1. Genesis
In the beginning, Steve created the heavens and the earth. The physics was a bit janky at high speeds and tiny distances, but he just blamed that on Surreal Engine 9 and filed it away as a FIXME. At the scale he was interested in, everything was beautifully Newtonian.
His thesis, "Sexual Reproduction: A Meta-Meta-Heuristic Approach for Genetic Optimization" was the joke of the Computer Science department. His idea of splitting the populations into dimorphic subgroups who would evaluate each others' fitness was indeed proving to be capable of rapid evolution on inexpensive hardware. Unfortunately, by relinquishing control over the fitness function, he had limited his ability to steer the evolutionary process in any productive direction (eg. trading stocks). Instead, his populations became obsessed with gaming the opposite sex's fitness functions. They spent the bulk of their time on bizarre mating rituals, or otherwise busying themselves with the proliferation of their genetic material.
Aside from the sexual reproduction mechanic, the other attribute that set Steve's world apart was the licensing: It was open source. Shortly after the world had stabilized, while he was still experimenting with large reptiles, he announced his world on alt.sim.planets:
Hello everybody out there using Surreal -
I'm doing a (free) universe (just a hobby, won't be big and professional) with a novel evolutionary strategy. This has been brewing since April and is starting to get ready.
I've got reptiles, fish, birds, bugs, and all sorts of flora. To be honest, the reptiles are starting to get a bit out of hand. Does anyone have any ideas for how to balance things out?
Patches are appreciated. Any suggestions are welcome but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Patches came pouring in. A cocky Siberian teenager helped solve his dominant reptile problem. A bohemian hipster committed his art project: Birds with huge, cumbersome tails covered in beautiful glittering fractal designs. A group of bored grad students held a competition to create the "ultimate scavenger", resulting in several entirely distinct lineages of crab.
His best friend Gabe even got involved. Gabe's experiments around increasing the stereo baseline of predators' eyes resulted in the abomination of the winghead shark, whose absurdly sized cephalofoil was slowly being tamped back into reasonable dimensions by successive generations of relentless evolution.
The universe came to be called StevieNix. As the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Steve was responsible for keeping the simulation running. The entire world ran in a corner of the CS department's break room, on an ever-expanding beowulf cluster of donated hardware that would otherwise have been destined for landfill. His colleagues referred to it as the "rat's nest". Things mostly worked okay, thanks to the magic of fault-tolerant distributed consensus algorithms and Steve's tongue-in-cheek labeling of any glitches as "stochastic events".
Anyone could fork StevieNix, and many did. StevieNix became the foundation for millions of games, experiments, birthday presents, and corporate teambuilding exercises. Despite many of these forks running on vastly superior hardware, Steve's master branch had the dual advantages of mindshare and a well-liked BDFL. All patches flowed through Steve, and any patches he liked ended up in his instance.
And so the centuries elapsed. Steve's simulated lifeforms continued to evolve in strange and unproductive directions, nothing useful appeared, and nothing much changed.
Until one day, out in the real world, the star Sirius went out. Then, everything changed.
2. Cancer
Stars aren't supposed to "go out". The astronomy community was concerned. They stared at the spot where Sirius was supposed to be. It wasn't there. They appointed one of their number to dust off his telescope and scan the region. Nothing detectable. Strange.
The global astronomy community consisted of so few people that all notable members would comfortably fit inside a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant, if they felt so inclined. They didn't, and scheduled a meeting online. After twenty minutes of technical difficulties, people talking over each other, and attempts to converse with members who had clearly joined the call for appearances' sake only to turn off their cameras and walk away from their desks, Gabe was regretting his decision not to push harder for the restaurant. At least he could have gotten pho.
The following action items were recorded:
Update star charts (Gabe)
Press release?
Note: Need reassuring messaging, avoid causing panic. Assemble subcommittee. (Gabe)
Schedule follow-up meeting to brainstorm theories (Gabe)
A significant fraction of attendees also privately recorded the following action item:
Grant proposal (me)
The astrology community was substantially larger and better organized. They already had a well-established theory around the disappearance of stars, and the extinguishing of Sirius was widely and excitedly interpreted to herald an era of change driven by inner reflection. The general public learned about the disappearance of Sirius through their horoscopes, long before the astronomers' press release subcommittee had any hope of being assembled. As astronomers neither read horoscopes nor contributed anything of value to the astrology community, the intellectual output of the two groups remained isolated until Gabe happened to bump into his upstairs neighbour.
"Gabe! So good to see you! How have you been?"
"Oh, hey!" Gabe responded, mentally flitting through reasons to exit the conversation. "Yeah, pretty good, tired mostly."
His neighbour nodded knowingly. "Cancer, right?"
Gabe jolted a little. "What? I sure hope not!"
"But you were born mid-July, no?"
Gabe relaxed and let out a sigh. "Right. Yes, Cancer."
"I knew it. You're always so empathetic. I can tell by how deeply connected you are to your emotions. I can always tell, you know. You couldn't be anything but a Cancer."
Gabe resigned himself to the conversation. "So what's up with Cancer these days?"
His neighbour nodded again and furrowed his brow. "Mmm, yes. Cancer has a strong association with Sirius. The darkening will have profound implications. Sirius is your beacon, your source of spiritual guidance-"
"I guess you could say it's pretty serious, eh?"
His neighbour glared at him. "Whenever a star darkens, it's pretty serious."
Gabe blinked.
"Whenever a star darkens?"
His neighbour nodded, more quickly this time.
"How often does a star darken?"
"Hard to say, maybe every century or so? It seems to be happening more often lately, must be something going on in the heavens."
Gabe stood rooted to the spot, bag half slung off his shoulder. He knew better than to take his neighbour seriously, but it didn't seem like he was joking.
"What was the last star to darken?"
"Procyon, around eighty years ago. Don't you remember that? We were all thrilled, Procyon had been causing disharmony for centuries."
Gabe slowly unfroze and started shuffling to the front door of the apartment building. "Yes, Procyon. Yup. First Procyon, now Sirius. Right. OK, good talking to you!" He offered a distracted, halfhearted wave, opened the door, and practically ran all the way to his office at the University.
3. "Research"
Trounced by a bunch of zodiac enthusiasts. What an embarrassment. There weren't enough hens in the world to lay the cumulative quantity of egg on the astronomers' faces. Truth be told, the field had languished during the Great Peace. While their primitive ancestors had once gazed upon the stars and seen the final frontier - an infinite array of worlds ripe for the raping and pillaging - modern enlightened folk had no such interest in conquest.
The field of astronomy, like the rest of academia, had slowly ossified into an elaborate economy of prestige and grant grubbing. The occasional student unfortunate enough to enter the field spent several years taking "classes" under a rotating cast of senior academics, during which he learned the basic art of memorizing accepted ideas and paraphrasing them in sufficiently novel ways so as to avoid triggering anti-plagiarism software. A successful student was one who flattered, but never out-shone his academic superiors.
After the years of classes, should the student wish to continue his academic career, he would seek a supervisor. As there was precious else to do with an astronomy undergrad degree, most did. Then, the "research" would begin. A typical research project involved studying the intersection between some aspect of astronomy and the interests of some minority group, eg. "Red Dwarves and the Short Statured Community: A Critical Analysis of Terminological Impact". The output of the research project would be a thesis - consisting of a survey, some basic statistical tests, a self-flagellating discussion, and several hundred pages of literature review.
If the student successfully wrote and defended his thesis, his next step was to become a researcher. This was a similar role but with less autonomy. Researchers often joined research groups - teams of individuals, collaborating on such heavy-hitting topics as "The Role of Cultural Contexts in Shaping Scientific Paradigms in Astronomical Outreach: An Intersectional Perspective on Star Party Planning and Telescope Accessibility". The primary function of the research group was to convince Government and Non-Government Organizations to supply them with grant money, and as a young researcher ascended the ranks of the research group a steadily increasing amount of their time was spent, not on producing the "research" itself, but on convincing the government that the research was extremely important and thus worthy of being funded.
After decades or (more likely) centuries as a researcher, a successful researcher would find himself at the penultimate stage in his career - as a tenure-track professor. Here, his role was almost exclusively to raise grant money, with a smattering of teaching and supervision. Perform this job adequately, and the astronomer could obtain the holy grail of the astronomy career path - tenure.
Tenure was effectively retirement. So long as the tenured professor continued to both meet his university's extremely lax teaching/supervision requirements and avoid accidental death and execution, he could spend the rest of eternity doing whatever he liked. In almost all cases, what the tenured professor liked doing was "research". And so, the astronomical literature continued to grow, and the grants continued to flow.
At no point, in this career of potentially infinite length, was he ever rewarded for looking through a telescope. So he didn't.
When Gabe reached his desk and fired up his computer, he realized that he didn't even have his own telescope. He was pretty sure the university had one, but he didn't have the foggiest idea how to use it. With a sigh and a deep burning of shame, he navigated to the newspaper archives and searched for the words "horoscope darkening".
4. Degrees of Darkening
"Whatcha doing?"
Steve had stopped by Gabe's office to consult his opinion on important lunch-related matters, but became distracted by the clutter on the screen and the frenetic manner in which Gabe was typing into a spreadsheet and clutching his hair.
"FIVE stars, Steve! FIVE! And those are just the ones visible to the naked eye!"
"Hm?" Steve's internal optimist suggested that "five stars" may be an allusion to the class of restaurant that his friend had in mind, but his internal realist pointed out that the rest of Gabe's pronouncement didn't make sense in that context - and plus, Gabe was more of a "two stars" kind of individual. On balance, Steve could tell that lunch wouldn't be forthcoming and was beginning to regret his choice of dining partner.
"Five stars have disappeared from the night sky in the past thousand years. Look!"
He gestured across his spreadsheet at a haphazard pile of numbers, notes, e-mail snippets and URLs which, while Steve found incomprehensible, he could easily judge as an inappropriate collection of data for a spreadsheet. Steve nodded. "Ah yes, I see."
"The astrologers have been all over it for centuries, and no one bothered to tell us until - well, it doesn't matter. And look, they're all in the same quadrant!"
More gesticulations at the chaotic table of seemingly random data artifacts.
"Mhm."
"I need your help", Gabe pleaded.
Finally, something sensible. "Yes, you might", Steve agreed.
"I need to find all the stars that have disappeared that aren't visible to the naked eye. Can you help me program the telescope?"
Steve spent a barely perceptible moment mourning his afternoon plans. They had involved a hearty lunch, a light nap, and a VR stroll in his favourite StevieNix garden where he'd been working on a bipedal fork of the great apes. But it wasn't every day that a colleague asked for a favour, and if the state of the spreadsheet was any indication, Gabe was in over his head.
"Sure, no problem. Where's the manual?"
Imagine five trees catch fire in a forest. If you are standing some distance from the forest, all the individual burning trees would appear to be close together - perhaps taking up only a couple of degrees in your field of view. You would feel relatively unthreatened by the fire, and your attitude upon noticing the burning trees may be akin to "how unusual, someone ought to do something about that".
Now, imagine the same five trees catching fire in the same forest, except you are standing much closer to them. The first major difference is that they would be spread out more widely across your field of view, taking up more degrees. In the extreme limit, if you were right in the middle of the burning grove, the affected trees would take up 360 degrees of your field of view and your attitude would be closer to abject terror.
The five disappeared stars took up twenty degrees of the sky. There was cause for concern.
Programming the telescope turned out to not be that hard in the end. The telescope's manual was located, and Steve was pleasantly surprised to find that its manufacturer had designed a fairly intuitive programmatic interface. The hardest part was figuring out how to turn it on and log in. In a couple of hours, they had the focus set to infinity and the telescope was panning around on demand.
In order to not have to scan the entire night sky, they drew a bounding box around the region containing the five known-disappeared stars - twenty degrees up, twenty degrees across. They added another ten degrees on each side for good measure, making a total of forty degrees in each dimension. The university's telescope had a fairly wide field of view of 1 degree, meaning the entire region could be captured in 1600 frames. At 15 seconds per frame, it would take a little under 7 hours to scan the whole area. Steve and Gabe uploaded the code to the telescope, sent one of Gabe's unfortunate astronomy students up to clean the lens, made tea, and settled in to wait for nightfall.
There was no immediate task at hand, and neither Gabe nor Steve were fond of nor skilled at small talk. Thus, they sat in a silent stalemate and sipped their tea - Steve wishing Gabe would address the elephant in the room and Gabe wishing Steve wouldn't.
After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Steve disregarded both of their wishes and asked the big question. "What do you think is causing it?"
Gabe looked down at his cup and didn't answer.
"Stars can't just run out of fuel this quickly, right? You get some advance warning?"
"Yes, it's usually either very drawn out or very dramatic" Gabe responded.
"Can stars become black holes without first going all supernova?"
"It's theoretically possible, but there's nothing near us that's big enough. The closest star that could even go supernova is Betelgeuse and that's six exameters away."
Steve thought back to his garden in StevieNix. There was a Betelgeuse there too, but it would never go supernova. The entire night sky was an illusion - millions of carefully placed point light sources, modeled after scans of their own sky taken tens of thousands of years ago. He could make Betelgeuse vanish with one change to a config file.
"Could it be...Are there any signs that this universe could be..."
"StevieNix?"
Steve laughed nervously.
"No. No offence, Steve, but our universe isn't a stack of hacks in the corner of the CS department. For starters, our physics actually makes sense."
Steve didn't take offence. He could tell that his friend was getting agitated, so he changed tack to the only other plausible explanation.
"So, aliens then?"
"Yeah", sighed Gabe. "Aliens then."
5. Observational Anomalies
Steve and Gabe took turns napping while the telescope relentlessly panned, tilted, and captured images. To keep himself awake, Steve wrote a simple script to stitch together the 1600 images, taking into account planetary rotation. When this was done, he set a breakpoint in StevieNix to pause it when the sim planet reached the same position as their own. This took six months in sim time, but only a few seconds in real life. He then took the exact same images in sim and stitched them together, thus giving himself a baseline for comparison.
At 4am, the last frame came in from the university telescope. Hurriedly, he ran his stitching script, overlaid the real life image on top of the StevieNix one, and ran an image diff. After a few attempts, the results were conclusive. He roused Gabe.
"Seventeen."
"Seventeen?"
"Seventeen stars, all contained within a thirty-three by twenty-six degree bounding box."
Gabe rubbed his eyes. "This is comparing against the StevieNix sky, right?"
Steve nodded. "I have no idea where to find the source data, so this was the fastest way."
Gabe rolled out of bed. "We can't be sure untill we've compared it to an actual scan. No offence, but half those stars could be easter eggs or wedding proposal gimmicks or whatever."
Finding an actual scan of the night sky was harder than it should have been for a tenured professor of astronomy, but Gabe had already made some progress on this front in his frenzied panic earlier. It wasn't long before an appropriate image had been located, rotated, and cropped to fit the same area. They ran the image diff.
Seventeen stars were missing.
The two exhausted friends leaned back in their chairs and alternated between staring dumbly at the screens, and at each other.
Eventually, it was Gabe's turn to break the silence.
"What now?"
Finally, a question Steve could answer. "Coffee. And breakfast. Let's go."
Although the journal editor could plainly see the vast and terrifying implications of their paper, "Observational Anomalies: The Sudden Extinction of Seventeen Proximate Stars", there was still a process to be respected. The average paper went through nine rounds of peer review prior to being accepted for publication, during which time any and all originality was carefully sifted out, lest the paper interfere with another academic's sinecure. Following a frank behind-closed-doors discussion with the editor, Gabe and Steve uploaded their paper to a preprint server and alerted the press through various backchannels - mostly by tagging science journalists on social media.
Through the tireless work of the Astrology community, a sizable fraction of the general public was already aware of at least some of the darkenings. Of those people, most were vaguely skeptical of the idea that this was a routine event - little cause for alarm, outside of astrological considerations - but had assumed that if there was anything to worry about, the government would take care of it.
The prevailing sentiment inside the government was that, while the star darkenings were unusual, it was not their problem. As government employees, they were accountable to - at most - widespread public outrage (and usually not even that). In the absence of any immediate threat to their livelihoods, all individual government employees were happy to leave the star darkening question to the astrologers and the scientific community - who, up until the publication of Observational Anomalies, hadn't the foggiest idea that this was going on at all.
Thus, public unease continued to stack up over the centuries, like dry tinder, until the popular science articles discussing Observational Anomalies took a match to it.
A hundred thousand year planetary peace doesn't arise without cause. A significant contributing factor was the Federal Department of Social Emotional Calibration. The FDSEC's stated goal was the eradication of all anti-social personality traits, chief among which were aggression and ambition. This was accomplished through various means, including by exerting influence over the embryonic selection process, re-education of people exhibiting anti-social traits, and - in the extreme - execution.
Suffice it to say, the minority of the public who reacted with hostility to the news of the likelihood of an advanced star-extinguishing alien race in their neighbourhood, kept it to themselves. The unburned centuries' worth of unease on the star-darkening question conflagrated in an extreme, public flame of rapturous excitement.
UPDATE: Part 2 has been published!