Lessons from Pluto
A [possibly] fiction novel
Gibraltar Station
1:52 hours
he old fluorescents reflected greenish light off the monitor. The windowless room was the Tonly thing Victor Robles saw for 8 hours a day from 2300 to 700 hours in the morning. His chair gave a protesting squeak as he sipped from the constantly refilled coffee mug. A row of blank metal cabinets filled with backup hard drives were his only company as he stared at the antique flatscreen with breathless anticipation. Normally the job was so uneventful that he would regularly sneak in some time playing fútbol on his phone. But now, as the imagery from the New Horizon probe came in there was nothing that would tear his eyes away from the screen. The blurry crescents sent from thousands of kilometers out were already enough to get scientists from all over the world salivating. But these new images would be humanity's first ever close in views of the Pluto/Churon system. Everyone who remembered the heady days of the Voyager flybys or the Cassini mission, was crowding the bloggosphere, even those in Owen's camp who'd tried to demote Pluto back in '06.
But none of that mattered now. What mattered was that after years of waiting and budget
negotiations, they were finally going to get results. This was the final frontier in local planetary science.
“Are you getting anything yet on your monitor?”
The text was from Maria, his boss. She was as excited as a prom girl when they found out that the Gibraltar station would be the first point on Earth to get the signal. He sent back a quick text telling her that it would still be a a bit longer.
Roger hadn't even been employed at the Iberian Space Agency when the probe had been launched back in '06. He'd only managed to work up to this position 9 months back. It had taken a lot of late nights doing calculations and staring at seemingly endless streams of data before he'd gotten the promotion. But now as he became the first human to watch the telemetry arrive, he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was worth it.
The first image was still blurry, but even so the sight was one that changed the course of everything humanity knew about the universe. The shock momentarily numbed him, then he literally jumped out of his seat as his coffee cup, which he was sipping from, fell to the floor.
The next instant he was smashing his fingers on the keypad of his phone as if by shear force he could subdue the satellite network to run faster. Feeling like he would die of old age before the woman answered, he finally got her on the third ring and felt all of the words which he'd been rehearsing tumble across his tongue randomly. “Senora! Senora Robles! The imagery! It's in...and....I don't know how. Have you seen it?!”
If Maria Robles was famous for anything, it was keeping a cool head under both extreme pressure as well as endless drudgery. Since astronomy tended towards the latter, she had a little less practice in this case. Nonetheless she'd spent most of her life in administration and knew Victor as well as anyone else in the department. She carefully helped him calm down to the point where he could finally speak in complete sentences. “Now Victor. I know that you're very excited. We've all been waiting for the better part of a decade to see these images. So can you please now tell me what has you so flabbergasted?”
Her measured tone and calm voice did it's work as well as any therapist could. After a few deep breaths, Victor managed to weave together his jumbled thoughts into one mind-boggling sentence.
“Senora. The imagery from Pluto shows a huge structure near the equator that is unmistakably artificial.”
There was a long silence and Victor couldn't tell what was going on at the other end. But having been through several moments of deep breathing, he was now just a bit less agitated then the voice at the other end.
“Um. Victor. You...you're certain of this? I mean, you're just getting the data in now, aren't you?”
“Senora. It is not possible to mistake this. I am looking right now at the sunlit side of Pluto and I am seeing a large cylindrical shape. Comparing it to the overall size of the planet, I would guess that it's 300 meters in diameter, and it's nearly long enough to jut above the meager atmosphere.”
“Santa Maria! This is the most incredible discovery since ice on Europa!” There was another long pause and he heard her whispering to someone else. “Victor, now listen carefully. I need you to get this data to Madrid right away. We're going to make this announcement ourselves, and to hell with NASA.
Victor knew she was taking a big risk with that. It was their satellite, after all. But sadly, they were beyond the curvature of the Earth, and wouldn't get the signal for another 18 hours or so. Victor sent commands to the craft to take more photos at the highest magnification and sent the whole zipped file off to Maria. But even after that was done, he continued staring at the image. That structure, it was so huge. Even with Pluto's meager gravity, it would have taken a small army to build it. An army of what though?