September 20th, 17:20, Royal Victoria Hospital, Dundee, Scotland Masses of writhing concern and aimlessness were glutting the corridors at Royal Victoria and giving its circulatory system thrombosis. Alick strongly doubted that he or anyone else could get there in time should a patient suffer the inevitable cardiac arrest. He’d told this to people. First calmly, then in colorful tirades, but no one seemed to truly grasp it. People didn’t understand that death happened. Not even here in a place formerly called the Victoria hospital for incurables. What did they think “incurable” meant? Death was a thing they comprehended in the abstract, sure, as a terminus somewhere, as a mechanism that filled graveyards and depopulated family-reunions, but not as a simple event that could happen at any point whether they were around for it or not. Storybook-poisoning, plain and simple. “No one dies on ordinary days”, but now the ordinary days were done with, and proper mortality suddenly became a real possibility in the public consciousness. Time to check up on loved ones. Time to see if you’re in the will or not. Time to crowd a hospital. While sense had been running low before, it sure made interesting sounds as it vanished down the drain completely, Alick thought. As far as he was concerned, whatever the sky did seemed so obviously safe it was laughable. Or rather it would be safe, if people acknowledged that it was safe. If they didn’t trample each other to death over it for example. Brodie’s estimate was that about ninety percent of tragedies occurring right now were human error and still it seemed like an enormously generous guess. “Sorry! Excuse me!” A man who looked like he maybe had been trampled, judging from the state of his suit, asked for Wilford MacDonald and the nurse pointed to room 205. Though MacDonald hadn’t been visited in about a year; at least he was still with them. There had been folks today asking for family members who passed away months ago. Some of whom even seemed incredulous when this was pointed out to them. Some of them tried to argue about it. “No one dies on ordinary days”. The more Alick thought on the matter, the more these visitors belonged here. They too were incurable in a certain sense. Hopeless. Simply Hopeless. Today, with its few morse-like flashes, had been worse than yesterday’s fourteen-hour light show in many ways. Relative calm meant that people dared to go outside again. Ready and primed to be incredibly stupid for no other reason than the things they were seeing. As soon as earth emerged from this situation, Alick reckoned as he folded a bed sheet, there would have to be a mandatory course on how to deal with mass hallucinations for the entire human species. Lesson one would be “Come to work anyway, you melodramatic knob. This isn’t about you. Do your job.”, a personal paraphrasing of Imogen Campbell’s recent press statement, which not nearly enough of Alick’s colleagues seem to have read. Well don’t you look good today Alick! Please, come in.” The boundary between Monica’s compulsive politeness and failing eyesight got harder to pin down by the day, though he didn’t much mind. “I sincerely doubt that, miss Silberman. How are you holding up?” Her room offered some refuge from the noise, despite the fact that she was usually one of the more visited patients. Perhaps everything simply flipped in times like these. “Oh I think you quite enjoy being the sane, responsible one. Don’t deny it, I know I am. These things show on your face, Alick, between all the carved-out lines of mild annoyance; there’s just more purpose to your glower. More of a spark.” He didn’t know how to respond to that, but Monica kept going. “It suits you. Really does suit you. And opportunities like this are rare. You should savor it.” The nurse sighed and checked a few readouts. “It really seems like you’re in on a weird sort of joke sometimes.” A shrug. “Of course! That’s the benefit of being old: you start to get all the little punchlines.” She tried to give a soft chuckle that sounded more like a croak, and when she looked back up at Alick, there was some alarm in his eyes. “Should we switch you back to the-“ “No, no, don’t bother.” Another chuckle. This one sounded slightly healthier. “Do you remember Claire? My daughter?” Alick nodded “She was here yesterday when it all started. Came in before work to clear a few documents with me, always the little perfectionist. To complain about her husband too, to be nosy about her sister, when… Well, you know what happened then. I have never- never never never seen my daughter speechless. Not once in so many years and so many moments to be grateful for. I was glad I could add this to the list. Through the rising noise and confused screaming outside I laughed and clapped, and she just stared at me as though I had answers. You see Alick? You should cherish this feeling of control.” The old woman smiled conspiratorially. “We don’t get to be the sane ones all that often.” Hopeless. Monica too was absolutely hopeless.
September 21st, 07:43, Military facility near Oban, Scotland It is astounding how quickly one becomes inhuman. How optional most habit-driven cognitive processing is. The whole day had been a series of incomprehensibly fast crossfades between static events. All of them lingering just long enough to burn themselves onto a retina before reality inserted another cartridge and exploded with new instants. Not thinking was easy when you didn’t even know how to produce neurochemical events that could cut through the sensory onslaught. That’s not true; he did know a way, but there were orders to follow and agreements to honor. Michael had flickered back into anything approaching normal temporality only when their helicopter to a military facility somewhere in the highlands was up in the air. The weapons-grade white noise of its oversized propeller beginning to drown out the overwhelming everything. Connor had then been looking at him like a specimen of sorts and maybe had been doing so for a while at that point. Possibly the agent was trying and failing to read his facial expression. Michael himself couldn’t make much sense of his mind’s contents, so that wasn’t surprising, though surely still unsettling to someone from Piltz’s trade. Connor’s own facial expression was inscrutable. One seat over, Tara had been writing, re-writing and re-re-writing a press statement which swelled and shrank on loop like the chest of a living organism. He’d tried reading it over but crashed and burned five or so words in. Instead, Michael just signaled that it was fine. It was fine. The sun had said so. But maybe celestial bodies had strange standards for these sorts of things. Now the three of them were walking down a mercury-lit hallway, flanked to both sides by broad-shouldered men in suits, one of whom might have been the pilot. Piltz was casually chatting with the bald one to his right, paying no mind to the fact that he didn’t get responses. Maybe he was getting some shape of reply from the lack thereof or maybe doing this simply amused him. There was no way to tell. It did amuse Michael once he regained a certain capacity for emotion. Funny; the absurdity of it, only amplified by how entirely lens-blown the framework of “absurdity” had become. They were instructed to turn right. A tap on the shoulder managed to cut through Lowe’s newly assembled filter functions, though Tara might have already been talking before. If so, it hadn’t scanned. Now she was explaining how the task-force would be organized. She had apparently been able to cut out the Americans and such almost entirely by way of tactical vagueness. Michael remembered some blink patterns he was supposed to perform yesterday evening. How they must have been suggested by some foreign powers to prove an ability to control the sun. No way anyone would fuck with that. Maybe a past version of his brain had been aware of these things as reasons for why they wouldn’t just get kidnapped, though current-Michael was just nodding along. Right now, whatever hand they were playing felt brand new to him. “Hey, we need you not to zone out, okay? Whatever kind of loop you’re in; trash it and worry about the fallout later. This is what you wanted, right? And you’ll have to be fully mentally present.” She looked dead serious, and Michael was relieved to know what that sort of expression meant again. “I-“ He inhaled deeply. “Yeah, I’m all there. Just some coffee maybe...” A cup was presented almost retro-causally by the guard to his left, though he couldn’t even guess where it had come from. Black. Slightly floral and miles from his usual instant. Remembering what coffee tastes like was an experience surprisingly similar to coffee in a way that wouldn’t make sense to people who have never forgotten. He smiled, signaling the journalist to keep going. According to Tara it had been impossible to bargain for a complete absence of politicians, but she’d been able to keep them to a minimum in a way that greatly exceeded Michael’s expectations. A few EU functionaries, most of them only in a spectator-role. There would also be a military general and a clergyman. The journalist noticeably winced when she said it, but this too had been more or less expected. The general at least. Luckily all the other committee members earned their seat by being genuine academics of various types. The rest could simply be ignored. Tara sighed. Maybe from exhaustion first and foremost, but her own cognitive loop didn’t look all too pleasant either. She seemed a lot less happy with her hard-fought deal than the freshly re-humanized Michael, and he felt bad about that. Then again: he had explicitly outsourced this job due to a certainty he would have been terrible at it. High standards were profoundly important to the skill of negotiation, or so people said. They stopped as though remembering that the absence of movement was possible and as though subsequently distrusting that memory. Connor threw a quick glance into the room ahead before giving a confident thumbs up. Deep breaths were drawn. A conference room fell entirely silent. Some suits in the back seemed to briefly consider clapping before deciding against it. The mood was shapeless, though not without teeth. Then, a woman Michael would later come to know as Imogen Campbell, minister of something or other and a personal favorite of Tara’s, waved them in. She looked around fifty and had allegedly been in a position of “real power” before her early retirement into politics. Sometimes Michael wished to be sufficiently cued into statecraft to make sense of these types of stories when he encountered them, but for now he would simply outsource trust and read up on it later. There were also more familiar faces along the stretched-out desk opposing Michael’s own podium. Jules Dumont-Vatel, a famous French astronomer, who, in his old age, had come to look a bit like a wizard, and Allison Garber-Bullough, quantum physicist and science communicator, who had gone against the dress code and elected to wear her lab-attire. The woman all the way to the left, Susanne Helena DeVries, had single-handedly convinced Michael and many others of the value that philosophy held with regards to any and all inquiry through her books. At the time, this was a begrudging acquiescence, though over the years he had grown genuinely thankful for it. Gratitude only added to a general appreciation for DeVries’ idiosyncratic style of matryoshka-layered theory-fiction. She was possibly the only person younger than Michael present, and living up to her reputation by nonchalantly chewing bubblegum. Lowe couldn’t recognize any of the others, though the name Georges Akande, apparently belonging to a hulking Algerian Mathematician did ring a bell. So did “David Alexander Tackett”, the Linguist whom a popular magazine had on multiple occasions described as the next Noam Chomsky. The Military representative, a certain general Otto Volkogonov, with his uniform and pug-like sunken face which seemed to protrude from beneath his hat, as well as Father Peter Dreyfus, who couldn’t look more monk-ish if he tried, didn’t ring bells for obvious reasons, though neither did the old and kindly seeming Sociologist Kamala Bhatti nor her mirrored inverse; Neurobiologist Ernest Clin, across whose forehead annoyance traced its stratagems and battle-plans with such verve that it almost seemed to pulse. Behind these people, who constituted the actual task force, followed five rows of nondescript suits of various names and nationalities. None of them appeared to have speaking privileges. They were deemed important enough to know, but not intelligent enough to act, Michael thought, and while he was still in the habit of avoiding his astro-cognitive ritual in order to maintain sanity; he had a good feeling that this statement would have been deemed true. The sky was cynical like that. Looking down on humanity was its nature. Above the assembled functionaries hung a two-directional screen, displaying live video feeds of the sun to both Michael and the assembly that was beginning to feel vaguely like his court. For yesterday’s preparatory patterns, the Sol-Systems site with its minimalist blink-tracking and spartan design philosophy had been perfectly sufficient, though it did make sense for this committee not to rely on an anonymous member of the public for vital sun-related info. The committee. That’s what Connor, Tara and Michael had been calling it, or maybe “the task-force”, since whatever body sat before them did not have a proper name. No one had had the time to come up with a clever acronym, or had felt the desire to, which would have greatly reassured Atiq Albarn of the group’s competence, had he known about it. While the crowd in corner Pub had various theories as to the identity of Sol-Systems, none of them had any clue about the committee. Imogen Campbell tapped her desk, the sound acquiring a strange sharpness through the microphone. “Mr. Michael Hugh Lowe, it is an honor that you would join us.” her tone only carried plausible-deniability levels of sarcasm. “Now please: Take a seat. I see no need to delay our investigation any further. If there are any dangers known to you which we should be aware of; please inform us of them now. Otherwise you are from here on out permitted to do whatever it is you do, so long as it is in the pursuit of answering our questions and so long as you speak the exact wording of each statement out loud. Is that understood?” Michael nodded. “I take that to mean no dangers?” He nodded again. “Excellent. In that case we have already decided on a first experiment. If you’re ready, please use the following statement: “The thing that the person I am looking at is thinking is true” while slowly scanning across the ten of us.” Campbell fixed him to the wall with her eyes, already sensing hesitation before Michael had even committed to hesitating. “The purpose of this should be fairly obvious.” Transitivity was an interesting thing to figure out, though it did have obvious risks in that it might be used to cut him out of the process. He would be giving them ten tests for free, which he couldn’t ask about, since the test would otherwise be inconclusive from their perspective, as Michael could simply be asking the questions himself and simply pretending. Refusal simply wouldn’t do.“I will, but I do have a condition” “And what’s that?” Dr. Bhatti asked. “If this works, I need you to promise now to only make use of it when it is strictly necessary, and keep in mind that I will know whether it is strictly necessary.” Connor gave a curt little nod from beside the podium, and it wasn’t quite clear whether he endorsed this move or whether he had accepted the assessments of necessity as a task directed at him. “While this demand might be construed as selfish, I feel like the phenomenon in question does specifically concern me, and I do therefore feel entitled to the conclusions you reach about it. This task-force is not to withhold information from me by not making me privy to its routes of inquiry.” The panel exchanged looks and nods, before Campbell announced that this condition had been accepted. Michael closed his eyes, released a mental block and went to work, yielding a pattern of 1010101100. A brief pause, before the panel nodded in approval. “Mr. Lowe,” This time it was Tackett speaking in an English so proper that it seemed dusty. “our conclusion is that the effect is either transferable in this manner, or that you can read our minds, which would make the test pointless. We will assume the former for now. I hope you understand that it will be necessary for us to only explain most tests after the fact. Feel free to reassure yourself of this statement’s honesty. So please, try “b equals b”” No such thing was necessary, both since Michael sought to establish trust, and since he was well aware of how sociological trials worked. You simply could not tell the test subject what you were trying to figure out, at least not if you wanted remotely usable data. “b equals b” the thought reverberated into the back of his skull and much much further. Nothing happened. “Wonderful”, Tackett said. “Whatever this is, and let us use the colloquially emergent moniker “Sol” for now, seems to only be reading outputs of your mind, unless you specifically direct it elsewhere as in the previous test. In such cases it seems very comfortable interfacing with other minds, so we may conclude that it simply chooses not to. What I was thinking when I told the statement to you was “bee, the creature, equals b, the letter”, which is obviously false, though Sol did not check for the originally encrypted meaning, instead defaulting to your interpretation of it.” Tackett folded his hands expectantly “Please attempt the statement I had in mind.” “Bee equals b” and all monitors went dark. Now this, this was what Michael was looking for. Since they’d been honest and cooperative, he felt inclined to return the favor. “I should inform you before we go any further, that the current policy of stating the phrase out loud is not perfect since-” he looked for a good way of putting it. “since Sol seems to be using contextual info that isn’t in the word-by-word, but which is meant, maybe even subconsciously. I promise not to use this actively for the sake of deception, but it is an issue. The statement “tomorrow will be a good day” for example resolves differently depending on whether my implied mental context is “for me” or “for people in general”. That was one of my own tests on Tuesday.” Father Dreyfus now leaned slightly forward to indicate a desire to speak. “Yes, I remember reading as much in the report we were graciously provided with. Though I am no expert in…” The pastor attempted to reach for a word that didn’t exist, “I must admit to being quite uncomfortable with a different part of this, as well as with some results of your other experiments. It seems that… Well it seems like this Sol is able to see the future, whether it is yours or the world’s.” Restating the conclusion revived some splinters on the nervous breakdown Michael had had two days ago when discovering that same fact. It was more than just uncomfortable. It was terrifying. “Well-“ he started to speak before being interrupted by Dumont-Vatel. “I do not find it surprising in the least, or even particularly noteworthy.” All heads safe for Akande and DeVries, who were discussing something in private, snapped towards the astronomer. Michael couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it had been going on since his clarification and the fact that it seemed more important to them than this was troubling. “Sol... My current hypothesis is that it is a machine-intelligence of sorts. It clearly has the memory, data access and raw processing power to answer all sorts of questions, difficult questions about the world, instantly. We should expect it to be able to run a model of earth at increased speeds in order to confidently make assessments of its future state. In fact we can be sure of that.” The old man stopped scanning his colleagues and looked up at Michael. “Have you ever noticed any sort of delay with regards to the response time?” Michael was beginning to catch on “Definitely not eight minutes if that’s what you’re asking, but from my experience of it; none at all” Vatel nodded. “It would not have to be eight minutes, since the sun is clearly not actually what Sol is affecting. Its influence is evidently on sensors, as many have realized, though we do have cameras in space, far enough away that Sol should not be able to affect them in time unless it has some way of breaking celerity.” The old man briefly paused and stroked his beard as though reconsidering that possibility. “Every sensor we have access to registers the events at the exact same time, which strongly points to Sol knowing what questions mister Lowe will ask of it before he asks them. Since Sol is an agent of such knowledge and such intelligence, we should expect it to make accurate predictions of the future either by way of a sufficient model or by way of genuine time travel. Would you please ask Sol whether it engages in time travel as we conceptualize it?”
September 21st, 11:55, Apartment of the Linton family, Belfast, United Republic of Ireland It had been two days since Gemma Linton last went to school. Most kids hadn’t. Most teachers hadn’t either. Her friend Mako had told her that the entire building was empty yesterday, though not locked, since no one came to lock it anymore. Mako had sat at the window, texting friends and reading a book about magic, reflecting on how traumatic for the people of that world it must have been when magic started being a thing. Her friend was smart like that; talking a lot about the things she was “reflecting” and “ruminating” on, though Gemma didn’t think that particular thought made much sense. Magic isn’t a thing that starts. Just like physics didn’t start being a thing here, from what she knew. Physics is and always had been, and for the folks in the fantasy book; magic probably was and always had been. Magic was sensible like that. The blinking was not. Miss Fraser always told them the world was going insane, what with social media and youth culture. She didn’t like music unless it was made by people who were even older and even whiter than her, and she applied similar criteria to the other teachers. When Miss Fraser said “world” she meant “people” of course, not “physics”. That much was obvious. That much made sense. Though the world was going insane, so sense could not be relied upon. Gemma’s mom had started saying that recently, and her face was all scary when she did. You could never tell whether she would laugh or cry next, and oftentimes she did both. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even sad. There simply was no emotion for it that Gemma had learned yet, and ruminating didn’t much help. Ruminating just called to mind the scary face of her mom at dinner again, and the impassive frozen response of her dad pretending that everything was normal. Pretending like this was not insane was even more insane than the normal insanity to Gemma, so she preferred watching the news. The news was talking about the sun at least. It was confused by the sun. It was trying to find an emotion that didn’t exist yet, and Gemma profoundly wanted to have that emotion, so that she wouldn’t feel so stuck anymore. Like her mind was filling up with a viscous energy that couldn’t be put anywhere. Miss Fraser had also come to school yesterday, Mako reported. Maybe to say that she told them so. That their generation was strange, and that the migrants were at fault, and that this was just the next big insane cultural phenomenon that didn’t make sense and needed to be stopped. Gemma didn’t even know if she wanted it to stop. She’d need an emotion to do that. Any sort of- Her dad hugged her from behind, asking if she wanted to turn the TV off and she said “no”. He’d hugged her a lot recently and harder than normal. It hurt a bit and reminded her of how dad had petted the dog much more, shortly before it died. Lucy. The dog’s name had been Lucy and she had avoided the name for a few months because thinking it had hurt too much. Right now, the emotion that didn’t exist was stopping her from flinching though. Maybe from blinking too. Her eyes hurt. She didn’t want to end up like the sky. She didn’t want to go insane. “Okay sweetie, we can leave it on, but please have breakfast with us. Mom’s hungry” That was probably a lie. Mom hadn’t eaten anything since it started. She had forgotten hunger like Gemma had forgotten blinking and dad was pretending like those things were normal. He made coffee and burned himself. Mom was crying again. When Gemma had stood up on her chair and climbed onto the kitchen table, sitting down in the middle of it between her parent’s plates, no one complained. Because of the counter she couldn’t see the screen from her chair, but from the table she could. They were reporting from that place again: Corner Pub in Scotland, where all the people more insane than the sky had gathered to collectively write fantasies in which things made sense. Gemma liked the owner, how sensibly confused he was, even though he looked like those terrorists she used to see on TV. Dad also had a friend who looked like those terrorists, and he was nice, so maybe the news and Miss Fraser were wrong about them. Miss Fraser used to be wrong about a lot of things, that’s why Gemma never used to do her Math homework. A big topic of debate currently was the sort of switch that happened from the 19th to the 20th, where the former was entirely erratic and the latter gave them these very concise and structured patterns with a long pause in between. They said it felt like dragon taming, like someone was figuring out controls. Sol-Systems thought that the sun had had overly high expectations for human intelligence with regard to cryptography, but that it had learned its lesson on Tuesday and was now giving us an easier, less information-dense place to start. Siobhan Gohdes said cryptography was the science of understanding coded messages. Siobhan Gohdes also said that Sol-Systems was mentally ill. Maybe that’s why Solsys could talk to the sun: because they had been insane already. Mako was probably at school again. Her parents wouldn’t let her skip school, even if it were the apocalypse as Gemma’s parents thought. There might be two or so more students there, maybe a teacher, maybe not. It’s not like Gemma wanted to go to school, but she did want to see Mako and hear her ruminate. She wanted to see people who weren’t her parents. Dad had always said that spending time with other kids was important for young girls and now he wouldn’t let her leave. Hypocrisy was what they called that, and not just on TV. Dad was insane. Mom was insane. She wanted to see Mako. Suddenly the television cut back to a news room full of shocked and confused faces, interrupting a businessman in Corner Pub mid-sentence. There was silence, before it cut again to a podium somewhere. The woman behind it was apparently called Tara Keene, and she told them that everything was under control. The phenomenon had been figured out and was entirely harmless. There would be three blinks in short succession, then five, then one exactly… She waited for a moment. Now. And it happened as promised. Dad was violently coughing on the other side of the table, so Gemma turned up the volume. It got even worse once she did. Mrs Keene apparently was the spokeswoman for a transnational, though EU-led panel of experts investigating the phenomenon. This time all of them had a coughing fit collectively. As a family. The way they had been collectively doing almost everything over the past two days. No one had said it out loud yet, at least no one reputable, but the blinking did seem to occur mostly during the Afro-European daytime. Sol-Systems’ first camera was located somewhere in Scotland. People on the internet had somehow figured that out from weather patterns and the occasional airplane flying by, though more cameras all over the world had of course been added since. Made available by mostly anonymous sources. No one had brought it up because it was ridiculous. Aliens or gods or anything really never communicated with Europe. They always communicated with the states. Everyone knew that. Europe wouldn’t launch missiles at the sun. It was unthinkable. Stories about people whose thoughts became true came to mind. Gemma had once read a YA-series about that. If she had been in Corner Pub and someone had held a microphone to her mouth that instant; she would have proposed that they were in exactly such a story and more specifically they were living out the nightmare of her math teacher. The world was going insane and the EU was handling it. The only person at school was an immigrant girl reading fantasy books. It would have made a lot of sense… but sadly she was not in Corner Pub and sense didn’t matter anymore. Mrs. Keene for her part at least looked very American. According to her Wikipedia page she was the sort of modern metropolitan who didn’t live anywhere but rather just stayed in places and became American by default. Her accent didn’t give anything away on that front, and she used a lot of words that Gemma didn’t know, like “contingency” and “imperative”. Those were reassuring. Mom always said that it was important to know as many words as one could, because if you knew all the words, then no one would be able to sell you anything. Gemma didn’t get the benefit of that. In fact she wanted people to sell her things, but she tried to heed the advice either way. Sometimes she wondered whether dad did most of the grocery shopping because he didn’t know all of the words, and would therefore still be sold things. The speech had degraded into a Q&A with various remote-participating reporters. Few of them even attempted to hide the mad scramble going on in the backgrounds of their respective studios, and those who did seemed far less prepared than their colleagues in a desperate attempt to uphold professional decorum. To a question about the riots, widespread panic and general unrest caused by the committee's caginess with regards to the information Keene seemed to possess, the American looking woman responded calmly: “We can say with absolute confidence that our current approach lies within the μ+4σ to μ+5σ range of policies with respect to how well they minimize long term damage” she gave a brief smile “I hope you can appreciate that public relations rarely get to compete with particle physics in the socio-cultural arena of certainty”. What followed was an introductory course on p-values by a statistician who seemed to have been woken up for this very occasion, and which ended in broad agreement among media personnel that this conclusion to the press-conference could not possibly have been more than an exceptionally tasteless joke at the expense of a wildly distraught and uncertain populace. Gemma didn’t think she understood the statistics talk, so she messaged Mako about it.