Of Moons, Mares and Men

by Electricut

Lunar Lights

It all began with the lights. From my bedroom in my small, otherwise empty house, I could hear the sounds of commotion and wonder outside, and I found it to be as good a distraction from my tedious work as any. I pushed my chair out from my desk, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge on my way out, and strode onto the porch. My beagle hound Bessie trotted over to me, seeming a bit distressed with all the people outside at once, and I gave her a reassuring scratch on the head. Everyone living on my street must have been outside, looking up at the night sky, so I craned my neck upward to join them.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but it certainly wasn’t the Northern Lights spiraling around in the sky, above the Midwest, America. However, I found myself at a lack of anything else to classify the amazing lightshow as. The lights and colors swirled far over our heads, radiating from one spot, though there didn’t seem to be anything immediately special about that spot. All I could see there was clear, deep blue night sky.

The desire to get a closer look suddenly struck me, and I rushed back inside to retrieve my trusty telescope. I also decided to grab a portable radio from the shelf to see what the news was about this, and my cell phone. I flipped the radio on, and got a broadcast talking about the lights right away. No one knew quite what they were or what the cause was yet. While they looked a lot like the Northern Lights, they were not caused by anything natural; in fact, no one could find a cause or source at all. They just… were. It also seemed that they were not just over the Midwest, but everywhere in the world that wasn’t getting sunlight at that moment. Since they only shimmered in the night sky, they had been dubbed the Lunar Lights, until someone could figure out what they really were.

I set up the telescope as quickly as I could, and began calibrating and positioning it to the source point of the lights. While I was doing this, my phone rang. Almost on cue… I thought, as I positioned it between my shoulder and chin to keep both hands free.

“Kurt, are you seeing this?” Duncan, one of my co-workers, asked.

“Find me someone who isn’t seeing this, and I’ll be impressed.” I replied, looking through the telescope. “I’m trying to get a lock on the center of this whole light show… you have any idea what it is?”

“I had one, yeah, but it’s a little… abstract. I wanted to see if anyone else had something before I put that on the table.”

“Well…” I started, making a tiny change in the telescope’s angle, “It seems like the lights radiate from a fixed point in space, almost as though there should be some tangible source, unlike the Northern Lights. I’ve got my eye on the ‘origin point’, but there’s nothing there. I mean, there might be something light-years away, but definitely nothing close enough to do something like this… And I doubt it’s just a really elaborate practical joke, it’s just too large scale for that. I don’t suppose anything unusual entered the Earth’s atmosphere in the last hour or so?”

“Nope, nothing.” Duncan replied, and I found myself at a lack of possible explanations again. “So, you don’t have any idea what it is, either?”

“None yet, though to be fair, I’ve only been seeing it for a few minutes. Let’s hear your idea.”

“Alright, well, notice how the lights are spiraling outward, not inward. After I had a thought about it, I looked into it, and black holes seem to work similarly to this, only flowing inward. So, bear with me here, but what if this is the other side of some black hole?”

I shook my head. Can we save the crazy theories for later? “So you’re saying that one of the drain plugs of the universe is letting out right above our heads, is that right?”

“It’s just a theory, can’t know anything for sure just yet. But it would make sense that we’re only seeing lights right now. It just opened up and, you know, light travels fastest. If we start seeing actual objects falling out of the sky, then maybe there’s something to my idea.”

“I still have my doubts.” I stated, adjusting the telescope’s zoom slightly. “Seems a little sci-fi to actually be happening. But I guess I’ll keep that idea in mind.”

“Right. Give me a call if you hear anything new. Later!” I heard a click, and snapped my own phone shut. Little did I know, the real answer to this problem would be a lot more sci-fi than Duncan had predicted. I spent the better part of the night observing the lights, but when it became apparent that they weren’t going to do anything else but look pretty, I decided to sleep on the problem and work on it more in the morning. After all, as a scientist with a fair understanding of astronomy, this really was my most pressing concern. I doubted anyone would expect me to do anything else when there was research on something new and affecting the whole planet to be done.

When I awoke the next morning and looked out the window, I saw no lights in the sky, which was a little disappointing. However, when I sat down to watch the morning news, cup of coffee in hand, I saw that the lights were still shining bright on the other side of the world, in the same exact point in space. Well that’s one thing all but confirmed… I thought, and jotted down a few thoughts on a notepad, the lights aren’t tethered to Earth at all. Unless it’s moving with Earth along its revolution of the sun, rather than revolving the Earth itself… but how would it even do that without moving like the moon? Ugh, I don’t understand what’s happening here… it’s like the lights have their own set of physics.

I shrugged and loaded up Netflix. I always liked to set aside an hour or so in the mornings to watch something before working, as it tended to brighten up the day. The two I watched most were Doctor Who, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I have enough weird science stuff on my plate today as it is… I thought dryly. Colorful talking ponies it is. I hit a button on the remote, and kicked my feet up on my desk as the familiar theme song began.

Just as the episode started, however, my home phone rang, and I paused to answer. As expected, there was only one person who would call me at this time of day, and considering it was my boss, Damon, I had little choice but to answer.

“Kurt? I trust you saw everything that happened last night?”

“Provided it was just the lights, yeah. I went to sleep when it became apparent that was all that was going to happen.”

“Yes, that was all. However, it’s still quite the unusual phenomenon by itself. I’m calling everyone to get their take on it.” I told him everything I had theorized so far, as well as Duncan’s idea. I still didn’t believe it for half a second, but everything had to be laid out, no suggestion ignored no matter how improbable.

There was a short pause as I finished, then Damon continued: “An interesting theory. However, there is one piece of new information that makes it slightly more complicated… just before sunrise this morning, there was the slightest shimmer in the area of the lights. We aren’t sure what it was yet, but it was something that interrupted the stillness in that spot in space.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like what? An object? A different sort of light?”

“A… distortion might be the most accurate way of putting it.” He explained. “Almost like a mirage, but of nothing in particular. Labs all over the world have their sights locked on that spot now, so the next time the space distorts, or if anything else happens, we will have more information about it.”

“Good to hear.” I commented, “All these lights in the sky, and it feels like we’re feeling our way around in the dark.” He chuckled slightly, and the phone conversation ended shortly thereafter. The rest of the day passed by comparatively uneventfully, with my TV and radio both tuned into news about the Lunar Lights. When night rolled back around, along with the colorful display, I was on top of things, and prepared my work station on the front porch. Bessie wandered over again and curled up at my feet. My telescope was quickly set up to observe the source point again, and I kept my eyes peeled for this ‘distortion’ Damon had told me about.

For a while, I saw nothing. The lights themselves were quite entertaining, but I wasn’t here to be entertained. I needed to figure out what they were, and this distortion was the only lead I had. An hour passed with nothing new to speak of, but halfway through the second hour, my vision through the telescope blurred. At first, I thought it was a smudge on the lens, or perhaps my glasses. When it turned out to be neither, I hit myself in the head for being stupid, and realized that the ‘distortion’ was back.

It was as though there were some heat signature standing out from the space around it, but considering it was outside the Earth’s atmosphere, I doubted that was the case. Still, it seemed like something were shimmering in that space, different entirely from the lights around it. In that split second, I thought there was something distinctly familiar about the sight, but it passed a moment later. I got out my notepad and jotted down everything that I thought could have been relevant, which at this early stage was almost everything.

I must have fallen asleep outside at some point that night, because I woke up slumped back in the lawn chair I had been sitting on. Bessie was still on the porch, though she had moved slightly to bask in the sunlight. I shook my head, trying to wake up. Somehow I can tell this is only the beginning of my sleep schedule being thrown into chaos… With my eyes half-open, I flopped back in my chair, my view of the sky and pale setting moon blurring past. However, my eyebrows lowered in thought a moment later. There’s something not right here… I opened my eyes and raised myself back up, squinting at the moon still in the sky. What… what is that?

I quickly stood, knocking over the lawn chair in the process, and strode out onto the road as fast as I could. High in the sky, the moon I had seen hung heavily above, but I realized with a start that it looked nothing like the moon I was familiar with. Not one of the familiar craters or ridges was there; in fact, not even the colors remained. While it was still hazy in the morning light, it almost looked like a distant reflection of Earth, with swatches of green and blue, and masses of fluffy white clouds. I knew it couldn’t be a true reflection of Earth though, because none of the continents lined up: the ones on the ‘moon’ were completely different shapes. In addition, this ‘moon’ seemed to have an additional smaller moon of its own. To top it all off, when I spun my head around to see if anything else confusing was in the sky, I found the Earth’s real moon in a different part of the sky, just the same as it had always been.

Thinking fast, I whipped out my cell phone and set it up to take a video. I don’t know what’s going on at all, but I’ll need to have evidence of this. I tried to get a decent shot at the object in the sky, but it was still too hazy in the morning light, and it would barely show up on the phone’s camera. The telescope! Maybe I can see what’s actually going on up there. I swung back around and peered through the lens, ready to adjust it to view the ‘second moon’, but what I saw caused my heart to race even faster.

The object was already focused on by the telescope. The device hadn’t moved, but it was already right where it needed to be. I quickly tried to steady my thoughts before getting a closer look. Does this mean… the object is right where the distortion was? Could this thing have… materialized there? I put my eye to the lens, and was able to see the object in much clearer, though it was still hard to see in the morning light. I experimentally put my phone up to the telescope lens, and it seemed to be able to record well enough.

It was a good thing I started recording, as something seemed to be happening up above. The clouds on this object were moving around at alarming speeds, and seemed to be stretching to cover the entire surface. Within the span of about twenty minutes, the object had been completely obscured by its own clouds. How is any of this possible…? How can clouds move that fast, and more importantly, how can there be clouds and grass and water up there on that object? To be technical… I don’t think it can even be classified as a second moon. That’s practically a whole planet, and it’s quite possible that there’s life up there…

I shook my head. But that doesn’t make sense either! If a whole small planet materialized in the Earth’s sky, our gravity should have shifted dramatically without delay. Since nothing’s changed, it’s as though that planet doesn’t exist. As though it were nothing more than a mirage or illusion… could that be…? Considering the small planet had stopped all activity, I put my eye up to the telescope lens again. To my interest, it seemed to be ever-so-slightly translucent, furthering the idea that it could be an illusion of some kind.

First the Lunar Lights came, visible all over the planet, and they spiraled from one fixed point in space. That space began shimmering, and in that place appears a tiny planet, complete with its own even tinier moon. However, none of this has any adverse effect on the Earth, only serving to amaze and confuse. What’s the point in all of this…? If it turns out to be an illusion, who’s pulling the strings and why? And if not, what the bloody hell is happening to the planet?