September 19th, 22:18, Corner Pub, Edinburgh, Scotland Corner Pub was called Corner Pub because it was a pub on a corner, and also because bars with clever or ostentatious names are always terrible and overpriced. Everyone who’s ever been to a place just called “Murphy’s” or such knows this to be true. If you tap a good brew and charge for it sensibly, if your music is interesting but unobtrusive, if you can tell a good tale to a customer who cares to listen and if your stools aren’t actively designed to cause back-pain; then you don’t need marketing. If it had been completely up to Atiq Albarn, he would have gone even more minimalist with his brainchild. Called it “Pub” or maybe even just “Place”, though his wife had been so terrified by the blatant disregard for searchability that Atiq was eventually forced to settle for more. He didn’t know if he even wanted the sorts of guests who would find a bar by way of search engine instead of just walking past and feeling curious, though Corner Pub was as much Katje’s as it was his, and she was quite a bit more digitally minded. “Hey, I need another Auld Jock.” “Aye, comin’ right up” Charging sensibly under certain celestial circumstances meant “charging nothing”, the two bar owners had reasoned sometime around noon, when the sky-flashing really went out of hand for a while. It was a pragmatic choice twice over, both because it left them in the pleasant position of being one of the few establishments which wasn’t getting looted, and also because physics breaking shenanigans were really one of those life events that made you reconsider Pascal’s Wager and how a bit of extra apocalyptic generosity was a decent way of putting oneself on a hypothetical deity’s good side. Besides, Katje had this feeling that money wasn’t gonna be worth anything for much longer, whereas social capital rarely lost its usefulness. There may have been some wishful thinking in that sentiment, Atiq thought, some motivated reasoning, but wishful thinking was better than blind terror, so he hadn’t called attention to it. They were in a good position to pull through this either way, since, while they had both quit moderately well-paying positions in tech and consulting respectively for this pub; they had only done so after saving up for a while. They weren’t- Atiq wasn’t that reckless, and Katje could reluctantly be reasoned into some semblance of caution if one had a few years to spare on the task. Now the Albarns were leaning against well-stocked shelves behind their counter and contemplating how alien the world in which they bought this place suddenly felt. Corner Pub had, over the course of a single morning, become a relic of yesterday; of a far-off era before the sun had decided to pull the collective rug out from under humanity. Katje had thrown up from the sheer absurdity. Atiq hadn’t managed to close his mouth and get a word out for at least an hour. Then they had talked. They had hugged. They had opened the bar two hours early. All of this had already felt like lifetimes ago mere seconds after it happened, and while dusk had brought some approximation or sanity back into circulation, no one expected it to survive the next dawn. Most of the conversations taking place in Corner Pub had the texture of cavemen attempting to explain lightning. There was disagreement on which god was to be held responsible, and whether they were to be thanked or inculpated. There were those who still tried to fit the square peg of recent events through a science-shaped hole, and then there were mavericks like the red-haired girl on the leftmost bar-stool, outlining her personal theory to a small crowd of half-conscious listeners: “…it’s fucking light bulbs ‘n shit. How they flicker when they’re not screwed in right. Doesn’t mean it’s, like, broken. See; with the planets all orbiting, the gravitational pull they have on the sun – and that gravitational pull is weak, mind you – that would slowly twist the fitting from its socket, see? Shit’s simple physics if you don’t fall for all that quantum-crap like a chump. So all we gots to do is screw it back in…” She would then go on to explain how one simply had to reverse the orbital direction of all the sun’s planets and possibly wait for a couple of millennia. A few people nodded. Someone loudly fell over.
September 20th, 11:00, Storage Unit, Glasgow, Scotland Michael Lowe had woken up to a notification which read “Don’t do anything! Don’t think a single thought before we meet!! Don’t talk to anyone!!! I’m handling this.” At first this caused confusion, though only until his eyes inched upwards to the sender-name, at which point the emotion was replaced by a terrifying knowledge that yesterday had not in fact been a dream. The past day had been a lot. A lot more even, than it had been for everyone else on earth and that certainly wasn’t a low bar to clear by normal metrics. He’d had a solid four hours of experimentation to refine his theories and reassemble his cognitive faculties before contacting Tara, yet even then he wasn’t able to put it any more eloquently that “The fucking sun goes out when I’m wrong about something”. Michael followed up with proof of course, or at the very least evidence, by “predicting” a few blinks in advance. Whether he was causing them or not really didn’t matter, since even being able to figure out their pattern was enough of a hook for any journalist worth their salt. He still insisted that it was the former, or at least an unknown common cause of both his neural outputs and yesterday’s phenomena. He had to insist, because what he really wanted was a task force. Some kind of body to crack this thing, and while its composition would be much more up to Tara and any number of governments than to him, there were nonetheless some suggestions Michael had in mind. Dumont-Vatel certainly, Susanne H. DeVries... Suddenly acquiring superpowers wasn’t the worst excuse one could have to meet their heroes. He had earned at least some compensation. “Sorry to keep you waiting”, Michel waved as he approached the run-down storage building. “Not at all, you’re five minutes early. I just hope you stuck to the rules.” 1) Don’t do anything! Not a reasonable demand if taken literally, but he’d tried his best. 2) Don’t think a single thought before we meet!! Similarly unreasonable, though Michael had managed to refrain in the way that actually mattered. 3) Don’t talk to anyone!!! Success. It may have come across as rude at times, but the world had bigger problems both right now and always. A slight preexisting disregard for manners had made following the letter of the law quite easy in the case of her last rule, and since it had the most exclamation marks, it ought count for more than the other two. Michael gave an affirming nod. As for Tara Keene; she was herself an interesting choice to be sure. The selection-dial of a person not running on undiluted panic and sleeplessness would likely never have landed on her name, but when it flittered into Michael’s consciousness yesterday, he didn’t second guess himself once. There were more high-profile choices of course, though high profile wasn’t always the same as competence, and there were no other high-profile journalists in which Michael had a remotely comparable amount of misplaced trust. “Misplaced” not only because they’d had a dozen or so interactions at best, ten years ago in San Francisco, whereupon they didn’t exactly stay in touch, but also due to her general disposition. Michael had then been something between a start-up promoter and a professional socialite, while Tara had been a music journalist in addition to singing vocals for a short lived, though cult-adored, punk-rock band. Their sphere of sci-fi-steeped futurists had learned the word Sanpaku from Gibson around the same time and developed a strange infatuation with the woman based on that feature alone. Shallow attraction, though they’d soon discover even more ground for fascination beneath the surface. Michael did at least. Destructive Interference, as the band was called, made a name for itself by contributing the soundtrack to a sprawling cyberpunk audio-drama around 2010, which went completely viral with that same sort of audience they were enmeshed with, though on a far wider scale. Exactly the kind of audience which read Novali, incidentally, a magazine that originally had its roots in speculative fiction, but moved ever more towards genuine reporting on scientific discoveries as time moved on and “conquered the future” like they often said. The line was blurry, though Novali did its best to signpost and often succeeded. So, when Destructive Interference crashed and burned mere months later (Everyone had seen this coming) the magazine’s then-editor-in-chief saw a shining opportunity to take cyberpunk’s newly acquired sweetheart under his wing. At very lucrative conditions of course. Extraordinarily lucrative. The whole affair would have been a scandal had they not both been so well loved, since from an outsider’s point of view Novali’s business decision was obviously insane and entirely sentimental. Tara had no background in science reporting. None whatsoever. Maybe the editor had seen something that the rest of the world was blind to, or maybe he was simply able to extrapolate from the rest of Keene’s work ethic more skillfully, but either way; she took to the field like it was her calling. Soon the former punk musician could conduct interviews with leading physicists without missing a beat, seemingly committing entire fields of research to memory in a single day. Tara was world-stage now. Niche, but world-stage, while Michael had gone back to a newly independent Scotland in his early thirties to study chemical engineering in Glasgow. “Really, it is good to see you again. Where’d you fly in from?” “Paris, and much as I’d like to do some relaxed catching up under other circumstances; we don’t exactly have the luxury to. I really hope this isn’t some kind of trick, Lowe. Remember that my integrity is on the line here.” Her hair was short now. Slicked back sable entirely indifferent to the wind, and it was making her look quite serious. You need more proof is what you’re saying.” while Michael had expected something like that – had been certain of it in fact – there really wasn’t much he could do apart from predicting more blinks. She gestured to the storage unit. “In there. And yes obviously. With what you told me, I’m currently operating on forty percent likelihood that you actually believe it and a twenty percent likelihood that it’s true. Maybe multiply fifty-fifty odds of me going insane for even considering that possibility.” “Those are-“ Those were insanely generous numbers, Michael thought. “pretty good for a first hypothesis, aren’t they?” “Worryingly good, if only because there are no alternatives as of yet, and to my knowledge no one else has been able to even make decent predictions of blink densities for a given interval, let alone advance-calling individual events with to-the-second accuracy.” He nodded. “But that’s not even the worst of it. We can go a step further: let’s say someone had figured it out. They wouldn’t come up with some batshit story and risk being filed away as a lunatic. Even if the underlying cause WAS something crazy, they wouldn’t go out of their way to mention that upfront unless they were genuinely distraught or insane. They’d just claim they can predict it, put forward evidence and then worry about the less believable details once they have a platform.” The journalist breathed in deeply. She looked the most put together out of anyone Michel had seen today, but clearly the compartmentalization which allowed for some semblance of calm was taking a lot out of her. “Reasonable.”, he sighed. Yesterday, Michael did consider just posting blink-patterns on twitter to get famous overnight, before realizing that this would likely mean government officials at his doorstep. The thought had been disregarded quickly. Getting Tara as a middleman/spokeswoman wasn’t just the sad excuse for a reunion, but also a genuinely decent strategy to acquire a better bargaining position. He gave her a brief hug reserved for treasured acquaintances from prior lives and thought he felt a slight trembling beneath her coat. “Not that it means much, but you don’t think you’ve gone insane, do you?” Michael produced a brief chuckle that was maybe less reassuring than intended. “The number of people who don’t must have dropped to the single digits yesterday.” Amplified by the empty storage lot’s acoustics, Tara outlined the second half of her test. The first half had already satisfyingly concluded with a complete lack of sky-outs throughout the morning hours. Possibly this even had the pleasant side effect of restoring a bit of much needed sanity to earth, though only for it to be shattered over the next few minutes. Tara found it difficult not to feel preemptively sorry about that. If Michael really was causing the blinks as opposed to predicting them, she said, then he should be able to produce any pattern the journalist asked of him. Three equidistant blinks, then five, then four sets of two. 1+1=3, 1+1=3, 1+1=3 and so on. The difference was subtle, but it wasn’t enough to just be wrong. He had to really offer the falsehood up as a statement for his brain to consider. To consciously speak it into his cranium and sacrifice it on a cognitive altar. Again, there was this strange sensation of neurons spanning the void between stars. Michael knew it had worked even before he opened his eyes again. Addressing Tara’s now obvious trembling would be pointless. She’d just blame it on the cold. Still, some look of relief did find its way into the woman’s face momentarily. “Well shit.” Predictable insanity was better than unpredictable insanity, but it still wasn’t great. “Sixty percent?” Michael gave his most disarming smile. “Possibly.” There was a brief pause before the footsteps of a tall, unshaven man in a long black coat became audible, and they only became audible because he wanted them to. “Michael, this is Mister Piltz.” A look of betrayal flickered across M. H. Lowe’s eyes as the man stepped closer. He seemed even more abnormally put together than Tara, and in his case, it came across a lot less like an act. “You promised to not involve anyone who-” “And you were under the impression that I am trustworthy?” the journalist frowned. Michael reshuffled his thoughts. He did trust her, but not in a standard capacity. What he had for Tara Keene was a kind of meta-trust and it was one that the literal fucking sun approved of, he reminded himself. Terrifying as it was; whichever mechanism governed his astro-psychic phenomenon seemed to make no difference between types of ideas ({clear, unclear},{subjective, objective}) so long as they were thought in the right cadence. The sun was very comfortable evaluating seemingly undecidable statements like “I can’t afford to sleep yet”, which had passed through Michael’s mind yesterday evening and received a sky-out in response. That one wasn’t even meant as a test. After hours of experimentation, phrasing thoughts like these mental sacrifices had simply become default. An unnerving little accident, and just one of many. Only one last question merited posing before Michael had taken the universe’s advice and went to bed that day: “I will be fine tomorrow”. The sky had agreed. “I trust you to betray me only when it is in my own interest.” He finally said. “Expecting people to be entirely truthful is actually a form of distrust, don’t you think? Since you don’t trust them to know when you would prefer being lied to.” “What a scary degree of freedom to permit, though I guess it’s meaningless one way or another. You don’t have much need for trust anymore if your hypothesis really tracks, do you?” “Well I’m glad that’s sorted out” declared the man in the long coat. He was one of those people who seemed to only use half of their mouth for speaking as well as emoting, though his voice was clear despite this. “I would suggest that you trust me in a similar manner, Mister Lowe, if only by way of transitive property. Feel free to check though. I would love having my trustworthiness validated by a star.” Michael gave a hesitant nod since that check had already been performed a sentence earlier. “Lovely.” Piltz actually used his whole face to smile this time. “My name is Connor Piltz and I will be something like your body-guard if you’ll have me. More importantly for today though; I have a reputation as a… human lie-detector, let's call it, so please, tell me a bit more. Twenty percent might be exceptional odds to you two, I understand, but it’s not the kind of number a government likes to see. Not when they’re supposed to assemble a whole secret commission based on theories like these.” An effortless charm carried through Connor’s voice, and even if he didn’t have the ability to know, Michael would be certain that this was what secret agents sounded like. This observation was scary and reassuring in equal measure. Piltz looked younger than the two of them, though he probably wasn’t by much, and his eyes were entirely inscrutable as Michael disclosed more information: How he had to use a certain cadence. How he had discovered it yesterday by accident. How this phenomenon wasn’t limited to human perception. What tomorrow’s lottery numbers would be. That subjectivity wasn’t real, and so on. This experiment too yielded satisfactory results, it seemed. Connor was hired. Tara got to work again. Michael felt like his tether to reality was at least partially restored, though he did wonder how he had gone from living in the thing to hanging on by a thread.
September 20th, 08:07, Sainsbury’s, Aberdeen, Scotland
Pandemonium was what they called this before it became normal, Caitlyn thought. Though the news were still calling it pandemonium now, so perhaps language didn’t quite match this speed of adaptation. Either way; noise levels within the grocery store were close to unbearable, and while it might not have had the room to fit all demons, it certainly seemed to contain most of them.
When plan A of climbing out the window to her ninth floor apartment failed, Everard had gone through plans B to F in rapid succession. D for example: Ordering Pizza and writing in the delivery-notes that they were to message her, should a suspicious person stand guard at her door, was discarded not only because the delivery industry seemed to have shut down entirely, but also because she realized halfway through that anyone who did show up might just be an agent in disguise.
In the end, Caitlyn had settled on G, which was artless, and risky, and just didn’t seem right in a great number of different ways, but at the end of the day she did need food and batteries. The best knife in her pantry wasn’t exactly sharp, though it narrowed to a decent enough point, which was what mattered. She steeled herself. The steel didn’t need to.
Caitlyn had once read about the pro-way of doing this in some sort of spy thriller. It involved stabbing a blade through someone’s throat sideways with the dull back facing spine-ward and then cutting out towards the larynx in a single motion. She really hoped she didn’t have to do any of that. Blood was… Blood was an issue nerves-wise, though being prepared for it never hurt anyone.
The woman had donned a pair of oversized shades and a hooded jacket, gripped her chosen Ikea knife firmly with both hands and kicked down her own apartment door. No one did end up being on the other side of it. Just the same old run-down corridor. Maybe they had given up at some point during the night, though the “why” of this move was anyone’s guess. Pandemonium. The brief quiet of her building’s stairwell hadn’t lasted for long. In the streets, turmoil already found its residence, and as soon as one entered any kind of store, reality ended altogether. There was looting and pillaging. Shouting and screaming. Unidentifiable liquids in places where you didn’t expect them and easily identifiable actions in places where you absolutely did.
While a lot of stock had been stolen or trashed, this particular Sainsbury’s had held up comparatively well through the onslaught, in part due to being surrounded by more tempting establishments. It wasn’t great, but Caitlyn had been able to find some microwavable lunches, batteries, and a fistful of cigarette packs, which she had grabbed when someone took a crowbar to their locked compartment. Smoking was what people who tried to crack codes did. She’d seen it in movies. And since she was one of those people now, C. J. Everard had made a split-second decision to pick up the habit.
No one was manning the counter for obvious reasons, meaning that she had to calculate her haul-cost by hand and then add five quid to be sure. Just in case she had screwed up somewhere. Caitlyn slammed the money onto a cash registry, paused to look around until she saw a camera and spoke directly towards it, trying as hard as she could to cut through the noise.
“I, Caitlyn Jeanne Everard, hereby buy these products at their-” She took a deep breath attempting to steady her voice “at their agreed upon, listed price. It’s on tape. You cannot use this to arrest me under false pretenses, you hear me? And I’ll fix my door! That’s what the bike-lock is for, see?” She waved it at the camera. “Even though it’s mine and- and even though I only broke it because you forced me to. I am a law-abiding citizen. You cannot arrest me. Good day!”
A young boy snatched up the cash almost immediately, but that wasn’t her crime, now, was it? People were staring. Someone got their smartphone lens so close that it almost touched Caitlyn’s face, and this prompted her to pull the hood even lower when she headed for the exit. The sunglasses helped a bit, but still: She wasn’t used to this. Nobody was used to THIS, of course, but Caitlyn wasn’t even really used to people on normal days. Maybe the noise had subsided a bit during her declaration. If it had, it was picking back up in full force now. Bottles broke. More screaming. No one was following her though.
Caitlyn looked at her phone: No blinks. None whatsoever since sunrise, and that was copacetic with twelve out of the thirty-one models she was currently considering. Whipping up a blink-tracker had become necessary yesterday, amidst stroboscopic flurries that simply couldn’t be handled manually. Minimal effort once she had figured out some basic mechanics. See: You couldn’t just use a program that tracks global solar power output and checks for dips. That was her first idea, but the thing is that there were no dips. Measurement-frequency wasn’t the issue, and neither were delays nor covert graph-doctoring. So that kind of made sense, if you took a step backward to look at the ground and how it was still emitting reflected light. Photons were arriving, they just weren’t detected by human eyes until they bounced off of something, so it stood to reason that they could still be absorbed, including by things like solar panels. But that also kind of made no sense whatsoever! Retinas too just absorbed light, didn’t they?
The next test was to look at captured video and sure enough; cameras could see the blinking just fine. Implementation was easy from there. Caitlyn had aimed a webcam at some region of the sky, set up a program to look for dips in average brightness, and made it output a timestamp-alert. No problem. This also made everything else on the “what works?”-spectrum click into place: The thing that mattered wasn’t the process of detection but the intention. You could totally extract optical data from an array of solar panels, but since no one did that, they didn’t count as observers. Everything that didn’t count as an observer worked normally, because it would be dangerous if it didn’t. Global temperature drops or such. The final conclusion of these experiments was so obvious that her intuition had been singing it from the start: the only reason why you would care about observers was that you were trying to communicate something.
Caitlyn Jeanne Everard had successfully arrived back at the beginning: The sky was talking to her. Perhaps it had been a lot clearer in its first two messages than throughout the rest of yesterday, but the sun’s chosen ward would not be deterred by mere cryptographic difficulty. She had a code to crack.