The pedestrian signal at the Shibuya Scramble Crossing chirped its familiar electronic song, a rhythm set against the ocean-like rush of Tokyo traffic. A wave of high school girls, their dark blue uniform skirts fluttering in the cool December breeze, surged into the intersection. They moved as one, a laughing, chattering constellation of smartphones and trendy keychains dangling from their bags, their world defined by the next exam, the latest pop release, and the cute barista at the Starbucks overlooking the crossing. Steam rose from a nikuman bun held by a girl walking backward, her face bright with laughter.
Thousands of kilometers away, under the relentless, pale-blue fire of the Dubai sky, a different kind of rhythm played out. The percussive clang-thwack of pneumatic hammers and the bass roar of heavy machinery echoed off the glass-and-steel skeleton of the new Al-Burj spire. A team of South Asian workers, their yellow hardhats bright against the dust, maneuvered a massive steel I-beam into place. Shouted commands in Hindi, Urdu, and Tagalog cut through the din. They were building a monument to human ambition, a testament to mankind's desire to scrape the very heavens.
Further east, on the sprawling, sun-baked green of the Maidan in Kolkata, the world was softer, slower. A man in a crisp white kurta skillfully let out the manjha—the glass-coated string—of a vibrant red peteng. His six-year-old daughter clapped with delight as the kite caught the wind, soaring higher until it was a dancing speck against the hazy white marble of the Victoria Memorial. Her laughter was the only sound that mattered.
In Tokyo, Dubai, and Kolkata, on every continent, in every nation, 8 billion individual lives unfurled in their own beautiful, chaotic, and mundane patterns. They were all, in their own ways, looking up—at a friend, at a rising skyscraper, at a kite.
They were all blissfully unaware of the impossibility that was already tearing through the dark, a shadow moving faster than any god or demon of their collective imagination.
They had six days of normal left.
_____________________________________
SIX DAYS BEFORE ORBITAL INSERTION
DECEMBER 14, 2011
ISRO TELEMETRY, TRACKING AND COMMAND NETWORK (ISTRAC), BENGALURU, INDIA
The time was 02:17 AM.
The only sounds in the mission control annex were the whisper-quiet hum of the server racks and the rhythmic tick-tick-tick of Dr. Aristha Sharma's pen against her coffee mug. The mug itself was long empty, its contents replaced by the stale, metallic taste of sleep deprivation and sheer willpower.
At twenty-nine, Aristha was one of the youngest lead analysts at the Indian Space Research Organisation, a prodigy who saw the universe not as a collection of stars, but as a grand, unsolved data problem. Her station was her kingdom, a semi-circle of six monitors displaying cascading columns of code, orbital plots, and raw telemetry.
She was working the graveyard shift, assigned to the 'Brahma-1' Deep Space Survey Probe. Her task was a digital needle-in-a-haystack: sift through the terabytes of data Brahma-1 sent back, filtering out gravitational lensing "noise" to identify potential exoplanet candidates. It was tedious, vital, and usually, utterly predictable.
Until it wasn't.
A flag popped up on her primary diagnostic screen. It wasn't the usual pale-yellow warning for a data packet collision or a sensor misalignment. This flag was a stark, screaming crimson.
[ALERT: UNCATALOGUED_VECTOR_HIGH_SIGMA]
Aristha frowned, pushing her wire-frame glasses up her nose. A high-sigma vector alert meant Brahma-1's primary telescope had detected an object on a trajectory that was statistically... well, "impossible" was the unscientific term. It usually meant a sensor flare from a nearby magnetar or a simple software glitch.
"Not tonight, you don't," she muttered, her fingers blurring over the keyboard. She initiated a diagnostic sequence, a custom script she'd written herself. glitch_filter.py.
The script ran. The alert remained.
Her brow furrowed. She rerouted the feed, isolating the data packets from the moment of detection. She dumped the raw observational data, bypassing the friendly user interface for the cold, hard numbers.
There. A shadow. A pinprick of non-light where there should have been nothing but the faint background radiation of the cosmos.
"Okay," she breathed, her heart kicking up a notch. "Let's see what you are."
She cross-referenced the coordinates with the archives from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Her security clearance gave her access. She typed in the coordinates and the timestamp.
The VLT data, captured three hours earlier, confirmed it. It wasn't a glitch. It wasn't sensor artifacting. It was real.
A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She initiated a preliminary parallax calculation to determine its distance and velocity. The computer churned for a moment, then spat out the result.
Her breath hitched. The numbers couldn't be right. She ran the calculation again. And a third time.
The numbers didn't change.
The object was close. Not "edge of the solar system" close. It was "inside Mars's orbit" close. And its velocity vector...
v_rel: -112.4 km/s
It was fast. But the terrifying part was the deceleration value attached to it. It was actively, impossibly, slowing down. It wasn't a rogue asteroid or a comet. Those didn't brake.
With a trembling hand, she ran the most terrifying query of all: mass and albedo estimation based on its gravitational influence on Brahma-1 and its observed brightness.
The program ran. The answer appeared.
EST. DIAMETER: 31,850 km
EST. MASS: [ERROR: VALUE EXCEEDS KNOWN PLANETARY MODELS]
Aristha did the math in her head, her mind screaming in protest. Earth's diameter was roughly 12,742 km.
This... this thing... was 2.5 times the size of Earth.
And it was heading straight for them.
The empty coffee mug slipped from her numb fingers and clattered onto the desk, the sound like a gunshot in the silent room. She didn't flinch. She was staring at the trajectory plot. It wasn't a flyby. It wasn't an impact.
It was a burn. A powered, calculated, orbital insertion burn.
Its destination: Earth's orbit.
Aristha scrambled from her chair, her legs unsteady. She didn't grab her notes. She didn't log out. She sprinted. Her security badge slapped frantically against her chest as she ran down the sterile, fluorescent-lit hallway, her heart hammering a desperate code against her ribs.
She burst through the door to the office of the Mission Director, Dr. Biren Ghosh, without knocking.
Biren Ghosh was a man of fifty, with kind, tired eyes behind thick glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard that was more salt than pepper. He was working late, as he always did, a cup of cardamom tea steaming next to his keyboard. He looked up, his expression a mixture of surprise and instant concern.
"Aristha? What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Sir... Biren-sir..." she panted, leaning against the doorframe, trying to force words past the knot of panic in her throat. "I... I need..."
"Sit, sit," he said, standing up, his fatherly demeanor taking over. He rounded his desk and went to the small water cooler in the corner. "Here, let me get you some water. You're as white as a sheet."
"No," she gasped, shaking her head violently. "No water. Sir... do you have... in your drawer. Do you have anything stronger?"
Biren froze, the plastic cup halfway to his lips. He knew Aristha Sharma. He'd recruited her himself. She was the most disciplined, brilliant, and impeccably professional analyst on his staff. She'd turned down champagne at the Chandrayaan-2 launch party. For her to ask for liquor at 2 AM in the command center... something was terribly, fundamentally wrong.
He wordlessly returned to his desk, opened a bottom drawer, and pulled out a bottle of Amrut single malt, kept for either catastrophic failures or monumental successes. He poured a small, two-finger measure into a glass and handed it to her.
She took it, her hand shaking so badly the amber liquid sloshed. She downed it in a single, desperate gulp, coughing and sputtering as the raw, smoky peat hit her system. The burn in her throat was a welcome, grounding pain.
"Now," Biren said, his voice low and serious. "Tell me."
She shoved her laptop, which she'd grabbed on pure instinct, onto his desk. "Brahma-1. High-sigma alert at 02:13. I... I thought it was a glitch."
He pulled the laptop closer, his eyes scanning her screen. He saw the alert, the failed script. He saw her raw data dump. His fingers, faster than she would have expected, flew across her keyboard, replicating her steps. He saw the VLT cross-reference.
"You checked for signal integrity?" his voice was sharp, all fatherly concern gone, replaced by the Director.
"Twice, sir. It's not artifacting."
"Timestamp alignment? Data corruption from the solar flare last week?"
"Negative. MOM and Chandrayaan telemetry are perfectly clean. It's... it's real, sir."
He ran the orbital calculation himself. He saw the vector. He saw the deceleration. He ran the mass estimation. His face, already pale, went ashen. He slumped back into his chair, his composure cracking like thin ice.
"My God," he whispered. "Biren..." Aristha's voice was barely a whisper. "It's 2.5 times the size of Earth. It's... it's braking. How is that possible? The G-forces... the energy..."
"It's not possible," Biren said, his mind racing. "It defies... it defies everything." He stared at the screen, at the plotted trajectory. "An L1 point insertion. No... it's coming closer. It's aiming for a co-orbital path. A... a shared axis."
He snatched the secure phone from its cradle—the red one, not the black one. The one that bypassed all switchboards.
"This is Director Ghosh at ISTRAC. Get me Chairman Nair. Yes, now. I don't care what time it is. Wake him up."
A tense minute of silence stretched, filled only by the hum of Biren's desktop PC. Aristha stood frozen, wrapping her arms around herself, the whisky's warmth doing nothing to stop the chill that had settled deep in her bones.
"Chairman?" Biren's voice was firm. "Biren Ghosh. Sir, I apologize for the hour. I am sending you a data packet. Right now. I am here with Dr. Aristha Sharma... yes, that Sharma. Sir, you need to see this immediately. It is... it is a Code Omega event."
Another agonizing silence as the head of all of ISRO, miles away, opened the file. There was no sound on the other end, just dead air. Then, a sharp, inhaled breath.
The Chairman's voice came back, tinny, strained, and terrifyingly calm. "Biren... what in God's name am I looking at?"
"It's an object, sir," Biren said, reading from the screen. "Confirmed 2.5 times Earth's mass. Its trajectory is... it's powered, sir. It's impossible, but it's happening. It is on a direct, powered insertion burn for a shared Earth orbit."
The silence on the line was so long this time, Biren thought he'd been disconnected.
Finally, the Chairman spoke. "Dr. Ghosh. Dr. Sharma. You are not to speak of this to anyone. Not your colleagues, not your families, not a soul. Do you understand me? I am patching us through to the Prime Minister's Office. You will be briefing the National Security Advisor and the PM himself in... ten minutes. Stay exactly where you are."
The line clicked dead.
Biren slowly placed the receiver back in its cradle. He looked older than fifty. He looked ancient. He stared at his own computer screen, where he'd pulled up a simulation of the orbital path. Two planets. One blue, one a massive, terrifying red dot. On the same circular path.
Aristha finally sank into the visitor's chair, her legs giving out. The adrenaline was gone, replaced by a hollow, sickening dread.
"Sir," she whispered, staring at the clock on the wall. 03:04 AM.
"NASA's Pan-STARRS... the ESA... the Chinese. They'll all see it, won't they? Their automated systems will flag it."
"Yes," Biren said, his voice flat. "By morning... it's going to be international."
Aristha looked back at her laptop screen, at the final, damning calculation. The time-to-insertion.
"But Biren..." she said, her voice cracking. "The calculation... the orbital insertion... That... that thing..."
She pointed a trembling finger at the countdown timer.
"It will be here in six days."