Sky Circles

I used to watch the trainee pilots fly circles over the nearby airfield when I was little. There was a hill, formerly part of a dam, but at the time already long in disuse, on which grass and weeds grew undeterred. I could lie there, on my back, watching them fly through too big sunglasses and trailing them with my fingers. When the planes were high enough, they would trail lines of precipitation behind them, which looked not unlike clouds, and by which I could trace the path they had recently taken from so far below. What I'm watching now is kind of like that.

We first sighted it about a week ago, through one of the telescopes somewhere in the mountains of Latin America. It's not the first odd object observed through a telescope, and of course that started the whole game of telephone this usually invites. The team with the data shares some pictures and says that they're unsure about what it is. This prompts somebody to immediately shout about aliens, and the others to quickly rebuff them, and on and on, until it gets reported as aliens anyway. It is odd, admittedly. A cloud of objects, on a spiral trajectory, with - as far as we could tell - nothing in the center. If it were just two objects, then we might have been able to make a relatively easy hypothesis, but as is so often the case, with increasing number of particles, easy answers drift further and further away. The objects were small. Small enough that the cloud's collision course with the earth wouldn't worry any serious astronomer. Upon entry into the atmosphere, pieces of that size would be expected to burn up before hitting anything. We found other things to be worried about. The motion looked suspiciously like a consequence of strong electric charge reacting to the Earth's magnetic field, which were expected to - at least temporarily scramble communication, maybe harm data carriers. The latter, would likely be an issue. There just is no way to move the vast amounts of data to any other medium. Some of it, perhaps I wouldn't mind if it disappeared. I have a lot of unsorted documents that I'll likely never need again, but have been keeping, mostly due to the anxiety that I might one day be asked to produce them. I understand though, that some data we'd likely need. We started printing out the most important things we could print, but that only works for text and pictures. Data that is static in time. We've had people print the raw data for video and audio, but I'm expecting that recovering the files from there will be more difficult than we've anticipated. The sales of Faraday cages have spiked, predictably. It's the solution I've chosen for myself, though of course having storage media detached entirely from the systems meant to use them has put the world to a halt.

Now, though, the last few hours before the cloud of debris is expected to be in the vicinity of our planet, we get to see an incredible display of nature. As the particles impact the atmosphere, they flash as they ignite. Immediately, they become highly visible from the surface, as bright lights that begin to circle in the sky. The different masses make them spiral out into trajectories with different radii. The same can be seen as they begin to break apart and burn up in the atmosphere. An intricate pattern of curves and spirals spreads over the evening sky. I raise an old polaroid camera over my head. It has a relatively slow shutter speed, at least when compared to the phones and professional reflex cameras, so it records parts of the trajectory on the film stock. I make a few of them. Some of them will land at the lab, I'm sure. I make sure I include the moon in the background, and the upper edge of the my phone that tells the time, at least to the minute. Some, I make for myself. Without the need to remember what time exactly the picture was taken, or from which position. Soon enough the visible sky is spiderwebbed with streaks of light, I watch my phone die as its memory is wiped by the flux in induced magnetic fields. Good riddance.

The first place to go dark is the center of the cloud. The last pieces of debris burn up or spiral outward, leaving a dark hole in the center of the lightshow. The sun has finished setting at this point, leaving only the errant lights and the burning objects in the sky to illuminate the cityscape. It's like watching fireworks, but eerily silent and without all the smoke. It becomes easier to see individual objects burn up in their spiral trajectory. It's become a mark of finality to me. Everything I didn't consciously decide to save, is now lost, and no amount of fussing will change that. I take it in stride, watching the last arms of the interlocked spirals burn themselves out. I stay where I am for a while, just looking into the night sky that is suddenly much darker, only illuminated by the few stars visible behind the light pollution. So little seems to have changed. I sigh, gather the developed polaroids from next to me, and begin my journey back home, curious to see what will have changed when I arrive.