Chapter One

Evata and Rosa started early that morning, in their home-connected labs, long before their daughter awoke. It was the life they had found themselves in, and while they might have preferred sitting on the couch and having fun with their daughter watching cartoons, the world needed them.

Or at least, that’s what Edmund always said when Halikkon tried to make accommodations for the demands that they had placed on them. “But the world needs you.”

And now that Viktoriya was eight, she was much more self-sufficient in her routines when her parents became enthralled with their commitments to Halikkon.

Being a part of the elite Halikkon scientific community was not exactly the flowery societal bliss that other scientists thought it might be.

Yes, they were independent of iNASA-Climate, but it was not as glamorous as most of their peers would have imagined.

Eva retrieved her black handbag that held the reports she had worked on so diligently and made her way toward her home lab.

She touched the bio-reader at the door, and the AI immediately greeted her. “Welcome, Eva.”

The door slid open. “How are you doing, Noxxor? Your tone sounds ‘happy’ today.”

“I am Artificial Intelligence; emotions are not how I operate. Instead, I utilize bits and lines of code. But if you are asking about my current state, I have run several debugging algorithms, searched for malware and other intrusions but have found none,” the smooth feminine voice said.

She chuckled back. “I believe that, in human language, is I’m fine.”

“I believe so, as well. If I could believe.”

She took her seat where her various comms screens lit up as she moved within range, joining the meeting in progress.

When Edmund noticed her, he said, “Oh, there she is now. Explain this, please, Eva. What we are looking at.”

“Look, it’s not rocket science!” she spoke plainly into her headset. The funny thing was, it was exactly that. Or at least partially—there were plenty of other scientific disciplines involved.

“I don’t know, Evata,” came Edmund’s voice barreling into her ears, his face stoic on her large screen.

“How many modeled simulations have you run to get to this data set?”

“One hundred fifty-eight, so far,” she sighed, running her fingers through her short hair, slicking it back onto her head.

He paused a moment before responding. “And of those one hundred fifty-eight simulations, how many displayed deviations in rotation and trajectory of Earth as shown?”

“Every single one is the same every time,” she said to the screen full of her fellow scientist’s faces.

“I’ll forward you the data models. But the TITAN effect is worse than we thought. The total mass of Earth’s atmosphere decreases in ways that we simply couldn’t imagine. We’ll hit a two percent decrease in the rotational speed in eight months, down from the zero-point-eight stall we’re already experiencing.”

“And trajectory?”

She looked down at the report she had pulled up on a different translucent digital screen hovering over her desk. “Up from one-point-nine-three to two-point-eight percent by the end of the year.”

Edmund paused. “You’re certain?”

“Yes, I’m certain.”

“Noxxor, please display holo-chart. The field for our orbit, minus eight hundred hours,” she said, rapidly tapping on the hologram buttons docked in front of her, virtually lifting them up and down. It was frustratingly impossible for her to stop adjusting the display under her fingertips and get them positioned just right.

A field appeared in the conference stream with Earth’s location and other planets, along with illuminated lines showing their respective orbital paths.

She swiped the screen, causing the image to surface on top of the prior trajectory immediately. “Zoom Earth trajectory, please… Now, please compare this trajectory overlay.”

“Bloody hell! How did this escape our TITAN simulation models? How? How did this not show up?” Edmund muttered, still in disbelief.

Evata dug her fingers into her hair so hard that she scraped her scalp, then raised her hand, pointing.

“Look, folks, gravity works. We’ve moved slightly away from the sun, and with every day that passes, we keep drifting a micro-bit further out in our trajectory orbit, slipping off our path.”

“We have to call an international meeting. This is the end of us all. We must correct this immediately,” her colleague Zho said from her area of the conference screen.

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Evata stared as Edmund’s eyes widened. She realized he did not believe the data on the holo-display. She knew well that he understood clearly what the trajectories represented, but perhaps too clearly.

Perhaps he could not bring his mind to process it all at the moment. She noticed him staring silently at the screen much longer than expected.

“Sir?”

Something visibly troubled her at the weight of what she had presented. Admittedly, she’d wondered if this may happen. If something went so awfully wrong, what would they do? Her mind flashed back to the reporter asking the exact same question.

And when she had seen the widening orbital trajectories, she knew exactly what it meant, or at least, theorized, and now what she’d feared the most might actually come to pass.

Trouble.

Coming when they were least prepared for it, but isn’t that the thing with trouble? Trouble always came when we were least prepared, hoping to take us all by surprise, it seemed.

“I think you should phone the president on this one,” she said, trying not to let her voice shake.

“Daddy!” Viktoriya shouted with all the enthusiasm of any inquisitive, excited eight-year-old.

Evata jumped in her chair, startled at the sound of her daughter’s high-pitched screech of excitement. She spun in her smart chair to make sure her girl hadn’t crept into her office—something she did on many an occasion.

Not seeing her daughter in the room, she returned her attention to the panel of her fellow researchers on the sizable, curved computer screen. They looked at her expectantly.

“Apologies, team, I’m going to go check on that. Do you mind if I take… just a moment?”

Edmund nodded from his screen as he leaned back into view. “I have already updated the president with the short version. I agree with your assessment to inform him. Be sure to send the reports and trajectories when you’re back. Aura can analyze them as a second set of eyes; send them her way. Then we’ll be ready to give the president a full disclosure if required.”

“Yes, sir,” Eva said before putting herself on mute and stopping her camera stream. She let out a long, audible sigh. While she typically loathed interruptions while she worked, she was thankful for this moment of respite.

No matter what data she assembled, Halikkon always wanted more. They couldn’t fathom that their monumental, Earth-saving project was failing.

And they surely couldn’t face the dire consequences of their failure.

After a moment’s rest, she stood and walked away from her communications station and across her large laboratory at the rear of their home. The screens, imagery, and holograms all dimmed as she moved out of range.

Her lab was clinically white and made of stainless steel in parts, and smelled of sanitizer. Everything had its place neatly tucked away—save the experiment she was conducting in her favorite fume hood.

The hood was an older model, but the one she used when she first discovered a method to enhance rocket fuel. It was a discovery that was one of the critical factors in getting the first humans to Mars. That and Rosa’s nuclear splicing discovery, which changed nuclear physics forever.

She ran her hand gracefully along the front of the relic as she walked by, smiling softly as she stepped. The sight of the old clunky machine made her feel a little nostalgic and proud.

Viktoriya yelled from what sounded like right outside of the laboratory door, “When I push these two magnets together, they fly away from each other, look!”

“Watch when I do it again! See! Look how fast they go, so far! Ha, that one flew off the table! How do they do that?”

Evata quickened her pace across the room, the insulated soles on her lab shoes squeaking with every step. She put her palm on the bio-reader and the door retracted with a hiss.

Outside the door, the father-daughter pair was indeed a scene to behold. Viktoriya sat in front of her on the windowsill of their nearly floor-to-ceiling glass panes, still her favorite spot in the house, with Rosa picking up magnets scattered across the gray hardwood floor.

“Sorry, hun,” he said, still gathering magnets. “Viktoriya and I were playing in my lab. She found these and hasn’t put them down since. Did we interrupt you?”

She smiled. “Only a little. Frankly, I’m quite happy about the respite. It is turning into quite a circus in there, and I’m worried that they are simply going to discard the data as another anomaly in the noise of the arguments going back and forth.”

He stood and walked to her, wrapping his arms around her waist to give her a quick peck.

“It’s that bad? I heard the raised voices.” She shook her head, her slicked-back hair tousling out of place.

“Quite frustrating. Edmund wants more data. He is in disbelief, perhaps shock, considering the way he gawked at the screens.”

Her husband’s big, brown eyes widened with surprise. “More data? How? I don’t understand. This is the more data. What does that even mean?”

She nodded and watched the soft lines on the face of her usually lighthearted partner become a little more complicated, his goofy demeanor fading away.

“Mostly, they don’t want to believe Earth’s rotation and trajectory are changing much from the decrease in mass. I think they have convinced themselves the variances are within normal tolerance. They truly believe TITAN’s adverse effects may slow down and will equalize. But I think Zho got it. She is worried, like oh shit worried.”

He pulled her closer. “But if they believe that—”

She sighed, knowing where her husband was going with his thoughts. “Then they certainly won’t believe our initial cooling models either.”

He pulled her into his chest, holding her tight. The tweed sweater he wore itched her cheeks a bit, but she didn’t pull away. Instead, she pulled him closer.

“Edmund has asked me to send the trajectory data and all the reports to Aura,” she said. She continued after a long pause. “That may be a good thing, you know; she’s always one to side with us.”

“Good, that’s good,” he said. “Apparently, we’ll need all the help we can get to support the data.”

They both looked toward Viktoriya, who was excited to show them her discovery with the magnets. Eva tried to disguise her watery gaze.

Viktoriya smiled wildly, sticking the magnetic pieces together and repeatedly pulling them apart.

“Look!”

“We have to do something,” she heard her husband say through her ear she had pressed to his cheek. He stroked her hair. “For our family alone, even if for no one else.”

They both gazed at their daughter, realizing that the mistakes, their mistakes, had put everyone, including their own Viktoriya, at risk. In terrible danger.

She nodded against his sweater, trying to keep her composure. He was right.

She stared out the window for a moment, noticing the trees surrounding their estate were still and somber. She thought about the saying ‘the calm before the storm’.

If the dead calm of the branches were providing a glimpse of that, she did not want to consider what the coming storm would unveil.

They would have to do something.

Even if the broader scientific community refused to listen to them.

They’d take care of it for themselves.

Because the world was cooling.

And it was cooling fast.