “What the hell is going on?”“That’s what we need to find out, call me directly when you get the data.”Tseet'r'wip turned back to a now empty room, shoulders slumping and with a tired sigh he thought “Well I didin’t need sleep anyway.”After what felt like hours of tossing and turning, Tseet'r'wip did, finally, get to sleep. And was immediately awoken by comms ringing through. Groaning into a roll and groggily looking at the screen his heart rate jumped up ‘Did they get the data already?’ “This is Tseet'r'wip.” “It’s Kree'r'sip, get back to the lab, now. The Director is already on her way, you gotta go now.” “What! I told you to call me first! What the hell happened?” “Not my call, you wanna get there fast, this is huge.”Tseet'r'wip threw on some close and called a car, rushing back to the lab. He tripped his way in and froze. ‘Oh shit. That’s not Hee'swi'lip, that’s The Director!’ Standing at his terminal was Kee'swi'pip, head of CESBoR, frowning at something. “Good morning Director,” came Hee'swi'lip’s voice from behind Tseet'r'wip as she entered the lab. “I’m told there’s been a development in Technician Tseet'r'wip’s findings, but I didn't realize it was so… important.”“Oh it is” Kee'swi'pip said, making a few gestures on the terminal and projecting the screen on the wall. The wall filled with data, repeating frequency patterns in myriad bandwidths, a general out pouring of EM radiation in low energy, and finally, what appeared to be a directional funnel of fusion radiation ejecting from the local star. The last bit of data scrolling across the screen left no questions, total system energy consumption, 10^33 erg/sec.It was Hee'swi'lip that recovered from the shock first, “That's… they’re… a sapient species is doing that!”Sol System:“Ey Jerry! You ready for next week? It’s gonna be a banger!” Jerry’s eyes drifted up from idly moving his food about his tray, seeing the tall, lanky form of Mike walking up to his table.“The wha.. Oh right, the anniversary, I mean nah.”“Nah!? What the hell man! It's the 500th anniversary of the Caplan Drive firing man, and WE are the ones helping humanity move through the stars!”“Ok, one: we’re glorified janitors. Two: Last Dream 12 just released and I gotta keep ahead of the spoilers so I'll be grinding that for a while.”“I wasn’t gonna say it but you do look worn out. You gotta get away from that console for a bit man. Get yourself out there, meet somebody, make some stories. And so you know, we are NOT janitors. I at least am a Robotics Technician specializing in systems drones on Helios One”“Call it what you want, we fix maintenance bots and food fabs. Sure 500 is big but what really changed? Same earth, same Mars, same Ganymede. Sure the constellations shifted and astrology weirdos freaked out for a century or so but even they don’t care anymore.”Mike shook his head and sighed, scooping a spoonful of what was reasonably close to mashed potatoes, “You are such a downer man. It's a party, open bar and free buffet with basically the whole crew there. Even Ashley.” Jerry rolled his eyes as Mike wiggled his eyebrows. “Besides, I heard from a friend in Marketing there’s gonna be a huge announcement, like bigger than when the drives fired.”Lorenz System, Galactic Democratic Council Station:A low susurration filtered its way through behind the dais where Kee'swi'pip waited. She stood, reviewing her notes on her data pad, trying to control her crest, and failing. She hated these kinds of presentations, ‘Lectures and conferences are one thing, but trying to explain the enormity of this find to a bunch of politicians is a nightmare.’ She could hear the FIrst Chairman's speech dying down and shook her feathers out, trying to calm her nerves. The aide at the doorway beckoned her forward. Kee'swi'pip squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, and stepped out onto the dais.A polite, low applause rose in the chamber as she walked to the podium scanning the crowd. A representative of all major species in the known galaxy was present in this room,‘Well, except one’ she thought, ‘this is going to be a lot’The cephalopod like Praxians, crab like _____, and saurian ____ seated at the front being the founding races of the GD. Taking another deep breath Kee'swi'pip picked up the screen remote and began her speech.“Seven cycles ago CERBoS discovered a new HVS, that is Hyper Velocity Star, in an arm of the galaxy once thought to be entirely inactive. Through long hours of data analysis it was discovered that there was no natural explanation for the sudden acceleration of the star. As such we directed the observation platform to make a more thorough scan of the system and discovered this.” Shifting the display to the data collected by the platform showing the wide bandwidth artificial frequencies, the deformation in stellar corona and energy consumption.“After much deliberation and various models being run we’ve come to only one conclusion. There is a previously uncontacted sapient species that has manipulated their star to drag the system through the galaxy. However, none of xenosociologists can give any reason why a society that is clearly a level two civilization would do this.”The low murmuring that always accompanies a speech being translated into multiple languages suddenly swelled in volume. The presiding officer broke in to quiet the crowd and Kee'swi'pip continued.“This is unusual for several reasons. First and foremost, we can think of no viable reason to move an entire system from its orbit. That particular area of the galaxy is, essentially, dead. There are no threats to this star in the calculable future nor anything in the projected trajectory that is beneficial enough to do this.”The volume grew again but she powered through it. “It is the recommendation of the Galactic Academy of Sciences to contact this new species.”Sol System, Kuiper Belt Observation Platform 3:‘Next, Next, Next’ thought Comms Officer Miguel Jaurez as he cycled his secondary antenna through random frequencies. ‘I knew this job was going to be boring but god damn this is boring.’As he thought this the emergency frequency started going crazy. He quickly flipped over and answered“Ob Plat 3 state your emergency.” His request was followed by a series of mechanical sounds not unlike the samples of dial-up modems he’d heard in the underground retro-remix-post-hop he listened to. “What the fuck...” He ran the sequence through the standard decoders and got nothing, except that it was definitely artificial. “Hey John, come look at this.” he said as the telemetry data came in. The signal originated 140 AU out. ‘We’ve got nothing out there…’PSN: This was inspired by a paragraph in the work of Dr. Matt Caplan about how a new HVS would be a good way to find an alien species in a paper titled "Stellar engines: Design considerations for maximizing acceleration", in which he also shits on solar sails.
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