September 19th, 07:42, Royal Victoria Hospital, Dundee, Scotland A general „wha-?!“ accompanied by a number of obscenities was going around when the sun first blinked. Of course no medical professional would ever remark upon a drastic spike in near-miss vertebrae dislocations from people whipping their heads about. Not with everything else going on. But the statistical outlier ought still be quite significant, nurse Brodie reckoned. This was really the last thing an already strained medical system needed. Couldn’t people just once be sensible? They wouldn’t go any more nor less insane if they checked for affirmation of their senses slowly. Cautiously. With care for an anatomical instrument that someone else would have to repair in the aftermath of their gross public negligence. If the sun really was vanishing, if the wrath of God had been incurred; they’d know about it soon enough, wouldn’t they? And spinal injury wasn’t gonna help the numpties escape divine punishment either. „Oh don’t be daft, there’s folks trying to die in peace here!” he shouted at a panicked flock of patients and coworkers in the hallway, to little effect. Intuition convincingly claimed that this was gonna be a long fucking day. Even longer than usual. Only one faint flicker of relief could keep Alick Brodie going, through the omni-directional screaming and the prophecies of certain doom; and it was that his hospital at least didn’t have a psychiatric ward. That was the next observable effect, after the bloody gits had realigned their cervical facets and got around to mulling over the implications: What it meant that everyone had seen the same thing. At first collective realization exacerbated the initial shock, but quite swiftly, dawning above the horizon line, came a soothing understanding that they were at least caught up in a mass-hallucination, as opposed to the very quite pedestrian personal sort. That relieved people. It relieved them so much in fact, that the nurse could even switch out an IV-bag and berate an elderly gentleman for not having taken his pills at the right time. This didn’t last of course (only about five minutes before the cheeky bastard of a star did it again), but maybe some small contingent of the populace had learned a valuable lesson in the interim about how easy insanity was when everyone else also did it. Maybe when this global phenomenon was done with, they would even do the conscientious thing and not bother a shrink about it. Alick winced. He rarely had felt so much sympathy for a profession that wasn’t his own.
September 19th, 07:30, Apartment of M. H. Lowe and R. Newhall, Glasgow, Scotland I’ll have to revamp my entire pay-structure is what I’m saying. Here: “The pattern holds for k-scaling far exceeding predictions made by Matthews et al while the other parameters have proven fragile even at comparatively low temperatures (see appendix 11b).” Sorry Des, I really don’t see it. At all. Either the woman has figured out a way to game the system while waging guerrilla warfare on my remaining brain-cells, or she’s hitting deadline crunch uncushioned. Either way I’ll kill her when this is through.” Although loud, Michael’s rant was little more than background-hum to Reg Newhall who was, once more, dangerously close to heaping tobacco into his coffee filter. The idea of a sardonic smile flickered across his mind, though he was far too tired to know if he actually produced one. Hitting deadline crunch at terminal-v… He should have been smart enough to do that. Everyone else seemed blessed with the good sense to do so, but Reg… Oh he had fucked up big time in trying to be the model student and getting his work done early. That was the thing with academia, especially in faculties like his: how busy you looked held a great deal more significance than how busy you were. If Reginald Newhall came in tomorrow looking like he hadn’t pulled three all-nighters in a row, if he were still able to blink normally, why, they’d think him dead weight. Lazy. Selfish. And yet his dissertation was written. There were no more tests he could perform. No more conclusions he could come to. He had checked and triple checked every word and every comma, but this too he could not tell anyone, because no one believed you when you said that there was nothing you physically could do anymore. No one finishes before the deadline. You must have been sloppy if you do. You must have not cared enough. If Reg didn’t look like he’d been writing to the last second, head half-stuck to his monitor, it would impact his grade or at the very least his reputation. “Will you stop with the melodrama?!” Michael’s voice drifted into audibility again as he tore the box of tobacco from his hands and replaced it with coffee. “I’m helping you stay awake, not kill yourself” While Reg didn’t think he was trying for corporeal cessation, he didn’t know what else he might have sought to accomplish either. “Desiree Bernet? Yeah she seems the type to fuck with you.” There was a pained groan as Michael let his head fall onto the documents. Most annoying of all seemed the hindsight-clarity on how obvious a move this was on Des’ part. He charged for beta-reading by page count and while there were rules against the obvious loophole-abuses like non-standard font-sizes and such, the self-proclaimed genius of Michael Hugh Lowe had completely neglected to think of contingencies for someone handing him a data-draft. Such cruelty simply wasn’t and shouldn’t be expected from his fellow man. A misanthropy-counter ticked up by about three ill-defined increments and deposited an outmoded idea into the mind of its owner: Punitive justice as deterrent. An example would have to be made of Bernet to scare future sociopaths into compliance. Unsightly, yet hopefully effective. Though only once he was done of course. Glasgow’s foremost beta reader still had a reputation to uphold, a lucrative image to cultivate. Suffering be damned. As for Des’ crime: A data draft could best be described as the way in which you would present your scientific results to yourself. Maximally short. Maximally devoid of contextual theory, since it is presumably already known (to you). Anyone familiar with and adept at academic writing can turn a data-draft into a finished paper, so saving money by handing in just the DD for beta-reading requires nothing more than a certain degree of confidence and malice. Checking a data-draft on the other hand required an outsider’s arteries to pulse nothing but aberrant masochism while they pulled double duty as the world’s most mnemonics-ridden polymath. Appendix 11b comprised about a dozen scatter-plots of vaguely eldritch implication, though significantly less horrifying than those in 11a, of which they were cleaned-up versions. Sinusoidal regression through obtuse parametric derivatives seemed to yield a reasonable enough fit for Desiree’s assertion of generally stable systemic oscillation-. HALT. Michael forced his mental gear-shift into sharp reverse at a moment’s notice. Maybe the numb exhaustion or some other cognitive fallout of a misanthropy-counter’s uptick had made him briefly glance over something obvious, but it hadn’t been enough to trash his pattern recognition entirely. Data shouldn’t get less eldritch when cleaned up. The noise removal had gotten rid of something noteworthy. Something imminently disturbing. And if something is imminently disturbing and noteworthy, and a pattern; it usually isn’t noise. Lowe looked at the scatter-plots again. Oh. Oh no. Some more calculations unfolded backwards, and their natural conclusion only grew less believable from there. Two options: {The measurements are wrong, The universe has gone batshit}. Standard procedure to initially test the former hypothesis for sanity’s sake. What else would be expected if these numbers were correct? What would go wrong? “this data reflects reality”, Michael spoke into his own mind, a place which somehow felt vaster and colder than normal, waiting for an error message to flash, but instead the reply consisted of screams from outside. A question had been answered, though its speaker wasn’t yet aware of this. Many more questions were raised, and everyone would be asking them very soon.
September 19th, 07:38, Apartment of C. J. Everard, Aberdeen, Scotland A gust of the usual salty wind tore at Caitlyn Jeanne Everard’s overly large shirt where she stood on her balcony. She wondered how it might impact her fall-trajectory. She wondered how it might impact her impact, though the answer to that was probably “barely”. Hah. Still got it. Always with the jokes. Always with the precipice… precipices? Precipi? Aberdeen had a normal amount of high rises per capita, derailed by the exceptional quirk that a staggering number of them were local-authority-housing like this one. More than Glasgow and Edinburgh combined. No one believed that, but it was true. Aberdeen also had surprisingly low suicide rates by Scottish standards and there must have been some connection linking those two. Either that, or it’s all the silver-city gravestone-granite making people think they’re already dead and thus needn’t bother. Clever ploy, but she wouldn’t fall for it. No siree. Wouldn’t ever fall for that again. Only fall for other reasons. “When in doubt; go with gravity” as the raindrops say. A man on the other side of Caitlyn’s apartment door was talking about basement keys he’d borrowed a few days ago, though after a while he’d probably go away and drop them in her mailbox. Caitlyn was pretending she wasn’t home. He knew that she was pretending. Caitlyn knew that he knew. But none of that meant she had to let the man sneak a peek into her apartment, now did it? What was she? Insane? The tactic was so obvious it was insulting, though in the end she supposed that it wouldn’t matter for much longer. The young woman pushed herself up onto the railing, allowed the wind to catch her hair and sighed. Tedious. Tedious tedious tedious tedious. People were always so poetic about it in novels, but with the key-neighbor’s passive aggressive monologue as tonal backdrop, her heart just wasn’t in it. Oh well. At peace with her suboptimal situation, Caitlyn leaned forward, and it was suddenly dark. The sky winked at her. The sky winked and a smile crept across chapped lips as she thought “Hah. Close one.” The term “wink” really didn’t do it justice, but no other word could be expected to meet that standard either, since human language hadn’t evolved to describe inorganic blinkage. Winking was what it felt like though: Deliberate, like a secret handshake. Symbol, intervention, conspiracy. The ground and buildings retained their stolen incandescence of reflective glow as the sky for a fractional second turned to night and basked in the glory of its more distant stars. Soon after, the sun was there again as though nothing had happened. A celestial eyelid ripped back open to its baseline position of constant vigilance, but it didn’t matter. The message had been heard loud and clear. Thank you, sky. Thanks for giving a shit. “The universe doesn't care, that's our job!”, or so Caitlyn had been told all her life, though people never seemed to be doing it either, this task of theirs, so what gives? This was justice. This was right. The vast sphere of burning hydrogen above had to pick up the emotional slack for everyone eventually. Down on the street, a woman who had looked up at some point, but entirely ignored the obvious suicide attempt in progress, was now screaming. Maybe a few more ticks on the misanthropy counter would have been helpful if one didn't want to be so consistently disappointed by humanity, but Caitlyn Everard wasn’t the sort of person for mental constructs like that. More screaming. Now in different voices and from different directions. They were panicking because it wasn't for them. They didn’t understand things that weren’t about them, so they didn’t know what this meant. The earth's creatures hated what they didn't understand. Their confusion turned to rage before it was even fully registered, but Caitlyn did understand. She understood because this WAS about her. A secret handshake between a star and a woman, and she would heed its intent willingly. Caitlyn Jeanne Everard stepped away from the railing of her balcony and sighed, wagging a finger at the unfathomable mass of fusional plasma. This was a bit late, wasn't it? Couldn't someone have brought themselves to care a bit earlier? Sent some kindness? Not that she held grudges much. Never did. She wasn't unthankful. Forgive and forget. Forgive and for-fucking-get, but still: Food for thought. Panic had spread to the hallway now and a terrifying thought had spread to the forefront of Caitlyn’s mind: They keys. In retrospect the man’s ploy was even more obvious and even more insulting. Why would he have ever needed basement keys? The lock was always busted anyway, and when it wasn’t busted; the hinges were. With the new facts properly aligned it all made sense though. Since Caitlyn was the sun’s chosen ward, it was only sensible for the state to have people tasked with watching her. The “neighbor” had fallen silent, which must mean he thought she didn’t grok her situation and would soon be running out into the halls screaming. Right into his arms for some sick experimentation or cosmic blackmail by some strange corrupt committee deep within the solar-power lobby’s deceptively green-washed pockets. Hah! Think again. In one swift motion an envelope was grabbed and imbued with Caitlyn Jeanne Everard’s counteroffer to a government that thought it could exploit her now that she had become useful to it. The slip of paper passed beneath her door frame read in strongly angled letters: "I don't negotiate with terrorists" followed by as many exclamation marks as would fit the envelope. Seemingly in approval of the gesture there was another sun-wink from behind. “Once is divine intervention, twice is a pattern”, the woman’s thoughts looped into themselves as she hurriedly reached for her phone.