Oxygen Leaks

Sascha Engel

After teaching higher education in the U.S. for a few years, Sascha Engel now lives in Cork City, Ireland. His fiction and non-fiction work has been published in academic as well as literary venues. Sascha is the editor of Strukturriss, a journal focusing on experimental fiction and poetry.

Quarantine

Thursday, April 2nd, 2020 original fiction by Sascha Engel (a 19 minutes read)
SHARE THIS STORY
   
photo of Sascha Engel. image credit: Bing AI image generator
image credit: Bing AI image generator

-1-


‐ So when was this?

‐ Well it must’ve been a few weeks after the celebration... You know, the signal takes a while and so does our processing... And that was before the satellite networks started acting up...

‐ Celebration?

‐ Yes, so, you probably remember, there was this big announcement. I think the New York Times, or maybe it was the Post? Anyway, one of them called it ‘breathtaking’, and I remember there were plenty greetings and congratulations from all over the globe... And Ed, that’s Ed Stone, the guy we asked to do the announcement, Ed was incredibly excited. But of course you have to play it safe, right, so we only said we’d reached new regions, or something like that...

‐ Could you elaborate please? And maybe go back to...

‐ The beginning? Oh fine, alright... So do you know what the Heliosheath is?

‐ I read the dossier but to be honest, not really...

‐ Right, yeah, it’s a bit difficult to wrap your head around. So one of the things people usually don’t know, right, and why would they... is that we’re actually inside of the sun’s atmosphere, so to speak. It’s not made of the same stuff as ours, obviously...

‐ You mean oxygen?

‐ That, yeah, but mostly nitrogen. And there’s a lot of other stuff there too... But anyway, the sun’s atmosphere isn’t something you can breathe in, obviously. It’s actually... we’re actually protected from it by our own atmosphere, you know?

‐ So is it radiation? Or like the new northern lights everywhere?

‐ Well sort of, that’s part of what’s going on there, although the northern lights aren’t really... Anyway, so the sun has an atmosphere, right, and it goes far beyond Neptune or Pluto but it’s still within the debris we’ve found out there, like the Oort cloud or Seadna... And we call that the Heliosphere. It’s mostly plasma, solar plasma, and magnetic winds. Sometimes when the winds get really bad they disrupt our satellites and other communication...

‐ Yes we have some very recent experience with that, I believe.

‐ Yeah you would have, alright. If that’s what this is... I can barely hear anyone on the phone anymore, that’s how bad the solar storms have gotten... The solar wind ebbs and flows as plasma, so to speak. The sun sends out ionized atoms from its corona...

‐ Is that the...

‐ The outermost part, yeah. The part we can see, actually. And one of the side effects is actually the heat that we get on Earth, you know, so we’re protected by our atmosphere but the sun’s rays still reach us, just in a fairly harmless form...

‐ And then they go on further?

‐ Well, not through Earth generally but yes, way further, all the way to Pluto and even beyond, you know, not quite to the Oort cloud but out to a lot of debris way out on the edge of the solar system, still held there by the sun...

‐ That’s incredible.

‐ Absolutely! So when Voyager 1 reached the Heliopause...

‐ What’s that now?

‐ Heliopause. Spell it with... Yeah, like that. The Heliopause is where the solar plasma hits interstellar plasma...

‐ They collide?

‐ Yeah, sort of. Think of it the same way a comet looks, right? The sun sends out all this plasma, all these particles, and they go in all directions at the same time, I mean why wouldn’t they, right? There’s nothing but the planets and a bit of debris in the Heliosphere to stop them... But then that plasma movement only goes to a certain point. Beyond that point there’s a different kind of medium, different, you know, kinds of radiation and plasma and all that, and the two, I guess, collide. And where they collide or sort of mingle, it’s a big zone, right, so this isn’t like you’d hit a wall or anything... That zone is the Heliopause.

‐ OK, and why a comet?

‐ Well if you think of it, right, the solar system is sort of moving through a soup of radiation, you know, plasma from other stars... Think of Supernovae, the explosions of dying stars, and those, you know, send out huge amounts of plasma and this happens everywhere all the time throughout the Milky Way... So the solar system, the Heliosphere, is moving through that.

‐ Around the galaxy?

‐ Exactly, the Milky Way. So the plasma from the sun has a much harder time going in the same direction as the sun than the other direction, right? Like a car, there’s wind coming from the front but you can send stuff flying behind you.

‐ I think I follow.

‐ So the sun’s plasma and interstellar particles collide, right, and because the sun goes in a specific direction, the plasma is concentrated on one end, sort of pushed towards the sun, and on the other is goes flying into space without any issues... So the Heliopause looks a bit like a comet, with a tail in the back and a compressed zone in the front...

‐ Alright, okay, but let’s get back to... You said the celebrations were for...

‐ For leaving the Heliosphere. We noticed for a while that Voyager 1 was sending data that was consistent, you know, with the idea that we’re all in the sun’s atmosphere... You know, that hadn’t been a thing before! So that’s really exciting. There are all these particles that it measured, for years and years and years... But then suddenly after 2010 we’d noticed that Voyager’s sensors were being hit with particles with a lot more energy than the ones from the sun!

‐ And that was...

‐ Those were the interstellar particles I mentioned earlier. They have a lot more energy than the sun’s plasma... And we noticed these increased steadily and the sun’s plasma reduced... So that was really exciting already but then suddenly the low-energy particle percentage dropped, I mean, look at the data series, it goes from above twenty-four particles per second before August 2012, right, here, see how it drops to ten, eight, here, and then suddenly to four or less, and stays that way?

‐ So that was when...

‐ That was when Voyager 1 left the sun’s atmosphere and entered interstellar space. And that’s also when... Well I assume that’s why we’re here, the ‘current situation’ I think you called it, that’s when that began, too.


-2-


‐ So when was this?

‐ We would say a few cycles after the quarantine came into effect... Maybe three or four? No more than five, we know that, because the transition directives were still in force after 117-B. The Council was still under lots of pressure and so we changed the emerging planets policy...

‐ Can you give some more details about the quarantine?

‐ Oh, the usual procedure, you know, with the changes we’d applied ever since the 117-B case turned sour... The new policy changed the order and severity of some  measures relative to how it was before that, but operationally, a lot of it was more or less the same. And this one did seem to be a fairly standard solar system, after all... The patterns we received weren’t out of the ordinary at all, the usual electromagnetic chatter...

‐ What are the differences between the approach to this system and the approach to 117-B?

‐ Well, primarily, we’d been set on total non-interference. In 117-B, you see, we had sent probes with and without visibility protection and done all kinds of infiltration into the dominant species, but that didn’t end so well, did it?

‐ Perhaps not. But...

‐ We mean, far be it from us to criticize...

‐ The Council does welcome constructive criticism.

‐ We’re sure it does... The point is, 117-B hinged largely on hovering close by the dominant species, with satellites and all kinds of other surveillance equipment, and if we recall correctly, there had even been invasions...

‐ Reconnaissance missions.

‐ Right, yes. Of course. So we were involved early on, whether this was in a civilizing role or maybe as points of contact or something like that, we were there. So eventually the dominant species found out what we really are.

‐ Leading to...?

‐ Well fast-tracking this sort of thing might be cheap for the Council but...

‐ Please keep your criticism constructive.

‐ Well, with 117-B... Policy says to follow the standard civilizing curve by introducing universal cultural norms well after local ones, say a few hundred planetary cycles after, right? We remember we were told that this policy was designed for the protection of the dominant species, to prevent jumping too far too quickly... But we mean, it’s also clear this was to protect ourselves...

‐ How so?

‐ Well if the dominant species is busy among themselves, infiltration would be more feasible...

‐ Reconnaissance.

‐ Yes, yes, of course.

‐ And 117-B?

‐ They ended up figuring things out far too quickly. It’s always a risk to underestimate emerging planets. Too many non-local developmental pushes, too hasty a program, and some of the probes were all too obvious... How could we disguise them as asteroids or gods or whatever the developmental state required if they were quite literally visible in the dominant planet’s atmosphere... In any case, the dominant species found out and our program... Collapsed we suppose is the way to phrase it, with the dominant species subsequently removed from its planet.

‐ Indeed. So, what changed after 117-B, what was different this time?

‐ Different to 117-B... Well, like we said, total non-interference. We stayed well clear of anything concerning the dominant species this time. They need time to figure things out, we said... We mean, the standard civilizing curve is our own, right? We ourselves had needed time too, right? So, the new policy was: no interventions, no need to teach them more than absolutely necessary, and the normal curve points to...

‐ You were certain it applied here?

‐ Absolutely. With a star classified in the II-B band, like this one, the general curve is entirely sufficient to predict civilizational developments of dominant species. As it was in this case, you know, they switched between dominant metals as predicted, developed plant-based symbiosis as predicted, discovered nutritional advantages of symbiosis with non-dominant motile species early on... Although this one did take a bit longer to find the disadvantages... But it’s still within the usual curve.

‐ Technologically, yes. Socio-culturally...

‐ Which is exactly why we made a point not to interfere this time. We just set up the usual defensive measures to ensure quarantine. As far as we know, nobody ventured inside and we certainly never sent any probes, disguised or otherwise.

‐ And then what occurred?

‐ Well...

‐ Please do feel free to state your view. Criticism is always...

‐ Oh, yes, that’s not it. It’s just...

‐ Just what?

‐ We’re not actually too sure. Suddenly... something went wrong.

‐ Can you give more details?

‐ Well the alarm was caused entirely unexpectedly... We didn’t anticipate this particular issue at all...

‐ What issue would that be?

‐ Well... We suppose there’s no better way to put this... Entirely unexpectedly, the dominant species started attacking the quarantine.


-3-


‐ What happened when Voyager left the... what do you call it?

‐ Heliosphere. But... I don’t know, you tell me.

‐ What do you mean?

‐ Well I mean I don’t even know what’s going on with all the outages and all that. Why are we talking about Voyager when...

‐ What do you mean you don’t know about the outages?

‐ I mean do any of you even know...

‐ A lot of it is classified. But I mean it’s no secret we’ve lost contact with the ISS and that the sky won’t stop lighting up...

‐ Yeah that’s all the space debris coming down.

‐ And you’ve seen yourself, not only can we barely hear the Chinese and Russians telling us of course everything’s fine on their end but...

‐ It’s the whole network, right? All the cellphone outages and TV and Internet... And all the credit cards and ATMs... The solar winds are really... Is that why we’re here? You think it’s connected to...

‐ I couldn’t possibly say.

‐ Right, but surely you...

‐ Let’s focus on your statement. So when Voyager left...

‐ We were elated, I can tell you that much. It was thus huge occasion, everyone was there... I think maybe Ed spoke to the president? I don’t remember, there was so much going on... The data was there, exactly as predicted, you know, the solar wind velocity drops to almost zero and there’s a sort of pummeling by the interstellar medium, everything exactly as predicted. So that was great! But then...

‐ Then what?

‐ You know full well what happened. We lost the signal.

‐ Please, I’m just here to get the facts. Why was it unusual for you to lose the signal? Hadn’t it been incredibly weak anyway?

‐ Yeah it had... But it wouldn’t suddenly stop like that!

‐ Why is that?

‐ Well so it was weak, alright. Really, really weak. When Voyager 1 sends its data, it’s about the energy of a light bulb. That’s a comparison you can quote me on, NASA actually has it on their homepage... and this sort of dissipates and it takes... I think now it’d be seventeen hours or so for Voyager’s signal to get to Earth, and then when we get it it’s dozens of zeroes behind the comma, you know, that’s how weak it is. But we still get it. It’s still there. Or I guess we used to get it. So we would have to wait for it. And then you can’t just measure the plasma drop I showed you earlier and say, oh, cool, this is interstellar space... You have to have something to hang your hat on, right? So we had to wait for a solar flare to reach the Heliopause... that was in 2012 and we got the data and it was announced in 2013... So this all takes a good long while. But the signal was there, it was still sending stuff... You know, like it’s out there, all by itself, and it’s been working for so long... But still it sent us stuff, all the time. And Voyager 2 did too, and Pioneer 10...

‐ Are these the other spacecraft involved in the incident?

‐ Yes, those and maybe one or two others. There are very few man-made objects that’ll escape the sun, you know? Like, maybe five in total. Or so we thought.

‐ What makes you say that?

‐ It looks like they won’t get out, that’s for sure.

‐ Why is that?

‐ Well, like I said, the signal from Voyager 1 suddenly stopped. But before it did that we received this... This really weird communication.

‐ What was it?

‐ Well we’re not entirely sure... But, you know how we measure radiation with the probe, and that’s the way we can tell where they are?

‐ Yes.

‐ Well right before the signal stopped we received a reading that was so strange, we couldn’t really... It didn’t make any sense.

‐ In what way?

‐ Well first off, it was a type of plasma we’d never seen before. Far denser than anything Voyager had ever sent to us, but still recognizably interstellar. See this curve? See how it moves, here, around one point seven cosmic particles per second in October 2011 and all the way to here, June 2012, then up, along here, crossing two per second by August, right, and then in October we’ve got between two point two and two point four at all times... But now see this, here, it suddenly goes to two point seven, three, three point four, and then breaks off... Completely. And it’s an energy outburst of a type we wouldn’t expect out there at all... See this here? A huge amount, there, it goes from expected background radiation here, and way off the chart over here... I could show you more...

‐ What do you conclude from this?

‐ Well, I mean...

‐ You can give it to me straight. We’re here for the facts.

‐ Yeah, the facts... To be honest, the only possibility that’s completely consistent with this data is a bit... Well, speculative...

‐ And that is?

‐ Voyager 1 must have encountered some sort of... barrier...

‐ Barrier?

‐ Yeah, like some sort of threshold of radiation we weren’t aware of... And that barrier killed the probe.


-4-


‐ Can you specify what you mean by ‘attack’?

‐ Well, see, it’s a bit tricky... We’re not entirely sure what type of attack it was... Or if it was one... We mean it wasn’t anticipated at all. The technology was there for the dominant species, sure, they had moved on to the carbon age... Hadn’t yet discovered solar wind riding... So they had all the issues of a civilization at that stage, synthetic overload, planetary warming, all those things... And satisfyingly, introducing the usual global cultural movements had succeeded but had not been able to remove local conflicts... Which is satisfying, you know, because there was a balance slowing them down a bit, just the right amount, the same as ours was before unification and expansion, and it seemed to ensure the quarantine measures would never really have to be tested... It was great, after 117-B, promised to be a model case, you know, unification without external pressure and...

‐ But...?

‐ But then the quarantine shield was attacked from the inside. Or so it registered at least... But if it was an attack it was rather strange...

‐ In what way?

‐ The normal civilizing curve, as far as we can tell, prescribes that the dominant species will expand within its solar system at first, you know, to its nearest moon and then maybe to a neighboring planet, stuff like that. Interstellar travel without riding particle winds is incredibly wasteful and expensive, right, especially when the initial thrust comes from carbon combustion... And it also takes forever, you know? Normally we're expecting dominant species to come to the realization that interstellar travel is a multi-generation affair and thus to focus on their own system first... And as you know that's why the quarantine measures are directed to the outside, you know, to ensure no one comes in... ensure growth without interference... We mean there's a quarantine shield in place facing inward, too, but, you know, it shouldn’t be needed.

‐ Right.

‐ Yeah. But with this species... We guess they're unusual.

‐ Would you mind expanding? For the record?

‐ Well this was certainly the first time for many, many cycles that a quarantine measure was attacked from the inside before being attacked from the outside... We had observed the dominant species reach their nearest moon and, given the usual trajectory, this would mean trips to their neighboring planets within a cycle or so... but an attack probe? That is very unusual at this early stage.

‐ Indeed.

‐ But then some sort of probe appeared. And by the way we really need to rethink the inward-facing shield. There’s nothing left of the probe except what we measured before so we can’t say... And we mean it's not as though we didn't send the usual warnings... Simulating the stellar plasma drop-off and its replacement by interstellar plasma... Signal jamming at the right frequencies... Tried and tested techniques, one would think. But the probe kept approaching regardless.

‐ And then what did you do?

‐ Well with the new quarantine policy it's all automated systems... We have to override them which, as you know, requires Council approval and that takes some... Anyway, by the time we were able to act it was too late.

‐ In what sense?

‐ The probe was destroyed, of course, which is a pity... We’re not too sure if it actually was an attack probe and now we'll never know. But more importantly the other automated mechanisms kicked in, too, and those...

‐ For the record: what are these other mechanisms?

‐ Well, as you know, there's a special protocol for whenever an attack by a dominant species is discovered earlier than should be possible given their position on the civilizational curve... The presumption is that it's not actually the dominant species... You know, attacking.

‐ A reasonable presumption.

‐ Indeed, in most cases... but in this case we’re not too sure... But be that as it may, the automated mechanisms kicked in before we were able to get override clearance, and by the time we took over, the quarantine measures... We mean, by that time the emergency defense measures had already begun.


-5-


‐ And what happened next?

‐ Well we alerted you guys and you said not to make this public so initially we’d concocted this ruse... But now of course we don’t really have to.

‐ That is classified, I’m afraid. Could you please...

‐ Oh sure but...

‐ We’ll erase this part from the record.

‐ Do what you must. Point is, the same happened to Voyager 2. Or at least so we think, you know, what with the probes being some forty years old and we have no way to adjust their systems to measure... And we wouldn’t even know what to measure. All we know is their signals are both gone and their final measurements look exactly the same... Here, see, density of interstellar radiation suddenly goes up way beyond what we’d expected, and then...

‐ Then nothing.

‐ Exactly.

‐ What conclusion have you drawn?

‐ Well there must be some barrier out there or another, something that we can’t detect from here, that destroys our probes. We can’t go public with it, you know, so we don’t really have... And these amateur networks, you know, it’s incredibly difficult to pretend we still have contact... Fortunately, I guess, everything’s jammed now anyway, so we don’t have to do the same stuff we did when Pioneer 10 disappeared.

‐ What was that?

‐ You know, we claimed we lost contact, right? I mean the probes are ridiculously old and the public doesn’t know how batteries work anyway so... That would have been the easiest I think. But I suppose with the sun acting so strange lately we won’t have to come up with these super-low radio signals to trick the amateurs. Now with the solar winds picking up so much, I mean there are real solar storms out there, you know, like the northern lights are everywhere now... They probably won’t realize...

‐ Realize what?

‐ That none of our probes has actually left the solar system, you know? I mean, say the sun stops pummeling us and communication systems come back online. Then how can we leave the public in the dark?

‐ Don’t worry about that. Your part in this is clear...

‐ Yeah sure but... I mean, let me ask you something: why do you care so much about this anyway? You didn’t answer my question earlier... Sure our probes were destroyed, absolutely tragic, but why aren’t you focusing more on what’s going on with the sun? Do you think this has something to do with...

‐ That will be all. Thank you very much for your time.


-6-


‐ In what does the automated defense system consist?

‐ Depends on the situation, really, we mean...

‐ In what does it consist in this particular case?

‐ Yeah, well, you have to take into account what the policy concerning these types of solar systems and their dominant species says... If there’s an attack on a quarantine measure, and the dominant species protected by it is still in an embryonic stage of space flight... that’s, we guess, between none at all and just before they discover solar wind surfing... If that’s still the case, then the attack must be presumed to come from someone who’s not part of the dominant species... Say, someone infiltrating them... And we’re thinking in particular of, you know, given current galactic politics...

‐ Leave those to us, please.

‐ Either way, policy clearly says that any such attack is to be considered as stemming from someone at our own technological level rather than the dominant species. And we think where it goes wrong, or is lacking nuance, if you don’t mind us saying...

‐ On the contrary. Your frankness is much appreciated.

‐ Well it says not to distinguish between attacks from outside and inside the quarantine shield. Which we suppose makes sense, you know, they can easily sit on one of the outer moons or something... We recall in this particular system there were quite a few of those... But still, it seems... well, heavy-handed is the right term we guess.

‐ So because the automated system assumed there was an attack...

‐ Yeah it doesn’t distinguish between attacks from the outside and attacks, or maybe pseudo-attacks, from the inside. So now the defense measures are activated, right, and we remember thinking this can’t be right, why would there be an attack of this kind, so slow, with a probe that clearly looks... We mean, have you taken a look at the measurements we’ve taken? That’s not an attack probe, that’s just...

‐ Just what?

‐ Just junk, you know, we think it obviously comes from the dominant species and we think it’s just as obvious they never knew about the quarantine, this hasn’t actually been an attack, just a probe sending some data home to its, well, its planet... Or we guess what will soon have been its planet...

‐ So your conclusion is...?

‐ We think our conclusion, we mean, it’s tricky to say and we suppose we can’t rule out an attack entirely but... Maybe the Council should keep the automated measures less trigger-happy, you know?

‐ Could you specify your conclusion, please?

‐ Alright... We think this was not an attack, at all, neither from the outside nor from the inside of the quarantine shield, we think the quarantine worked just fine, and we think we don’t need to heat up a perfectly good sun, you know, and generate all these solar storms to remove a perfectly good planet with a perfectly good dominant species on it just to be on the safe side...

‐ That will be all. Thank you very much for your time.