'THE SUN IS life,’ said the Professor to the camera as he flipped on the prototype. His words would be streamed and memed across the world. The quantum solar power generator crackled and glowed, looking like a kettle that poured out inexhaustible energy. Within minutes, it glowed brightly enough to illuminate the laboratory. It was just an experimental proof of concept, but it powered the entire Ohio University campus.
If the Professor was the solar Jesus Christ come to cure the world’s ills with unlimited energy, then I was his Doubting Thomas. I had criticized his concept when I became an assistant professor at OU. Eventually, I came around after helping him solve a crucial technical bottleneck and realized he wasn’t a crackpot. And so I became the Professor’s protégé throughout the years of Project Aelius’s development.
The media acclaim and Nobel Prize were followed by almost unlimited venture capital funding. The next step was a worldwide network of generators the size of houses. The promise of unlimited energy and a golden age was within reach.
Little did I know that the world would learn to look on the dawning of the Sun with horror.
The day came three years later, when the Aelius network was turned on—what those left would call the Day of the Starmites.
The delegates in the orchestra section turn into human torches as their clothes combust within seconds after the plexiglass observation barrier bursts into pieces, and what seems to be a miniature sun appears. Those in the mezzanine don’t, but they are still horribly burned and die almost as quickly. Those in the balcony suffer severe flash burns and blindness. Their screams fill the air, too wounded to survive, but still conscious until death.
Aelius Auditorium is mostly fireproofed and doesn’t burn down, although the ceiling has a gigantic hole in it that wasn’t there a minute before. The Professor and I both wear fireproof, full-body protective suits to shield ourselves from the heat and radiation produced by the gigantic quantum solar power generator during activation. Through the tinted faceplate, I make out an impression of a massive flashing oval moving within the smoke.
The Professor and I are next to the generator, which was activated only minutes ago. The oval moves towards the entrance, and I hear a crashing sound. A massive hole appears where the entrance was just a moment ago. The thing moves into the afternoon sun, flashing all the while.
The protective suits shield the Professor and me from flash burns at a distance, but getting any closer to that thing will cook us inside them. So we keep our distance, threading our way through burned-out and smouldering buildings, looking for a path to safety. Roofs and walls collapse, small fires find a fuel source, and explode with renewed intensity.
Only hours later, several of the things crawl through the vast campus. When they see or hear people, they’ll start knocking down walls to get into buildings, starting fires wherever they go. The professor and I find bodies, whatever path we take. OU is a huge school, with tens of thousands on campus at the time of the activation.
We hear gunshots in the distance, followed by loud booms, presumably from military and police vehicle fuel tanks igniting. The sounds of fighting do not last long.
I joined Project Aelius in its fifth year, when its lack of progress meant that funds were starting to dry up and graduate assistants were giving up and moving on to more promising projects. The Aelius prototype used quantum entanglement to draw energy from the sun. The Professor calculated that the amount of energy that could be drawn posed no danger to Earth. He compared it to trying to scoop water with a net. Most of the water slides out, with only drops clinging to the net’s material. That the worldwide network would draw these creatures to Earth was impossible to know.
It is only the day after the activation, and the Professor has already named the creatures starmites. I tell the Professor that calling them starmites is misleading. It puts me in mind of a cute little bug glowing like a firefly.
The Professor goes into lecture mode at that. ‘I call them mites not just because of their shape, but their size. To us, they are giants, but consider their natural habitat: the Sun. A starmite crawling on the surface of the Sun must be like a microscopic mite living on human skin. There must be trillions of them on the Sun’s surface. Eventually, they’ll be enough on Earth to turn it into a literal fireball.’
The professor frequently pontificates on the starmite’s origins during periods of rest. The idea of life on the surface of the Sun seems impossible. Yet here it is. Perhaps it was native to the Sun, having evolved over billions of years. Or perhaps the starmites floated from one star to the next on solar winds, in hibernation for millions of years, colonizing stars, much like skin mites being passed from one human to the next.
When we finally find a cellular signal for our smartphones, we see news on the Internet that starmites are appearing randomly all over the world, and that all efforts to destroy them are failing. Smog hangs over most of the Earth as the starmites ignite unstoppable wildfires, and cities burn to the ground. It is clear that the Aelius generators, themselves powered by the Sun in a closed circuit and as strongly built as fortresses, are drawing the starmites to Earth. Only during the night is there relief from the starmites’ rampages.
When the Sun goes down, the starmites become inert, their internal fires dissipating. The Professor thinks that the internal organs of the starmite depend on the Sun’s rays. Without them, the starmite goes into hibernation, unresponsive to any stimuli. As a scientist, I put his theory to the test.
After dusk, I find an inert starmite lying on the football field in the wrecked Peden Stadium and try to crack the exoskeleton first with a hammer, then a pickaxe, and finally a bulldozer. Nothing so much as scratches the starmite. No wonder the military can’t stop them. If starmites can survive on the surface of the Sun, even nuclear weapons theoretically wouldn’t be able to harm them.
It is the Fire Marshal who saves us. We have been keeping ahead of a starmite raging through Bicentennial Park. Trees catch fire as the starmite follows us, flashing its deadly rays periodically. Then, the Fire Marshal pulls up in a firetruck covered in scorch marks. He tells us to hop in. We make our escape as the starmite charges.
The Fire Marshal takes us to a group of survivors in an underground utility tunnel. Once the Fire Marshal hears the Professor’s name of starmite, he starts singing ‘starmite, starbright.’ This gets a laugh out of the group. The laughter dies down quickly.
It is a small group of five, including the Fire Marshal, which no doubt aids in its survival. They have squirreled away food, water, and other supplies, and all seem to be quick on the uptake. Now that we have a safe, if temporary, place to stay, we talk. About the starmites, how the Aelius network surely draws them to Earth. Most of all, how had the Professor, and I not detected this with the early experiments? The only answer we have is that the scale of the Aelius network somehow produces an intense solar wind focused enough to act as a bridge for the starmites to cross.
That left the matter of how to shut it down. The main generator in Aelius Auditorium is the focal point of the worldwide system. If it could be destroyed, the system would go down, and the solar bridge would be dispersed. But how to destroy the generator, built with redundant systems to prevent failure?
‘Simple, of course,’ says the Professor with a smile. ‘Overload it. A battery pack will explode under the right circumstances. There’s no reason I can’t do the same to the generator with the kill switch.’
‘You can count on me to get you there in one piece,’ says the Fire Marshal.
The firetruck is a battering ram that smashes aside wreckage as we head to Aelius Auditorium. The plan is as simple as can be. Get to the auditorium as fast as possible, avoid starmites, smash up the Aelius network control computers, and destroy the generator using the kill switch.
We are almost there when a starmite comes crawling out of the wreckage of a smouldering building. ‘Get out here! I’ll distract it!’ says the Fire Marshal. We do as he says, both of us carrying fire axes taken from the firetruck.
He reverses the firetruck right into the starmite, which is knocked aside, but not for long. The Fire Marshal turns on the siren as he prepares to reverse into it again. The Professor and I run towards the auditorium. The Fire Marshal is giving the starmite a battle, but there will only be one outcome: a blazing firetruck and a dead fire marshal.
I push that image from my mind as we enter Aelius Auditorium through the smashed-up front entrance. The stink of corpses makes me gag. The generator crackles and hums with the energy it draws from the Sun. Every few seconds, blue light shimmers around the outline of the generator. Shutting it down will be a dangerous job.
‘Professor, I’ll take care of the kill switch. You destroy the control room.’ Both need to be done to ensure the Aelius network shuts down.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I created Aelius. I brought the starmites to Earth, however inadvertently. It’s my responsibility and my risk.’
I open my mouth to argue, and just as quickly shut it. We’re wasting precious time, and I’ve known for far too long that once the Professor makes up his mind, he sticks to his guns. It was that quality, more than any other, that had seen the Professor bring Project Aelius to completion.
‘Good luck, Professor,’ I say, for lack of anything better to mark the moment.
He walks towards the generator, and I towards the control room. My task is simple. Use the fire axe to smash up the control room and render it completely inoperable.
The Professor’s task is more complex. At the side of the generator lies a console with a mollyguard over the kill switch. The Professor carries two keys that must be inserted, followed by a keycode on the control panel. Once the mollyguard is unlocked and the kill switch is pulled, the Professor must make haste to get away from the generator before it self-destructs.
He’s almost at the console when I hear a crash come from the entrance. The starmite has arrived. Likely, it had seen us while we debated who did what. The consequences look fatal for us and the world.
Seeing the starmite, the Professor raises his fire axe towards me as I enter the control room. The meaning is clear: get it done now. I raise my fire axe and begin to destroy the computers. Not bothering with keys and keycodes, the professor grips the fire axe with both hands and brings it down on the glass of the mollyguard. It must be reinforced, for it does not shatter on the first blow.
The Professor raises the fire axe several more times and strikes the mollyguard until I hear a shattering sound. The noise and clear view of the Professor straight ahead attracts the starmite more than my destruction of the computers of the control room, which lies on the east wall and shields me from its immediate view.
As the glass shatters, the Professor tosses the fire axe aside and grabs the killswitch with both hands. The kill switch was designed to be difficult to pull, preventing accidental activation. The Professor, in his upper mid-fifties, pulls slowly with all of his strength. I pause for just a moment, thinking of running over to him to help him, then renew my rampage, this being my only clear opportunity to do so while the starmite is distracted. Screen glass and bits of metal and plastic impact against my suit and hood with each swing. The computers fizzle and spark as they are destroyed.
I hear a scream, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the Professor raise his voice. I drop the fire axe and look out the viewport. The starmite is almost on him. From that distance, if it flashes, he is dead.
The Professor pulls down the kill switch with a final hard yank. Immediately, blue light crackles all around the generator, and blue lightning begins to zap all around the auditorium. One of the bolts hits the starmite and knocks it away from the Professor, who is still holding the kill switch down.
A bolt of blue lightning zaps inches from my faceplate. I remember nothing after that.
I awake outside the smoking Aelius Auditorium. Whether I wandered out or was rescued by persons unknown, I don’t know. The survivors from the Fire Marshal’s group find me and explain that they heard a massive boom come from the auditorium, followed by a pillar of blue light pouring from the hole in the auditorium’s roof and seemingly into the noonday Sun. The next day, I find the starmite still inside, clearly dead. The extreme concentration of energy that hit it must have pierced its exoskeleton.
The generator is wrecked. I find no trace of the Professor, not a scrap of his fireproof suit or a shard of his faceplate. I can only guess that somehow he was carried off with the pillar of energy. Surely that was his end.
Perhaps the solar winds will carry the Professor’s ashes to the Sun he had obsessed over. Or they will be lost forever in the coldness of space. The survivors do not care.
The remaining starmites still roam. One day, will humanity develop a weapon to overcome them with? Will the starmites die out one by one due to aging or being removed from their natural environment? However it comes about, I hope Earth is reclaimed. What a pity it would be for humanity to go from wielding the power of the stars to running and hiding by day, only able to move freely at night, a pathetic mockery of civilization.
I survive among the ruins of Ohio University. On the walls of the ruins, mixed among the graffiti pining for lost loved ones and the gang symbols of warring survivors, I see, wherever there is space to write it, a repudiation of the words the Professor made famous the day of the first test.
The Sun is death.
