Prelude to a Star

By JK Smith

"... more Deep Impact than Armageddon, something akin to the intelligent sci-fi of Arrival.Thoughtful and convincing look at how man might deal with an extinction-level crisis.... a science-based one. This is no YA actioner, or dystopian adventure; " 4 out of 5 stars. J. Kinsley, Reedsy Discovery

"Those who like hard science fiction will enjoy the facts on science, mathematics, and technology. Soft science fiction fans will like the philosophical and sociological elements woven throughout the story. 4 out of 5 stars. OnlineBookClub

..oOo..

Dew was beginning to settle out of the evening air, making the sparse grass moist all around.  Lola stood quietly by while her father rolled out the mats with his usual ritual on these special moonless occasions. Then they both sat and gazed upward into the fresh night sky at their star—Oranos εpsilon. 

Stargazing had to be done in the early evenings now, before the stars would succumb to the strange, undulating lights of Aurora Helius, a reminder of the disaster enshrouding the Earth and the changes to the world of their memories. Like Aurora Borealis, Helius's lights would hue the evening sky from the delicate dance of the solar winds making passage high in the Earth's magnetosphere.  Those winds were very full these days, and so Helius's lights arose from all directions of the horizon instead of just the Northern.  Whereas Aurora Borealis had been held captive to Borealis, Greek god of the North Wind, Aurora Helius would be held captive by no one....    

..oOo..

Beset with an unexpected and growing catastrophe, humanity has limited time and makes a plan to ensure its survival. A science fiction novella set in the near future— a space, math, archeology, and genetics thriller told through the experiences of a female protagonist. Author tries to be true and accurate to the science, while still keeping it readable and enjoyable, not distracting to the story. Most character surnames derived from known stars and star systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JK Smith
• Release date: Feb 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215558393

JK Smith

Father, husband, son, brother, camper, sailor, friend. SF fan and science communication advocate.  Former Peace Corps volunteer and spent a career in the biological sciences. MPH in Public Health, JHU.

Book preview

Prologuε

There have been five calamitous extinction events

in our planet’s long and fiery history—

each all but erasing life's progress

before it again sprang anew.

We are all part of that turbulent story,

emerging in animated glory

each time molecules resolved

to rise from primordial stew;

Mocking entropy, enthalpy be damned,

life is but castles rising from the sands,

driven on by some marvel of nature

we can only pretend to understand.

Our sun has loaned to us

the fire of our creation;

yet it cannot be ours, for we are its

in wondrous transformation.

We, its children from afar—

the very atoms within our molecules

that ‘express as us’—

were born from a dying star.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century,

a sixth major extinction already was underway,

though largely man-made this time,

by hubris, waste, naiveté.

But something would speed it up now,

bringing risk to our continuation,

so we must act as the Great Apes we claim to be—

or we can only hope to start anew somehow,

after our cessation.

CHAPTER 1

Carrington and Kidney Stones

Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives. -Socrates, 469-399 BC

Dew was beginning to settle out of the evening air, making the sparse grass moist all around.  Lola stood quietly by while her father rolled out the mats with his usual ritual on these special moonless occasions. Then they both sat and gazed upward into the fresh night sky at their star—Oranos εpsilon. 

She had been so disappointed the previous month when the clouds stole their view, but the stars were crisp and clear this evening.  Stargazing had to be done in the early evenings now, before the stars would succumb to the strange, undulating lights of Aurora Helius, a reminder of the disaster enshrouding the Earth and the changes to the world of their memories.

Like Aurora Borealis, Helius’s lights would hue the evening sky from the delicate dance of the solar winds making passage high in the Earth’s magnetosphere.  Those winds were very full these days, and so Helius’s lights arose from all directions of the horizon instead of just the Northern.  Whereas Aurora Borealis had been held captive to Borealis, Greek god of the North Wind, Aurora Helius would be held captive by no one.

After finishing off the remaining crumbs of their mooncakes—a tradition they now shared—her father gestured with the thermos, More? She nodded, and he thoughtfully refilled her cup and then both gazed upwards again.  There it is! There it is! Still bright, still very close, she chirped.  This is ‘our’ star, Lola thought, it’s there for us—to remind us of our past, our future, and those we love but who are forever out of reach.

She found herself lost in thought—that their star would eventually fade beyond their vision one day, too far and too dim to outshine the growing glow of the Aurora even on the clearest of nights.  Their star would be just a memory then. But that wouldn’t be for a while still, and so she shook the sad thoughts fast from her mind, her father quickly wiping away his own tear before it might be noticed—but it was already too late.

Twelve Years Before

April 18, 02:30 EST, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Maryland-

Down a hallway from the well-funded labs, in a nondescript spare room that also served as storage for discarded instruments and dusty manuscript reprints, a struggling doctoral student sat wide-eyed in front of a monitor. On a different terminal to her right, her fingers frantically typed in numbers for confirmation.

It was a recycled keyboard, noisy, sticky, but it was all she could get her hands on at the moment. This is not right, she thought. Take a deep breath, Samantha, she said aloud to herself. Slow down and check the numbers again, bonehead. She was not about to let a mistake lose her this opportunity to convert a fellowship into a "real job." After two years and too many long hours, her paper was still floating in limbo.  A flux that large must be an error!  A measure of radiation emitted, a flux, is associated with solar flare activity. She knew that if what she thought she had detected was real, it would mean an exceedingly massive X-class solar flare event, even larger than the great Carrington Event of 1859. Man, that was big! And so she had to be sure.

Fred, the security guard who she’d begun to think of as a friend, strolled past her door making his rounds. Hearing the frantic clicks on her keyboard and sensing her nervousness, he paused to be sure she was alright.  His granddaughter was around the same age, and so he instinctively looked after Samantha on these long, late shifts. She smiled back at old Fred, her red hair shaking a bit as she nodded all was well. Then she turned back to check the wavelengths to be sure they were still set to the prescribed range. Pivoting to her right, Samantha again began pecking at the keyboard, though more slowly this time. Her movements finally managed to jostle her coffee mug its last remaining centimeter to the edge of the tray, launching it over and onto the floor. She continued unfazed.

Samantha’s project involved analyzing signals from the ‘SDO’—that’s short for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory—for anomalies outside the standard spectra typically monitored for solar flare activity.  SDO was positioned in a stationary, geosynchronous orbit. That’s about 36,000 km, or 22,000 miles above the Earth, about a tenth of the distance to the moon. More important though, it hosted an instrument for studying the sun, a Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager they called it. The imager can detect oscillations and the magnetic field at the sun’s surface. But the wavelength where she had detected the flux was not even in the bandwidth she was supposed to be studying, and so she wanted to be extra certain before waking anyone up over it.

It was then when Samantha finally stood up, took a deep breath, and tapped her ear, Call my kidney stone! That was her nickname for the lab director—long story— under whom she worked. The other end picked up and she began speaking, Dr. Hadar? Sir? Silence. This is Samantha... I’m at the lab.

Another moment of silence, then a confused, half-asleep voice responded,

Who... What the Hell!... Is that the time dammit?

This is Sam, sir, in the lab.  You told me to call you if I ever saw anything really unusual. Well, sir... I think I have.

The garbled voice on the other end shook itself awake, Ahem... What ya got, Sam?

Well, sir, a flux of over ten to the minus two watts per square meter in the one to eight Angstrom range.

Slow down Sam, did I hear right, a point oh one?

Correct.

Questions followed with Samantha responding. Yes.  Yes, I rechecked it several times... Yes, same method as before. Silence.

Sooo sir... at this point, unless something fried on the SDO, what else could it be?

After a final pause, he concluded, Thanks Sam. I’ll be there in thirty.  Oh, while I’m heading over, shoot a message to Pierre over at the SANAE IV.  Let’s see if they can detect anything coming through yet.  Mention me and let him know who you are. We’ll check the Algiers receiver together when I arrive.

Dr. Bartholomew Hadar had made the tough decision last year to work on his personal skills—ever since HR compelled him to work on his personal skills... last year.  As hard-assed as he could be, he figured he may not be perfect, and so he actually did take the ‘advice’ to heart, Um... Thanks again Sam, you did good! After the call ended, Samantha wondered if she should have mentioned the other thing she had noticed.

SANAE IV is a South African solar observatory located in the Antarctic, in Vesleskarvet, Queen Maud Land to be precise. It’s a lonely little base perched atop the Fimbul Ice Shelf along the coast. Bart Hadar still had a good relationship with that team. If this was a real solar event, SANAE should soon be detecting disturbances in the D-region of the ionosphere. Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances (SID) are detected using very low frequency transmissions emitted from the base. Samantha quickly drafted a message and sent it off to SANAE. She drew a sigh of relief and then reached down to begin cleaning up the spilled coffee cup, and a dozen other things she realized had probably gone unattended for far too long. 

As soon as Dr. Hadar arrived, they began combing over the data together.  He agreed that the measurements looked legit. With Samantha looking over his shoulder, he logged onto the Algiers receiver—the RALG—and they mined the data for anything unusual around the anticipated time frame one usually expects to see the first wave of particles—photons—arriving from such an event. It takes around eight minutes for photons of light from the sun to reach Earth, depending on the seasonal distance from the sun, but about three days for fermions—particles with mass, such as electrons and protons. Dr. Hadar saw something promising, but it was too close to baseline noise to be certain so soon after detection.

Samantha turned to the other terminal and pulled up a different set of numbers. I also wanted to show you the anomalies I’ve been following lower down the spectrum. So using our integration model at these two wavelengths, she pointed, and normalizing it against R-nought (R0) and the baseline noise here... to here, T sub-one (T1). She pointed again, I’ve got oscillation over time. 

Dr. Hadar smiled and, squinting at the numbers, did some cursory calculations of his own. His left eyebrow then raised more than usual, That does indeed look promising. I wonder about the standard error. Did you calculate a P-value?

Yes, it’s significant, not random against the model... P-value of point 017. Silent pause. And... so... She continued, I applied our model across the corona’s surface, along... this region here. She pecked at more keys, mashing up her data with an image of the region. Dr. Hadar moved closer to the monitor and adjusted his glasses.  It looks like, well... Samantha began.  Dr. Hadar couldn’t resist, and so he finished her words for her, Acoustic waves on the surface—I can almost see it! Oh, my.

Acoustic waves occur on the surface of our sun—energy from some disturbance or oscillation—and they even travel at the speed of sound through a medium by compression and decompression, adiabatic that is. A better model of detection and characterization of this sort of local helioseismology was what Samantha and her ‘kidney stone’ had been studying for two years, but up until now there had been no event powerful enough to cause waves large enough that she could be confident beyond the margin of error.

Another minute passed

Reviews for Prelude to a Star

[SciencePhile Smith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From Reedsy- Loved it! Thoughtful and convincing look at how man might deal with an extinction-level crisis. JK Smith has clearly done his research. This is no YA actioner, or dystopian adventure. Instead, Smith's story is a thoughtful and science-based one; more Deep Impact than Armageddon, something akin to the intelligent sci-fi of Arrival. -- Reedsy Discovery Reviews