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{ breathe }
unedited
1.1k words
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"There are eclipsing binaries, astrometric binaries, spectroscopic binaries. It's hard to tell which one we're in without a map of the star system." Maureen's voice trailed out, rambling in a scientific vocabulary.
"You're doing it again." John sighed.
"Doing what?" Maureen questioned her husband.
"Using astrophysics as a smokescreen. Just tell me the bad news." Penny walked down the hallways, hearing the conversation of her parents. Robot turned his face towards her, face full of purple dots, and she quietly put a finger up to her mouth—signaling him to be quiet; he obeyed.
"Okay, fine. If this is our planet," She pointed at a beer bottle, "and this is our sun," she held up a baseball and began rotating it around the bottle. "a typical orbit looks like this."
"Okay so I'm guessing our orbit isn't typical."
"The way the ecosphere is behaving alone and longer days and the increased temperatures I couldn't figure it out until I saw (y/n)'s notes and got up there and I saw this." She lifted the bottle to reveal a black mug.
"A coffee mug?"
"A black hole, hiding just off the shoulder of our sun. The gravitational pull is altering the orbit, pulling our planet closer and closer until when it makes this turn, nothing and I mean nothing on the surface will survive."
"How long do we have."
"Till the planet becomes uninhabitable? Weeks, maybe months. It's hard to know without more information. So, we have a decision to make, do we tell people?" Penny began to walk away from her parent's conversation, shocked at the realization that they would be running out of time on this planet very very soon.
"You're asking me."
"Yeah, I'm asking you."
"Honestly, I don't know. I mean god Maureen, you should have seen their faces out there tonight. Looking to me to answer question about that machine that I don't have. So, tomorrow I get to clean up that mess. This one-"
"It's okay. I'll figure it out."
"Whatever you decide, I'll support you." Maureen nervously smiled at the man in front of her, fiddling with the baseball in her hands.
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"Twenty seven people died crashing here. Husbands, wives, friends, parents. Dead because of what that thing did." One of the man argued in the control room. Most of the surviving adults were there to discuss the events that occurred the previous night.
"What about last night. It was protecting us." A man with ginger hair tried to defend the robot.
