G - Graveis Primary

831 years ago

Just over an hour past central dawn time we sat in our control room drinking coffee, chatting, and watching the gauges. We had no suspicion that in a few minutes we would nearly destroy our planet in our attempt to save it. The gauges were not the old-timey ones with glass and needles because those couldn’t accurately measure thaumatic energy. They were graphics on large screens with real-time telemetry data streaming in to imitate the analog dials. In the command center there were some of the old gauges, but those were only monitoring the basic gravity, temperature, and barometer at our site. Being more than 1,200 kilometers away meant those needles should not move.

Tharence, Istrid, and I counted down the minutes to the final acceptance test before the approval of the Graveis Project. The dashboards were full of mostly soothing shades of blue and green, showing aggregates and averages from over a hundred thousand sensors spread across all of Gioveda. The planet’s gravity metrics had been calculated, measured, and modeled over the past fifteen years. After it was discovered that the moon was falling. Not falling like a rock, of course. Falling like a slowly crashing satellite.

The effects were minimal in the beginning, so of course there were arguments and disagreements about whether it was even true. Political pundits made fortunes yelling that it was a hoax and a conspiracy. The religions were titular in their excitement that their centuries-predicted end of the world was neigh. Even the Sonii were involved, but mostly they had been showing up everywhere they could reach to sing discordant protest songs after their leadership learned what we were planning. It served to make them a fringe group for a long time. Now the so-called ‘song-witches’ were popping up everywhere like a plague.

Ultimately, the truth was undeniable. At first it was just noticeable when tides started rising and falling an extra inch. Storms were stronger and slower. Draughts were prolonged. But they were different by small amounts until it accelerated. As the moon’s orbit decayed, the effects worsened and sped up. We were in a very slow death spiral with humanity awaiting its fate at the center.

Eventually the tidal shifts became so significant they could no longer be ignored. Docks were underwater up to half the day. Rich people’s houses were sucked off beaches, and their massive yachts swamped and sunk in huge storms. That’s when the warnings were taken seriously. Rich people had to lose something first.

The hum of the automated machine puking out too-sweet hot and frothy drinks that barely emulated coffee belied the significance of this moment. We were about to draw on a combination of energies that history indicated had never been merged together. They certainly had never been used together in this magnitude. The theory was actually pretty simple. We were using a very basic natural force, a thaumatic energy, that allowed beings to attract and repel objects. It was commonly called telekinesis, or just magic before we understood it better. Then, by amplifying the thaumatic output with a hair more than 1.2 gigawatts of electricity, and utilizing the planet as a sort of anchor point, the plan was to simply… nudge the moon back into its proper orbit.

Sounds easy, sure. But we all know how theories work in practice. Not always great. Planetary math in a real solar-system, it turns out, is much more finicky than we thought. I was running through the calculations and assumptions again in my head as the test was about to begin.

“Everything looks great,” Istrid said. “Anybody want more donuts? Otherwise, I’m going to put them away so I don’t eat them all.” She giggled in that self-conscious way that made it clear to me she would end up finishing them all anyway.

“I’m good,” I said, still staring ahead as if inspecting a dust-mite a kilometer away. My blank stare was directed to an invisible point past the screens in a cloudy haze of calculations and unawareness of anything near me. I raised my pseudo-coffee to my lips and sipped loudly.

“None for me, Isty.” Tharence was incapable of using a person’s given name. Somehow, he felt it was fine to call people whatever he liked, even if they hated it. She sighed audibly, took the last jelly donut and closed the box for the journey back to the break room.

“Her name is Istrid, Thar,” I said in a tone so flat that a public singing contest would have sent me home in disgrace. I could never let that sort of disrespect go unchallenged, but I was exhausted by it and couldn’t muster more vigor in the moment. Anything gets tiresome when you repeat it close to a billion times. “Hey, Thare-bear. How’s it looking?”

“Tharence. My name is Tharence.”

“Oh, I know your name, but since you can’t ever seem to call Istrid by her real name, I’ve decided just now that I’ll only call you by yours if you call her by hers.” Screw this dunce-brain, I thought.

He just grunted. “Nominal. It’s looking nominal. We could be playing a board game for as much interestingness this has. Oh, and Brycen?”

“There you go… real names. Nice.”

“Brycen, my dad says he likes your mom the best of all his lovers.”

“Oh. Sure. That’s a pretty sick burn, Tharence ‘the Wrench.’ I didn’t realize your dad was into necrocoitus.”

“What?!” Istrid had returned with a little bit of extra powdered sugar on her cheek. “What are you two talking about?”

“The-rents over there just told me his dad likes to have sex with my dead mother. I guess the fruit really does rot at the base of the tree.” I smirked, now fully pulled out of my distant recalculations. Tharence shot me a look so cold and hateful a forearm hair on my left arm noticed, and shuddered.

“Eww. Tharence, is that true? Your dad has sex with corpses?” Istrid was always game for giving Tharence a hard time, since he was relentless with her. “He’s almost as sick as you, what with your obsession with… you know. Showing up here acting like you have a corn-cob up your butt.”

I chuckled as quietly as I could to myself, but not exactly silently. He really does act like he has a broom-handle for a spine.

One of the graphs streaming a pretty flat line spiked in my peripheral vision. My head snapped around to look at it. The disruption was barely a half a second long, but maxed out the thaum sensor scale. Any graph line that flattens at the top of the screen is a bad sign, normally. But nothing followed. I stared, while the other two sank back into sullen silence. Their silence beats the infernal noise the song-witches are doing outside. Sometimes deep in a bunker is exactly where I need to be.

My peripheral vision caught another one. This time Tharence saw it also.

“What’s that about?” he asked, sitting up in his chair.

“Yeah. the same thing happened here on this north pole sensor. One can be an anomaly, but two starts to look like a…” I cut off.

Graphs ticking off real-time measurements from the thaum sensors, the gravity sensors, and even the solar array outputs across the planet began spiking and falling all across the bank of screens, apparently at random. I grabbed the yellow handset on my desk and put it to my face. The device was hard-wired to Graveis Primary so that it just rang when I lifted the handset. The primary site was an enormous, and remote, outpost powered by several square miles of solar arrays, geothermal steam power, and a medium-sized nuclear reactor. Moving the moon requires backups for the backups, after all.

I heard ringing. Too much ringing in my ear. Why are they not picking up?

“The moon. Where’s the moon?” I shouted. Istrid jumped and then settled on her workstation to switch to that dashboard of measurements.

“It’s moving. Away. Did they just do it? Did they skip the test and just do it?” The confusion in her voice came with a shudder of concern.

Tharence had flipped another screen to the Gioveda monitor, a set of positioning sensors that maintained the facts of our planet’s position, speed, and rotation as well as the moon’s in relation to the sun.

“Uhhhhhhhhh.” The sound from Tharence’s throat was not reassuring. I turned to look.

“ANSWER THE PHONE!” My scream was involuntary. It rang two more times before someone answered.

“Not now, Brycen. We’re in the thick of… a thing here.”

“And I need to know about this thing you’re in the middle of. Did you break Gioveda? Tell me you didn’t go ahead without the international council’s approval… without MY approval at least!” My temper flared despite the calming words from my therapist that rustled about in my head.

“Um, Yes. We see that too. We didn’t do this, Brycen. I swear.” The voice was agitated. Even sounding scared.

“Well? What did you do? I can see the energy percentages at ninety-six now. What do I not know?” My role was to oversee the project. The entire Graveis project was ultimately my responsibility, and the outcome was ultimately on me.

“It’s growing on its own. I think. Well, the singers outside are louder than ever, so we are guessing…”

Guessing?! “You think? You are guessing?!” My voice cracked into a note I hadn’t reached since childhood.

“We think they’re amplifying the thaumatic energy. Making it grow too quickly. That’s a variable that we didn’t accou…”

The line went dead. That’s not possible. There’s a hard wire from here to there.

Istrid and Tharence stared at me.

“Ah. Brycen? What were they guessing? Guessing doesn’t sound… good.” Istrid’s voice trembled.

“I’m not totally sure. The call dropped.”

The three of us settled back in our chairs for a few moments and stared at the monitors. All across Gioveda sensors were going offline. That’s not great. The moon appeared to have found a stable orbit as the laser measurements were finally flat-lined. Well, at least that part worked. Istrid flipped a small monitor in the corner to the big central screen in front of us. I took a nervous sip of something vaguely brown and no-longer frothy. The map showed a disturbing pattern emerging. Sensors were going offline in an expanding circle from Graveis Primary.

The hum of the coffee machine caught my attention again. Tharence had restarted it to get a single fresh paper cup full of his favorite chocolatey coffee emulation. He stared motionless at it while it brewed, then he took the cup and abruptly turned to me with a sober face.

“I’m going outside to enjoy what remains of the clean air. I may be gone a while.”

“I’m finishing those donuts, guys. I’ll meet you up there, Tharence.” Iskra was already nearly at the door before my eyes tracked in her direction.

“You do you.” It was all I could say. It was the last thing I said to them. I hope it was enough.

A couple minutes later the blast wave from the explosion at Graveis Primary facility tore the exposed upper floors cleanly off of our building. My bunker was secure. I probably should have said goodbye to them.

* * *

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