The Star That Would Rewrite You

The rain had knocked out the road home, so they were stuck in the control room with a bag of pretzels and a screen full of green lines.

"Your aunt said don't touch anything," Soren said.

"I'm not touching. I'm reading." Maya leaned toward the screen. One line had a spike in it. "This one jumped. Everything else is smooth and this one jumped."

Aunt Priya didn't look up from her own monitor. "That's an old detection we reprocess for teaching. A magnetar. SGR eighteen oh six. Don't get excited, it's fifty thousand light-years away."

"What's a magnetar?" Soren asked.

"A dead star that can't let go of its magnetism," Priya said, and then her phone rang and she turned away, and that was all the explanation they got.

Soren opened his notebook and wrote magnetar and the number. Maya was still on the spike.

"A dead star," she said. "But that's a lot of energy for a dead thing."

"Neutron star," Soren said, reading off the screen now. "It says here it spins. And it has a magnetic field." He scrolled. "A big one."

"How big is big."

He read the next line twice. "It says at a thousand miles it would erase every credit card on Earth."

Maya laughed. Then stopped laughing.

"A thousand miles," she said. "That's not even close. That's like being in another city."

"The strip on a card is magnetic," Soren said. "It's just tiny magnets lined up in a pattern. A strong field pointing the wrong way scrambles the pattern." He tapped his own library card against the desk. "So a thousand miles away, this card is blank."

"Okay," Maya said. "Cards are just information. Wipe the information, whatever. But."

"But what."

She was quiet, chewing a pretzel, watching the spike. "But if it can move the little magnets in a card, it can move other little magnets. What else is little magnets."

Soren kept reading. His finger stopped on a sentence. He read it, and he didn't say it out loud right away, which is how Maya knew it was a good one.

"Read it," she said.

"It says it would distort the electron clouds of every atom in your body."

The rain went on against the window. Neither of them said anything for a second.

"What's an electron cloud," Maya said, but she said it slowly, like she already had a bad feeling.

"It's the shape," Soren said. "Atoms aren't little balls. The electrons are spread out around the middle in a shape. A cloud. The shape is what makes the atom the atom. It's why oxygen is oxygen and carbon is carbon."

"So the shape is you."

"The shape is everything. The shape is what lets your atoms hold hands. That's what a molecule is. Atoms holding hands in a particular way."

Maya put the pretzel down.

"Say the part again. About distorting."

"It squeezes the clouds. The field is so strong it pulls the electron shapes long and thin. Like squeezing a raindrop into a needle."

"And if the shape changes."

"Then the atom isn't shaped like oxygen anymore. It's shaped like something that has never existed."

Maya stood up. She walked to the window and looked at the rain and then turned around.

"So it wouldn't just kill you," she said. "Dead is still made of you. Dead is still oxygen and carbon in a pile."

"Right," Soren said quietly.

"This wouldn't leave a pile. It would rewrite what the pile is made of. From a thousand miles away." She held up her hand in front of the window, fingers spread. "My hand is holding hands. All the way down. And that thing could reach in and change the grip."

"Fifty thousand light-years away," Soren said. "So we're fine."

"I know we're fine." Maya was still looking at her hand. "That's not the part."

"What's the part."

She came back to the desk and put her finger next to his on the screen, on the spike.

"The part is that this is real. That's the part. There is a real thing, right now, tonight, that is spinning out there being that. It's not a story. It made that mark on your aunt's screen. The mark is here. In this room."

Soren looked at the spike. It was a small green jag. It had traveled fifty thousand years to be a small green jag.

"The light left it before there were cities," he said. "Before there was writing. It's been coming this whole time."

"And the whole time," Maya said, "it was strong enough to unmake anything that got close. And nothing got close. It just kept spinning and being that impossible in the dark where nobody could see it."

Soren wrote something. Then he stopped writing and looked up.

"There are more of them," he said. "The screen says about thirty found. But most of the sky isn't watched. So there are more we haven't caught."

"So right now," Maya said, "while we're eating pretzels, there are stars scattered around that could reach across a thousand miles and change what atoms are. And most of them, nobody has ever looked at. Nobody knows their names."

"They don't have names," Soren said. "They just have that spike, if somebody happens to be pointed the right way."

Maya sat back down slowly. She looked at the wall of the control room, at the ordinary humming equipment, at her aunt's cold coffee.

"The scariest things in the universe," she said, "are just sitting there. Not doing anything to us. Just being that strong for no reason, forever, where we can't see."

"We can see this one," Soren said.

"We can see the mark it made." Maya reached out and, very lightly, traced the green spike on the screen with one finger, following the jag up and back down. "That's not the same as seeing it."

Across the room, Priya's monitor pulled in the next hour of sky, and a new line began to draw itself, slow and green, from the left edge toward the middle, into a part of the dark nobody at the desk had checked yet.