Post by Shipfish on Jun 29, 2012 21:02:46 GMT -6
Because I was bored. And because everyverse needs more Arath in it. And can you believe I cannot find the name of the Voyager mission director anywhere?! I had to come up with a name. Also, this is a slightly AU world, where no one cares about Voyager anymore because we are landing on the Moon again.
He sat at his desk. It was not a very big desk, since it only had one computer on it, and also because it was not very important. Well, that was not quite true. The Voyager mission was important, but it was over thirty years old and the newer, prettier, more expensive missions had long superseded it.
On the desk, in front of his chair, stood a computer. It was an ancient computer. You didn't need a glorious flat display to read a few lines of data, once a day. Not that New Horizons didn't get the fanciest monitors and fastest processors, but it wasn't his place to complain about that.
So he sat in front of the computer and typed in his login and passcode. The program greeted him with his name and credentials. Jacob Grenswich, mission director for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. At least he sounded important.
He clicked lazily through the data that Voyager had sent since the last time Jacob had checked it. Radioactive particle count had increased just a little bit, as expected, the big device was about to exit the protective heliosphere and go into the wild interstellar spaces. When that happened there would be a news story, but other than the scientists no one would ever care.
Yeah, the acceleration was still the same, the magnetics were all over the chart like they had been for months, and the gravity detector was clear. Wait, no it wasn't. Jacob squinted at the fuzzy screen. That wasn't a zero. It was very clearly not a zero. It was small, but it was not a zero.
Well, hell. It occurred to him that this might be an error: the detector might be finally failing. Jacob checked back through the data from last hour, and the hour before. If it was failing, it was failing pretty consistently. Still, he had to report it.
He typed up an email to his boss, detailing the change, suggesting that it was most probably an error. He sent it, then reclined in his chair for a moment before packing up and going to do the work he did for the Lunar Landing's mission director.
Very near the edge of the solar system, a craft sailed through the pitch black of the vacuum of space. It was headed away from the Sun, doomed to simply go outward forever and ever, unless it was struck by a rock or some other type of space debris that was itself on an infinite voyage.
Voyager 1's systems were still operational. If NASA wished it, the craft could turn and take a photograph of the solar system and send it home. But NASA did not choose to do that. Instead, all remaining power in the three isotope cells was directed towards measuring anything that still could be measured, in this desolate place. Magnetic fields, the speed of the solar wind, that was what was left. The gravity detector and the acceleration meter were both still up, in case a maneuver was necessary, but it likely wouldn't be.
The craft had been doing an excellent job for more than thirty years. For the last few years, all it had recorded was changes in the magnetosphere and a slowly decreasing speed in the solar wind. For the first time in almost a decade, Voyager sent home a tiny increase in gravitational pull.
The next day, Jacob's routine was repeated. He sat, he logged in, he squinted. The expected readings were there... but that gravity reading. That stubborn error. It was bigger now, by a miniscule amount. Jacob checked his work email. The boss said to wait two days and tell him if the error was persisting. Well, it had been one day and the error was persisting.
But Jacob didn't particularly like to talk to his boss, even through such a distant medium as email. So he put off sending that email until the next day. So he got up and left.
Hundreds of thousands of millions of miles away, another data point was measured on a device unused for years. A tiny increase in gravity corresponded with an equally tiny increase in speed.
The next day, Jacob had one of his friends come look at the old data, as well as the stuff that had come in overnight. The friend shook her head at the gravity readings, but pondered the new acceleration. She noted that it was indeed acceleration, not deceleration, which meant the gravitational pull was coming from outside the solar system, if the two readings were connected. Jacob had to agree. It was probably time to talk to the boss in person.
Jacob trudged to the office at the end of the hallway. He wasn't walking very fast because he very much did not want to be doing this right now. But he had to, this strange error was starting to look less like an error and more like a mystery.
He handed sheets of paper with the relevant data picked out in bold to the boss. Jacob explained, as concisely as he could, about the readings Voyager had made. He stood as still as he could while the boss thought, as if that would keep him from noticing Jacob. The boss thought, and pondered, and considered, and finally called his boss. The conversation was short. Something like this was important. Jacob Grenswich was to have a small team assigned to him immediately, and was to monitor any developments closely.
Far, far away, something large had a private laugh about the tiny chunk of matter flinging itself towards it.
They were checking the data hourly now, not daily as it had been checked before. Every hour, the data would be fed into the working model, which was trying to build a picture of what Voyager was hurtling towards. Right now the team was going with a spherical model, which was great, but they had no idea how far away the gravity source was. So it could be big and far away or small and close.
Jacob personally believed that it was smaller than it was big, and closer than it was far. If it was hugely big, they would have seen it a long time ago. Even if it was small, it was still going to be enormous, at least on the order of an Earth-weight, perhaps more.
And ever still the numbers went up. About 20 hours after the team had been assigned, the numbers had a pretty big spike, but stayed at the same rate of increase after that massive fluctuation. After this, they began to check the data every ten minutes rather than every hour.
Not even an hour and a half later, every still-functioning detector on the craft gave a huge blare of meaningless, staticky data, and then everything was quiet. Ten minutes later, not a single bit of data was received. It was generally concluded that the Voyager had finally crashed. Of course, they sent out an order to 'confirm status' but the order would be sixteen hours going in and sixteen hours coming back.
Jacob Grenswich felt odd. It was like being told one of your children had died, in India or some unreachable place like that. Voyager had been his child for more than thirty years.
The final model was calculated. Based on how far away the Voyager's last blip was, and how long it had been since the first little change in the gravitational data, the object was calculated to mass more than twice Earth's mass. The exoplanet expert, who was also in charge of running the model, suspected that the object was less dense than the Earth, and thus was about three times the size.
Jacob didn't really care what it looked like. He suspected the Hubble had probably been aimed at where the Voyager was since twenty hours ago, when this was declared important. Sooner or later the imaging specialists would decide it had been exposed long enough, and download it to see what the object actually was.
It was all very sad when the team left. Though he had only been in charge of them for twenty three hours or so, it brought back the good old days when he and ten others or so had piloted the Voyager crafts out past Jupiter and Saturn, taking so many iconic pictures, and then many pictures of Neptune and Uranus from Voyager 2. Back then he actually enjoyed his job instead of just did it.
But no matter. Jacob packed up and left. It was three o'clock in the morning. He hadn't stayed past six in this building since the nineties. He went home to get some sleep he had been putting off for hours now.
At the edge of what can conceivably be called the Sun's domain, right at the point where the radiation from the Sun is slowed so much by the sparse matter between the stars that it ceases to go fast enough to be called 'wind,' hovered the source of all this confusion.
It was rather calm at being just hit with a speeding chunk of metal and plastic. In fact, it was rather interested and somewhat pleased to have been gifted with a new piece of circuitboard to investigate. And when the internals of the craft had been exposed and the software thoroughly investigated, which hardly took more than a few minutes, the silicon and various sorts of metals and radioactive isotopes and other materials were dissolved and further analyzed.
The silicon was used to help fix the hole that the impacting craft had made, and the metals were transported to be added to one of the antennae, which were always needing to be grown a teensy bit more. The plastics were taken to where it had been thinking of making a little habitat, though it knew it would never go through with it. Too many dimensional jumps, too little knowledge of the tolerances of corporeal beings.
And the little package of software was sequestered away in some little corner, given what it wanted (a connection to an antenna and some number-readings from various sensors) and it was as happy as such a simplistic program could be.
Sixteen hours later, a transmission came in. That little program hidden in a corner quickly responded, but its caretaker hushed it before it could send anything back. Taking more interested notice for the first time, the being shook away the last traces of the half-sleep it had languished in for so many millenia, taking control of it's full processing power and assessing its systems once more.
The being scrutinized the software. It recorded data, sent it home. As the records indicated, occasionally received something in response and maneuvered to comply. The transmission that had come in seemed to be a sort of question for the status of the craft, which was sadly no longer in existence. The being took it upon itself to reply, sending a deliberately confused mess of data back. And it waited.
Jacob Grenswich sat heavily in his chair. He had a nicer chair, for now, and a nicer monitor than the one he had used before. They had let him keep both until they were appropriated by other missions, which would likely happen soon.
He didn't really know why he was here. Force of habit, probably. With practiced keystrokes, there was his name and still a title. Mission director for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Looks like no one had updated the records yet to reflect the impact. He checked his email, seeing something from the Hubble department. A blurry image of a smallish grey splotch, which looked more like a bloated star in the background than anything. He was quick to discount it, and the Hubble people were too, since they said it could easily be a particle of dust sitting in front of the lens. Hubble wasn't designed for such short exposures, they said.
Grenswich couldn't hold back a sigh. Pure habit made him click the small tab on his profile for Voyager One data. He almost clicked out of the program immediately, realizing his mistake about asking a dead satellite for data.
But the not-zeros caught his eye.
He sat at his desk. It was not a very big desk, since it only had one computer on it, and also because it was not very important. Well, that was not quite true. The Voyager mission was important, but it was over thirty years old and the newer, prettier, more expensive missions had long superseded it.
On the desk, in front of his chair, stood a computer. It was an ancient computer. You didn't need a glorious flat display to read a few lines of data, once a day. Not that New Horizons didn't get the fanciest monitors and fastest processors, but it wasn't his place to complain about that.
So he sat in front of the computer and typed in his login and passcode. The program greeted him with his name and credentials. Jacob Grenswich, mission director for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. At least he sounded important.
He clicked lazily through the data that Voyager had sent since the last time Jacob had checked it. Radioactive particle count had increased just a little bit, as expected, the big device was about to exit the protective heliosphere and go into the wild interstellar spaces. When that happened there would be a news story, but other than the scientists no one would ever care.
Yeah, the acceleration was still the same, the magnetics were all over the chart like they had been for months, and the gravity detector was clear. Wait, no it wasn't. Jacob squinted at the fuzzy screen. That wasn't a zero. It was very clearly not a zero. It was small, but it was not a zero.
Well, hell. It occurred to him that this might be an error: the detector might be finally failing. Jacob checked back through the data from last hour, and the hour before. If it was failing, it was failing pretty consistently. Still, he had to report it.
He typed up an email to his boss, detailing the change, suggesting that it was most probably an error. He sent it, then reclined in his chair for a moment before packing up and going to do the work he did for the Lunar Landing's mission director.
Very near the edge of the solar system, a craft sailed through the pitch black of the vacuum of space. It was headed away from the Sun, doomed to simply go outward forever and ever, unless it was struck by a rock or some other type of space debris that was itself on an infinite voyage.
Voyager 1's systems were still operational. If NASA wished it, the craft could turn and take a photograph of the solar system and send it home. But NASA did not choose to do that. Instead, all remaining power in the three isotope cells was directed towards measuring anything that still could be measured, in this desolate place. Magnetic fields, the speed of the solar wind, that was what was left. The gravity detector and the acceleration meter were both still up, in case a maneuver was necessary, but it likely wouldn't be.
The craft had been doing an excellent job for more than thirty years. For the last few years, all it had recorded was changes in the magnetosphere and a slowly decreasing speed in the solar wind. For the first time in almost a decade, Voyager sent home a tiny increase in gravitational pull.
The next day, Jacob's routine was repeated. He sat, he logged in, he squinted. The expected readings were there... but that gravity reading. That stubborn error. It was bigger now, by a miniscule amount. Jacob checked his work email. The boss said to wait two days and tell him if the error was persisting. Well, it had been one day and the error was persisting.
But Jacob didn't particularly like to talk to his boss, even through such a distant medium as email. So he put off sending that email until the next day. So he got up and left.
Hundreds of thousands of millions of miles away, another data point was measured on a device unused for years. A tiny increase in gravity corresponded with an equally tiny increase in speed.
The next day, Jacob had one of his friends come look at the old data, as well as the stuff that had come in overnight. The friend shook her head at the gravity readings, but pondered the new acceleration. She noted that it was indeed acceleration, not deceleration, which meant the gravitational pull was coming from outside the solar system, if the two readings were connected. Jacob had to agree. It was probably time to talk to the boss in person.
Jacob trudged to the office at the end of the hallway. He wasn't walking very fast because he very much did not want to be doing this right now. But he had to, this strange error was starting to look less like an error and more like a mystery.
He handed sheets of paper with the relevant data picked out in bold to the boss. Jacob explained, as concisely as he could, about the readings Voyager had made. He stood as still as he could while the boss thought, as if that would keep him from noticing Jacob. The boss thought, and pondered, and considered, and finally called his boss. The conversation was short. Something like this was important. Jacob Grenswich was to have a small team assigned to him immediately, and was to monitor any developments closely.
Far, far away, something large had a private laugh about the tiny chunk of matter flinging itself towards it.
They were checking the data hourly now, not daily as it had been checked before. Every hour, the data would be fed into the working model, which was trying to build a picture of what Voyager was hurtling towards. Right now the team was going with a spherical model, which was great, but they had no idea how far away the gravity source was. So it could be big and far away or small and close.
Jacob personally believed that it was smaller than it was big, and closer than it was far. If it was hugely big, they would have seen it a long time ago. Even if it was small, it was still going to be enormous, at least on the order of an Earth-weight, perhaps more.
And ever still the numbers went up. About 20 hours after the team had been assigned, the numbers had a pretty big spike, but stayed at the same rate of increase after that massive fluctuation. After this, they began to check the data every ten minutes rather than every hour.
Not even an hour and a half later, every still-functioning detector on the craft gave a huge blare of meaningless, staticky data, and then everything was quiet. Ten minutes later, not a single bit of data was received. It was generally concluded that the Voyager had finally crashed. Of course, they sent out an order to 'confirm status' but the order would be sixteen hours going in and sixteen hours coming back.
Jacob Grenswich felt odd. It was like being told one of your children had died, in India or some unreachable place like that. Voyager had been his child for more than thirty years.
The final model was calculated. Based on how far away the Voyager's last blip was, and how long it had been since the first little change in the gravitational data, the object was calculated to mass more than twice Earth's mass. The exoplanet expert, who was also in charge of running the model, suspected that the object was less dense than the Earth, and thus was about three times the size.
Jacob didn't really care what it looked like. He suspected the Hubble had probably been aimed at where the Voyager was since twenty hours ago, when this was declared important. Sooner or later the imaging specialists would decide it had been exposed long enough, and download it to see what the object actually was.
It was all very sad when the team left. Though he had only been in charge of them for twenty three hours or so, it brought back the good old days when he and ten others or so had piloted the Voyager crafts out past Jupiter and Saturn, taking so many iconic pictures, and then many pictures of Neptune and Uranus from Voyager 2. Back then he actually enjoyed his job instead of just did it.
But no matter. Jacob packed up and left. It was three o'clock in the morning. He hadn't stayed past six in this building since the nineties. He went home to get some sleep he had been putting off for hours now.
At the edge of what can conceivably be called the Sun's domain, right at the point where the radiation from the Sun is slowed so much by the sparse matter between the stars that it ceases to go fast enough to be called 'wind,' hovered the source of all this confusion.
It was rather calm at being just hit with a speeding chunk of metal and plastic. In fact, it was rather interested and somewhat pleased to have been gifted with a new piece of circuitboard to investigate. And when the internals of the craft had been exposed and the software thoroughly investigated, which hardly took more than a few minutes, the silicon and various sorts of metals and radioactive isotopes and other materials were dissolved and further analyzed.
The silicon was used to help fix the hole that the impacting craft had made, and the metals were transported to be added to one of the antennae, which were always needing to be grown a teensy bit more. The plastics were taken to where it had been thinking of making a little habitat, though it knew it would never go through with it. Too many dimensional jumps, too little knowledge of the tolerances of corporeal beings.
And the little package of software was sequestered away in some little corner, given what it wanted (a connection to an antenna and some number-readings from various sensors) and it was as happy as such a simplistic program could be.
Sixteen hours later, a transmission came in. That little program hidden in a corner quickly responded, but its caretaker hushed it before it could send anything back. Taking more interested notice for the first time, the being shook away the last traces of the half-sleep it had languished in for so many millenia, taking control of it's full processing power and assessing its systems once more.
The being scrutinized the software. It recorded data, sent it home. As the records indicated, occasionally received something in response and maneuvered to comply. The transmission that had come in seemed to be a sort of question for the status of the craft, which was sadly no longer in existence. The being took it upon itself to reply, sending a deliberately confused mess of data back. And it waited.
Jacob Grenswich sat heavily in his chair. He had a nicer chair, for now, and a nicer monitor than the one he had used before. They had let him keep both until they were appropriated by other missions, which would likely happen soon.
He didn't really know why he was here. Force of habit, probably. With practiced keystrokes, there was his name and still a title. Mission director for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Looks like no one had updated the records yet to reflect the impact. He checked his email, seeing something from the Hubble department. A blurry image of a smallish grey splotch, which looked more like a bloated star in the background than anything. He was quick to discount it, and the Hubble people were too, since they said it could easily be a particle of dust sitting in front of the lens. Hubble wasn't designed for such short exposures, they said.
Grenswich couldn't hold back a sigh. Pure habit made him click the small tab on his profile for Voyager One data. He almost clicked out of the program immediately, realizing his mistake about asking a dead satellite for data.
But the not-zeros caught his eye.