NEW AUTHOR!
Julia Scott-Douglas lives in Los Angeles, California with a small menagerie and her boyfriend. She is inspired to write by her friends, family, city and the many books she both reads and reviews. Julia has been writing science fiction, fantasy and horror stories for several years and is currently working on getting her works published in various media.
Presenting a complete short story by Julia Scott‐Douglas!
The Day the Sun Went Out
“Maintenance Initializing,” flashed the screen.
Barker Thomas, universal engineer assigned to galaxy 572-3 checked his controls. The light was on that indicated the solar unit had powered down and the lunar module was in position to disguise the work.
“Maintenance Complete” said the screen.
Barker sat back, satisfied.
“All done, then?” he asked on his mindlink.
“Sure, sure, start her up,” said the superintendent of maintenance.
Barker hit the switch to move the lunar module, then the switch to power up the solar. When the screen showed a diagram of the lunar moving, he sat back, satisfied. Time for a lunch break, he decided.
----
Dr. Reese Spence watched the solar eclipse with his 6 year old son, Joey. It was a hot Florida day; sticky with high humidity. Dr. Spence felt rivulets of sweat running down his craggy face as he stared up at the sun through his viewing filters.
Great, he thought, just what I need, another crappy day to make my skin more greasy.
“Dad,” said his son. Dr. Spence looked down at his son’s head of black hair, sticky with sweat. His son sounded worried, but Dr. Spence couldn’t quite tell because Joey’s big brown eyes were hidden behind a child-sized sun filter. Dr. Spence crinkled his brows and squinted his eyes and the silvery brightness of the filter.
“Yes, what is it?” asked Dr. Spence.
“Oh, nothing,” said Joey, “Just, well,” he laughed a high pitched laugh that Dr. Spence had never heard from his son before, “Is the sun gonna come back after the moon covers it up?”
Dr. Spence barked an unnatural chuckle, “Of course it will, son, just wait and see,” he shook his head and patted his son’s shoulder, outwardly sure. But on the inside, he felt the trepidation his son expressed run up and down his spine as a shiver. He squinted back up at the sun.
Something bad is going to happen, he thought as he watched the moon completely cover the sun. His mother used to call these feelings the second sight. Usually what he felt came true. Dr. Spence shook it off. He was an astrophysicist at the local space program – a man of science. He knew only what the great god, Science, told him and all that it was telling him right now was that by the treble and pitch of his and his son’s voice, they both felt nervous as hell.
Dr. Spence looked back up at the sky. The sun was now completely covered by the moon and it seemed to be staying there for an awfully long time. Dr. Spence shook his head again, trying to shake the feeling of impending doom. Stop being unreasonable, he chastised himself, this is your millionth solar eclipse. Nothing new is going to happen. His scoldings didn’t seem to have much effect on his nerves, so he clasped both hands together and squeezed hard to stop them from shaking. Then he looked back at the sky.
As Dr. Spence watched, something seemed to grow from the moon. A dark, lightless orb was making its way out from behind the moon.
“Dad,” said Joey, his voice shaking, “is that the sun?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Spence breathed.
“It can’t be the sun, right? Since it’s light out here, I mean, if it was the sun, wouldn’t the whole sky be dark?” asked Joey.
“Well, light has to move all that distance to get to us, so if the sun went dark, we’d still have light for a while,” said Dr. Spence, his explanation not making any sense. He knew he was making something up and, in a glance, saw his son knew too..
Why would the sun be dark? I have to find out, he thought. His nervousness had turned to excitement and his entire body now had goose pimples.
“Son, I need to go to work…” he began.
Joey’s eyes grew big and filled with tears before Dr. Spence had a chance to say more.
“Don’t leave me!” Joey wailed.
“I was going to ask if you wanted to come with me,” said Dr. Spence. His excitement threatened to choke him and he shakily grabbed his son’s hand and pulled him to the truck.
This moment might be the reason I’m alive, he thought, I’ll be damned if I let it pass me by.
---
“Um, boss?” said the superintendent over the mindlink.
“What?” snapped Barker. He had been enjoying a good book while eating his wife’s not-so-good freeze-dried Khapodian frogs. Khapodian frogs were very difficult to prepare, and he knew she put her best efforts into making them for him, so he made sure he ate every last bit to show her how much he appreciated her cooking for him. It never occurred to him to throw the Khapodian frogs out. He was an engineer and nothing if not honest.
“The solar module isn’t working like it’s supposed to,” said the superintendent.
“How do you mean?” asked Barker. He looked out the viewscope at the solar module. It was completely shut down. He checked the controls.
“Call customer service,” the screen told him.
“No energy?” he asked.
“I dunno boss. When we did the maintenance nothing seemed out of order.”
Barker heaved a sigh.
Just what I need, he thought, a huge problem to delay my return home.
On any other day he would have been happy to stay at the station all hours, if just to avoid his wife’s constant barrage of complaints, but today she had made him freeze-dried Khapodian frogs, which meant she was thinking of him amorously. If he didn’t take this opportunity, when would the next one be?
“Boss, one more thing,” said the superintendent nervously.
“What is it?” asked Barker.
“Well, you uh… you moved the lunar module,” said the superintendent.
Barker sat back in stunned silence. He looked at the lunar module button. It was green. The module was no longer covering the solar.
“Boss?” said the superintendent carefully, “What do you want me to do?”
“Check everything out. I’ll get the Observers checking on the Occupants – they’re going to start wondering why their sky isn’t dark when the solar is. I’m going to call customer service at Solar Inc. They’d better have a good explanation.”
---
“The sun can’t just go out,” said Dr. Spence, trying to stay calm for Joey, “There’s got to be some explanation, like maybe another planet is covering it up, or maybe there’s some sort of dust storm. Whatever it is, it won’t happen again for thousands of years. This has never happened in recorded history.”
“What if you’re wrong, dad?” Joey blurted, voice trembling, “What if the sun went out, like the light bulb in the kitchen?”
Dr. Spence looked at his son in surprise. Joey had never doubted him, no matter what he said, but he could hear a change in his son’s voice – a lack of trust.
“Don’t worry Joey, that’s not possible,” said Dr. Spence with a confidence he didn’t feel. He looked at his son and patted his head. Joey turned and pressed his face to the car window.
Dr. Spence could imagine his son thinking the same thought that he, himself, couldn’t shake: How can it not be possible when it’s happening?
---
“You did WHAT?!” cried the Observer over the mindlink.
“I thought you’d like to know. But look, I need to call up customer service and find out what’s going on. My maintenance guy says there’s nothing wrong on this end, so I’ve got to go.”
“But, do you know what the ramifications of this are?” spluttered the Observer.
“No, I thought that was your job,” snapped Barker.
“My job? You’ve thrown my job out the window! Solar wasn’t supposed to go offline permanently for another few thousand earth years! The Occupants aren’t ready for this! They’ll revolt! And more importantly, they’ll begin to ask questions. They can’t know the role they really play. What if they find out that they are simply an experiment – a test model? What would you do if you knew that your whole purpose in life was to evolve so that a higher being who controlled every aspect of your life could see if it wanted to occupy your model of body? Plus, we have so much to learn still. Their bodies are in the upper tenth of desirability! They are important, damn it!” ranted the Observer.
“You’ve dealt with them before,” said Barker, “you know how to placate them when they are exposed to something they shouldn’t be.”
“By making them worship us!” shouted the Observer, “Look at all the hardship that caused them. Why, they have fought wars over your s…” he caught himself before saying the word, holding back from probing Barker’s sore spot, “the entity that you sent down there. I can’t expose them to more now – they’ll destroy themselves!” the Observer finished, nervous now that he had prodded Barker with mention of his son.
“Well, you try to think of something, okay?” said Barker – ignoring the Observer’s unkind comment, “I need to call customer service.” Barker hung up before the Observer could say more.
Why do they have to bring up my son every time something goes wrong on that planet? he thought. The kid was just trying to observe the Occupants more closely. So what if he showed off a little bit? That’s what kids do. If any kid down there had the ability to walk on water or make blind people see, they’d do it in a flash. Barker shook his head, dispelling thoughts of his troubled child, and called the Solar Inc customer service system with his mindlink.
“Due to an extremely high call volume,” said a pleasant voice, “all our customer service representatives are busy. We will answer your call in the order it was received. Your current hold number is 28,256. The current hold number that our customer service team is working with is 19,923.”
There was a blank silence.
Barker sighed and, leaving the line open, he stared into the viewscope at the dead space of the solar.
Wait! Barker’s mind screamed. The space around the solar was truly dead. Completely black. There were no solars glowing in the background. He swiveled his viewscope to get a better look. Nothing.
“Solar Inc screwed up,” he muttered, “I bet their server crashed.”
Barker opened up a second mindlink to his maintenance superintendent.
“I think…” started the superintendent.
“That the Solar Inc server crashed?” finished Barker.
“So, what do we do, boss?” asked the superintendent.
“We wait,” said Barker, intertwining his long fingers, “just check on that artificial sky for me and program in some stars, okay?”
“Sure thing boss,” there was a pause, then, “Hey! Why can’t we just program in a sun to cover over the solar? I could ever put some extra heat in the right places. It might work until the solar comes back online.”
“Now you’re talking,” said Barker, “Go ahead and do that.”
“Sure, boss. The project should be complete by nightfall on the east coast of the American continent.”
“Well, let me know if you have any trouble,” said Barker.
“Will do,” said the superintendent.
Barker closed the line with the superintendent just as the pleasant voice informed him, “We are currently helping customer 20,001 in the queue.”
Barker sighed and looked down at his hands. He had recently upgraded his body from the human version and, though he liked the upgrade, he hadn’t gotten used to this new model yet. There were still a few glitches, like having to eat and sleep, but those would get fixed in upgrades sometime or another. Currently he was occupying a bipedal form which was hairless with silvery grey skin. He’d been able to pick out the skin color, so he picked the silver while his wife and son picked the black. They all had small ears and large, black eyes. He had the basic version. His wife had wanted more bells and whistles on her version, which Barker bought her, and his son had gone with the model with an extra eye on the back of his head. Barker smiled at the thought of it. His son now looked rather amusing, though it was disconcerting to see someone turn around with an eye where only skin was supposed to be.
Barker was jostled out of his thoughts by a bored voice saying:
“Thank you for calling Solar Inc, can you please provide your unit number?”
“Yes, it’s 8161,” said Barker, “I think your server may be d…”
“Can I have the name on the account, please?” interrupted the voice.
“It’s Barker Thomas. Our service seems…”
“And who am I speaking with?” the voice interrupted again.
“Barker Thomas,” growled Barker.
“And what seems to be the trouble, Mr. Thomas?” asked the voice.
“I think your server is down, we shut our solar down for routine maintenance and it won’t…” began Barker.
“It says here that you have reached your shut-down limit,” interrupted the voice.
“What?” asked a bewildered Barker.
“You had a limit of one billion shut downs. Your billionth was today.”
“Hold on, let me get my statement. That doesn’t sound right,” said Barker, fumbling through the controls on his screen.
---
Dr. Spence got off the phone feeling worried.
“I just talked to a guy in England. It’s night there and there are no stars. How is that possible?” he asked his co-worker, Dr. Laura Tessy – or Laura to her friends.
Each time he saw Laura, he felt self conscious. He knew he was unattractive - with a pocked face, greasy black hair and roly-poly body. Laura was a buxom blonde, with a mind a big as her breasts. He’d always admired her and once, after a late night managing a satellite, she had promised him something that he held in his heart, hoping that the day might come for her to fulfill it. He stared into Laura’s face, remembering that night:
It was just the two of them in the observation area. They had been observing some fascinating formations on the telescope when Reese asked Laura to come over to his house that night. The questions seemed impulsive, but he had been thinking about the right way to ask all night. She let out a tinkling laugh; refused him, but then said:
“If the end of the world comes, I’ll sleep with you,” her voice lowered and her face grew serious, “Honestly, you’re a really nice man. There’s no one I’d rather share my last moments with than you. But any other time…” she trailed off, her face flushed and he had smiled reassuringly at her.
Though he loved his son, he wanted to sleep with Laura more than anything in the world, and it seemed that the end of the world may have come.
“I think your theory about it being some kind of dust storm just outside orbit is the best one yet,” Laura said, breaking into Dr. Spence’s reverie.
Laura shot a worried look at Joey and leaned forward to Dr. Spence, giving him a delicious view of her breasts, “Should he be hearing this?” she whispered.
Dr. Spence shrugged, most of his attention had returned to the mystery of the sun; the rest was on Laura.
“What would the ramifications of a dust storm be?” asked Dr. Spence, slipping back into professional mode.
“I don’t know, but I guess we’ll be finding out pretty soon.” Dr. Spence’s flicked his eyes at her and she looked at him meaningfully, then at Joey, who was pretending not to listen.
Dr. Spence tensed in excitement. This was the moment he’d been waiting for! Time to cash in on the promise she made him.
“Joey, why don’t you go to the daycare area and play for a little bit. Dr. Tessy and I need to discuss this situation further and you shouldn’t have to listen in on it. It might just make you worry when you don’t need to,” he said, not taking his eyes off Laura’s blushing face.
“I don’t want to leave you, daddy,” whined Joey.
“Now, don’t you worry, I’ll come get you in fifteen minutes,” said Dr. Spence. Laura raised an eyebrow, “or a half an hour,” he amended, “nothing will happen during that time. I promise.”
Dr. Spence escorted his frightened son out of the room and locked the door behind him.
“So, you really think it’s the end, huh? Time to cash in on our agreement?” said Dr. Spence, turning to Laura.
“I guess so,” said Laura with reluctance, “I think I can say that the end of the world has come.”
Dr. Spence nodded and pulled her close to him. He began to fumble with her bra strap.
---
“I found it!” said Barker triumphantly, “Our statement says we have
another 5000 uses before we upgrade.”
“Hold please,” said the bored voice.
A pleasant voice came over the mindlink,
“I’m sorry, Mr. Thomas, but due to the modification of terms noted clearly at the bottom of the last page of your statement, there is a mandatory upgrade. It was an upgrade or opt-out option and today was your last day. Many people have had this confusion. Would you like to upgrade or opt-out?”
“How much will the upgrade cost?” asked Barker.
There was a pause.
The voice said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Would you like to upgrade or opt-out?”
It was another recording.
“Upgrade,” Barker sighed, scrolling through the statement and trying to find where the price was. He saw some tiny fine print on the bottom of the last page of his statement.
“You chose upgrade, is that correct?” asked the recording.
“Yes,” said Barker. Even with his enhanced vision, he couldn’t read the tiny fine-print on the last page. He’d have to submit it to a character identification program to find out how much the upgrade would cost him.
“Your account has been debited. Thank you for calling Solar Inc, where all your solar troubles are solved. Goodbye.” The recording disconnected him. Barker sat there, completely irked that he had been duped out of some unknown amount of money by a recording.
He called up his superintendent, “Hey, don’t bother with the sun and heat program – just work on the stars,” Barker instructed, “Are your guys clear of the sun?”
“Let me check,” said the superintendent. There was a pause, “Yeah, turn her on,” he said.
Barker clicked the solar off and then on again and this time, it lit up.
---
In his office, Dr. Spence was just pulling off his pants when Laura shouted, “Oh my god!”
“What?” asked Dr. Spence, hoping she was referring to his almost naked body.
“The sun, it’s back!” she said.
“Oh,” said Dr. Spence, crestfallen, “does that mean…”
“I’m afraid it does,” said Laura, quickly sliding back into her clothes and patting him awkwardly on the back, “maybe some other time,” she said, a smile flitting across her lips.
“Yeah,” was all he could say. He dressed and retrieved Joey.
---
Newsflash – Brought to you by Astronomers' News
A Dust Storm Passes
A dust storm passed earth for 3.5 hours yesterday, blocking the sun’s light to Earth. Renowned astrophysicist Dr. Reese Spence says the storm passed dangerously close to our atmosphere, but earth appears unharmed.
“We are still studying the affects of the storm on earth at this time, but there appears to be no damage to our atmosphere. This time we appear to have gotten off unscathed, but it is likely that next time, earth will not be so lucky.”
Dr. Spence and his team are researching any damages the storm may have had on weather patterns around the world. You can trust in Astronomers' News to keep you abreast of any new developments as they are made.
The Observer read the article and smiled.
Gullible humans, he thought, maybe one day they will find out the truth.
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