By Brian C. Mahon
Standing alone on the front porch, staring at a face in the sky? This really wasn’t how I expected the world to end.
And that’s saying something: I toured from Stanford to Cambridge to lecture on how universes should end. I covered heat death, big freeze, big snap, all the standard methods. When someone inevitably raised their hand to ask my prediction for humanity’s end, I always offered my honest belief, that we would wind up killing ourselves off. Of course, there was always a follow up question about meteors. “No,” I would tell them, “Jupiter mostly guarantees we’re okay.”
Mostly. That was until Xiao, a post-doc of mine, found a previously undetected, and very large, blue-shifted object. To our collective regret, she confirmed the existence of Planet X. As recently as 2015, those of us who had nothing better to do theorised the hypothetical planet would have a very regular, very long, and very predictable, normal orbit. But as the Gemini Observatories subsequently proved, it doesn’t.
It’s fine, I told them all. I told my students it would be fine. I told my wife it would be fine. I told 300 million Americans on national TV that it would all be okay. I said on one newscast, “Rogue planets are a known phenomenon. Though we are unluckily near the trajectory of one passing by, it would do us no harm. In fact, we should all be thankful to bear witness to such a unique, cosmic wanderer. It will all be just fine.”
Those were my words: just fine. I told my friend Robert the same, and Pam, the girl at the student union coffee bar, and I even argued Neil’s and Katie’s concerns down. The calculations were not terribly difficult. I did them real-time on a Sunday morning talk show to demonstrate to everyone that Planet X will not be dragged in by the sun’s depression in spacetime to roll around a gravitational drain tube into a collision with us. “Heck,” I said to the camera, warm coffee in hand, “we still have Jupiter, our friendly star system sentinel, to help us out too.”
As it is, I am wrong.
This wasn’t how I expected the world to end, with a rogue planet veering off course to come to us, to get between us and the sun, to open its jaws wide. Cosmology didn’t prepare me for Uranus-sized carbon eaters cruising through the cosmos. Telescopic evidence of teeth the size of Phobos have me in a state of shock. I should be shaking, but it’s all a little too helpless to worry over. I will say, the eclipse was a brief surprise. The increasing weightlessness is not.
It’s time to stop fighting it, I suppose. Time to follow my wife off the front porch and drift upwards with the rest of the suburban chaff, cars and tricycles and basketballs and unattended children and all.
If Planet X hadn’t repositioned the Earth betwixt it and the sun, I never would have had the opportunity to see the dentition of a planet eater and offer a smile back.
About the Author
Brian Mahon
Brian Mahon is a former cook, lab technician, submariner, and now-and-then writer.
He splits his remaining energies seeking knowledge, fighting age, doing laundry, and writing as a creativity relief valve.
He can be reached both on Facebook <@MahonMiscellany> and through his website, <www.mahanimalism.net>.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Tim Borella is an Australian author, mainly of short speculative fiction published in anthologies, online and in podcasts.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Ed lives with his wife plus a magical assortment of native animals in tropical North Queensland.
Jessie Atkin writes fiction, essays, and plays.
Bryan is a writer, activist and retired-barrister based in Melbourne, Australia. He appeared in the High Court in significant constitutional, native title and refugee matters including the Mabo litigation, Bryan has published numerous legal articles, and the book "A Mabo Memoir" (2013).
Deborah Sheldon is an award-winning author from Melbourne, Australia. She writes short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum.
PS Cottier is a poet who lives in Canberra, with a particular interest in speculative poetry.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.