A Dark Matter

Predator Press

LOBO

Standing there almost at the top of Mauna Kea, I didn't know shit about astronomy or physics; I was a tourist with a telescope, shivering at the top of a mountain, gawking at the stars and planets.

I have found away to be cold even in Hawaii, I remember snarking to myself.

When my friends suggested I go to the lookout point, I figured it sounded cool. Pianosa is pretty damn flat; even if the space stuff didn't impress me, I would probably enjoy just the scenery.

But the problem is you don't drive up a mountain to see stars during the day. The journey was an excruciatingly long and boring climb into darkness, saturated with what often felt like forced conversation; by the time we got there I was feeling irritable.

And then I saw the Universe.

It stopped my heart.



***

Staring down at clouds with your feet on soil alone would have been enough. But the sky...

... I just cannot find the words.

There's a reason the Keck telescope was built there ... you can see the rings of Saturn with your naked eye. At my friend's behest, I stared at the celestial beauty through his $20 binoculars, utterly amazed. And in a strange confluence of fortune, Jupiter was in view as well; I hogged the magnifying lenses shamelessly while I watched the moons visibly circling gracefully around the magnificent giant.

"What's that dark spot?" I asked, watching a dark orb swinging toward the colorful, living surface.

"That's Jupiter's Eye. It's the largest and oldest storm in the solar system."

"No," I says. "I mean the one swinging around it."

And even as I said the words, the object swung behind the massive planet.

"It's a moon."

"Really?" I says. "I thought moons would have nice, tight circular courses. This one just kinda screamed in, and went behind it."

"Yeah, okay," says the guy, searching the spot with his own binoculars. "You're seein UFOs?" he guffawed.

"I didn't say it was a fucking flying saucer," I says, still peering through the lenses. "I asked what this thing is."

All of us ogled the sky for a while in silence.

"It's a moon," the guy repeats, packing his binoculars audibly into his belt minutes later. "Do you have any idea how large something would have to be, being visible behind Jupiter?

"Not at this-"

There it was again.

I stared at the arching spot for a precious second to assure myself it wasn't my imagination.

"There it is," I says.

I could hear him receding in the background. "Darting about is it?" he says sarcastically.

"No," I argue irrationally. "It just came around the other side."

I force myself to remove the binoculars, and finally face this asshole.

"Son," the rather unremarkable guy says loudly in the distance, slamming a car door that reads Keck Telescope Personnel. Lowering his electric window, he adds, "Jupiter is about 25,000 miles wide."

Disinterested, I return to the view. The thing creeps beyond Jupiter slower and slower, until seemingly to stop. And escaping Jupiter's ambient light, it was almost invisible already.

I figured we have about 167 days.

Give or take.



***

Six months later, I feel I have done what I can to warn everyone.

I have warned the "proper authorities" ... but no one will listen. SETI has blocked my calls.

I took up mathematics and science, and proved that -by virtue of the bending of surrounding light- a gravitational giant had been slung like a Frisbee from Jupiter at our solar system, at a speed of approximately 30 miles per second.

No one listened because my mortgage was foreclosing ... but I could not work.

And my wife was leaving me because she thought I was crazy.

And only now, now that a tiny dark stain is visible in the blue sky, do people peer at it curiously. It's the antithesis of a star; almost like a growing period, punctuating a gun-metal grey sky with violent green and blue lighting jumping and dancing for it.

Today it's unseasonably cool, windy and dark.

People will want to watch the spectacular show.

Many will be barbequing.