Starcosmo

Chapter 10: The Offer

Geneva, Switzerland

Zero hour + 3 days

Emily Banner was going nuts.

Nothing about The Lights made sense.

"Excuse me, please," she snapped, pushing back a gaggle of Ph.D's having a heated argument in the middle of the hallway. The place was a madhouse. It was officially Joint Center for Study of Intra-Atmospheric Phenomenon, but everyone was calling it Center. It was where all the atmospheric, astronomic, and exoplanet scientists had gathered for attempt to study, understand, and perhaps weaponize the eerie Thing that was hanging over all their heads like an extraterrestrial Sword of Damocles.

Emily had arrived Tuesday. NASA had dispatched her to Geneva more or less immediately, since it was her area of expertise, and her work at the Space Center allowed her to be first-to-upload the ridiculously high-res images of the object.

That first night, the Lights had driven everyone watching nealy half-crazy by its "flickering", also known as The Dissapearing Act. After Emily's episode in the parking lot, she and Jason had gone inside and been reviewing video footage when the damn thing came back. Or, as some were now suggesting, re-materialized. It hung around for another hour, and then went poof again.

There was definitely a feeling, developing amongst the more sensitive of her peers, that someone was having a big laugh at the expense of the people on Planet Earth. Yes, it was magnificent, and awe-inspiring, and the biggest thing to happen to generate interested in science careers probably since the Challenger blew up.

It was also maddening as hell.

It didn't show up on radar or lidar. It didn't reflect any lights or lasers they shot at it. It didn't seem to matter what they threw at it: laser,  microwave, X-ray, Y-ray, Z-band; it was opaque, or transparent, to all of them. It made beautiful photographs, but apart from that, it was like it wasn't there at all.  

If not for the Shrooms and the Silver Rain, Emily realized, she might give serious credence to the idea that it was a mass hallucination.

Except that it made such beautiful photographs; except for the Shrooms.

Randon pushed her hair back as she shoved her way into the tiny closet of an office they'd given her, as the barest gesture of thanks for basically discovering The Lights. The best part about it was the floor-to-ceiling window looking out into The Pit, a massive, circular room hastily constructed in the center of an interior office building shuttered deep within CERN. It had been an internal courtyard with skylights but, of course, this was the perfect setup for joint observation, so a huge number of desks and tables had been pushed into the room, and work commenced from there.

Emily, so far, had the best theory on the object's arrival, aimed at answering "where it came from" as well as giving hints as to "What it was"; the flicker across the moon they'd seen while monitoring the eerie silver rain was, when slowed down sufficiently, exactly what'd you expect to see if a massive glowing spaceship was slowing down from supraluminal speed on its way to a parked orbit around Earth.

It was the damnedest thing science had come across in the last twenty years. It scared the hell out of most people.  It had, of course, spawned a new major religion --well, a cult, really. Emily watched the news feeds and thought of natives in Papa New Guinea responding to tablet computers. So much progress, she thought, and there's still a sizeable minority of us ready to start a cargo cult.

"Still here?" Jason said from behind her, coming in with a steaming mug of coffee and a plate of food. "I thought you'd be sacked out by now."

"No," Emily said absently, putting her fingers on the window. She didn't seem to need much sleep these days. The Lights was currently in an "away" phase, not visible, as it had been for the past three days. This was, so far, the longest stretch of absence since its appearance six nights ago, and people were starting to worry it wasn't coming back.