THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

It was a stunning sunset this evening, deep and scarlet reds that faded into purples and indigos, and finally deep navy blue and almost black. The clouds were gray cotton ringed with colors. I watched it from Mauna Kea, alone up here at the monitoring station. I lingered outside and sipped a coffee and sat in a lawn chair until the sun was fully down.

About ten in the evening, just after sunset, my detectors went haywire. Readings all over the map, nothing where it should be. The solar neutrino flux had dropped by half. The Gauss solar mappers, in polar orbit about the sun, were detecting massive oscillations in the magnetic fields. Even visible light had dropped by ten percent.

I pipelined these new readings into my computer model. By midnight it had processed the anomalies and made a prediction as to what was happening in the sun’s core. This prediction – which could be validated by a current spectral analysis of output – had interesting implications. But the sun had set, for me. The neutrinos that ping my detectors pass through the earth, normal matter, light years of lead, easily. A neutrino is a ghost, passing invisibly through matter. But for a spectral analysis I needed real time light which was blocked by this rock I call home.

I am not actually alone on the peak. There are quite a few others, over at the observatory. But we are all busy with our own projects and none welcome distraction. My presence is a sinecure. This facility could be fully automated but it gives me a quiet place to work on my thesis. And since my work is concerned with nuclear fusion in stars I am at the ground zero of data collection, and I prefer solitude to company.

A Japanese university obliged me. Exactly as my model had predicted – fully validated.

With this confirmation my model began crunching again. Normally I would have gone to bed by then, but this night was not normal. I couldn’t sleep if I tried, even without more coffee. Which is the ghost, I wondered, the neutrino or the matter that it passes through? Neither notices the other. To even detect a neutrino requires very sensitive and specialized detectors. I suppose it is a matter of perspective.

At two in the morning I read the news that caused my heart to skip a beat. I felt a momentary sadness. For a moment I pondered what to do. I took a deep breath and decided to do nothing. There is nothing I, or anyone, could do. I turned on the radio, expecting to hear panic, but there was only hiss. I could not tune anything on either AM or FM, as expected. A mercy, perhaps, for all of us. Some – many – will never know it happened, begun and ended in an instant.

It is now seven in the morning. I sit with my coffee in my lawn chair, watching this last very spectacular sunrise.