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The beach house had the same peeling wallpaper, creaky floorboards, and smell of cigar smoke I’d experienced a hundred times before; but, while I wasn’t ready to call it beautiful, I didn’t mind it so much. I saw a monitor in Bill’s kitchen-slash-office tuned to a talk show on Zelka Six, showing graphics and photos of what was being recorded in history as The Christmas Supernova.
“Everything we know about the universe says this is impossible,” a man’s voice was saying. “Because of the expansion of the cosmos, we expect to see the light of stars shifted into the red side of the light spectrum; but we’re seeing that the light from this body is blue-shifted instead, to such a small degree that it’s hard to tell, but it’s been measured and confirmed.”
“And you think that means it’s artificial?” a woman’s voice responded. “If this object is as far away as cosmologists think it is, how do we know that the laws governing light and energy aren’t radically different outside of our corner of the universe, or that some objects aren’t moving in other directions? It could be orbiting—”
“It has to be artificial,” the man said on-camera, “or else everything we know about the universe has to be rewritten. We know that the Celestials are advanced enough technologically to pull this off, else how could they have begun life on Earth? Clearly, they’re trying to send us a message.”
“See, that’s your problem,” the woman said, “it’s like everyone on Earth needs something to worship, so they feel special and important. Well, we’re not special, we’re just animals who evolved from primates over thousands of years. That’s the message more people need to hear, and no real scientist would question—”
I sent the off-command to his monitor; remembering what I saw on the beach, what a group of ‘the destined’ had done to Raskob’s sandcastle, all so that they could worship a star. I saw the whole world dividing into groups, running to worship every created thing, abusing every beautiful gift, and denying the creator himself.
The kid from Slammers had been right. I did see things