Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

I picked up the paper. “Okay, so what am I looking at?” “Luminosity readings. Normalized across thousands of amateur-generated data sets and corrected for known weather and visibility conditions. Supercomputers were involved. The point is this: Our sun is not the only star that’s getting dimmer.” “Really?” I said. “Ohhh! That makes perfect sense! Astrophage can travel at 0.92 times the speed of light. If it can go dormant and stay alive long enough, it could infect nearby stars. It spores! Just like mold! It spreads from star to star.” “That’s our theory, yes,” said Stratt. “This data goes back decades. It’s not deeply reliable but the trends are there. The NSA back-calculated that—” “Wait. NSA? The U.S. National Security Agency?” “They have some of the best supercomputers in the world. I needed their supercomputers and engineers to try all kinds of scenarios and propagation models for how Astrophage could get around in the galaxy. Back to the point: These local stars have been dimming for decades. And the rate of dimming increases exponentially—just like we’re seeing with the sun.”