Empyrean Maternal Swarm Incident

It’s like he doesn’t have a single nerve in his body.   What I observed, sitting across from me in this dimly lit room, was a characteristically gloomy man. A sort of iron visage accompanied his gloominess, something that concealed the sense of personal shame at the mere mention of it. The Empyrean Maternal Swarm, or as Sunset Enterprise began to call it, “Our Greatest Failure.”   The awkward atmosphere was only made further so by the incongruence in our duties and rank. Unlike this man, I had no obligation to obey his command. Likewise, he had no reason to answer any of my questions. But we both knew that making this interaction any more difficult would only brew a series of bureaucratic problems later on. Every corporation had their eyes on this project. And now that the project was spiritually dead, everyone looked to Sunset Enterprise for answers.   “Mister Dietrich, answering these questions is for both our benefit–”   “Miss Tellus,” he said, accompanied by an aggravated pause, “I am trying to answer your question. But you have to realize something.”   Despite having some irritation myself, I held my tongue.   “This was no ordinary project failure. Nothing like what your other big names experienced— Murakami, Johnson, none of those dealt with something on the same level as this. So when I’m trying to take the time here to articulate myself,” he said, his tone now weighing down his words, “It. Is. In. Your. Best. Interest.”   The point was clear. He was not to be disturbed while thinking. If I was going to get anything useful out of this investigation, it would be by playing along with Dietrich’s way of doing things.   “I can answer your first question. No. This was not a calculated risk.”   I nodded my head at him. His eyes narrowed. “Quite frankly, I’m surprised you had even asked that question, given the nature of what happened.” He leaned, knocking ash off the end of his cigar as he stared into my eyes. “How in the hell would we have even begun to speculate there was something living inside the sun?”   “Consider it a formality that I even asked, then.” I answered back, playing it cool. “I ask everyone I talk to that question.”   “Hmph.” Dietrich leaned back in his chair, letting a plume of smoke escape from between his lips. “We were performing another test that day before we decided to fire on all cylinders, so to speak. I mean, for god's sake, we were working with the sun here. If anything went wrong, it was going to be a very expensive mistake.”   “Yet something still went wrong.”   “Yes. We’ve already established that.” Dietrich replied, annoyed. “We had about fifty percent of E.M.S online and receiving that day. Our batteries were working just fine. This was a milestone in terms of E.M.S’s operation. Technical hangups happened all the time, and because just about any engineer would be vaporized being that close to the sun, it made fixing problems take that much longer.”   “There were problems before the incident?”   “Small ones.” He confessed. “Nodes not receiving orders. Wire hookups in the wrong place. All sorts of random shit. Nothing major.”   “Right. Continue.” I said, scribbling a series of notes onto a paper.   “So E.M.S is working at half capacity. We decided to push it to sixty percent next cycle. That’s when E.M.S’s communications array started to panic.”   “Panic?”   Dietrich shook his head. “Not actually panicking. Thing’s not alive. But basically, every alarm started going off. Fuckin’ thing was sending back all sorts of messages, half of them not making any sense. Mutually exclusive problems, like the array was too cold and too hot at the same time. That the receivers were taking in too much energy and at the same time, were offline. Stuff characteristic of a program failure.”   “Then it sends back this audio, this fuckin’ thing that keeps me awake still. It was like a giant bellow.”   I squinted at Dietrich. “But how’s that—”   “Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re going to start objecting to that, aren’t you? ‘Sound doesn’t travel in space.’ No shit. Not normally.”   “There’s a good chance this thing was communicating directly with the array, turning waves into audio for us. Speaking directly to us. It knew that there was someone listening on the other end of this machine. It knew the communications array was two-way.”   I remained silent, allowing Dietrich’s tangent to continue.   “After the bellow, we hear a groan. ‘Enough.’ It just kept saying that, over and over again. ‘Enough, enough. Enough.’ Kinda like it was annoyed at us.”   “The last thing we saw was a beam of light, and then the entire array was shot to pieces. Turns out these beams kept forming from the sun, shooting out at various parts of the E.M.S. Burnt holes through everything, the shielding did nothing to stop it from being turned into cosmic swiss cheese.”   Dietrich leaned forward, dropping ash off the cigar again. “That’s it.”   “So.. you expect me to believe that the sun is alive?” I scoffed. “It’s ridiculous, I mean—”   “Look, Miss Tellus, I’ve told you everything we know about it. There is no reason for us to hide a normal fuck-up. We deal with normal fuck-ups all the time and we fix them. It’s in our record.”   “I’m aware of the reputation Sunset Enterprise has with its clientele,” I said, writing down his statements, “But how do you expect to convince anyone that the sun is alive? Or that something inside it is alive? I don’t even believe it myself.”   “Think of it,” Dietrich replied, “What would we have gained from sabotaging our own project? And you know damn well that no one was going to interfere with it. It was going to jumpstart the shit out of Earth’s infrastructure. Imagine rebuilding everything on a near-infinite energy grid. Everyone would win from something like that.”   “It just seems like an absurd way to shift the blame.” I replied with a sigh.   “You can check all of our received communications from E.M.S that day. We have it pulled off for investigations like yours. You’re not the only hand prying into this fuckin’ cookie jar. I’m sure that plenty of your kind are going to sell the data to tabloid writers too, but what fuckin’ choice do we have?”   “That’ll be all for today then, Mister Dietrich.” I stand up, quickly turning around.   “Thank god.” He mutters.