Bokeh

By Keshav Sadashiv Sapru

Solar System, 300 million years ago.

A paleolithic farmer growing some grain on his watery field stands up for some reason, perhaps to stretch, perhaps by that instinctual drive to look around when nobody is there, notices a white, shiny object out, far in the blue sky above him. It seems to be as far as the nearest city would be to him, but he can’t tell for sure. Mesmerized by its appearance, the object seems to fall through the sky. He approaches one of his fellow farmers to declare what he saw. When all of a sudden everything in his vision seems to turn to white.

He has been vapourized. From orbit, a massive 1000 km fireball illuminates the backdrop of the lush planet on which it rudely halted all life. Little streaks of particles flash almost imperceptibly, on the corners of your vision, if you were there. Signaling a much worse future.

Solar System, Today.

Four astronauts from the Extended ISS programme, approach a vast pyramidal like mountain, called the D&M. Abnormally high radiation, guaranteed that this would be the first location where a manned mission to Mars would take place. It was unclear whether a natural nuclear reactor was the culprit behind this at some point in Mars past, or a more sinister interpretation of the data as suggested by some

scientists, mostly disregarded as the loony fringe. At the intelligence community’s behest, for whom all threats, no matter how foreign or domestic were worthy of investigation, nudged the programme executives at NASA to put this area on the itinerary of the international team sent on the first mission of Mars. If either of those hypotheses would be correct it would be astonishing. As the first would imply that Mars had water on its surface for much longer than anticipated, while the second would imply, even if in the long past, of the presence of an alien civilization which wiped out an indigenous society on Mars and reduced it to its barren self as seen now, before everyone.

Far Away, Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow

In a decrepit solar system, with torn apart planets and dim double binary stars, remnants of vast space mining vessels dot the main beltway of this system like asteroids. Whoever built these monuments to creative destruction are mostly lost to history. Their handiwork to be scrutinized by those they would’ve crushed without a thought countless eons ago.

By Keshav Sadashiv Sapru