Perimeter Defense
26-11-2007, 06:29
The event had occurred - that was what mattered truly, but of some interest to observers was when it occurred. Unfortunately, the only recorded time was in the pattern of Sol-time, an inherently imprecise measurement that never took into account the gradual slowing of Terra's axial rotation, due to friction caused by her satellite's tidal forces. There had been, long ago, a project to use a massive kinetic field array at the Lagrangian point between the two large bodies, but such an endeavor was infeasible even by the standards of the current day.
Sol-time, however, was fortunately only imprecise up to the tenths of a second over a few hundred thousand years. This was sufficient for the datestamp to be extrapolated and adapted to a useful margin of error in the Perimetrian archival date form based on the decay of a black hole of stellar mass 54.1. No matter if a few deciseconds were lost in the conversion; such variance was trivial in the eyes of most anyone besides sentient computers who would treat the difference as substantial beyond reckoning.
Alas, the narrative digresses from the actual event at hand. What had happened indeed was that a colony of Perimeter Defense-based humanity simply vanished. Indeed, the planet in its entirety, up to the last breaths of the exosphere, did not dissolve, or atomize, or break apart - at one point it was simply there, and then next, it was not.
The planet was a particularly big one, with an impressive gravity footprint that caused the average height of humans on it to be six to seven inches below the median on the homeworld of Cyvils. Such was its gravitational influence that on its disappearance, an expanding wake splashed out from the sea of space, an Einsteinian distortion coherent to the titular scientist's calculations about perturbations in the spatial field. This wake knocked a nearby colony world (in the same system) substantially off its normal orbital pathway - leading it, over time, to the star around which it revolved. So profoundly divergent was the new orbit from the standard, that in the first solar cycle alone - completing over a period of one month - the surface was baked to a crisp, killing each and every one of the six million inhabitants, whose starships were smashed to the surface by the shockwave, leaving them stranded on the planet.
The surviving colony in the system, a cold place of heavy snow and dark sky, was too far to have been affected to the extreme by the planetary act of prestidigitation. It sent, via disentanglement ansible, a message to Cyvils, informing all of the anomaly and the tragedy that came with as a consequence. All grieved for a time - six million was no small number of persons, not to mention the loss of a rare habitable world - but it was only for a time; now the real matter at hand came to view - how the hell did that planet disappear, and why?
Hundreds of ships came after some weeks, sweeping the place where once stood a proud human colony. There was nothing to be seen for the first few days of scouring a site which had nothing in it - but after a week of scanning, there was discovered a strange artifact at the center of the planet-void. Some fifty meters across, it was marked with mysterious symbols that could not be identified, and would reflect any penetrative scanning laid upon it.
The decision was made to try and retrieve it, and single robotic ship gingerly approached the structure. The moment the probe touched it, a blinding flash of light emanated from the structure, and everything within a million kilometers was destroyed in a wholly un-mysterious fashion - converted to debris.
Naturally, such flashes of energy coupled with the still-expanding gravity wake would call the attention of other nations...
Sol-time, however, was fortunately only imprecise up to the tenths of a second over a few hundred thousand years. This was sufficient for the datestamp to be extrapolated and adapted to a useful margin of error in the Perimetrian archival date form based on the decay of a black hole of stellar mass 54.1. No matter if a few deciseconds were lost in the conversion; such variance was trivial in the eyes of most anyone besides sentient computers who would treat the difference as substantial beyond reckoning.
Alas, the narrative digresses from the actual event at hand. What had happened indeed was that a colony of Perimeter Defense-based humanity simply vanished. Indeed, the planet in its entirety, up to the last breaths of the exosphere, did not dissolve, or atomize, or break apart - at one point it was simply there, and then next, it was not.
The planet was a particularly big one, with an impressive gravity footprint that caused the average height of humans on it to be six to seven inches below the median on the homeworld of Cyvils. Such was its gravitational influence that on its disappearance, an expanding wake splashed out from the sea of space, an Einsteinian distortion coherent to the titular scientist's calculations about perturbations in the spatial field. This wake knocked a nearby colony world (in the same system) substantially off its normal orbital pathway - leading it, over time, to the star around which it revolved. So profoundly divergent was the new orbit from the standard, that in the first solar cycle alone - completing over a period of one month - the surface was baked to a crisp, killing each and every one of the six million inhabitants, whose starships were smashed to the surface by the shockwave, leaving them stranded on the planet.
The surviving colony in the system, a cold place of heavy snow and dark sky, was too far to have been affected to the extreme by the planetary act of prestidigitation. It sent, via disentanglement ansible, a message to Cyvils, informing all of the anomaly and the tragedy that came with as a consequence. All grieved for a time - six million was no small number of persons, not to mention the loss of a rare habitable world - but it was only for a time; now the real matter at hand came to view - how the hell did that planet disappear, and why?
Hundreds of ships came after some weeks, sweeping the place where once stood a proud human colony. There was nothing to be seen for the first few days of scouring a site which had nothing in it - but after a week of scanning, there was discovered a strange artifact at the center of the planet-void. Some fifty meters across, it was marked with mysterious symbols that could not be identified, and would reflect any penetrative scanning laid upon it.
The decision was made to try and retrieve it, and single robotic ship gingerly approached the structure. The moment the probe touched it, a blinding flash of light emanated from the structure, and everything within a million kilometers was destroyed in a wholly un-mysterious fashion - converted to debris.
Naturally, such flashes of energy coupled with the still-expanding gravity wake would call the attention of other nations...