The Perihelion Protocol

I.

The woman who hired me had eyes like broken glass. She sat in my office on Sunset Boulevard and slid an envelope across the desk. Ten thousand dollars in crisp bills, the kind that smell like a bank, not a person.

"Palomar Observatory," she said. Her name was Evelyn Cross, and her voice was the sort of voice that made you do things you would later regret. "Look at their solar data. All of it. Every measurement for the last five years."

"Why?" I asked. I did not ask for much. Ten thousand dollars was enough to make you ask one question.

"Because someone is lying," she said. "And I want to know what."

I took the job because I needed the money. My office had a foreclosure notice taped to the door, and my refrigerator contained nothing but a jar of pickles and a bottle of rye that had been open so long it was turning to vinegar. I went to Palomar. I looked at the data.

The Sun was swelling. Not much—0.003 percent per year—but the acceleration was exponential. The astronomers at Palomar knew. They had known for years. And they were not telling anyone.

II.

The agency that owned the data was called the Interstellar Navigation Commission. Fancy name for a government black site buried in the Santa Ana Desert. I broke in on a Tuesday, wearing a maintenance uniform I had stolen from a dry cleaner and a flashlight that barely worked.

What I found in those files made my hands shake.

The Sun would undergo helium flash within three centuries. The Earth would be vaporised. There was no fixing this. There was only one option: a generation ship. A vessel large enough to carry five thousand people—scientists, engineers, artists, the best of humanity—to Proxima Centauri, four point three light-years away.

But the ship was not for everyone.

The Perihelion Protocol, they called it. Select the elite. Launch in eighteen months. Leave the rest of us behind to watch the Sun swell and die. The Commission had been building the ship in secret. They had the funding, the materials, the engineers. All they needed was time.

I took the files. I went to the Los Angeles Times. The editor read them, went pale, and then called Commissioner Harold Voss.

I went to the bar across the street and drank whiskey until the bartender stopped serving me. At midnight, Detective Ray Sullivan—my friend, my brother in everything but blood—found me sitting on the curb outside the newspaper building.

"Jack," he said. "Put the files away."

"They're going to leave five thousand people and abandon billions," I said. "That's not salvation. That's genocide with a better name."

"It's survival," Sullivan said. "And if you publish this, they will kill you. Not the Commission. The public. People don't want to know. Let them live their lives."

III.

I published it anyway.

The headline ran across every paper on the West Coast: COMMISSION PLANS ELITE ESCAPE WHILE BILLIONS FACE EXTINCTION. I expected outrage. I expected people to storm the Commission's offices. I expected revolution.

What I got was silence.

Then came the denial. Commissioner Voss appeared on the radio, calm and reasonable, and said the reports were "the desperate fabrications of a disgraced veteran with a chip on his shoulder." The Palomar astronomers issued a statement saying the solar data had been "misinterpreted." The government declared me a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Evelyn Cross found me in my office, which had been trashed—papers scattered, desk overturned, the jar of pickles smashed on the floor.

"You think truth matters?" she said. Her eyes were cold. "Truth doesn't launch ships, Mr. Morstan. Belief does. And the public believes what they're told to believe."

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I'm someone who knows the ship launches in eighteen months," she said. "And you're someone who's going to disappear if you don't stop asking questions."

I did not stop. I tracked Commission shipments. I followed engineers to the desert site. I interviewed workers who had seen the ship's hull being riveted—three hundred feet long, built for interstellar travel, hidden beneath a facade of weather monitoring equipment.

They found me on a rainy Thursday in October. Not the Commission. Not the government. Just men in dark suits with guns, in an alley behind a bar in Boyle Heights, while the rain washed the blood into the gutter and nobody stopped because it was Los Angeles and nobody ever stopped for anything.

IV.

I woke up in the hospital. Sullivan was sitting in the chair beside my bed.

"They got you good," he said. Three ribs broken. Internal bleeding. A bullet that had missed my lung by half an inch.

"Did you publish?" I asked.

Sullivan looked away. "No."

I closed my eyes. The ceiling was white. The room smelled of antiseptic and regret.

Two weeks later, I sat on the ruins of Hollywood Hill and watched the Sun set. It looked normal. It always looked normal. That was the worst part—the Sun looked exactly the same as it did yesterday, exactly the same as it would tomorrow. But it was lying. It was always lying. It was getting bigger. It was getting redder. And in three hundred years, it would eat the Earth.

I lit a cigar. The smoke tasted like ash.

Evelyn was right. Truth does not matter. Belief matters. And the public believes what keeps them sleeping at night.

I watched the Sun disappear behind the mountains. Somewhere out there, beyond the visible horizon, the Commission was building their ship. Five thousand people. The best of humanity. The rest of us were just ballast.

I finished the cigar. I stood up. I walked home through the rain.

The Sun will swallow us all. And nobody will care.

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