Art: Space Clock.
Did some space giant throw their alarm clock across the universe?!
The first sightings were baffling. Something was coming toward the earth at great speed, and it was emitting light in a pretty tight spectrum that suggested it was other than natural. At that point it was no more than a blurry pinprick, but the blue shift alone said it was headed our way. And even as it grew in size, it wasn’t until ten months out that astronomers first got a clear picture.
It was a clock face, a digital readout. Due to the high velocity, they couldn’t pin down what time it was: the clock read “18:88” at all times as the different sets of photons all arrived out of sync. Some segments were brighter than others. The 1 in the tens digit of the hour was much fainter than the bottom right vertical member of the ones digit of the minutes, for example, which glowed for every digit but 2.
In any case, an international forum was set up to discuss the “space clock problem.” The more expoverished nations with fat military budgets had their own private discussions about how to study it, which mainly came down to when to launch. The physicists had already figured out its nearest approach was those ten months ahead, but some said launch as soon as possible, others said wait until we could judge its trajectory better. If it was going to hit us, that would mean one set of possible responses, versus if it was going to fly-by.
The fly-by crowd called for sending probes the other way, so we could get a longer look at it if it sped off past us. If we wanted to attempt to attach to it, that would also be the best way to go.
But the defensive posture was obviously to get in its way, or at least near its way, before it got to us. So that was the main focus: science later, protect first. There were a dozen launches scheduled, some as soon as a month, if only for the possibility of weather or technical problems scrubbing the first launch dates, forcing later launches.
There was also a large contingent focused on the prominence above the clock face, which had come to be called the “snooze button.” They called for the obvious move of pressing it. Smack a probe right into that thing, it was obviously built to take such an impact and register it in whatever it used internally to operate itself.
Others thought that was so typical, assuming that because it looked like a digital clock and its display changed like one, it must be one, complete with a button on the top. They explained that it was traveling so much faster than anything man had ever built that we might as well not have wheels, and shame on the poor human brains who thought it must just be a clock.
Nine months and change later, after a baker’s dozen of launches come and gone with no dent, no snooze, not even a glancing blow, but thirteen missed-by-a-million-mile whiffs, the clock started to slow down. Not in counting time, it was still dead-on accurate at that, but it started to not rush at the earth so magnificently quickly. It slowed to what for it was a crawl, but was still a dozen times faster than anything we could put up.
The physicists had to revise the arrival schedules and the militaries tried to scrounge up the budgets for a few last-ditch launches, but the fact that it had slowed down by far more than we’d ever sped anything up, and it did it so gracefully, made the accountants and actuaries think any real effort to look at it would have to depend on first knowing it would be where we expected it to be, and that meant waiting on the clock.
In the meantime, the manufacturers had been busy. Replicas were made, some more accurate than others, some which promised to update the arrival date over the internet, with a countdown mode you could toggle by pressing the broad button on the top. The office pools and gamblers were all placing bets on when exactly it would either pass or stop at earth, and the churches were scrambling to explain just what the hell was God doing? Testing our faith?
But time marched on, and eleven months after it was first spotted, the clock came into orbit around the earth at three past nine by its count, but at 1452 by coordinated universal time. Once it had arrived, it began running around the earth a lot closer than where the moon has kept our tides running for billions of years, and there it stayed. It was close enough and large enough to cast an oblong shadow over a patch of ground roughly the size, but not the shape, of Texas.