ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE
I'll never forget the day the Hawking III probe found the first pillar wandering the Kuiper Belt. I was eating breakfast when the newsflash announced NASA had just released images of a large metal cylinder drifting through the darkness.
In the following days, everyone discussed whether we should be celebrating the first signs of intelligent life outside of Earth or preparing for an invasion. I, for one, couldn’t stay away from the internet, despite my mom’s best efforts to keep me focused on school. How could I do it, when other probes found another seven pillars in the Kuiper Belt, all in the same exact orbit from the Sun?
Like everybody else, I followed every step of the Marco Polo, the first manned mission to inspect it. We had to wait two weeks from the day they arrived to
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Stepping on its transparent floor felt like drifting in space. In there, a few basketball-sized spheres floated around, never leaving the ambient. Made of Baltemium, a metal only found on the Pillars, they reflected the spatial landscape around them, giving the impression they were made of stars. The first crews on the Pillars tried to take them from the Sphere Chamber, but an undetectable force held them in place. Many conjectured they floated using quantum levitation, but our tests indicated otherwise.
I could spend hours observing their sluggish movement, the eventual collisions and the gentle way they redirected their course when they were about to leave the chamber. Watching them always eased my reasoning. I handled them like they were family, only authorizing others to touch them with proper care, wearing gloves and masks. I wouldn’t want anyone infecting them.
But the Pillars held more secrets them the spheres. My favorite was a phenomenon called “solar occultation”. Any probe or ship beyond the orbit of the Pillars was unable to detect the presence of the