The Last Stars

Nobody can a hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But you can feel it as a tingle on the back of your neck. The same feeling our ancestors experienced as a predator hunted them through the deep woods and on the high plains. This was that multiplied by a thousand. The terror as the cosmos screamed out in pain as its death throes wracked its way through the 'verse. You can't explain what's happening, you just know something somewhere has gone terribly wrong.

What we were only starting to witness and still have yet to comprehend was our galaxy dying around us.

Its been so many years since those early frantic times I have trouble recalling all the details, but I'll do my best. They're asking all us old-timers to write down our experiences, apparently I've reached the age I'm considered wise. While I personally find this hilarious, I know it's important to preserve these memories for the future and help the youngsters understand where they came from. What we had to leave behind and what they will never know.

More than sixty years ago I was a young man only a few years out of college. I had few friends since moving to the city and spent most nights alone, either working out or watching t.v. My job was enjoyable but not exactly interesting to the casual observer. I was an urban planner focusing on integrating renewable energy into cityscapes and attempting to make these existing cities more environmentally friendly. My mom was a city planner and since I had no direction in life I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. I wasn't passionate like my colleagues but I was good at my job and I stood out because of it.

I was at the gym one night when I saw the first reports briefly pop up on the news. Apparently two stars in the same constellation had both gone out at once. Scientists had never witnessed that particular phenomenon before and it was cause for acclaim. One of the few times, up until that point, it actually paid to be an astronomer. None of them had anything to actually say though, it's not as if they were actually capable of flying out there and seeing what had made them go out.

It was all just silly theories and conjecture. Nothing concrete or absolute. After a few days the news cycle changed and the networks moved on to the next dumb thing to be alarmist about.

And then it happened again.

The second time, it happened a couple of weeks later. It was in a completely different part of space which only added to the late night talking points. The theories were fairly similar but were beginning to grow more and more outrageous.

When it happened a third time, again in a different part of space, people began showing genuine concern and a terrifying question was immediately pondered. "How many other stars have died that we simply never noticed because they weren't a part of constellations?" An idiot late night host actually said that. Smartest thing to ever come out of that dopes mouth but he was right and people wanted answers. Senators and Congressman were demanding answers from NASA, the military, and every academic who's field got even a hairs breadth from touching space. But again, how do you study something that's millions of lightyears away. Something so far away it's measured in how long it takes for light to travel in between, a dying light that is.

Now what every soul on earth was reminded of was these stars were so far away we were seeing what they looked like eons ago. It was only now we were observing they were dying and they were dying in bunches. What we knew for a fact was over the space of four months 31 stars had died. What the actual number was is still a mystery. Some said multiply by 100, others said multiply by 1000. It was all just dribble, nobody actually knew for sure but they were certainly going to try. More than 50% of our spy satellites were turned away from earth to take as many pictures of the stars as possible. I heard they were taking pictures every 5 minutes and had computers comparing the pictures to see if any had died in the space between. Never actually found out if that was a real fact or just one of those things people make up during a panic. To be honest though, it didn't matter if all our satellites were pointed towards the skies. There still weren't enough to photograph every square inch of sky and star.

Over the next year we would watch as more than one thousand stars would shine for their last time. They were out of our reach and out of our control. Humans as a whole were not used to feeling this truly helpless.

As the anniversary of the first dying came upon us, governments began to vehemently study the star in our own backyard. The Sun. Was it dying? Would it? How long do we have? As we would quickly find out, we didn't have long.