The sun is not a star. That’s what I heard my father say in a fit of fear once.
I was twelve years old when he came back from working at NASA. He retired and started working on solar panels instead, but always hated working on sunny days. He wasn’t warm or even remotely acknowledging of me or my Mom anymore. He looked at us as if we were ghosts the entire time that he was with us, something that still gives me a chill to this day.
Before his retirement, he used to be more of a family man. He kissed my mom, give me a warm hug, and was overall a proper father towards me and my little sister. And he always seemed like he loved his job. The pay was good, and he’d always bring me some parts of a scrapped project he had been working on. Life seemed rather routine, but peaceful and beautiful even. I thought I was way luckier than any of my friends whose parents weren’t always as successful.
Before retirement, my Dad would have pictures of him on the International Space Station, space shuttles— before they were phased out— controlling a Rover that was meant for Mars at some point and even meeting one of the presidents of the United States. He was an excellent astronaut and I remember during one of his many visits from high-ranking officials in government, that man said to him that he was one of the best. I wasn’t really sure who this person was, but he had a strange symbol on one of his badges. From what I could tell, it looks like a shield with six eagle wings coming out in pairs of three on each side. After this meeting, that’s when everything changed, and I didn’t see dad for six months
But when he returned and retired, he never had any more interest in outer space. He’d stare up at the night sky and almost looked like he wanted to curse at it. He dreaded every day when the sun would rise after having a hard time sleeping every night.
One day I decided to tell him that I wanted to be an astronaut like he was. His response was rather surprising and demoralizing on top of that.
“Listen, Hayden, I want you to promise me that you won’t follow in my footsteps. There’s nothing good about outer space. And there’s nothing especially good about the sun.”
He clearly wasn’t fond anymore about the idea of space travel. I resented him for what he said to me that day.
For years though, his health was deteriorating. Mentally he was becoming more unstable and would frequently have nightmares, screaming in the middle of the night and saying things like, “It’s not a star!” and “Nexus Gates!”
To me, this sounded like unreasonable gibberish.
That was always something that puzzled me and made me wonder what exactly it was that dad had experienced during his time at NASA.
But finally, he had to be put into a mental home, his mind completely losing it and spilling out into senseless repeats of some unexplainable event that was incoherent and absurd.
On one particular Friday afternoon, Mom and I were cleaning out dad’s stuff and I happened to come across his journal in his briefcase that he left open by mistake probably. I wasn’t even aware that he had one, so I opened it up and started taking a look at what he wrote down.
There were some more absurd pictures that he had clipped inside it. There were astronauts that I had never seen, and we had quite a few of them visit our home. There was also him with a team of five others that I couldn’t identify. Behind them was a large facility, futuristic in design. It looked like he was on the set of a science fiction, space exploration TV show from the 80s. That’s probably an exaggeration, but you get the point. It looked out of this world.
He wrote down a lot of stuff but most of the pages were just recollections of his many exploits that had to do with previous missions that I was already aware of. It wasn’t until I got near the end of the journal that the last few pages had a different take. They were more detailed, and their content was not what I was prepared to learn about.
“Project Light Hand.”
I found this to be an unusual name and started looking through his notes of what it was about. Instead, I believe I discovered what caused my father’s mental instability and I am not so sure I should be sharing it with others now. But if you’re willing, here was his story.
***
February 17, 2017
Things are going great. We are a little bit ahead of schedule, and we should be arriving on the moon in about ten minutes. I couldn’t believe I got picked by the Protectorate Organization as a Moonwalker. I wasn’t even aware that they were still doing moon missions. Hopefully, one day I can tell my son Hayden about this one. Unfortunately, they still had me sign that non-disclosure agreement, so I’ll have to keep this one under wraps for a few decades.
I’ve docked now and already I’ve met the team that I’m going to be working with. About forty-three other people are working on this moon base. We’re supposed to keep an eye out for UFOs. At first, I thought they were kidding but the Director of the base, also called Director John Valley, told us that UFO doesn’t mean aliens, although he did say that we shouldn’t rule that out as a possibility. Personally, I thought I was learning things a little fast but after my association with some of the other crew, I was becoming a little more informed about our place in the universe. At least, I was learning about our general knowledge of the solar system.
***
February 19th, 2017
I was in the mess hall and four other guys were sitting at a table. They invited me over and one of them, his name was Damien, was spouting about some nonsense that went down about four years ago.
“So here’s a fun story, my friend who works with the Protectorate military branch on Earth told me that they had to deal with some nasty beast that crash-landed in the woods somewhere. It was wiping out all the people in the surrounding area and they had to hit that thing with flamethrowers and missiles for over a day until it destroyed one cabin and, get this, the couple that was in that cabin was armed to the teeth and managed to get the final shots in. I’m telling you, it’s rather embarrassing that civilians were able to get the win from under those guys.”
I wondered about what this beast was, growing more curious about what else they knew. But there were some dismissals of his claim and the conversation changed into introductions.
“So where are you guys from?” Damien asked.
A few spoke of various places. Kansas, Egypt, and one from Vietnam which I was a little surprised to hear.
But one guy replied, “Not entirely sure. My memories are foggy, but I believe I came from overseas.”
Everyone looked at him like he was crazy except for Damien. He suddenly came up with a theory.
“Oh, oh, I heard some scientist talking about this one,”
Despite his overdramatic mannerisms, everyone sat at attention because he seemed to have a lot of inside information.
The Vietnamese guy said, “Well go on,”
“Okay, I’m assuming you guys have heard of that similar thing called the Mandela effect, right?”
Everyone in the group rolled their eyes. Well except for our mystery man. He seemed a little more interested. I for one did not care too much so I quit paying attention and couldn’t recall anything else that was spoken of.
***
Now was the day of our experiment. It was February 27th and one of our fellow astronauts as well as scientists was about to do a spacewalk, or as we like to call them, “moonwalkers”.
Her name was Judy, and she was definitely a cute one. She reminded me a lot of my wife based on her behavior and the way that she got so flustered by every little inconvenience. We mostly tolerated her even if she had the tendency to blame us for some of those inconveniences.
She was taking one of the Lunar Roving Vehicles quite far from the base. We had been receiving reports that there was a strange power surge in that area. The Apollo missions also discovered it long ago but was unable to find its location. Now things have changed, and our technology has improved. And from what I’ve heard, it’s improved even more so than I formerly believed.
We watched on the monitors as her cameras recorded everything. She was approaching a large lunar cliff face, a steep 90-degree rise, and in front of her was a large, white marble platform. It had a circular design, with a row of pillars holding up the top of the cliff from the inside. In the center of it was an obelisk with strange symbols of unknown origin carved into each side.
“Judy to base, are you guys seeing this?” she radioed.
I was watching in confused amazement. Never in my mind did I expect to see something so human built on the moon. Ancient humans on top of that. But there was something that caught my eye. There was a small carved-out section near the base of the obelisk. A statue sat inside.
I told the Director about it and he relayed what I said to her.
She walked towards it, reaching down and pulled it out. When she took a look at it, everyone in the room couldn’t quite make it out. It was abstract, and every time you thought you were just about to figure out what it was, it would somehow change shape again.
“I guess I’ll be heading back.”
She turned around and when she got back to the lunar rover, there was a sudden flash from behind her that caught everyone’s attention. She turned around but saw that nothing had changed with the monument.
***
March 7th, 2017
We’re finally going to see what the solar base is going to do tomorrow.
I have to admit, Project Light Hand is going to be amazing. Judy and Damien were explaining to me that it would allow us to have infinite energy from the Sun. They explain to me how there is a space station that orbits near the sun. I thought that was insane, the heat and radiation should have killed everyone there, but they assured me everything was automated by a series of robots that are controlled from here.
They showed me some footage of the space station. It’s kept in an orbit on the other side of the Sun, that way no one from Earth can spot it. Smart, but I honestly couldn’t tell you who would be wanting to know about it. What the project is supposed to accomplish is it will fire a beam down into the Sun that will rip open a temporal portal that can be contained inside a massive reactor on board the space station. Thus, we won’t have to rely on nuclear, solar, wind, or fossil fuels ever again. A large portal into the sun will generate endless heat for the next billions of years.
“I didn’t know we perfected wormhole technology?” I said.
Damien laughed and said, “Dude, they got that thing in the bag like 20 years ago. Remember when I said about my buddy who has to fight aliens on Earth. You think that technology hasn’t been exploited by us?”
Judy rolled her eyes and said, “First off, you shouldn’t be telling everyone about what’s going on in the military branch of our organization. You can get in trouble Damien.”
“Big deal, the Director has been in the rooms where I was telling some of the others about all the weirdness that goes on back home.”
“Yes, but you signed the nondisclosure—”
“Don’t try to use that in this argument. That only applies when we get back to our normal lives. I’ll say whatever I want while I’m up here. We’re literally on a moon base!”
I enjoyed their conversations. They were such a comedic duo with each other, and I even felt like maybe there was a bit of romantic tension between them. But I still couldn’t wait for the project tomorrow.
***
March 18th
We were excited about the new project about to commence. Everyone was in the control room, staring at the dozens of screens on the wall and desks. There was an anxiety that I believe we all shared; the fear that something might go wrong, or perhaps the entire loss of the space station itself would set us back a dozen years.
I stuck close to my two friends that I had made. Judy and Damien. We watched as a nearby satellite was recording the station from the outside.
That’s when the Director told everyone to be quiet and watch. The countdown had begun.
My thoughts were going back home and how this was going to be a revolutionary moment for everyone on Earth. The idea that my kids would look at me and know that I was there when history was being made was a heart-racing moment.
Damien was getting rather uppity about the whole thing; he insisted that this test should’ve been experimented on Jupiter first. He was worried that the reactor wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the energy and that we were risking the solar station’s survival during this project.
“Don’t worry about it man,” I said. “If the station is destroyed, nobody loses their lives, and it’s just the government’s money that’s wasted.”
He gave me a deadpan glare and said, “Yeah, my tax money burning up right before my eyes.”
Judy and I paid him no more attention and we watched on the monitor as the countdown was nearing its end.
Three… two… one…
A beam of energy was shot down into the filtered light of the sun, digging deep into its surface. We were all standing with astonishment, happy that the first part of the operation was going smoothly.
Judy smiled at me; I did the same as this was a monumental moment in human history. With energy from the Sun, we could have enough power to travel all the way to the next star system.
That’s when Damien rolled his eyes at everyone else’s cheering, and I saw that his face suddenly lit up when he took another look at the screen. There was another eruption of murmuring coming from those who are near the front, and Judy and I turned back. The color of the room had also changed from bright yellow to a sudden mixture of crimson red and Egyptian blue coloring.
I couldn’t process what I was looking at. This was unorthodox and completely insane. The sun was changing to a different color. The surface of it was blue, deep and malevolent. Surrounding it was a hue of energy that was red in color. The whole thing made the sun look like a menacing abomination as it pulsed with waves of energy outwards.
Everyone looked in shock and horror as they saw the entire space station that was orbiting above the sun get torn to shreds and disintegrate into molten shards of metal in outer space.
For a brief moment, I thought about how Damien was right. But then I realized that what was happening was far worse than any of us could understand.
Alarms started going off all around the base. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for any of us to do, since this was well out of our area of expertise.
But then the satellite caught something else. What we were seeing was happening in real-time. Thanks to the wormhole technology that has been appropriately named “Space-Time Drilling”, we were able to transport a lot of our small-scale fleets to areas within our solar system. Everything from satellites, space stations, and radio transmissions. I wasn’t completely sure how they achieved this, but all I can guess is that the alien technology probably had something to do with that.
But what the sun did next was that it shot out a concentrated beam of energy from a singular point on its surface, firing at a tremendous speed that was equivalent to a flash of light. A long streak came from the surface and was heading out into outer space.
The Director was already getting in contact with Command on Earth.
I left the room with Judy and Damien, and we ran out to the observatory section of the base, wanting to see the change in the sun’s surface when the light finally reaches us.
We had about one minute left by the time we reached the observatory and stood next to each other alongside at least a dozen more people who were in the room. Perhaps we all wanted to see with our own eyes.
I watched as the beautiful white light that came from the Sun dim and became that vile dark blue light.
I could only imagine what my family and friends on Earth were thinking when the sun suddenly changed color.
“This isn’t going to end well. I can only imagine how this will impact photosynthesis.” Judy assumed.
“I wouldn’t think about that. Just imagine how fast society will crumble with this change.”
I stood there in contemplative silence. My mind was still reeling over what had transpired and I kept wondering how this could have happened? What did we do that could cause the sun to change? I guess it wouldn’t matter because everyone in the room started shouting and panicking, their fingers pointed up toward the sun.
Judy shook my shoulder, and I came out of my trance. My eyes stretched out from shock as I saw a gigantic beam of energy, supercharged and bright as the sun was before, coming straight towards the Earth.
“NO! DEAR GOD, NO!” I panicked.
That’s when there was a massive flash of energy and a vibration that rippled through the base. No one could look up and the few people who saw it happen started screaming out that they couldn’t see.
I saw my skeleton through my hands, even though I had my eyes closed on top of that. It must have been tremendously bright to have been able to accomplish that.
But after a few seconds had passed, the light had died down and I was able to look back out into space to see what had transpired.
My heart sank and I fell back out of despair. I watched as an entire molten material was firing off into all directions of where the Earth once was. The Earth, everyone on it; it was all gone!
I’m not too sure what exactly played out outside of my field of vision. I became so distraught that I was having flashbacks of my own life. Typically, this is associated with someone who had just died. Perhaps I felt that I had died. Memories of my wife opening the door, our son and newborn daughter waving to see me as I walked up towards our beautiful house. The thought alone that they have been instantly vaporized was so distressful that I must have shut down emotionally for quite some time.
Judy and Damien were shouting at each other about something that I wasn’t paying attention to. But then they grabbed hold of me and led me along through the base towards the control room where the Director was.
Judy sprinted ahead of us and approached him first. “Director, we have a really bad situation!”
It must have been hard for him to hear because there were a dozen monitors with men on them, dressed as captains, shouting and explaining to one another what had happened to Earth’s Command.
The Director replied, “Listen, Judy, I’m trying to have a discussion with all of the other captains. Currently, there’s too much panic going on throughout the chain of command. Whatever it is, I already know about it. Earth is gone, and now every human that is currently off-world is the last of their kind.”
He turned his back on her and kept trying to tell the others to calm down but there was still some distraught going through them all.
Judy— frustrated— stomped her way out of the room and Damien and I followed after.
Damien attempted a moment of humor; it was his way of coping after all. “You sure were able to make yourself heard with all that stomping around. You’d think the low gravity would make that more difficult.”
“Shut it, Damien, I wanted to know more about something but apparently the Director has better things to do.”
Finally, my silence was broken when I heard her say that. I guess my curiosity had come back despite my shock and inability to process my loss.
“What exactly was it that you wanted to know?”
She stopped right outside the women’s barracks, then she turned around and said to the two of us, “I wanted to know more about that monument.”
She walked in and closed the door just as quickly. We weren’t going to follow after her because, well, it’s the women’s room.
***
I laid down on my bunk for a few hours. Damien was right below me doing something with his tablet. I kept replaying those moments. The sudden loss of my whole life and now being trapped on the moon. The Earth, all of its beauty, all of its people, all gone in an instant. A flash of light only to be atomized. My only hope was that it was quick, and no one actually felt it.
“Bad news Shay, look at this,” Damien holds up his tab. It was a simulation of Earth and the moon.
Damien explained, “If you notice, the moon no longer has the gravity of the Earth to keep it in its orbit. Now we’re being slingshotted into outer space.”
“Better than falling into the sun don’t you think?” I said.
“Yeah but, I don’t know man. It’s going to get really bad here. We only have enough food to last us a year.”
“What about water?” I asked.
“Eh, that’s probably not going to be an issue. We get our water from the Moon. There’s plenty of ice on the surface. Of course, as we head further out, it’s going to be a lot colder, and we probably won’t be able to use the lunar rovers anymore.”
“So, it doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die.”
“It’s not as bad as all of the people on the space stations. They have less food than us, and they have to recycle all their water but it’s a limited supply. I’d say they’ll probably only last two months at the most. Without the wormhole technology leading us back to a habitable planet, the entire human race will go extinct within a year or two at the most.”
“Why did this happen to us?” I mumbled. “All we wanted was to find an even more efficient energy source than nuclear power.”
The process of tearing open a wormhole took a lot out of the nuclear-powered engines of the space stations that we had been building. Sure, they would last for a few decades, but eventually, they had to be replenished and that would require more time and money to be devoted to refueling instead of expanding outwards.
Damien suddenly interrupted my thoughts and said, “You know, I wonder what it was that Judy was up to? We should probably go see, don’t you think?”
Considering the alternative of laying here in bed, I had nothing else to do. Both of us left the bunks and went over to the women’s side.
I knocked on the door, and quickly it slid open. There was a beetle-shaped redhead that answered the door. She spoke with a smoker’s cough. “What are you doing here? I ain’t letting you in with all the women.”
“Uh, we just want to talk to our friend Judy.”
“Judy? She left about an hour ago. I think she said something about seeing the Director.”
We thanked her for the information and ran to the Director’s office, seeing that that would be the likely area that he would be in at the moment.
We knocked on the door and heard a bit of shuffling from behind.
Damien and I gave a brief glance at each other, wondering what it was that they were trying to hide in there.
The automated door opened and Judy was the one to answer us.
I was the first one to ask, “Judy, we want to know what’s going on with you. What aren’t you telling us?”
I looked inside and saw that the Director was sitting at his desk, staring out into the black void from his tiny, oval-shaped window.
“I don’t believe I’m at liberty to discuss that with you,” she spoke, dropping a signal that she wanted us to leave.
The Director suddenly spoke up, turning around in his chair towards us. “Let them in. Nothing matters anyway.”
She stood aside and the two of us walked in and approached our boss. His eyes were red, and his face looked exhausted. His whole body was hunched over his desk, and he said, “So, I take it you want to know what is going on with Judy. Ask away.”
We weren’t expecting an invitation, but I said, “Listen, I get that Earth is gone now and we are not going to last much longer ourselves. But why do I get a distinct feeling that you two have been planning something.”
“We are. How about you take a guess at what it is?”
I looked around the room, trying to see if they were leaving a clue for me to notice. Nothing looked too out of the ordinary. Mostly because the Director loved to collect artifacts from other cultures. It’s funny, this room probably houses some of the last Fine China, African vases, and bottles of unopened Italian wine that look like they had been sealed in the 1920s.
Damien was also looking around, but he was a little more focused on Judy. Now I was certain that he had a thing for her. But now probably isn’t the best time.
Then I looked at the desk. On it was that statue that we found from that weird monument that we found outside.
“That’s not supposed to be here Director.” I pointed it out.
“Clever. I think it’s time that Judy and I let you two in on our little secret.”
I looked at Judy and she remained quiet.
We waited as he took a deep breath and said in a calm and serious tone. “I’m not supposed to discuss this with you boys, but none of that matters anymore. This statue is a key to a form of technology that our organization has been trying to master, but it’s often too unpredictable.”
“And what kind of technology is that?” Damien asked.
“Nexus Gates.”
“Nexus what?” I said, baffled.
“They’re called Nexus Gates or Gateways or Points, depending on who you ask. They’re a mysterious technology that randomly appears in various areas around the world. Our organization has known about them, but how they operate has been difficult to replicate for our own uses.”
“Well, how important are they?” I asked.
“Our wormhole technology is only able to stretch us as far as the Kuiper belt. We’ve only managed to create a small fleet that can survey our little dot in the galaxy. But these Nexus Gates are a big deal. Our wormholes are child’s play in comparison to them.”
I saw an open seat from the other end and swiftly sat myself down. I was definitely going to need it after what I heard next.
“In what way?”
“Wormholes are the basics. But these Nexus Gates are capable of— and this is just from myths and legends as well as first-hand accounts from those who have managed to activate them— but they are capable of interdimensional travel as well as an unusual side effect of time travel. They bend reality to their will, and manipulate space-time with relative ease, and yet not a single human knows how to actively control one. Not any that we have met.”
Damien had the same shocked expression that I had. I asked, “So there are other universes out there? These gates are capable of teleporting us there?”
Judy intervened in the conversation and said, “Yes, but don’t think that any of those universes are like ours. Some of our most brilliant astrophysicists and meta-physicists have concluded that there is such a thing as infinite universes. There may be an Earth just like ours, only still around. It’s just a matter of finding one which isn’t an easy course.”
The Director was slumped down in his chair and had his hands over his face. The distraught in the air hung heavy.
Damien started laughing, spooking all of us into thinking that he had finally cracked. But instead, he said, “Guys, don’t you remember. He said those Nexus Gates are capable of time travel.”
I don’t know why it didn’t hit me before. If we can activate it, and get it to help us time travel back, then we could prevent this whole thing from happening.
“It’s not that simple,” Director Valley said. “Nobody in our organization has ever managed to use any of them. There have been mishaps where they turn them on, but the technology is so advanced even though these gateways are estimated to be hundreds of billions of years old, possibly trillions.”
“Well, what is the statue for?” I asked.
Judy replied, “Not every Gate needs them but it is said that some are powered by them. They function kind of like a key.”
“Maybe we could—”
“Enough!” the Director shouted.
Everyone stood quietly, watching him still go through his emotional breakdown. He kept shaking his head and crying.
“Sir, with all due respect, I’d like to go home and see my wife and kids again,” I affirmed.
“You’d die trying to go by the off chance that you would be able to get a piece of technology that no one understands to work exactly how you wanted it to?” he coldly glared at me.
I glanced over to Judy who looked like she was fully on board with my idea. Then I turned towards Damien who had the same expression. I looked back down at my superior, looking down at a man stricken by despair over the loss of our homeworld.
“It sure beats staying in here to die,”
His eyes change for a brief moment. I could almost see a spark of hope come back to him, but the worst timing ever dropped on us when everyone in the base started screaming. I too felt something enter inside my head, and everyone in the room was covering their ears and crying out in dreaded panic.
A loud screeching sound, slowly morphing into a low growl with a voice so deep and filled with so much hate, it was a deafening experience even though it was a telepathic voice.
“YOU STOLE FROM ME! YOU DO NOT OWN MY SOUL! I WILL WIPE YOU OUT AND CLEANSE MY DOMAIN! PRAY TO YOUR GODS AND DIE!”
After all of that, the high-pitched ringing faded away and everyone in the room was visibly shaken. My hands were out of control and the Director looked like he had been foaming a little at the mouth. Damien was on the floor, his whole body shaking uncontrollably, and Judy was leaning against the bookcase on the right side of the room. Everyone was unprepared for this intrusion, and that’s when the insanity outside the room began.