Silash laid in the Observatory, trying desperately to sleep. The cold floor was a sort spot on his back. Despite this painful coolness, or perhaps because of it, he laid there in a pool of cold sweat and agonized.
He thought back to every time he'd tried to mention this event to the Upper Echelon, and it stung him like an electric dagger.
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The thronging room of the Upper Echelon was cool and damp, but it smelled unlike that at all. It smelled instead like the strongest crushing of flowers known to taumankind.
"Yes? Hello? Hello? Anyone there? Is anybody here? Is there a tauman being within my bicameral radius?"
The voice echo, echo, echoed across the tall, cavern walls of the Upper Echelon.
"No."
The five present members of the Upper Echelon stood up from their barnacle encrusted seats to stare down at the being that had dared respond to them.
"No?" asked an Upper Echelon member from within their crisp, white robes.
"Non," said the being. "Because there is more than just one of us here."
The Upper Echelon members all rolled their souring eyes in a near united synch as they realized that the being was carrying a small, yapping Pramboodle with themselves.
"You've got to be kidding me," whispered an older member of the Echelon.
"I've got something serious to tell you all about," said the being.
Gramathustra, the eldest and wisest of the five, also the one who had begrudgingly approved the meeting, groaned and banged her small little gaveling orb.
"Please, go ahead, Silash..." added the older member of the Echelon who'd been talking earlier. Their name was Zulbungha.
"You see, there is a primordial beebrilation in the spiractical ganglius of the numbilical flangsion. I've analyzed my readings in both glurps and blurpisii, and have reached a conch lushion that grasps that the arc of the convergence is in play."
"Sorry, can you say that again?" Gramathustra requested.
Zulbungha groaned.
"Absolutely, I apologize. I do feel that I went a little far with the field specific jargon there," Silash replied. His pet yipped loudly. "Basically, what's happening is that I've been noticing readings on my globerculatron that have been totally off the charts for the last three moon cycles. They come in patterns... Three bursts of energy that are higher than anything I've recorded in my decade of service to the Observatory. These energy blasts are by far the highest I've seen even among the historical data in the Observatory's archives for at least five centuries. Yes, that's right - the last time something like this was recorded was in times of the Currdling. So you have to understand why I'm so concerned. Worse still, it looks like these bursts of energy are coming from quadrant 4 alpha, about five hundred light years away from us in the separate cluster section of the space torus."
"Did he just say space torus to us?" murmured Zulbungha with an eye-roll. "I didn't know that we were here to sit and listen to fairy tales."
"The space torus is a highly accepted theorem that pervades all modern scientific thought in Nomachiato!" spouted Silash defensively. "Regardless of what your personal beliefs might be, there is real evidence that our planet indeed is but a point in an enormous space torus with no real end or beginning!"
"Planets... space toruses... this is just getting ridiculous..."
"Zulbungha, please try to take me seriously," Silash said. "This is real science we're talking about here."
"Why can't we talk about something reasonable, like magic? Do I need to use my system to turn you into a newt or something so that you can stop bugging us?"
"Zulbungha," groaned Gramathustra with a strained look, "Regardless of our opinions, or how often Silash has come here with different... observations... it is our duty as members of the Upper Echelon to hear him out. We don't have to believe him, but we do have to listen to him."
"Fine."
Silash felt his lower right eyelid twitch a little. These were the Upper Echelon, how could they be so... distracted and annoyed? Sure, he'd had a few bad readings before, but this clearly a legitimate cause for concern! He argued further that the bursts of energy signified some sort of a release from time, and possibly the movement of some large entity of indeterminate power levels. The Echelons seemed to think this was absurd, and even Gramathustra cracked a smile under the dense living wood over her face.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
"I'm just relaying what my readings are demonstrating," said Silash. "And furthermore, something actually came out of one of these readings, too. There seems to be some large object headed our way as we speak!"
"Headed our way? How would you know?" Zulbungha looked like she was so bored that wanted to tear off her hands and eat them.
"Like I said, I've been recording the bursts of energy with tools at the Observatory for several moon cycles now. I have my readings with me." Silash pulled out a large, manilla file folder. A slew of papers immediately tumbled out, spilling over the floor in a haphazard mess. "Oh, wow, terribly sorry about that. Um, but it's all here." He scrambled to pick them all up. "Yes, all here in this folder."
"And this... large object... is it related to the bursts of energy?" Gramathustra asked, gesturing with her hands as if to by effect move the conversation along at an increased tempo.
"There is no way to be certain, but what I can say is that I first noticed it directly after one of the large energy surges."
"Wait a second now," said Dhilbergarth, raising a finger encrusted with living wood. He then stroked his beard, satisfied when everyone was looking to him. "Silash, you said that this... energy... you observed was coming in bursts, but now you've called them surges. Which one is it? I want to be certain we're actually understanding what's being told here, and if everything doesn't entirely line up, well, then, how are we supposed to-"
"I would categorize them as surge bursts if I were to be perfectly technical," said Silash. "I do apologize."
Zulbungha groaned. "Look, Silash, is there anything you want from us? What exactly are we supposed to do?"
"Well, first of all, I think we need to look into how we will handle the impact of whatever this large object is. From my projections, it's headed right toward Nomachiato and will make impact on our surface dangerously close to downtown Gifflenberg."
"Of course it will, that's what your readings always seem to say," said Zulbungha. "It makes me wonder if they always read that way because the Observatory is so close to downtown Gifflenberg. Makes me think that maybe some faulty readings are at play. I mean, remember, what, only five or so moon cycles ago? The interdimensional rift portal?"
"This is different than the portal!" Silash purported. with frustration. "This is a real phenomenon only once recorded since!"
"Well of course. Just like the portal was different than the shifting currents in the sun that were going to cause a large ray of lasers to melt half of Nomachiato down, right?"
"There was just a slightly above average probability of that happening than normal, Zulbungha! That genuinely was a different situation! I'm saying that, unless all of my readings from three moon cycles are completely wrong, then we only have a few more moon cycles before an enormous extraterrestrial mass collides with our planet! This is a serious threat to public safety, and if we cannot think of a way to divert or halt this mass, then we'll need to consider evacuating downtown Gifflenberg!"
"...This again..." Even Gramathustra was getting very over this conversation. "Listen, Silash, we know that you're a very intelligent and knowledgeable scientist. But if we evacuated Gifflenberg every time you had some funky readings in the Observatory, well... there would never be any people living in Gifflenberg. Just a moon cycle ago you were very concerned about those space worms coming to infect us, and what happened there?"
"That was different, they got diverted by intergalactic weather patterns!"
"Well, who's to say that the same won't happen with this large... mass that you keep referring to? How do we know that something won't miraculously come and prevent it from making impact?"
"But that's no way to make public policy! Peoples' lives are at stake here!"
Zulbungha sighed. "Silash, we're sorry, but we just don't think that we can get behind following your every whim here. We're the Upper Echelon. You are a valuable scientist who does important work but we cannot trust that you have not made a mistake. Generally, your work at the Observatory is more important from a historical perspective, as in, it is more important for you to record the data than it is for you to interpret it. That can be done after the fact, after time has passed and the effects can be properly gauged."
"But the Observatory machinery does most of the recording automatically! And then I file the papers and scrolls, and I parse and read through it! I have to interpret it, what else would I do?"
"I don't know, read a book or something." Zulbungha shrugged. "Either way, you can't just keep coming up here an bugging us like this, even if it is our duty to hear you out in states of emergency, there have been far too many false positives for us to take all of this at face value. I'm sorry, but that's just the way that it is."
Silash bristled with frustration. "You're going to regret this!"
"That better not be a threat, Silash."
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Silash was suddenly filled with a jolt of fear. This better not be a threat. Was there a possibility that the Upper Echelon would think that he had something to do with the disaster that had happened today? Was this going to be an extreme case of shooting the messenger, wherein the person trying to warn others of impending doom instead gets blamed as the perpetrator? Originally, he'd been thinking about how vindicating it would to see the looks on their faces when the Upper Echelon realized he was right about the space mass, but now as he remembered their conversations over and over again, he became deathly afraid that he might become an unexpected scapegoat.
And then, he heard a terrible, booming knock on the Observatory door. He decided to ignore it and stay sitting on the ground. Maybe whoever it was would go away?
Another knocking, more forceful this time. It sounded almost violent.
Silash looked around in the dark for a blunt object, or a knife. He didn't know who was at the door, or what was really happening. But if someone was coming for him, he wasn't going down without a fight.