The Annoying Orange Orb Outside My Window Each Morning

My mate Ed has been working on a new project for the last week or so. He hasn't done the classic "never comes out for food or sleep" routine, because, unlike all those other scientists in the movies, he isn't an idiot. But he did keep the basement door locked (where our workshop is), and he did refuse to tell me what he was doing. Ed has done this before. Usually the results, though utterly, utterly useless, make great conversation pieces, but sometimes they are explosive or, on one memorable occasion, sentient, so I was in two minds about what to expect this morning when he announced that he was done, and asked me down into the basement to show me.

I couldn't see anything new in there except for a single, one-inch long component rocker switch in the middle of the otherwise empty worktop. It had a red wire and a black wire soldered to the contacts underneath, trailing off the table into some dark corner of the lab. Ed was sitting in a chair at the worktop, with the switch under one hand and a stopwatch in the other. As I descended the stairs I saw him turn the switch on and start the stopwatch simultaneously. He counted to five and then turned it off, before he looked up.

"Is that all of it?" I asked, sitting in the chair opposite him.

"Yes," said Ed bluntly, smiling broadly at me. There was a pause. I was half-inclined to believe him. Ed is the kind of guy with whom, after a while, you learn to take nothing for granted. But he shook his head and continued, "No, this switch is connected to one of Jazz's network ports." He nodded at Jazz, the extremely ancient Acorn personal computer that has been sitting in the corner of our basement for the last four or five years. "As you know, Jazz's other network port runs directly into the university data network. That network has a large number of other computers on it, including among other things a pair of Cray supercomputers that serve the Theoretical Physics labs..."

I know all this already, and Ed knows I know. Most of his projects begin with a speech exactly like this, right up to "Theoretical Physics labs".

"Now the Crays, as you are probably not aware (unless, like me, you are updated on a minute-to-minute basis of the status of the experiments currently in operation in the Theoretical Physics Centre), are even as I speak involved in running and processing the data from a ground-breaking experiment in a region of physics known as quantum tunnelling. Now, as I recently realised, quantum tunnelling is not all that different from the phenomenon called teleportation..."

I hold up a hand. "Let me guess the rest. You've got some kind of program stored on Jazz. When you close the switch, that's the cue for it to transfer itself all the way over to the Crays, where it forcibly takes over the experiment."

"You have learned well. Yeah, it aborts the experiment currently in progress, and then begins its own sequence of instructions. When I open the switch again, the program ceases and everything goes back to normal."

I nod approvingly. I long ago made the point to Ed that doing bad things to other people's expensive laboratory equipment was not very nice. "So what does the program actually do?"

Ed waves his hands vaguely. "Teleports stuff. It's a bit complicated."

"I saw you already closed the switch."

Ed winks, and checks his stopwatch. "That was one minute and thirty-one seconds ago. Why don't we take a walk outside? The results won't be visible for a few minutes."

"The results will be visible from the street?"

"You'll see. Or not."

Cryptic. Ed takes the stopwatch with him as we head up to the front door. He locks it and we walk out into the suburban street. There is no traffic about but there are a few people going about their business. It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining and it's almost noon.

"You're not gonna blow the whole world up, are you?" I ask Ed. This is not a dumb question. Ed flirts with Armageddon practically on a monthly basis. It's all rather worrying.

"No, nononono. Nothing like that. Something rather more spectacular."

I point at a dark building on the horizon and say, "TPC's that way." I'm still half-expecting some kind of explosion.

Ed shrugs. There's a long pause while we wait under one of the trees that line this street. I sit down on the pavement and enjoy the sunshine. Ed intently studies his stopwatch. We wait for at least five minutes. Nothing happens. I point this out to Ed.

"It'll happen, it'll happen," said Ed. "What's the speed of light these days?"

"Uh... Two hundred and ninety-nine million, seven hundred and ninety-two thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight metres per second by definition," I recite. I'm a geek. You know this.

"And the radius of the Earth's orbit?"

"Just under a hundred and fifty million kilometres." I frown and look up, cogs a-whirring in my head. Ed counts from the stopwatch.

"Eight minutes fifteen, eight minutes sixteen, eight minutes seventeen-"

The Sun goes out.

There is no sound, there is no descending "pyeeow" tone of power generators spinning to a halt, but suddenly the world is plunged in total darkness. All the birds stop singing. I hear a very distant honking as cars screech to a halt in the middle of the road. There are stars visible overhead. My eyes aren't adjusted to the darkness - I can't see a thing, least of all Ed, but I can hear him beside me, laughing uproariously like the lunatic genius he always was.

"Well, so much for the rumours of the Daystar," is the funniest line I can come up with on such short notice.

Five seconds later the Sun came back on again, just as Ed promised. We went back inside and performed the traditional post-experiment ritual of getting some popcorn and watching the news reports about it on TV. Ed, the forward-thinking guy he is, already has a blank videotape cued up. The press seemed to be pretty excited about this one, and personally I didn't blame them.

"Are you gonna tell them who did it?"

"Probably not," said Ed. "See, if I did, I'd get loads of credit for it, but they'd probably lock me up as well. Whereas if I leave it as a total mystery, I've got this great gag lined up for Christmas 2012..."

Next: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Discussion (20)

2008-05-26 17:00:44 by IL:

Sam, there's something that deeply disturbs me about this story and i'm surprised you haven't noticed it: What about all the people that died because of this trick, all the drivers that crashed their cars, all the people that fell from buildings because of the shock, and so on. And since Ed is so clever, he *knew* that he will cause many people(hundreds of thousands?) to die, which leads me to the conclusion that Ed is evil.

2008-05-26 18:32:08 by Alex:

Agreed. If what he did was teleport the sun away, even if just for five seconds, then there'd be a lot more damage to the earth. We'd almost immediately start flying away from the center and go out of our normal orbit...

2008-06-01 20:15:06 by Piers:

Yeah, the Earth would fly out of orbit, and when the sun came back we'd be in a very different orbit, rendering all calendars useless. I think.

2008-06-02 23:03:31 by Jacob:

Also if we go closer we'd be vaporized, and if we go further we freeze.

2008-06-03 06:10:51 by Tadrinth:

Rather than teleporting the sun away, Ed could accomplish the appropriate effect by teleporting Earth in place, but rotated 180 degrees. This would have no effect on gravity or earth's orbit.

2008-06-04 06:34:12 by Maelin:

The earth wouldn't fly out of its orbit and off into space if you suspended the sun's centripetal gravitational force for just 5 seconds. How much of a difference do you think there is between 5 seconds of orbital motion and 5 seconds of linear motion? In 5 seconds the earth completes less than one six-millionth of its orbit. If you removed the sun, the earth would just travel along tangentially until the sun reappeared. It would alter the length of the year perhaps, but we'd hardly shoot out of the solar system.

2008-06-05 04:13:00 by SirQuady:

Pffft. You panzies. It'd be worth it for the hilarity and awesomness of doing it :D :P Great story!

2008-06-05 21:58:43 by pozorvlak:

The line "sometimes they are explosive or, on one memorable occasion, sentient" is beautiful.

2008-06-10 08:39:38 by Artanis:

I apologize if this causes problems... but I just linked to here from the Casual Collective (http://www.casualcollective.com http://www.casualcollective.com/forums/General_Discussion/59233/2) I don't know how much traffic a link in the CC forums can generate. Just a warning.

2008-06-10 14:52:53 by qntm:

It doesn't seem to have generated much/any traffic so far, so I'm not worried. I've had two pages on the front page of reddit.com simultaneously before now, I have a sturdy host ;)

2008-06-10 20:42:53 by Artanis:

That is both refreshing and slightly disappointing at the same time. /sigh

2008-10-20 21:54:56 by RequiemofReason:

Could this have possibly been accomplished, by teleporting a very large object between the Earth and the Sun, creating an instant eclipse? This does raise the question of how Ed constructed such an object- even milimetres thick and made of ultralight materials, the object would still have ridiculously high mass. Even with a universal constructor, the raw materials necessary would probably necessitate deconstructing a number of asteroids. Teleporting Earth in place seems like a much less messy solution.

2008-10-29 15:55:43 by Thrack:

Considering the 8 minute and 17 second time delay, any object that Edd would have put between the Earth and sun would have to have been right in front of the sun and therefore have a diameter close to that of the sun's in order to create an eclipse. I think it's more likely that Edd moved either the sun or the Earth. If he moved the sun, as the story implies, then he could easily move the Earth back to it's original orbit and therefore negating the negligible change in orbit. Alternatively, perhaps Edd didn't move anything and instead caused all the electromagnetic radiation production to cease at and around the sun using some property of quantum tunneling. A third possibility could be that Edd redirected the radiation in some way. This doesn't help the people who might be hurt or killed in car accidents or unexpected falls, unfortunately.

2008-11-02 13:03:33 by Thrack:

I just noticed, in You're Radical Ideas (which is in the subdirectory Escape) Sam calls this process "the fusion inhibitor". So judging from that the Sun, and the earth and anything else, is not being physically moved by Ed. Though if fusion on the sun ceases then that means there is no outward push in the sun keeping it from collapsing from gravity Though how much of a collapse can occur in five seconds, and what affect that will have, I don't know.

2009-10-25 19:41:43 by DD:

I see you know "IT".

2012-11-20 13:50:53 by Larry:

So it's almost Christmas 2012, are we going to hear about the gag he had planned?

2016-04-05 00:32:21 by Evonix:

My guess is that he just teleported the light away, it would be relatively easy, involve stuff traditionally affected by such stuff and how it all reverted after he stopped running it

2018-12-10 19:26:43 by Eragonawesome:

I want to make these characters in an OP D&D campaign now lol

2021-07-16 04:56:19 by Tux:

Well, at least it didn't try to sell NFTs to you.

2022-03-11 01:55:00 by Kisu:

Well, i am late and dumb, but i distinctly remember some line somewhere in my sleepless wikiwalks and youtube binges that the sun only properly works because of quantum tunneling. So my first guess would be that he just turned it off for 5 seconds, and by extension the sun. He uses a breaker switch. So he literally built a light switch for the sun, no?

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