. 06

Chapter 6: A Million Billion Years

Ellie rinsed her face in the sink. Hannah was hastily rinsing herself off in the shower while she sing-hummed Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls. Ellie grabbed the loaned white panties off the bathroom floor and put them on, then went back to the room to slide into the dress she was wearing earlier. She didn't bother with the bra. She was checking her phone when Hannah came out of the bathroom in the denim shorts.

3am. Geeze.

She set an alarm for 7am, in four hours, when she'd ping the General channel on Slack to let her office know she'd be out sick. A plausible hour to realize you're too sick to work.

"Any more check-ins from Kathleen?" Hannah asked, putting her grey T shirt back on.

"Nah," said Ellie. Her stomach gave an audible grumble.

Hannah chuckled. "I share the same senti... That's what I..." She bowed her head and gathered herself, laughing at her own stammering. "My sentiments exactly. Jesus, I need food. You ready?"

They strolled across the Holiday Inn parking lot to the IHOP next door. Though the desert air was cool at this hour, the pavement still wafted residual heat around their ankles.

When they arrived, Ellie asked for a table and the hostess sat them immediately; The restaurant was deserted at this hour on a Wednesday (TECHNICALLY Thursday).

The hostess handed them menus and walked away without a word. Hannah opened hers immediately, but Ellie had other priorities.

"So will you fill me in on everything over breakfast?"

Hannah glanced around at the empty restaurant. "Yeah, I think we can talk about it here if we keep our voices down. Let me decide what to eat and then I'll start talking."

A sallow-eyed young waitress in a dirty, IHOP-blue apron came around. "To drink?"

"Coffee. And water, please," said Ellie, whose eyes were beginning to sting a little from exhaustion.

Hannah smiled warmly at the waitress. "That sounds perfect for me too, thanks."

The waitress nodded and shuffled away. Ellie selected two plain pancakes and a side of scrambled eggs, then put her menu aside.

Hannah hid behind her menu for several more moments, muttering things like "ugh, that sounds so good", and then finally put her menu down. "GOD I'm starving," she repeated again. "I don't know why anyone has dinner before sex. Stuffing your face after a good fuck is the best."

Contrary to Hannah's previous comment, she did not keep her voice down; Ellie thought privately that the kitchen staff could probably hear her. She also realized that Hannah probably didn't care.

"Okay," said Ellie. "Start from the beginning."

This time, Hannah actually got quiet. "Okay, so this where I tell you that I'm not insane, and you just trust me and put aside your disbelief for the time being."

Ellie nodded.

"I would like to recruit you," said Hannah, "for a very big project that has been going on for the last 25 years away from the public eye."

Ellie's brow furrowed. "Intimate fuckin' recruitment process ya got there."

Hannah opened her mouth to respond, then paused as the coffees and waters arrived. The waitress scribbled down their food orders (Hannah ordered a Denver omelet, bacon, a three-stack of chocolate chip pancakes, and a side of toast) and left them again. Hannah downed half of her water before she continued. "I wanted to have sex with you either way. But I didn't know for absolute certain that I wanted to include you in ... well... this until after we fell asleep together. Then I knew I'd found a winner."

An unpleasant feeling crept up Ellie's throat. She felt used. "Okay, so I'm this ideal candidate to do what, exactly? Follow you around and drain your tits? Oh, and what's going on there, by the way?"

"We'll get there," said Hannah. "Just give me a minute. And no. That's what the pump is for." Hannah smirked. "Though you are pretty good at it. Crap, I should've brought the pump just in case..."

"Focus," said Ellie.

"Yeah. Okay. This is the part where it's important that we're sitting down." Hannah waggled in her seat, as though grounding herself for this next part:

"In twelve years, the world is going to end."

Ellie began to feel foolish again. She sipped her coffee. Terrible, but essential. "So.... Climate change, I guess?" She couldn't keep a tone of mockery out of her voice.

"No," said Hannah, "Believe it or not -- and you won't yet -- every living thing on Earth will dodge that bullet"

"Every living thing, huh?"

"Yep," said Hannah. "Out like that." She snapped her fingers. "Birds, bugs, fish, worms, trees, grass, germs. Everything."

"And how do you suppose that will that happen?"

"A gamma ray burst."

"Come again?"

"Sure, should we sneak off to the bathroom?" said Hannah, grinning mischievously.

Ellie glared at her.

"Sorry. I'm sorry. I've explained this so many times and it's old news to me. I can sound really crass when this lands on virgin ears. I need to work on that."

"What's a gamma burst?"

"It's something that occurs when massive stars go supernova. You know what that is, right?"

"Yeah," said Ellie. "Like when a star dies and explodes."

"Exactly," said Hannah.

Her throat caught. "Wait, the sun's gonna explode? I thought that wasn't gonna happen for like a million billion years."

"Not the sun," said Hannah. "The sun's not a massive star and it will be around for a long time. No, our problem is a star that's approximately 93 light-years from here."

"That sounds far."

Hannah smirked. "Not far enough, unfortunately. So this star -- we call it Uriel -- went supernova 81 years ago."

"Wait, it already happened? It's not happening in twelve years?"

"Twelve years from now is when the gamma radiation hits Earth. Remember, 93 light years -- 81 plus twelve -- you get it."

"I guess," Ellie lied. "So why does this kill every living thing?"

Hannah shrugged. "That's just the way gamma radiation is. It's the highest-frequency light wave on the electromagnetic spectrum. It will penetrate every material -- concrete, soil, bedrock, the planet itself -- and then it will penetrate the nuclei of every cell of every living thing. The exposure will cook our DNA and kill everything in an instant. Oh, fuck yeah."

Ellie was bewildered by the abrupt tone change before she realized Hannah was watching the waitress approach with their food.

Plates landed with a clatter, and Hannah dove in while Ellie processed. "Oghmygohd," she said through a mouth full of pancake, "Ah luhhve choccachip pan-hakes"

Ellie wasn't listening. Fuck.

So it was a given at this point that Hannah was a loonie; Ellie understood that now... Her neck and cheeks went red with embarrassment at having given so much of herself to somebody she barely knew. She felt...

Disgusted? Well, no...

Angry? Probably not as much as I should be.

Violated? No, I'll be masturbating to tonight's events for years, even if I end up running screaming from this IHOP.

She nibbled a couple bits of egg without tasting them. Hannah had finished one pancake and was now halfway through the Denver omelet. "People say chocolate and eggs don't go together, but I disagree," Hannah said between bites.

Ellie gave an absent-minded nod and returned to her thoughts.

You could still just leave. Your car is a hundred yards away. You can go home and get a terrible night's sleep and show up for work tomorrow -- exhausted, but back in the embrace of boring sanity.

Ellie didn't do that, though. Instead she sat and watched Hannah eat with abandon. A chunk of bell pepper was stuck to her cheek. She finished the omelet, grabbed a piece of bacon, and sat back in her booth gnawing on it. She noticed Ellie staring.

"Thought you said it was rude to stare," Hannah said thickly through her bacon.

"I think we're past that, don't you?" said Ellie.

Hannah's eyebrows went up. "Want some of my chocolate chip pancakes?" She pointed with her bacon.

A grin crept onto Ellie's face. This goober wouldn't hurt a fly.

Ellie finally dug into her own food... Hannah has a point about sex before dinner... and felt the mediocre cuisine soaking up the worst of the unease she had gotten from Hannah's speech.

I might as well humor her for awhile. If she was going to murder me, she probably would've done it already.

Ellie chased her food with some coffee and sat back, waiting for Hannah to slow down.

"Okay, so long list of questions," said Ellie. "First off, why haven't I heard about this?"

Hannah shrugged. "Nothing to be done. We can't move Earth. We can't move Uriel. There isn't anything we can build that will protect us. It's not like a nuclear blast where a few feet of concrete will keep you safe. We're very much fucked. And the only thing that telling people does is cause panic." She put her bacon down to emphasize the next point. "Do you want to spend your last twelve years in a world of seven billion people who know exactly when and how they'll die... MUCH sooner than they expected?"

Ellie found her cavalier tone chilling. It also lent to her doubts that any of this was true. "But this can't be the only star that's done the gamma-burst thing, right?"

Hannah shook her head in a tornado of curls. "Happens all the time."

"So then why is Uriel the one that kills us?"

Hannah peered over the booth partition and waved to the waitress. "Excuse me, miss? Can I borrow a pen?"

The waitress obliged and headed over. "Can I get you guys anything else? Ready for your check?"

"Sure," said Hannah. "But -- What was your name?"

"Brittany."

"Brittany. Do you mind if we sit here a little while longer, Brittany? We're having an important conversation." Hannah smiled at her. " I promise we'll tip well."

The waitress shrugged, took a couple of Hannah's empty dishes, and departed.

Hannah grabbed a napkin out of the holder and laid it flat on the table. She sketched with the pen.

One little circle. "Earth," Hannah explained. A bigger circle, way on the other side of the napkin. "Uriel." She drew rough scribbles across Uriel from pole to pole so that it looked like the orb had been canceled. She tore the napkin a little in her enthusiasm. "Boom, supernova."

On the other axis, Hannah drew two beams shooting out of Uriel from opposite sides of the star. One of the beams intersected Earth. "Gamma rays." She looked at Ellie. "The beam is gonna be lined up just right to hit Earth. Think of it like a real-life Death Star."

"It'll blow us up?"

"No," said Hannah. "Just sterilize us. It's like Earth being dunked in Clorox. Everything drops dead. Nothing rots because the microbes are dead too. It'll just be dead plants and billions of -- well, mummies, basically."

Ellie's face contorted. "Ew, that's horrible."

"I know, right?" said Hannah, her eyes going wide with an academic fascination that Ellie found thoroughly off-putting. "Now, have we ever been in the path of a gamma burst before? Yes. We've found evidence of low-level gamma exposure in soil layers. But those came from millions of light-years away. The radiation had dissipated enough to not be dangerous."

"And for gamma ray bursts that have happened closer to us," said Ellie, understanding now, "we weren't in the direct path."

Hannah pointed the pen at her. "Exactly."

"Okay," said Ellie, "Say I believe all this... and I'm not sure I do..." Hannah closed her eyes and nodded. "We're fucked. Okay, so then what? What is this 25 year project you want to recruit me for?"

Hannah smiled. "Good question. You know Fyd Yeltsin?"

Ellie blinked. "The gajillionaire?"

Everyone loved, hated, or loved to hate Fyodor "Fyd" Yeltsin. The world's first trillionaire (a title he achieved in the '90s at 22) and only child of a long-dead Russian oligarch, it was difficult to think of an industry Fyd didn't have his fingers in.

When the media wasn't fawning over his private space company and his renewables projects, they were doom-publishing about his hostile takeovers of private tech firms -- which included half of the mainstream social platforms and online retail -- and his monopolization of the entire information sector.

Fyd was bizarrely untouchable by government regulation. He was frequently called to Congressional oversight committees as a matter of procedure to give testimonies and apologies in front of watery-eyed dinosaur senators. It was never a fair fight. These ancient congressmen didn't understand what Yeltsin did well enough to update their own iPads, much less pass laws to reign the guy in.

And so, Fyd was both hero and villain -- champion of renewables, pioneer in space travel where nobody else could absorb the cost, and monopolistic fat-cat. Whether you wanted to worship him or hang him, you had good arguments to do it.

Ellie's more leftist-minded friends unaffectionately called him "Fat Fyd" in reference to his wealth hoarding, though physically he was just as fit as the rest of his California tech-bro cohort. Ellie was more or less aligned. Trips to Mars might be sexy and all, but wouldn't those untold billions be better used feeding the poor and lobbying for socioeconomic equity in the halls of power?

Ellie couldn't say that she squared with how Yeltsin chose to spend his time and money.

"Yep, that one," said Hannah. "So in 1997, NASA astronomers found Uriel. And they were able to identify the signs of a massive star that was about to explode. Or... had already exploded, rather. They pieced things together and, after corroborating with a bunch of expert egg-heads at several universities, they were able to pinpoint the date of our demise."

"Which is?" asked Ellie.

"June 25th, 2034."

"And they kept it to themselves," said Ellie.

"Well... They went to the Secretary of Defense," said Hannah, "because NASA's budget still comes from defense funding. Defense Secretary shared it with Bill Clinton, and the first thing his administration did was seal it." Hannah mimed slashing her own throat. "The only problem that could be solved was the matter of keeping this out of the media. Not even subsequent presidents were told. George W. had no idea, Obama's out of the loop, et cetera. The only government entity that gets briefed is the director of the CIA. The one leaving office always briefs the one coming in. Nobody else sits in that meeting."

"And the CIA -- or just the director, I guess -- is looped in to maintain secrecy?"

"Exactly," said Hannah. "So, Yeltsin was included in those early days before the gag order, because he was already known as a front-running expert in astronomy and cosmology. He helps confirm NASA's findings, he buttons his yap about the whole thing, and he gets cookin'."

Ellie noticed, not for the first time, Hannah's Texas twang that emerged when she was speaking quickly and forgetting herself.

"He decides that the only thing to be done is to invest in space travel and get some people off this rock. He agreed to front the cost for an interplanetary migration project IF the government stayed out of his hair and gave him full, unmitigated control over the project. The only role the CIA plays is maintaining the secret in partnership with Yeltsin."

"Hang on," Ellie said, and she actually laughed. "Are you telling me THAT'S the reason he wants to go to Mars?" Ellie recalled the multiple space ports Fyd had built across the southern U.S. -- in California, Texas, and Florida -- and the constant news about experimental rockets and launch failures and successes -- all to the same drumbeat: Going to Mars. She'd always considered the whole exercise obscenely wasteful. A vanity project for a man with more money than God.

"Mars is a lie," said Hannah. "A smoke screen. And besides, fuck Mars." She physically swatted away the concept. "Mars sucks. There's basically no atmosphere, it's too far from the sun to ever be warm enough for us to live there, and even if we melt the ice caps, it would be a colossal energy cost to keep the water liquid and usable."

Hannah paused to gulp more coffee. "Mars," she repeated, shaking her head, like it was the punchline of a terrible joke. "But. Mars DOES allow Fyd to work on interplanetary travel in the public eye without anyone figuring out what he's actually doing. Mars captures the public imagination."

Now this really was comical, and Ellie's incredulity was complete. She summed up, smiling: "Okay, so there's a grand CIA-slash-tech-trillionaire conspiracy to hide the apocalypse from everyone and build some kind of... I don't know... Ark... to leave Earth. The fuckin' President isn't even in on it... and based on what I signed earlier, the CIA will straight-up murder me if I go telling people."

Hannah nodded gravely. "You're getting it."

"No, I'm really not," said Ellie. "It makes no sense that Fat Fyd has more authority than the President. I mean, come ON."

Hannah tilted her head inquisitively. Once again, the graceful swan dive of curls. "Why doesn't that make sense?"

"Because... because..." Ellie realized she didn't have a good answer for that, so she switched tactics. "All right, then if not Mars, where are we going instead? The moons of Jupiter?"

"You're not going anywhere," said Hannah. "Neither am I."

This wiped the smile off Ellie's face.

"Wait... Okay... so I'm in on the secret but I don't get to go? I'm still stuck here?"

"I'm sorry," said Hannah, "that's the way it has to be."

"... Well then who goes??"

If all of this was some ridiculous joke... or the ramblings of a crazy person... why did Ellie suddenly feel afraid? Why was she angry that she didn't have a ticket for this space ark that didn't exist?

"That indignation you feel. Right there," Hannah said. "That's why it's so important that this secret is kept."

Ellie's cheeks burned at her own transparency.

"And to answer your question," Hannah continued, "The children go. My kids. Your kids, maybe."