Back in the present, in a secure meeting room somewhere in the universal simulation, the time-dilated meeting was still ongoing under Protocol 404.
Stephen Hawking continued his presentation, explaining the situation in more detail for the remaining humans who thought the mass was just some novel thing the scientists and researchers in Lab City had discovered. They felt the same as Aron initially had, that as long as it wasn't an immediate nuclear war or something, they would easily be able to handle whatever it was.
They had obviously forgotten that they'd been called to this meeting venue as a result of Protocol 404, so Dr. Hawking had to explain to them the importance of the green object on the screen.
"The object, although very far from us at about seven light years, is heading toward us at a quarter of light speed," he said. The humans in the room finally understand the implication of what was being said. Although they weren't astronauts, nor did they have any deep understanding of the field of space research, they still knew that an object of that size moving toward earth that fast was definitely not a natural occurrence.
"From the way it's moving, it's obvious that we aren't simply in its path. And that isn't all—we're still not sure if .25c¢ is its maximum speed and will need to observe it for a longer period of time to come to a conclusion. But during that time, we need to assume that it's accelerating," he said, then paused to allow the people to digest what he was saying.
"We only managed to discover it with the mana mapping we were doing, meaning the object has yet to reach a point where satellites using conventional imaging can discover it. That also means that it started its journey sometime between one day and six years ago. We can only know for sure once we can detect it with regular imaging. Right now, we've already tasked our radio telescopes with determining its velocity and acceleration, but we're only 60% confident that we'll get any kind of results within the next three years. So the only method we have to track it is on the mana map. That'll give us its rate of acceleration, if any, but it won't give us any detailed information on what it is. For that, we'll need the radio telescopes—and all of them on the planet, at that" He paused once again, this time giving a longer break for the humans to digest the information he had been churning out.
"If we can send a mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, we can extend our visual observation range and get detailed information on the object," he continued. "It won't be very good, but we can use it to rule things out until we get a bigger, more specialized deep space telescope in position at the L2 Lagrange point."
(Ed note: L2 is the Lagrange point at which the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth counter the centrifugal force of an object in orbit around the Sun, keeping it stable without requiring any energy input. Lagrange points are found anywhere the gravity of two celestial objects reaches some kind of equilibrium.)
He hadn't yet mentioned their hypothesis of what the mass might be, or where it had come from. This meeting would obviously last a very long time.
After a minute of silence, he dropped his next bombshell. "Since the object's never been picked up on visual sensors before, it's obvious that it's been created recently. Which means it was either created and launched by intelligent life and is an uncrewed object, or it's a crewed vessel and contains intelligent alien life."
The people in the conference room had just confirmed the existence of intelligent alien life and their reactions were complicated. Their jaws had dropped from a combination of surprise, disbelief, fear, and many more emotions they hadn't even known they could feel at the same time.
"So, to confirm," General Stiles cleared his throat, "alien life exists and this object is definitive proof of that?"
"Yes, and they're coming directly toward us," Dr. Hawking confirmed.
"I'm guessing your next question is how they're only just now discovering us when we've existed for so long?" he continued. It really was the question that was on everyone's mind, and he immediately answered it. "We've got two theories, one more likely than the other." He paused, creating suspense without planning to do SO.
"The first hypothesis is that they discovered us long ago and it just took a lot of time to create a vessel capable of reaching us in a reasonable time, which means we're facing a civilization that's either very patient, very curious, very goal focused, or a very long-lived race... or anything, really, that could convince them to spend that much time preparing to come to us. lіghtnоvеlwоrld~?~??. The second hypothesis is that they only recently discovered us due to this," he said, and the screen behind him immediately showed the mana map of the earth.
On the map were areas of varying mana density, but there was only one part of the map that showed a blinding light; and behold—it was right on top of Eden.
"We think it might be the result of this concentration of mana right here." As he said that, the map displayed the blinding light covering Eden, then zoomed in until it was focused on Avalon Island, which was the center of the area of blinding light.
"Fuck," Aron said in a low voice. No one but Nova, who was omnipresent in the room, heard it, but the reaction told her that he had already discovered the source of the mana concentration on Avalon Island.
"The fusion reactor," he continued. "Wait, no.... It's the mana produced by the reactor’s energy to mana converter."
About half of the electricity generated by the fusion reactor beneath the Cube was excess, so rather than store it, Aron had made the decision to use it for industrial purposes, like manufacturing the hybrid mana batteries for the Zeus One and Olympus electronics, along with some other various processes and applications.
Apparently, that decision had been a fuckup on a truly colossal, or rather cosmic scale.
