The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

dark. Peter first suspected the onset of twilight as the cause and began to be frightened by it as it was not yet that late. But, it was just not as bright in the room, because only point sources of light could be seen.
The seven missing stars were all in a radius of about 60 light-years around the Earth. Therefore, the cuboid piece of the universe in which he was standing had an edge-length of 120 light-years. Massive stars shrank to a millimeter, and that was, in actual scale, still too large. But at that scale, even smaller points of light would hardly be visible, so the astral projector did not shrink the stars any further.
Peter felt all alone. The cosmos was just so fucking empty. Here a dot, then nothing for a while, then another dot. You’d never make contact with another intelligent species. The space in between was transparent, but a wall of steel couldn’t shield better than this vast amount of nothing. It was depressing. Peter increased the scale of the stars. Now they were an inch tall, and everything looked much better. There was something like the Christmas spirit about it.
He walked around the room, stretching out his arms and spinning, and when he caught a star, it started oscillating around its position as if it were anchored by a rubber band. Peter spun faster, got down on his knees, and straightened up again, the stars frolicking around him like young dogs. The universe had gone mad, and yet it was only he who was a bit meshuga. If there was a God... did he also sometimes move through the universe like this and upset everything around him? Peter couldn’t blame him. To exist in a perfect, harmonious world must be deadly dull.
Stop! He wanted to take care of the runaways after all, so he used the app to set the center of the display to Sigma Draconis. After all, that was where it had all started. Actually, IC 342 had been the trigger, but that particular galaxy was too far away to be of any use here. The space around him moved again. The stars kept their size but streamed to new places. It looked like they were following a secret plan, and they were. But the plan wasn’t really secret, it was formed by their coordinates in the smartphone app that anyone could download free from Google or Apple. Perhaps this also applied to his life, hmm? And, was there some app somewhere that had stored his coordinates for the next 30 to 40 years that, realistically, he still might have coming?
The universe slowed down. He caught a star disappearing into the middle of the column, presumably Sigma Draconis. It was a disadvantage of the astral projector that the most important object, which was the one in the center of the display, always became invisible. Or was that a strength? Did one recognize better what really happened if one disregarded the center of the events for a moment? You must be having one of your philosophical days again, Peter. Better solve the problem.
His subconscious was usually right when it talked to him. Enough with the philosophy, even if he didn’t know which problem was meant. Peter looked around and walked a few steps through the sea of stars. It was overwhelming. The boundaries of the living room seem to dissolve. The astral projector not only created a three-dimensional hologram in space, it also threw two-dimensional projections onto the walls, giving the impression of infinity. Peter had to be extra careful not to smack into a wall. Only the lighter colored wood of the living room door told him that he must not go further in that direction.
He could not find 47 Ursae Majoris. The star should be in the upper half of the room because the northern sky was placed there. Nonsense. He had chosen Sigma Draconis as his starting point. For a moment, Peter tried to imagine the universe from the perspective of this star. He would certainly have succeeded in the past, but now the excellent 3D representation was projected behind him. It was just so much better than what his imagination could come up with.
But he still had the app. He marked the positions of the seven stars, turning them into cosmic beacons. There they were! Their waxing and waning lights were immediately noticeable. Peter counted them and wound up with six. Number seven was in the column. But the picture made no sense. The stars seemed to be distributed randomly. He tried to trace some geometric shapes on them, but he failed. The stars were not on a spherical shell, or an ellipsoid, or a cube, or a cuboid.
It would have been too good if his idea had worked immediately. Sigma Draconis was unsuitable as a center, so he tried 47 Ursae Majoris. The universe rotated around him. He had to hold on to the column for a moment because the motion made him dizzy. The projector mistook this for a switch-off command and Peter reactivated it with a wave of his hand. Fortunately, the app hadn’t reset itself yet. The universe continued to rotate until 47 Ursae Majoris disappeared into the pedestal.
Again Peter examined the picture. Chance still ruled. He couldn’t forbid it. So it was the next star’s turn. In the meantime he had gotten used to the rotation of the universe. Gravity kept him oriented nicely. How might that feel outside a spaceship? He would like to go into space one day, but he would never be able to afford it. The other day he’d read a novel in which a young man named Martin Neumaier refused tooth and nail to set off on an exciting mission to Saturn. How unrealistic!
Even from the perspective of the next star on the list, it didn’t show what he’d hoped for, and neither did it from the perspective of the following one. Peter repeated the process until he had worked his