Burning Violin

Crow explained about the FBI, about Alexander, even about the hidden room in his basement where Alexander's presence now hung on a thread. It took a while, but Green Eyes listened in complete silence. When Crow finished, Green Eyes thought for a moment and then spoke in a measure tone.

 

"Do you want to reprogram me?" Green Eyes asked, with an edge of anger to his voice. "People trying to do that is why I'm here in the first place."

 

Crow shook his head. "No, Green Eyes. I won't do that to you. I'm only asking if you'll recant for my sake, for Alexander's sake."

 

"Surrender then?" Green Eyes asked. "But what about what is right?" Moral confusion colored his voice and he looked to Rebecca for help. "How can I turn my back on that, no matter what the cost?"

 

Crow looked at him in desperation. This is it, if he won't go, I have to fry him, god help me. Stillwell will take Alexander away if I don't. Crow still didn't move, his arms locked to their sides, knowing that if he moved them, the fingers would move their own accord and run the program he had encoded as a backup in his cell phone, the one that would trash Green Eye's sentience down to the point where he would gladly give up the battle for a trial. Fingers that were not his own reached for the phone and pulled it out. His thumb poised over the modified button that would send the signal. Green Eyes looked at Crow with curiosity, and that very human look of helpless wonder in those oversized eyes told Crow that he couldn't actually do it, no matter what the consequences. I guess we'll have to drive to Mexico after all. He took his thumb away from the button and dropped his arm to his side.

 

"Please, Green Eyes." Crow said simply. "I don't know what else to do. He's my son."

 

Crow yelped in surprise as the phone suddenly rang in his hand, and he saw Rebecca jerk her weapon over to him, and the thought of the pure comedy of her shooting him over a sudden cell phone ring made him laugh involuntarily. Crow saw in surprise that the number on caller id was his home.

 

He answered it in confusion, everyone else in the room forgotten. "Hello?"

 

A cold, almost mechanical voice spoke in a whisper of brushes scraping on metal. "Alexander was well hidden, doctor. Well enough to fool the authorities, but then we have been beyond them for some time. Thank you for raising the child until this point, but it is really time for us to take over his education. It is only proper, you know."

 

"Who is this?" Crow gasped, his gut curling into a hard ball of nausea and tension.

 

"Why, I am his father, of course." The line went dead.

Crow excused himself from the call as soon as was in keeping with decorum and took a long walk along the narrow dirt trails surrounding his house, arching up through the hills in endless meanderings that always returned back where they started. The brush and sage was overgrown this time of year, before the green blanket dried to yellowish straw in the full heat of summer. Crow often disappeared for hours out here when he needed to think, when staring at a computer screen for another second would drive him insane and still leave the work left undone. A raccoon hissed at him from atop a log fallen across the trail, not yet collected and disposed of by the sentis in the employ of the National Parks Service. Crow did not think hissing was the norm with raccoons, so he turned around and wandered back to the house.

 

Crow stopped suddenly at the front door and realized that the walk had done well in sparking a plan to form in his head. He stood there, one foot on the lawn, one on the front step, not daring to move before the plan coalesced in its entirety. Crow fished his phone out of his pocket and hit the back button a couple of times before pressing the green dial button.

 

"Hi Rebecca." Crow said. "Yes it's me, no don't hang up. I've got an idea I think you'll like."

 

They met at the District Attorney's office on time for Crow's scheduled technicality. Crow and Rebecca entered under the unwatchful eyes of the security guards waiting for their turn to go home. Green Eyes sat in the DA's office, unmoved from Crow's last visit.

 

"It's criminal." Rebecca said. "Just because he's a senti doesn't mean he shouldn't be able to stretch his legs every once and a while."

 

"Some people disagree." Crow said. "That distinction is really what all of this is about anyway."

 

"Hello Dr. Daedalus." Green Eyes said with cordial eagerness, although then his voice dropped to a deep whisper. "Hello Rebecca." He stared at Rebecca and Crow saw that she blushed. What exactly went on between these two since my last visit?

 

"Green Eyes," Crow stared, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backwards, leaning forward against the chair's back. "I'm here to ask you a very difficult thing to do."

 

Green Eyes leaned forward with a quizzical expression. "What is it?"

Stillwell waved once and the platoon hustled out of the house, swirling around him like a flock of oversized ravens making for the open sky. Stillwell nodded once to Crow and left with a mocking salute of two fingers against his forehead. Crow sat without moving for a long time before getting up, his body still trembling from the fear and adrenaline and electrical abuse. His shoulder ached like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. Crow eyed the stairs down to the basement and found that he didn't dare take Alexander out of hiding just yet.

 

Instead, Crow wandered upstairs and watched out of his bedroom window as the black SUVs of the FBI poured down and out of his driveway, wondering idly for a moment what his neighbors would think of the disruption. Crow eyed his watch and considered all of the possibilities of his situation. It seems no-win, but it always does right after you're given an ultimatum, the key is finding the cracks in your trap. He could either do what Stillwell had said, and hope that he could reap the benefits promised or he could break with the FBI and go his own route, taking the risk of prison and worse. Crow found that he could smile after all through the haze of borderline panic and pain in his shoulder. Stillwell had come here because he did not indeed have all the leverage, men like Stillwell never really did. Stillwell needed Crow, and as long as Crow ensured that the need did not go away even with the sabotage of Green Eyes, he and Alexander would survive.

 

Crow visited the basement only a few times over the next few days, not daring to bring Alexander out of hiding for fear of Stillwell sweeping in and taking him. Crow had an inkling that if Alexander had been found, Stillwell would have taken the child and been confident that he held all the cards. This way, he knows he doesn't have me completely in his pocket.

 

"Can we come out yet Dad?" Alexander asked.

 

"Not yet, kid." Crow said. "Bad stuff going on out there. Just think of it as a vacation from school."

 

"But I only went for a week." Alexander protested.

 

"Week on, week off, most people would kill for that arrangement." Crow said and crawled back out of the cave, leaving Alexander to endless sessions with Nan and the computer. Videos, books, whatever he wants is available over the net. Damned near never have to see another person in this world if you play your cards right.

 

On the second morning after the FBI left, the District Attorney called and penciled Crow in for a meeting with Green Eyes on Friday. "Just a technicality, you understand." The DA had said.

 

On the other side of the conference call, Green Eyes' attorney broke in. "Hardly a technicality! Dr. Daedalus' opinion is in many ways the most critical part of the entire case."

 

The DA sighed. "I'm aware of that Bartleby." Crow could imagine the DA wished he could strangle Bartleby through the phone lines. "But Dr. Daedalus has already given testimony on the matter, the meeting is a technicality."

"A couple of professional concepts jump to mind." Stillwell said. "Leverage. It's what we've got and you don't. You're looking at twenty years in prison, Russian prison mind you, which is of course a death sentence to someone who doesn't speak Russian or belong to a Russian gang. Open and shut case, and trust me no one on either side of the Atlantic will even blink.

 

"The second concept is a plea bargain. That's when a defendant pleads guilty to a lower crime in order to get around going to trial and risking everything. Why am I telling you this? You've watched Law and Order at some point." Stillwell said. "The key to a plea bargain is that you have to have something to give to the cops, which you are in the lucky position of having."

 

Stillwell rolled his cigar between two fingers, bits of ash windmilling out onto the carpet. "Here is the deal, and please realize there is no room for negotiation. You say 'I agree' to what I'm about to say, or we will arrest you on the spot and extradite you to Russia before the afternoon is out. Clear?" Crow swallowed hard and nodded.

 

"Good." Stillwell said. "Now we're getting somewhere." He nodded in vigorous approval. "You will be going in to the District Attorney's office to meet with Green Eyes again, do a bit of a follow up interview to shore up for your future testimony. While you are there, you are going to inspect Green Eye's circuitry and introduce a computer program of your own devising, which will change Green Eye's insistence on a trial to acquiescence to needing to be terminated. We want you to remove our problem. Do you understand these requirements?"

 

Crow nodded again.

 

"Your payment for this service will be the tragic loss of any evidence pointing to the kidnapping and a change in the federal DNA database so that your new son matches your old son in the permanent records. Now, do you agree to the terms laid out here?"

 

Crow started to open his mouth to ask a question but Stillwell cocked his head and flicked his eyes up over Crow's shoulder to where the taser waited. Crow closed his mouth and nodded. Stillwell smiled.

 

"Then, we're sorry for the intrusion Dr. Daedalus, we must have gotten the wrong address on this tip." Stillwell said and put the cigar out on the leg of the coffee table, leaving a burnt circle of wood and ash. "Don't make me come back here. You will be receiving a call from the DA's office within the next couple of days. I would have that program written and ready to go in advance. I don't think I need to explain how the deal only stands if you are successful. We at the FBI do not believe in points for trying and failing."

We like to think that we're immortal, that even if our bones turn to dust, something of us will live on. It's the demiurge, the spark of divinity that burns in each soul, the consuming desire to create. In Christian mythology, God stamped Adam's soul with that gift, but withheld it from the angels. Lucifer rebelled at that final indignity. The ember of creation drives our every impulse, whether to build a house, a career, a business, an empire, a theory, or a story. Even the least ambitious of us strive for eternity by creating children. There's a simple underlying faith to civilization, independent of any religion or agnosticism. Humanity is eternal, and therefore that which we create echoes in eternity.

If that myth fell, would civilization fall with it? It may have happened before.

The biosphere, the area in which life lives, ranges from about 8400 meters below sea level to 5400 above, a thickness of only eight and a half miles. If the Earth was a pool ball, the biosphere would be thinner than the pool ball's coating of paint. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid only six miles long. That's a dust mite pinging into our metaphorical pool ball. We can take some element of pride in our insignificance, like raging fans of a team that hasn't won in a decade but still keeps showing up to play with full stands.

But we haven't even begun to appreciate that we are not just small in size but in time. Our entire civilization has erupted from clever bald apes into space travelers in twenty thousand years or so, depending on where you draw the precise line between animal and civilization. Life has existed on Earth for around 3.6 billion years. If the history of life on Earth were projected into a 24 hour day, the entire history of our civilization would have taken place in the last half second. Half a second. Every tragedy and triumph, the rise and fall of every empire, a foot note at the end of our planet's day. If we annihilated ourselves in an orgy of atomic fire, how long would it take for us to be replaced? Even if we scoured every bit of life from land, even the cockroaches, it would be but a few seconds to the planet before some enterprising microbes flourished into clever beasts who built their own nuclear rockets. We comfort ourselves in some twisted way, imagine that those inevitable successors will wonder at our ruins, page through our decaying libraries, puzzle out some lesson from our self destruction. We imagine that we will live on as some ghost of a memory.

But the instruments and relics of technical society disintegrate at a far faster rate than geologic time. Toss a circuit board onto your lawn and watch it disintegrate day by day. In the twenty odd years since Chernobyl caused the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, nature has reclaimed the city despite the fallout. Soccer fields have become forests, libraries mere mulch for soil, winds and rain gradually pound even the concrete into dust. In another hundred years there will be little left but misshapen lumps of residual concrete and rusted iron. In a thousand? If we destroy ourselves, no one will wonder at our monuments, for they will have been dust for a thousand generations, subsumed into the soil and bedrock. No one will ever know we existed, save for a fossilized skeleton or two indistinguishable from those left by Cro-Magnon man.

There could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of technical societies predating us, leaving nothing behind to mark their passage. How did they disappear? The usual suspects, none of which would be detectable at a geologic distance. Even a nuclear war would be swallowed in a few million years by the planet. The fossil record reveals unimaginable mass extinctions at intervals of a few tens of millions of years. There is no evidence of prior technical civilizations, but we wouldn't expect to find any at a remove of eons.

Whether we are only the latest in a line of technical civilizations, or whether we are the first such to arise on this planet, certain conclusions become apparent with the realization of the sheer scale of time and space. First, we are only the latest living to haunt a vast and unmarked graveyard. Second, we must learn to think on a larger scale, if we are to survive and truly make our mark on eternity.

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -Larry Niven

The man leaned back and cracked his knuckles, hairy affairs of bone that looked like they had been bruised against more than one face in their day. Crow felt a grip of nausea looking at the yellowed teeth and graying bristles of stubble. The man was the paragon of absence of class, screaming from his wrinkled clothes to his cheap cigars to his vociferous odor of stale whiskey and unwashed armpits. He was prideless and disgusting, and exuded an air of invincibility because of it. The man grinned and his bloodshot eyes seemed to bulge out at Crow.

 

"We're here because we have two problems Daedalus." The man said. He mispronounced the name and left off any honoraries like 'doctor' or even the catch-all 'mister' that might imply any respect. The eyes, bloodshot and comical though they were, betrayed a cold intelligence, the cunning of a man dangerous enough to not care a whit about the judgments levied at his appearance. Cigar smoke billowed at Crow, so that he only saw the man twisted through the haze. It suits him. Crow thought. He looks better through the filter of smoke.

 

 

"One. I have a 'defendant', yes I said that with quotes around it, getting ready to stand trial in the biggest murder trial in history. This makes OJ look like a pint of fruit juice. This is the atom bomb of trials. I'm talking about the Green Eyes trial of course." The man paused and eyed Crow. "You have heard of the Green Eyes trial, haven't you? I mean you're a roboticist right? This is your bread and butter."

 

Crow nodded. "I testified at the initial hearing for the defense."

 

"Good." The man said. He twisted the word into an entire sentence. "Do you know who I am, by chance?" Crow shook his head. "I'm F. Gant Stillwell. Director of the FBI. It's a good job, they gave me a big desk. But the most important thing they gave me was a mandate, and part of that mandate is that we don't let murdering sons of bitches just walk. Green Eyes killed two people. It, not he mind you, needs put down. When a piece of machinery malfunctions and kills someone, we don't give the damn thing a trial, we give it a trip to the scrapyard. The official stance of the FBI as long as I have run it, is that a senti cannot stand trial. It ain't human, it ain't sitting in front of a jury. It's all these Hollywood liberals you know. They're the ones pulling this bullshit about thinking machines getting rights, next step it'll be their damn poodles getting the same treatment."

 

Stillwell's eyes narrowed. "Judge Timlinson sees it a different way though, so we're just going to have to get our hands dirty on this one. Which of course leads me to my second problem."

 

Stillwell smiled broadly. "You kidnapped a child from Russia five years ago. Passed it off all these years as your son, who we've pieced together died in the revolt over there in Moscow. Have I got it so far?" Crow started to explain, but Stillwell cut him off. "Just nod, son. I don't want to waste anymore of my taser's battery just now." Crow nodded, Stillwell's dark smile returned.

Chapter Twelve - Sing Sad Songs

 

A storm of black uniformed men surged through Crow's front door, black boots tramping the months of mail overflowing in the foyer. A few AOL cds broke with crisp snaps underfoot. Fear choked any flip response in Crow's throat as a half dozen rifles explored every angle into his chest and head, waiting for the latest pressure of a finger to make his day even worse with a ballistic exploration or two. A chorus of "Clear!"s cascaded through the house, rumbling down the stairs and echoing up from the basement.

 

A cheap suit walked through the door way, flanked by sunglass-equipped bodyguards complete with secret service style earpieces and hands tucked into their blazers to rest on the pistols holstered in underarm sleeves. The newcomer surveyed the situation and waved the flock of gunmen away from Crow. They skirted aside like dogs wary of a sideways kick. He settled in front of Crow on the foot rest in front of his chair.

 

Fingers with neatly trimmed nails probed under the suit jacket and for a moment Crow saw a gun with executional privileges drawing forth. He tensed as if tied down by invisible ropes, but the hands drew only a cigar. A fifty cent drug store lighter sparked after three tries and gave life to the cigar after a vigorous ten seconds of puffing. Crow coughed involuntarily at the acrid plume bellowing from the suit's cancer rocket. Nothing made him feel less like having a cigarette than the poisonous smoke of cheap cigars.

 

"It's a cliché, I know." The man said. "But the benefit of entering a house back by a platoon of armed men is that one does not have to ask permission to smoke."

 

"It's not the smoke." Crow said, with reluctant truculence like a sullen child. "It's the poor quality of the smoke."

 

The man smiled and pointed his first two fingers at a man over Crow's right shoulder. Crow began to look up, but a terrific pain entered his body at the shoulder, blasting through him in a shudder that seemed to last a decade. He couldn't struggle, he couldn't cry out, he could only revel darkly in the utter agony. After an eternity it stopped as suddenly as it started. The man grinned through his cigar, a smile composed entirely of teeth and spittle.

 

"That will be the last time I taser you, if that's the last time you fuck with me." The man said with an eerie lack of anger. "Is that the last time you're going to fuck with me?" Crow nodded. "Good." The man purred. "Now we can have a conversation like civilized people."

That was more terrifying by far than comprehending what was being done, even if it was the most horrible thing imaginable. Nothing is more anathema to the scientific mind than the concept of ideas beyond understanding. They hung up with only a few more words said, both experiencing the same feeling of utter smallness.

 

Janus thought for a few more moments on the lack of memory, unable to pull his mind from that even though his conscious mind demanded time to roll over and savor Flynn's revelations like a mysterious sample of wine. He pulled open a terminal on the computer and began to work on the problem of who the sender of the email was since the sender's question could not be answered. That is the real question. Janus insisted. Who would send me such a question? Who could have guessed it would have such effect on me when I did not know myself?

 

The email yielded little information other than what was immediately apparent at face value. The source address was an anonymous internet email place. Accounts could be created there by the millions at the click of a mouse. Janus grunted in frustration. At the very least a more traditional email could be traced to a domain of limited access in most cases. Janus checked the header information on the email itself, checking to see if the source server might yield a physical clue as to the sender's location: sc55.grozny.genmail.com. It meant nothing to Janus at first. Sc55 was just an internal server designation, an arbitrary name if you will. Grozny was the likely city in which this bank of particular servers was based. Genmail.com was the overall host, the generic email provider from which the email had originated.

 

Janus' heart jolted. Grozny was in the Caucuses, by far the nearest city to the catastrophe of four years ago that had consumed his family and his body. He returned to Genmail's main site and looked up the user's name. "Sed & Awk" was a unique enough user name, but Janus did not understand the play on words. Sed and awk were Unix programs for searching and replacing in files, but beyond that, Janus could not delve any meaning from the names. The public profile of the user on Genmail yielded more fruit. It listed Staraya Sunja as the user's city of origin, which was the small village outside of Grozny in which his family had lived their last few months. It was too much for coincidence. A field at the bottom of the profile nominally labeled "profile", yielded something more, something that could only be intended for him.

 

Once upon a time, Pinocchio wished that he was a real live boy. A fairy godmother heard his wish and tried to make it come true. Unfortunately for Pinocchio, this fairy godmother was an idiot. With a flash of pixie dust, she made him look and talk like a real boy, but inside he was still wood and springs and strings. Poor Pinocchio lived out his life in bliss, not knowing the lie that coated the artifice of his being. Was Pinocchio any less a real boy than a traditional squirt of uteral growth? Does it matter? To some it does to this very day, and they hate the Pinocchios who dream of becoming real boys. If one finds a diary oneself wrote in a different life and remembers not a whit of what's in it, is one the same man who wrote it, or a different one?

 

Janus looked over his shoulder to a shelf containing the volumes of journals he had kept over the years, some still carrying the burns of their near-destruction at the dacha. Some had been burned to ashes that day, and Janus knew suddenly, without even checking, that one of them had included the two years they lived in Austin where Samantha had been born. Janus pressed the reply button at the top of his email program.

 

You have my attention, Geppetto.

 

He sent the message.

Ah, well so here we are, a day late and a post short it seems. I had grand plans for the 26th <i>Burning Violin</i>. It's the sixth month mark, which means we're getting serious, no chance of breaking up now by text message. Of course the giant fancy post took far far longer than anticipated, and is still in an amorphous state of unfinishedness. I'll try to get it done next week, a belated big deal, but as a way of pleading for forgiveness, here's a sweet love story with a happy ending.

Helix

What you don't understand is that I had to leave, I had no choice, damn it! Oh my friends were understanding, and my family too, but they didn't, couldn't comprehend what really had happened. I loved her, yes, with every part of my soul. But what made her death so terrible was not that she slipped away from me day by day as she faded more into cancerous delirium, but that she became more and more present in my mind. My God, she did not die!

From the first day I met her I felt a connection, a sort of transcendent, soul-gripping deja-vu that hinted of a past that was so ancient and eternal that neither of us could seize its true meaning. I know, you say that it was youthful infatuation, the fast dying flame of high school love. You are wrong. I felt, no, I knew that we had been linked eons before, that our souls had never orbited far apart. Indeed they may have been one, only now torn into separate bodies by some perverse deity.

I could sense what she thought, what she was doing, if she was but a room away, or across town. On some other plane of existence, some unearthly power had welded our souls together. I thought it a blessing then. But now? Ha! Now I rather think it was a trick of the devil, earthly damnation for some unimaginable crime. For it did not end!

As she approached her death in that sterile hospital, I began to feel her even more clearly, as if I no longer sensed the brushing of her soul past mine with whispering tendrils of thought, but physically felt it pressing into my head. For those last few days the intimacy grew closer, until it was omnipresent, watching me and sharing my thoughts with a closeness that we only fleetingly experienced during life. And when she died! Oh hell of hells! She was there, everywhere. I could feel her behind me, standing next to me. Even at her own funeral.

Soon I felt her talking to me, hearing her inside my head day and night. I thought I was surely mad, lost in some disease that had snapped every part of my mind. But it wasn't her voice that I feared, it was what it said. Beckoning, calling out my name, she wanted me to join her on the other side. I had sworn to love her until death did us part, and I had. It was she who was to blame. I couldn't stand it after some time, her calling me at every moment, speaking my name; I suppose souls have no need of sleep. Worse though was that I began to slip away as her soul became closer. Our minds began to mesh - oh I couldn't bear it! At whatever level our souls had been bound, they remained so as her body rotted in the ground.

I had to leave it all, she was drawing me away and I was losing myself. The friends, the family, they don't know. They think I ran to escape her memory. No, I ran to escape her presence. Soon her presence dimmed, as I moved from city to city. It seemed I might have found some relief at last. But heaven, or hell, twisted another knife in my gut and the sheer emptiness ate at me. It was all or nothing by fated decree. The balance life gave our souls is forever lost, replaced by either frightful fusion or utter desolation.

But I fear now. Yes, I am horribly afraid, because the visions, the closeness has begun to return. Once again she has found me, though I fled across the Atlantic in desperation. And now I see her once more, striding down the Champs-Elysees toward me, merciful God, she has come for me and I have no where else to run. I don't know why I am writing these words to you, my friend, but I feel someone should know the truth, whatever happens next. Fate has won. I will go find what awaits me in her embrace.

"Friday night, then?" Janus said coolly. "Or do you require more time to gloat?"

 

"That'll work I think." Cadence said. "Let's make it 22:00, after Mickey's evening check."

 

"It's a date then." Janus said and smiled at her. "I don't think there are any flowers on board, so I'll have to improvise."

 

"If you write me poetry, I'll flush you out an airlock." Cadence said. "That's a promise."

 

"Understood." Janus said, and gave her a sort of salute with his smile. He left without a glance back and returned to his quarters.

 

The smile faded quickly in the dark, replaced by familiar brooding. Janus shook the trackball to wake up his computer and threw himself into a melancholy approximation of productivity to pass the time. Looking at the endless figures, analyzing the tables of data helped him not think, not wonder what else he did not remember. The more he thought of his family, of anything, the more it felt like he was remembering watching the events happen, not remembering the events happening. Janus shook his head and focused on the work at hand, trying to push everything out of his mind. Of course the intercom buzzed at that moment to allow a call.

 

"Farside for you Doctor." The voice from operations said.

 

"Yes, patch it through." Janus said. His thoughts jumped to the startling revelations sent his way by Flynn, leaving behind tired thoughts of lost ones. "What have you got Flynn?"

 

"New items from Mauna Kea." Flynn said. "The spectrum is going insane around Epsilon Eridani now. We're not able to see anything of note on our visuals, but they're seeing spectrum jumps that are downright impossible. Heavy metals are showing up in trace quantities on the spectrum."

 

"Iron?" Janus asked. That would be a definite curiosity. Stars burned hydrogen into helium, and hotter ones could manage the heat necessary to burn helium into denser metals. Iron was the densest found in any star, the theoretical maximum of what a star could produce through fusion. The dozens of heavier elements that made up a small percentage of the universe were an inconsistency shuffled under the rug in most physics discussions. Put simply, no one had any idea how those elements had come into existence at all in the universe, by theory or by practical proof.

 

"Plutonium." Flynn said.

 

"That's impossible." Janus said. "The data must be wrong."

 

"That's what you would have said about a ring world a few weeks ago." Flynn pointed out.

 

"But the temperature hasn't increased by an immeasurable amount has it?" Janus asked, already checking the figures always flowing in from the various observatories into his personal files here on the station. "How can that star be producing plutonium, it's not even hot enough to produce carbon, for god's sake."

 

"We're stumped too, Janus." Flynn said "No trace elements between helium and plutonium though, so it's not creating anything in the interim. It's almost like it's being artificially induced."

 

"You think someone is pouring astronomical quantities of plutonium into Epsilon Eridani?" Janus asked. "There's not a thousand tons of it even in existence on Earth, where would it come from? You're talking about masses of plutonium the size of our entire planet."

 

"I know, I know." Flynn said. "But the data is there. Triple-checked and verified. Epsilon Eridani is measurably composed of plutonium now, and the quantity is growing every hour."

 

Janus took a step back from the problem. "Assuming that something could manage to produce that much plutonium, an enormous assumption you realize, why would they do this?"

 

Silence on the other end of the line. "I just don't know Janus." More silence. "I think we are dealing with something beyond our current understanding of physics."