Chapter 1: Pōwehi
I remember when I used to think a terminal cancer diagnosis was as bad as my life could get. I ducked a flaming sword blade the size of a surfboard and shouted, “Thrombosilade!”
The air near my outstretched fingers began to wrinkle like a heat mirage on an Alabama highway in July. A sound like a thunderclap shook the castle ruins around us, followed by a sickening crunch like a giant eating kettle chips. Only the kettle chips were the bones of the elemental demon shattering due to the force spell I’d cast.
The demon reduced to trail mix, I started to check my inventory for new loot. A low-pitched hissing slithered up behind me. In the flickering torchlight, a shadow the size of a Sherman tank enveloped me. I turned to face the—and… I am getting way ahead of myself.
I knew I’d had one too many Blackwing Stouts back at The Leering Fairy. Let me back up the bus, back to before the world ended in an apocalyptic nightmare.
Terminal cancer. Yeah… good times.
[Insert Hiatus Marks]
Ready to snuff the lights, I couldn’t help glaring at the cosmic mess that had once been my living room. Aside from Gam’s 75-gallon tank, luminous with fluoresced faux Hawaiian plants, I hadn’t been kept much clean. Hadn’t always been my way, but the last six months had been… well, let’s just say mass suckage. In the universe of bad puns, that one was a monster, but I guess dead-men-walking are entitled.
I’d even let my gaming rig go. A setup like mine—dual curved monitors, backlit soundbar and subwoofer, full-sized mechanical keyboard, and a tower fit for Death Star defense—would have been impressive as hell had it not been for all the takeout bags and boxes, the invoices, bills, and other slob-mode detritus I’d not bothered to tidy up. Those monitors, once my pride and joy, had become expensive cork boards, their perimeters littered with post it notes and hung with an unkempt menagerie of convention lavaliere badges. It wasn’t just a mess. It was tragic.
Gam, short for my favorite vintage movie monster Gamera, paddled on the near side of the gargantuan tank and craned his neck like he always did when he wanted something. “Dude!” I muttered, disdaining myself for forgetting. “You need grub.” I grabbed up the flex-sealed tub of ReptoStix and gave my turtle buddy a little extra for his troubles. Gam is an adult male Cumberland slider, and he was as cool a pet as anyone should be lucky enough to own. I watched him for a few, enjoying the solace of simple pleasures, and then turned off the lights and departed for the night.
Most of the drive from my rental flat in Kailua Village to the summit of Maunakea went by in a disgruntled blur. I pulled into the lot at Keck Observatory and blinked. The whole 30 minute acclimatization stop at the Onizuka Center barely registered as a memory. Mannn, I gotta wake up. Don’t waste this.
I swiped my ID badge—Rick Tagler reporting for duty—and felt a little ice in my belly. Last night. Last chance. Either DEIMOS would reveal something for which my pitiful short life would be remembered, or I’d simply wither away, anonymous like space dust.
Before my butt could hit my workstation chair in Data Lab 9, Dr. Meredith Kinsy greeted me in her normal warm and tactful manner. “Tagler, another Friday night without a date? Poor thing.” I think she thought she was being the quirky grandma for the youngest visiting scientist. Nope, just annoying.
“I have a date with the stars,” I quipped, changing tactics on the fly by giving her a roguish wink. “And the hottest hottie in Hawaii.”
A little rose colored her powdered cheeks. “Oh, hon, you know I’m taken,” she said, a little more spring in her stiff gait. “If I was 30 years younger and had it to do over again, well… ”
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She blew me a kiss and shuffled out. I shook away a few disturbing images by getting to work. The Time Allocation Committee at Swinburne gave me the opportunity to do research at Keck, but the clock was ticking. Less than eight hours with one of the most powerful land-based telescopes in the world. Time had recently become my most treasured—and limited—commodity. I didn’t plan to waste it.
DEIMOS sounds like it should be a boss in one of games I play online, but it stands for Deep Extragalactic Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph. Basically, DEIMOS allows us to study the movement of stars and other celestial bodies. The proposal that had won me, a lowly professor of astrophysics from Down Under, this trip to Hawaii had been based on a theory. That’s a bit of a stretch. The proposal was based on a dream I’d had, a nightmare about a black hole gobbling up our solar system. Of course, I never told anyone about the dream. In astronomy, it’s all about the data, the data and what the data suggests.
In 2017, astronomers collected data from Hubble revealing that a super massive black hole was hurtling through space at 7.2 kilometers per hour. Not only was that discovery rather startling—black holes are mind-blowingly heavy and therefore move very little—but it was Conan-Doyle level mysterious. My theory was that black holes moving through space aren’t anomalies, but rather they all move, just in cycles. The “resting” black holes, I proposed, are dormant, simply waiting on some invisible clock to awaken them and begin rocketing through space. So far, DEIMOS defied me. Piles of DEIMOS data showed that, yes, some black holes moved, but very few. The one percent that did, kept traveling, but most black holes simply stayed put, churning in place and gobbling up anything that floated too near the event horizon. Very underrated movie, by the way.
I needed DEIMOS to reveal a once-stationary black hole when it first begins to accelerate. So far, no luck at all. My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I already knew who it was. It was my ex girlfriend, Sara. A dozen calls already. I left the phone in my pocket. While it was gratifying to know how much Sara cared about me and our relationship, it didn’t change anything. She didn’t understand. Heck, I don’t even know why I ended it.
The thrum of Keck 2, snapped me to work. Keck’s twin telescopes are perched on Maunakea, at 14,000 feet up, the closest land-based telescope to the stars. Along with DEIMOS and a dozen other large space acronyms, Keck boasts a world-class laser guide star adaptive optics system. Altogether, Keck had astonishing abilities and had made several astonishing discoveries. None of which had Rick Tagler attached to it as contributor.
After three hours of eye-bulging data analysis, it looked like my shift was going to end in failure. I didn’t know it at the time, but my shift was about to end in success after all… success so dreadful that I’d gladly, a thousand times over, fail ignominiously instead.
“You naughty boy,” Dr. Kinsy purred from the lab door, “did you retask 2 without getting clearance? It may well be your last night, but you really can still get into trouble.”
“Not me. I heard it adjusting but figured it was something you were doing or some other way-above-my clearance thing.”
She frowned and walked slowly into the lab. “No override orders have come in from the mainland,” she muttered. “That was the first thing I checked. Now, my interest is kindled.”
Mutely, I watched her. I don’t know why I didn’t just get back to work, but I found myself frozen in time by the inexplicable feeling that what Dr. Kinsy was about to do next needed to be observed. With a sigh of aristocratic annoyance, she sat at the workstation on the other side of the monitor bank from my own little pod. Her fingers looked like pale spiders on the keyboard. Pale jumping spiders, really, because her hands went back and forth from the keys to the touchscreens. Then, the spiders curled up, and Dr. Kinsy did something I’d never heard her do before. She cursed.
This wasn’t the run-of-the-mill s-bomb or f-bomb. Dr. Kinsy apparently dug deep into her darker nature because the phrase she uttered, apart from being physically impossible—I think—would have made a company of Marines blush.
I blurted out a startled, “What?”
“Tagler, get over here.”
Waves of gooseflesh erupting all over my body, I lunged to her side. “What am I looking at?”
“This is your area of study, isn’t it?” She pointed at some data, first on one screen and then the corresponding mathematical expression of the same on another.
“That’s not right,” I grunted. “Are you messing with me?”
Dr. Kinsy gave me a scalding, exasperated look as if to say, “Am I the sort of practical joker who would retask one of the two most important land-based telescopes in the world and then fudge numbers just to tease a young scientist?”
The goosebumps turned into rivulets of ice water running down my neck, across my shoulders, and worse still into the crevasse between my butt cheeks. The data showed the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, about 53 million light years from earth. I knew it well because Pōwehi, the black hole I’d been “watching” during my studies at Keck, had maintained a very precise and utterly vexing stationary position. Until now.
I skidded back to my workstation, yanked open a file drawer, and fished for a particular data composite. Opening the plastic-bound sheaf of prints as I scuttled back to Dr. Kinsy, I found the page I needed. My eyes ricocheted from new to old data and back again. There was no getting around the implications. Pōwehi, a supermassive black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, was gone.