Quintessence
Chapter 1: Resignation

73 Percent.

At school I was taught to never disobey protocol, to live every day by the rules, and to protect the heritage of man. It was naïve to believe we would adhere to such control. Give people any degree of freedom and they will decide what is best for themselves. I don’t consider this a bad thing, though, in hindsight, we should’ve been stricter.

I’ve disconnected this computer from the local network, just as Hwei-Ru explained. I’ll make as many copies of this hard drive as I can. I have to leave a record of the truth here, even if nobody or nothing ever replaces it. There isn’t anything else I can do. There is nothing anyone can do. If you’re reading this and have some insight to offer which I missed, then feel free to contribute. I don’t pretend to know or understand all that happened.

I’m not sure where to start. The beginning, obviously, but how much is necessary? Most details of the First Pass are available in the community archives, and those that aren’t should still be in the mass data stores. If you can access this, then you might even be able to go outside. Try the libraries, that’s how we used to store information.

My Grandfather told me many stories of the First Pass of P-8743-75O, which occurred when he was six years old. His was the impression which affected me the most. Most of what I know of the state of the world I learned from him. The archives lack a certain personal touch. I believe this was intentional.

When it first appeared, there was no real sense of worry, not from the common man. Its path was such that, while it would cross the orbit of the earth, it would do so on the other side of the sun, so concerns of a collision were dismissed. It was a curiosity to be observed, absolutely, but the only ones truly obsessed were the astrophysicists and the conspiracy theorists.

The physicists were so delighted with the discovery that a large portion of national astrophysical budgets and time were refocused on this new mystery, the ‘Dark Star’ as the media popularized it. Of course, we know it was never a star, but accuracy in general scientific reporting was never really a strong suit of the human species.

The correct term was a rogue planet, a title given to a larger celestial body not locked into the orbit of a star. According to its trajectory, it had come from somewhere in the Sirius system, one of our nearest neighbors, cosmologically speaking. The Dark Star was roughly the size of mars, with an odd habit of absorbing more light than what we had so far observed from any object within our own system.

From discovery it took two years to reach Jupiter, moving at a speed that put our first man-made probes to shame. It was here where we managed our first detailed pictures. The probes we used for the images were hack-jobs, rushed together in joint operations by China, Russia, and the United States of America of America. They used a new type of nuclear engine. The specifics are not something I studied, but the exact specifications are available from the archives, for those interested. Before we lost the probe, we received several hundred panoramic shots which, when stitched together, gave us a detailed look at only a small portion of one hemisphere. What was found brought the conspiracy theorists to the forefront.

These theorists already had a deep pool to draw from. Mad ideas about space had been around since when we thought of the place beyond the sky as the aether. The most popular conspiracy at the time was the idea of Nibiru, a rogue planet that was responsible for most mass extinction events since the formation of the earth. If the tales were to be believed.

This idea was shunned by actual scientists. It had about as much credibility as Bigfoot or the moon being a hologram, as most scientists reckoned it. Though, conspiracy theorists have little regard for evidence, and so the idea remained popular, even when disproved. When the Dark Star made itself known, it was greeted with some smugness from these theorists. It was their vindication. Even though we had determined that the trajectory of the planet had made prior passes impossible, this was mere conjecture to the doomsayers.

Even so, when the images came back it was no longer possible to deny the planet’s enigmatic nature. It was smooth, far smoother than any large cosmic body had a right to be. While there existed certain impact craters detected in the dark rock which made up the crust of the planet, they existed in such limited quantities that astrophysicists all over the world suddenly dropped their work to become the first to explain this new phenomenon. To my knowledge, no satisfactory explanation was ever settled. But then, those scientists had other matters to worry about.

The loss of the first probe was utterly unexpected, which I suppose could be said about any space-faring mishap. It was transmitting at the time of its destruction, this constant data stream allowed us some understanding of what had happened, but it gave no indication as to why. The probe had its course altered after it came into the orbit of the planet. The automatic adjustments as determined by the probes programming had done their best to repair the trajectory, but had ultimately failed. The probe first started to exit the planet’s gravity well, before it changed direction and unceremoniously rammed into the surface.

The readings received from the probe showed some sort of fluctuation in the gravitational constant. This was impossible, so the Russians and the Chinese blamed the United States of America for an apparent failure in the related components that the US supplied. An investigation into the incident found no such problem.

This was two years after the discovery of the Dark Star, by which time the media had become bored of the anomaly and had moved onto celebrity babies, or whatever made up the new flavor of the month. Losing a probe brought it back into the spotlight, and the conspiracies came back in full force. It was an alien ship, some claimed, the entire planet was hollow, said others. Some said it was a black hole, which had somehow gathered a crust, others that it was made entirely of diamond, which made the superpowers hide the truth in an attempt to secretly garner obscene wealth, somehow.

For another year there was nothing but wonder, nothing but postulation without answer. After this year, the planet moved through the asteroid belt, answering some questions and raising others. For those unaware, the asteroid belt occupies the space between Jupiter and Mars. Like with the rings of Saturn there is a common misconception of the density of the asteroid field. Despite appearing so bold on telescopes and other long-distance observation technology, there’s a vast expanse between the rocks and ice that make up the belt, to the point where traversal is relatively simple. The only real concern was that the Dark Star might throw some of the asteroids off path and towards earth, another popular doomsday scenario.

While there were recordings of predictable orbital changes taken during and after the passage of the planet, there were many anomalous shifts that could not be explained by our then notions of astrophysics. Some of the asteroids had shifted and been shot out by the gravitational pull of the planet at impossible angles, at impossible speeds.

It was a month after the passing of the belt that the first warnings appeared.

With the different space agencies eager to both understand the cause of the crash of the probe and consequently seek reparations for their losses, they had been studying the recovered data and the observed recordings from the planet’s passage through the belt. In their observations of the wake left behind by the planet, they noticed that the asteroids following their standard orbit into the gap left by its passage behaved unexpectedly. These asteroids would follow the same wildly unpredictable trajectory as those which were previously directly affected by the planet’s gravitational proximity.

The problem was that the planet had moved on. There was simply no explainable way that they could be affected by the gravitational pull of an object which was far out of the limits of major gravitational interference. Still, it happened, and it kept happening. The asteroids drifting in the planet’s wake kept getting thrown out, with the force diminishing at an alarmingly slow rate.

We never achieved a consensus on what the wake was, or how it was left behind by the planet. What we did understand is that both the planet and its wake created some sort of instability in the normal operation of gravitons. It had somehow changed what was thought to be the universal gravitational constant. On March the 17th in 2017, physicists calculated that in 244 days, on Thursday the 16th of November, the earth would pass through the wake left by P-8743-75O, and they could only speculate on the potential results.

Grandfather says he remembers that day being the first time he ever saw his parents fight. My great-grandparents were both old hippies, I was told, who tried to live sustainable lives and fight the growing threat of global climate change. Climate change was at least a threat they had understood and planned for, this new threat was unlike anything they, or anyone else, had considered a remote possibility.

They fought over how to weather this new threat. My Grandfather’s mother wanted to move into the mountains while earth drifted through the wake of the Dark Star, convinced an inevitable outbreak of riots and the related violence would put their family at risk. His father wanted to simply stock their fallout shelter and wait the whole thing out underground. His mother had the concern that they wouldn’t be able to get out, or would otherwise be trapped in by those who wished to loot them or take their safe zone for themselves. They owned no guns, but this was 21st century America, and many did.

Ultimately, they settled on moving to the hills.