Usurper of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

involved in creating a deathtrap for the astronaut soldiers.
    Aki knew enough to help the Vulcan Mission, even if it meant that she might never set foot on her home planet again. Someone had to try to save the world. It was her duty.

ACT VI: OCTOBER 2017

    THE INTERVIEWERS SAT in high-backed chairs, making the three men and one woman appear farther away and shorter than they really were. The jowly bearded man in the second seat on the left asked Aki to stop looking nervous.
    “You make an excellent first impression,” he said, then ran his thumb and forefinger along the corners of his mouth. “Judging from your size, you would eat less food and take up less space than the other candidates.”
    Aki was unsure whether he was joking at her expense or trying to make her comfortable and doing a bad job of it. The other three interviewers laughed. Waiting her turn outside in the sterile lobby, another candidate had told Aki that he aimed to look relaxed but keep his guard up. It had passed silently that they were far from relaxed, no matter how hard they tried to appear otherwise.
    After covering a few general topics—how her family and loved ones were enduring the solar crisis, what it had been like to see the tower from her school’s telescope—the interviewers moved to more probing questions.
    “Your Eastern views. Do you believe in the transmigration of souls and animism? Given your background, I’m curious to hear your opinion on the Life-Form Theory,” said the other man, the one with gray hair.
    Aki answered carefully, “I think it is a possibility.”
    None of the probes had found traces of life, nor any clues as to where the Builders were from, what the Builders looked like, or why they were constructing a Ring. The question floated as an amorphous unknown over all humanity. In the absence of knowledge, theories that nearly bordered on superstition reigned supreme, at least from Aki’s point of view.
    The Life-Form Theory was one of the dominant explanations. It suggested that the Ring itself was a living organism. Seeds fell upon the planet, constructing the mass drivers; mineral resources were launched into space around the star; and the Ring was built. With sufficient detachment from the crisis it spawned, the Ring looked like an artifact of beavers building a dam. When the time came to leave the nest, the Ring would scatter into countless seeds, each with a solar sail, flying off to other solar systems. Consciousness was not necessarily guiding the process. But with no evidence of consciousness or even a definition of “life” that could account for the Ring, the Life-Form Theory was hardly a theory at all.
    Aki responded with what she hoped was the safest answer. “Despite the fascinating theory, humanity’s number-one priority has to be to dismantle the Ring as quickly as possible.”
    “I’d like to know what fascinates you about the Life-Form Theory,” the woman asked.
    “If we find an organism that has adapted to the vacuum of space, our views of the universe would be turned upside down,” Aki said, speaking with the same polite tone the woman had used. “Presented with a life-form that possesses the power to alter an entire solar system, we would have no choice but to consider the possibility that everything we have observed in the universe until now, every single star, every nebulae, all the way to dark matter and galaxies, could be alive in ways we have never even imagined. Organic beings such as ourselves could have been created out of molds of these cosmobiological organisms when the organisms came to Earth in the distant past. Suddenly, we would not be who we think we are.”
    “I agree. But the same could be true for any highly developed civilization. Would anyone we interviewed in confidence describe you as having a special affinity for the Life-Form Theory over, say, the Civilization Theory?”
    Aki knew that she had entered the high-risk portion of the discussion. She knew the