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show you on here…” He pulled up a 3D matrix of dots on the conference room monitor.  “Sir, this model was sent to us by one of our web observers.  It’s a little crude but I believe accurate.  It represents the sectors we’ve been monitoring for signals over the past week.  Most of what we pick up is static but this is strange.  Normally the spread of static is even but what we’ve picked up is this,” he clicked his mouse and a gap in the 3D dot matrix was visible moving across the screen.  “This silence, or swathe, is cutting through the static.  If it hadn’t been moving, we wouldn’t have noticed it.  But it is moving and it is moving this way.”
    “So at gone midnight on a Friday we should be concerned by a moving patch of silence?” said the man on the teleconference, sounding tired and slightly irritated.
    “The problem is,” Marius pulled the table microphone towards him, “...is that we don’t know what this silence is.  All we know is that it’s big and moving this way.”
    The man on the teleconference looked confused.  “But we were told that the chance of a sizeable celestial object impacting on earth was millions to one?  How likely is it to make contact?”
    “That is correct sir,” said Brian’s boss, “The chances of an asteroid of any consequence hitting the earth are infinitely small.  And this may well not be an object at all sir.”
    Brian did his best to lean towards the now inconveniently placed microphone.  “That’s the problem sir – it is highly likely.  I should have explained the scale of the model.  The silence is one light-year wide, two high and of unknown depth.  The chances of it hitting the earth would be as likely as a marble balanced on a pier being hit by an approaching tidal wave.  But we don’t know what the tidal wave is made of or what it will do when it reaches us.  It might be nothing more than a moving gap in the static, or…”
    “Or what?”
    Brian’s boss took over again. “A worst case scenario would be a cloud of radioactive particles powerful enough to wipe out life on earth.  Or as Brian said it could be nothing.  We have always known about the potential for an event like this, we just never thought we would see it before it hit us.”
    “Well that is reassuring,” said the Senator.
    Marius stepped in.  “You see sir, we are being hit by radioactive waves all the time – most of these come from the Sun and most of those are reflected or absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere.  The Northern Lights are one beautiful example of this phenomenon, caused by EMP – sorry Electro Magnetic Pulses, caused by solar flares.  The UV radiation that causes skin cancer is another.  What we are facing could be something similar, only this phenomenon, this swathe, has come from outside of our solar system, possibly from outside our galaxy.”
    “From another Sun?”
    “It could have been generated in any number of ways,” Marius continued, “And as we don’t know what it is, it’s impossible to say.  It’s not travelling fast enough to be pure radioactive energy, or the first we would have known about it would be when it hit us - so it has to have some sort of mass, I don’t know, like the tail of a giant comet, only much, much bigger.  It could have come from a star collapsing in on itself, or colliding with another celestial body of comparable size.  What people don’t understand, sir, are the comparative sizes of the universe; if the Earth is a peanut, then our Sun is a beachball, and if our Sun is a beachball then some other stars would be the size of the actual earth in comparison, or bigger – big stuff sir.  Whatever it is, it took a tremendous amount of energy to produce.  Whether it is harmful to us is another matter.  My guess is we will feel it.”
    “How long until we know more?”
    “When it hits us.”
    “And how long is that?”
    “One, maybe two hours at most sir.”
     
     
     

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