Part #1 (The Night Sky Looks Different Tonight)
It came back. I don’t know how, but it all came back. Almost instantaneously, the terror we witnessed was washed away – and in its wake something entirely new had revealed itself. My name is Hank Beauregard, and eight months ago the night sky began to fade into pure nothingness. As I’m sure you know, the general public picked up on this a while back, and I hope the ensuing panic hasn’t been too harsh on you. The riots in my city kept me up for about a week after the initial news reports came out. I already had trouble eating and sleeping before the uproar began, but their reactions to this event only added to my malaise. It’s confusing enough when billions of stars disappear, but it’s even more perplexing when they start coming back.
Roughly five days after it had come into view, the expanding void faded as if it had never occurred in the first place. The Sagittarius-Carina arm was back, and so were the Magellanic Clouds. When we aimed our telescopes at it, the Carina dwarf galaxy sparkled as it always had. We spent a painstaking amount of time surveying the night sky, re-documenting each and every star we could identify with what we had. Everything was as it should be – well, everything except for one small detail.
Looking over images of Messier 16 – also known at the Eagle Nebula – we saw that the region known as the “Pillars of Creation” was nowhere to be found, scattered into dust by some unseen force. None of us knew what happened to it – it just vanished. I ran my hands through my hair, desperately trying to hang onto myself as I grappled with the impossible sight.
Two restless weeks later, there were still no signs of the Pillars. We frantically flipped through hundreds of images, each taken at slightly different angles by every telescope and observatory the world had aimed at the nebula. We prayed to someone – to anyone – that the Pillars would come back. At this point we didn’t give a damn about them in particular – we just wanted a sense of normalcy again. The sweat running down my forehead only added to the sensory nightmare that occurred around me, as my frenzied colleagues shouted and paced around the facility seemingly to no end.
We found one image that stood out, however. It wasn’t the Pillars – it was something else. I don’t know what the hell we were looking at, and to be honest I still have no idea. My coworkers and I just stared at it, blank-eyed and frozen in place.
At this point, hallucinations seemed like a possible answer to what we saw. There was something else where the Pillars of Creation should have been. The protostars around Messier 16 were dimming slightly, then returning to its initial glow. Slowly but surely, other stars underwent the same process, dimming for an instant before regaining their brightness. My predecessors had used this phenomenon to detect the presence of exoplanets over decades by measuring the timespan of the change in brightness. Using this method, we argued that this object was no larger than Titan – Saturn’s largest moon. None of us could explain how it moved so quickly, let alone how it moved at all. I suppose, to some degree, it was comforting to know I wasn’t the only confused person in the room.
The next week was perhaps the strangest so far. Using our measurements of changes in apparent magnitude across stars in the vicinity of Messier 16, the object was somehow moving at relativistic speed, showing no sign of slowing down. Just as the horror set in, something else started hovering over our heads. Messier 16 is roughly 7,000 light-years away. This anomaly – whatever it was – had seemingly moved across 0.0546 light-years over the course of the last three weeks – in other words, it was moving at roughly 95% the speed of light. If this was true, then based on when we were able to image it, its path would take it near Earth in a little over 368 years.
The event was astronomically soon – implausibly so, at that – but it still gave us time to prepare for their arrival, if it was even possible to do so. We desperately submitted our findings to every major journal as soon as we had them, and they were published within a year. I don’t know exactly why, but I would have guessed the appearance of a gargantuan cosmic anomaly would have sped up the peer-reviewing process. Whatever the case, we found what we found, and hopefully it was one-to-one with reality. We finally got our manuscript published, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I laughed and laughed until tears streamed down my face. I gripped my chair and fell to the floor. I was powerless to stop whatever was coming, but I took solace in knowing that my grip on that chair was my choice and mine alone.
My belief was far from suspended, but sheer terror still resonated through my mind. The sky was changing yet again – and this time, at an even faster rate than normal. Just as it had before, an expanse of blackness spread across the sky, replaced by an expanding band of starlight. It looked almost like oscillation, as if these titanic voids were rippling through space and time. We couldn’t possibly have known that it would occur. That being said, it would only make sense that more strange phenomena would come our way.
Just as we had before, we used the transit method as the stars of Messier 16 dimmed and brightened in a fraction of a blink of an eye. According to our observations, two more of these massive entities appeared, each one seemingly as large as the first. They were heading in the same direction as their predecessor, forming a small fleet of impossible bodies. As terrifying as these things were, I will admit: I was more than fortunate to be able to research such a captivating discovery from afar.
News reports about the ongoing observations only added pressure to our research. On top of monitoring the approaching objects, we were tasked with presenting our data in a way that would placate everyone currently panicking. Granted, it was more than understandable to be in such a state – we had all witnessed parts of the sky literally disappearing earlier this year. Sadly, each news report was as sensationalist as the last, which certainly didn’t put people at ease. It was far from our top priority, though, as I’m sure you know.
Months went by and the mysterious triad drew ever closer. Monitoring their voyage became our new routine, and – for a time – I almost accepted the entities as just another part of my daily reality. As far as I know, the world came to terms with their existence, reluctant as they may have been. Most people went back to their daily lives – after all, what more could they have done? What could any of us do, really? We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We didn’t know how to stop them. Hell, we couldn’t run, and we sure as hell didn’t have any place to hide. All we knew was that their trajectory aligned with Earth, and they sure as hell weren’t changing direction.
Some of us turned to faith in these strange times. I even found myself praying again. A few groups saw the entities as divine in nature – either sent by gods or gods themselves. Before long, fledgling cults started appearing, providing false hope of raptures and salvation to the vulnerable masses. I resented them for taking advantage of people, but then again – they were as far beyond my control as the things they worshiped.
Last night, another anomaly came knocking at the door. On March 22nd, 2023, we received an electromagnetic signal from deep space at approximately 3:19 AM, Central Standard Time. We don’t know what it means or who sent it, but we determined that it originated from the TRAPPIST-1 system – roughly 40 light-years from Earth. We have yet to translate it to anything even remotely legible, but we’re going to notify as many people as possible tomorrow. I don’t care if people panic again – I really don’t. If there is someone out there who can help us, this is how we spread the word. I don’t know if we’ll be able to decipher the message – if it can be deciphered at all. All I know is that the night sky keeps changing, and I don’t know if it’s for better or for worse.