The Hayabusa Effect

(Short Story)

• Author: Ricky Wilhelmson
  
  
  
  

The Head of State had the driver open the door for him and got out of the armored limo. There were no cameras or reporters. Slowly, the Head of State climbed up three steps, toward the glass door of the gray, flat-roofed building. There, again, he had someone open the door for him. One of the many small privileges that one had in a leadership position, he thought. One got used to it quickly. Being driven around by others and have them open doors became normal after a while. It just never felt normal for those having to do the driving and the opening. Inside the building, the Head of State walked down long, empty and windowless corridors. He took no notice of the letters and numbers labeling the many closed doors. Instead, he headed straight for the only open door. The meeting room behind it, as welcoming and as stately as a newly renovated primary school classroom, was empty. The Head of State was puzzled for a moment. One got used to never having to wait for anyones arrival. The others were the ones having to wait for him. That was normal. Until it wasn‘t. This was the room where the previous meetings had taken place. And today‘s meeting would happen here too. No doubt. Sitting down on one of the chairs made from bent aluminium pipes and pressboard was not comfortable. But the Head of State did not want to stand.

— The Probe
The japanese space agency JAXA control room in Tanegashima was quiet. So quiet in fact, that the keystrokes of the seven mission engineers typing on their keyboards was the only sound. The wait was on for new signals from the Hayabusa 2 probe. It had been launched five years ago and had catapulted itself through the solar system with several swing-by maneuvres, using the Earths gravity. Leading to a rendezvous with the 4.5 billion year old Asteroid Ryugu. „We have green light for the approach“, said one of the engineers into his headsets mouthpiece. Mostly to break the silence, since all of his colleagues could see the probes status change on their own monitors. The engineer typed a command that launched the approach sequence. Twenty minutes would pass for the command to reach the probe. A small adjustment of the probes stationary flight-path over the asteroid should then enable a telescopic suction tube to take a sample of asteroid material from the bottom of a three meter wider crater. Which the probe had blasted into the asteroid for just that purpose with a copper projectile, two days ago.

— Woomera
Barbecue smoke kept the flies away from the meat. That was the good part. But instead, the little bastards now sat on Georges sweaty T-shirt. Preferably on his back, where he couldn‘t get at them. He took a swig of lukewarm beer from the bottle in his right hand. Then used his left to push against the trunk of the tree. His hammock started rocking again. Four or five more minutes, he thought, and the ostrich-steak would be ready. He winked through an improvised sunroof at the bright Woomera midday sky. Now, in December, it was almost too hot to dig, here, in the australian south. The dry heat made his whole endeavour cumbersome. But things could be worse, he told himself. And the tunnels were nice and cool. He had bought the digging-machine from his predecessor. Also the generator and the long pipe, through which he pumped water, from a well, two kilometers away, to this place. His one-man Opal-mining operation. His attempt to swat a fly that had daringly landed on the rim of his beer bottle failed.

— The Head of State
„So this means, you still haven‘t got a clue?“, remarked the Head of State, adressing the small group of consultants in front of him and looking directly into the black rimmed, tired eyes of the Intelligence-Coordinator.

„We …“, began the reply of the Intelligence Coordinator, but he didn‘t continue. As the pause got longer, the Head of State stood up, stepped behind his very uncomfortable chair and put both hands on its back, facing the group. He bent slightly forward and started to look at every person in the room, one by one. Then he slowly shook his head, went to the back of the room and started pacing up and down.

„This is our fourth meeting. We have been doing this for almost a year now. Just me, you and your“, the Head of State made a half circle motion with his arm, „your troops. And in all this time we haven‘t made any progress at all!“

The Intelligence Coordinator wanted to reply, but was stopped by the Head of State with a gesture. He continued.

„In our first meeting, your analysts had discovered a high number of twin-births over the past six months. A very high number.“ One of the consultants in the group nodded.

„A number fifteen times higher than the average number of twin-births! A magnitude that couldn‘t be explained by just assuming a new kind of fertility treatment had hit the market.“

„Also, if I remember correctly, in that first meeting you pointed out to me the record number of cases of robbery, domestic violence, rural car accidents, sport injuries, sexual intercourse in public and … and …“

„Petty theft“, said one of the consultants.

„Exactly, right … petty theft. So you pointed out, that all of these things had gone through the roof over that last six months. Meaning my fellow citizens were going crazy somehow.“

Nobody said a word.

„That‘s what you pointed out. I am correct there, am I not?“

Nobody objected.

„So, I said to myself, I said, the only people going crazy here, thats you, gentlemen! I let you finish your talking. I did pretend to take your so called analysis seriously. Then I sent you away and started mentally preparing myself for having to replace my Intelligence Coordinator and his“, he again made another half-circle motion with his arm, „and his troops, as soon as possible. Because obviously they had gone completely bonkers.“

„Roughly three months after that first meeting you requested a second one. I said yes. But only because …“, one of the consultants bent forward, reached under the table and started scratching his leg. Then he sat straight again and put his index finger up his nose. A thick vein on the Head of States forehead started throbbing violently and he continued, now much louder.

„But only because the situation, if we can call it that, had not returned to normal.“

„To the third meeting you brought two new experts, who had developed a complicated model to explain the strange behaviour of my fellow citizens. But they couldn‘t really explain anything. They did however calculate when to expect a normalisation of the siutation. That was six months ago. Their predictions were completely wrong. Nothing normalized. Absolutely nothing. To the contrary. We are now seeing teenage pregnancies thirteen times higher than before this whole thing started. And we still have the same high numbers for twin births, sports injuries, robberies, car accidents, violence and what have you. it‘s getting worse and worse. And you, my dear Intelligence Coordinator haven‘t got a clue as to why this is? We are not at war with anyone. We have no hunger in our country and my citizens are not overly poor. At least, that‘s what they think. There are no diseases and no little green men are trying to invade us. Or did we miss a terror group that might have started to play around with chemical weapons on our territory?“

The Intelligence Coordinator shook his head and the Head of State continued.

„So what the heck is happening? And don‘t you dare say that you don‘t know!“

— The Probe
There was no life in the asteroids core. Not even in his outer layers, made of ice and cosmic dust. There were however large numbers of molecules which scientists would have classified as organic. But that did not mean they came from living organisms. On Ryugu, they did not come from anything that lived. But they still multiplied. Through a process called self-replication, two of these molecules could create a third, using only primitive substances. This process had been kicked-off last, roughly fifteen million years ago, when the impact of a small dead rock had caused the asteroid to vibrate in the ultrasound range. Much in the same way that the copper projectile, fired at the asteroid by the Hayabusa 2 probe 48 hours ago to pierce its outer layer, had made Ryugu ring like a bell.

„We are getting data. It looks good. Suction seems to work fine“, said the communications engineer in the JAXA groupchat.

The probes approach toward the new crater on the asteroid was a critical manoeuvre, especially the last few meters. The suction tube was telescopic, but since the probe might approach the surface at a slight angle, the engineers wanted to avoid a contraction. The probes autonomus guidance system activated the breaking thrusters in time, switched on the suction mechanism and filled the first of its three, sterile compartments with everything it could get. Fourty minutes later, the JAXA mission chief left the mission control room with a sigh of relief, and walked toward the recreation area. He bought a cup of unsweetened green tea from one of the vending machines and started to drink it, through a little straw made of white cardboard.

— Woomera
Potato sniffed at the ostrich-meat leftovers from last week, lifted his head and looked at George. Then he let his head sink again and strolled back into the shadows.

„Ya‘r gettin picky, are ya?“, George said after him. He hadn‘t bought Potato from the previous owner of the mine. The dog had just appeared one day. And stayed. In the beginning, he ate all the leftovers George would let him have. But for a while now, he had been choosing what, and what not to eat. Maybe, George thought, the people of the military base are feeding him now. It lay four kilometers to the northwest. Going in a straight line. By car it was more.

„Don‘t let tha cook af da base bribe ya, my friend. Ya‘ll regret it. Ya might be tha next meat linin in his stew.“

Potato did not get the hint. Not because he wasn‘t smart. But because he had stopped trying to make sense of the low growling sounds people made. They fed him when he played their games and if he stuck around. That was enough.

— The Head of State
The armored but otherwise unremarkable limosine snaked through the maze of suburbian streets, back to the government building in the city center. The Head of States Personal Assistant sat on the other side of the rear bench and typed, fully focused on her notebooks screen. The Head of State looked out of the side window, at the slowly moving traffic.

„Our next appointment is in 45 minutes, at …“, began the assistant.

„I know, I know“, replied the Head of State and rolled his eyes, so that no one could see it.

„For the next half hour, if‘d like to do some thinking, uninterrupted.“

The assistant nodded without looking up and continued with her typing.

The situation was concerning. Except for himself and the Intelligence Coordinator, only the Interior Minister had been briefed on all the details. Two months ago, a confidential memo had been sent to all the friendly states in the neighbourhood. Asking if they had seen any unusual numbers in their statistics. And they had. All of them. The answers had all been versions of „Oh, you are seeing this too?“, coded into incomprehensible bureaucratic gibberish. Fortunately it had not made the news. Yet. The few experts who looked at and understood statistics, and the even smaller subgroups that commented on the „anomalies“ in social media, were quickly defused. Either by well placed articles that interpreted the data in exactly the opposite way. Or by using exaggerations, to associate the authors with the crowd of aluminium-hat wearing conspiracy theorists. If a normalization of the situation had been on the horizon, this could have gone on, until everything was over. Of course, no one would really have known all that had happened and no one would ever find out why it had happened, but, who cared anyway? A Head of State had to keep his country stable, thought the Head of State. No matter how.

— Woomera
Four weeks in advance of the actual capsule landing, half of the Hayabusa 2 Mission Team had traveled to the australian Woomera region. The designated landing site, 120,000 kilometers square, was a former testing site for the australian Royal Airforce. Australian officials had arranged the accommodation of the Japanese team on the largest military base within the area. Likewise, a two person team for scientific support had been dispatched. Mike, a geologist, specialized in geochemistry and Lisa a molecular biologist with a knack for astrobiology. It was her who stood in front of the lab container, in the shade and took one last drag from her cigarette. The base, located in the middle of nowhere, was surrounded by a rusty, dilapidated barbed-wire fence. Which obviously had holes, Lisa thought, as she saw the dog, probably a mixture of Dingo, Rottweiler, Terrier, Labrador and who-knows-what-else coming towards her. She reached into her snack-bag, pulled out a dry strip of beef-jerky, crouched and called.

“Come, …, come here, … come.”

The exhausted and sad looking animal approached her cautiously and, after a minute of sniffing the air and assessing her and the environment, came close. It pulled the strip of beef out of her hands and started to chew, while Lisa padded its dusty back.

“Good boy,…, goooood boy!”

As Lisa got up and entered the lab container again, Potato continued to chew on the beef strip. He did not really like the dried-out, funny tasting meat too much, but he had become too slow for hunting lizards and pebble-mice.

— The Probe
Before sending them out to Mars, Venus, faraway moons or asteroids in the solar system, probes were thoroughly sterilized using aggressive chemicals and UV-radiation. But no object that managed to leave earths gravity well was fully sterile. There were just too many microbes in the biosphere. In the ground, in the upper atmosphere and anywhere in between. Bacillus subtilis was one of them. Present in large quantities in every microgram of garden soil, it also lived on the skin underneath human feet and in human intestines, where it helped digestion. It had even made it to the International Space Station ISS. Carried by the astronauts. It had also survived the launch of Hayabusa2 from Tanegashima, hidden on hard-to-reach surfaces of the probe, and had grown robust spores which survived the five-year journey to Ryugu. The Asteroids age was estimated to be 4.5 billion years. That made it as old as the solar system. Older than the Earth itself and thereby older than all life that had ever evolved on the blue planet. The self-replicating molecules in Ryugus interior, previously contained by the asteroids outer layers of dead mineral, now perforated by Hayabusa2, were also older than any life that had ever evolved on earth. A large quantity of these molecules made it through the suction tube into the probes sterile compartments for asteroid material and there it was sealed in a sterile environment. Another part escaped and came to rest, as a cloud of small particles, on the underside of the capsule, where it would be vaporized during atmospheric re-entry. The last, significant part, settled on the upper side of the capsule. Which had already been overgrown by B.subtilis spores. The double-phospholipid membrane of B.subtilis welcomed the molecule like a long lost relative on Christmas evening and immediately transported it into the interior of the cell. There, the molecule found all it needed to survive the trip back to earth. And more.

— The Analyst
The analyst leaned back, began massaging his neck and rotated his office chair, away from the monitor. None of his colleagues, all with bulky headphones over their ears, took notice. The fluorescent light made his head ache. The soundproof floor and walls gave the subterranean workspace the feel of a well lit grave. His own headphones had been playing back sounds of birds and flowing water, in an endless loop of Ambient-Music, for the past hours. He had ploughed through reports by the australian health service, without finding anything really new. About a year ago, the odd numbers had shown up for the first time in official statistics. His boss, the Intelligence Coordinator had said it in their meeting with the Head of State yesterday. A very high number of twin-births and extremely high numbers of teenage pregnancies. For the same time period, the reports also noted an abnormal increase in aggressive behavior. Both in women and men. Slightly more in women. The trend continued upward, steadily. Not, as one would expect, with different intensity in low-, middle- and high income segments, but equally strong everywhere. And still, no one knew why. The analyst thought about how best to proceed with his analysis. The point in time from which his compatriots had started to behave strangely, had already been determined. January 2021. He had a wild idea. Could he maybe also find the place where it had begun? He swiveled his chair back to face the monitor, put his hands on the keyboard and mouse and called up his agencies Geographic Information System. There, he let it show him all the abnormal reports submitted by the public health authorities. Each report a single dot on the map. For the most recent reports, he colored the dots green and for the oldest ones, red. He did the same for the police statistics that showed an increase in aggressive behavior associated with petty crimes. Again, using the same logic, he colored the dots belonging to the oldest reports red and the youngest ones green. Finally, he zoomed out of the newly created map, to visualize the entire Australian continent on his screen. The analyst looked at the monitor for five seconds, motionless, without blinking. Only the wire of his headset interfered abruptly with his subsequent attempt to sprint into his bosses office.

“OK, so which reports exactly did you show here?”

The Intelligence Coordinator pointed at a small dense cloud of red points in southern Australia. It slowly changed color to green, as it expanded across the entire continent. A town called Coober Pedy lay in its center.

“Only the abnormal reports. Pulled from the databases of Public Health and Police”, replied the analyst.

The Intelligence Coordinator nooded.

“And the center, the epicenter, is in Woomera, in Coober Pedy?”

The analyst shrugged. “That’s what the data says.”

“Did you look at the detail reports of the police stations or just the weekly summaries?”

“I don’t have the rights to access the details”

The coordinator typed a password, put his index finger on a tiny scanner integrated with the keyboard, looked into a webcam for facial authentication and clicked the mouse several times.

“Now you’ve got access. I want you to look at all police reports submitted by Coober Pedy station during the last quarter of 2020. Up to February 2021. Do it right now. If there are too many, let me know and I’ll get you help.”

“Understood. Thanks”, the analyst replied and left his bosses office without saying another word, headset still dangling around his neck.

Back to the group workspace, his colleagues took no notice of his return, as he sat down and began to read.

George Jacob McPhillister, born 1976 in Perth, leasing an opal mine to the south of Coober Pedy, on December 27. had taken his digger-drill on a three hour drive at 20 km/h to the next gas station. There he bought a sixpack of flosters beer, lit a cigarette, switched on the drillbit and drove directly into one of the gas pumps. The explosion killed him, the gas-stations attendant and shattered all windows within a 600 meter range.

Lisa Sophie Voychnik, born 1989 in Adelaide, postdoc for molecular biology at the University of Perth, was found dead on December 29. in the washroom of bar in Coober pedy, with cut wrists.

Her partner, Michael James Moorlet, born 1987 in Darwin, geochemist, also at University of Perth, took his life three days later by wrapping a wire-loop around his neck and jumping from a roof, on the Royal Airforce Base inside the Woomera Protected Area.

These three deaths were clear outliers, the analyst thought. Even in December, the average number of non-natural deaths for healthy persons under 65 was very low. Corresponding to one death every seven months. During the first week of January 2021, Coober Pedy, a small town with 1600 inhabitants, registered a total of 114 aggravated domestic violence cases. Contrary to expectation, all cases were reported to the police by the male spouse, not the female. Also, in that same week, the only clinic of the area registered a spike in births and stillbirths. All women with more than seven month into their pregnancy delivered unexpectedly, most of them twins, who, apparently, had been overlooked in the prenatal checks. In the second week of January 2021 the spiking early-, still- and twinbirths were noticed in the entire australian south. Much in the same way as the increase in violent and risk-taking behavior. Non-natural deaths and suicides were however not reported from anywhere else. The analyst wasn’t sure if it would be worthwhile to present these findings to his boss, still without being able to explain them.

— Woomera
Just before noon, on December 6. 2020 George took a break from digging and came out into the sunlight, leaving his newest tunnel through the entrance hole. Potato sat next to it, waiting. He was, as usual, hungry.
“So, ya’r back here now, eh? Got trouble with ya friends from tha base? Not feedin’ ya anymore, eh?”

Potato did not understand, sat down, started to scratch his neck using the left hind leg and observed George lighting the gas barbecue and taking a big piece of raw meat out of an icebox. The loud bang came as a surprise to both of them. Two hundred meters to the south, a fountain of small rocks jetted into the sky, followed by an expanding cloud of light brown dust. Both, Potato and George looked at it in complete surprise.

“What the …”, George said to himself, then dashed into his trailer to get a first aid kit. It must have been a small airplane crashing down on his claim, he thought. Heading toward the dust cloud with the kit under his arm, he was followed by Potato.

The japanese and the australian news reported the successful landing and recovery of the Hayabusa 2 re-entry capsule in Woomera on December 6. The first videos published through official channels showed only the small crater the capsules impact had left in the dusty soil. The recovery of the capsule itself was not shown. And no one mentioned the fact that George and Potato had been the first at the capsules landing site. Nearly half an hour earlier than the JAXA/RAAF recovery team. George had touched the capsule and wiped away dust in an attempt to find some kind of aircraft identification. Potato stayed at a safe distance to the blackened thing which, to George, looked like a miniature UFO from an old science fiction B-movie. Twenty minutes later, having achieved nothing, both headed back to Georges trailer, where the barbecue was waiting. When the sound of approaching helicopters reached them, George was already eating. It took a full hour before they departed again from the landing site. Nobody came to see George. Which put him in a bad mood and made him not want to share any of the leftovers with Potato. Still very hungry and hoping that the nice woman from the military base might feed him with beef strips and maybe stroke is back, Potato left and followed the sound of the receding choppers.

— The Analyst
The Woomera police reports were not exactly eye-openers. The three deaths reported in late December could not be linked by anything, except for the fact that they were strange looking suicides. The analyst closed the database with the police reports and went on to open the one maintained by public health authorities. Even for this short period of only a couple of months, there were hundreds of thousands of individual reports. Mostly individual health records. Without medical expertise, he couldn’t do much with them. Then he found a section where the largest regional hospitals placed only their monthly summaries and those contained assessments of unexpected medical cases, written in understandable language. He started reading the one for Woomera, but because nothing caught his attention, he continued reading those for the neighboring regions. Remembering the police reports about the increase in violence and risk-taking, he read about an abnormal jump in dementia cases. This was already the third regional summary mentioning them. Abnormal, because the cases could not be explained by old age or chronic alcoholism. Cases were spiking in all income segments, in the age bracket of fifteen to fifty. One of the reports gave the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease as a reference. It caused brain degeneration by allowing the accumulation of protein-plaques on nerve-cells. A variant called BSE affected cattle and sheep. Simply put, the analyst thought, the disease ate ones brain. In affected animals as well as in humans, this resulted in more aggressive behavior, especially in the final phase of the disease. Could that be the explanation? A new wave of Creutzfeldt-Jakobs that, for whatever reason, originated in Woomera?

— The Probe
The heating system that kept the Hayabusa 2 probe from freezing in space, also maintained the B.subtilis spores on the capsules exterior at a tolerable temperature. It was warm enough to keep metabolic activity inside the spores going and warm enough to make the self-replicating molecules reproduce within them. But only after landing back on Earth, B. subtilis came fully back to life. The spores started reproducing, while the molecule in them gently tweaked their bacterial machinery for protein production. This resulted in a new protein being generated which, by earth standards, was quite ordinary, except for the fact that it could alter itself to take two different shapes. One, harmless and inactive. The other, reactive and mobile, could coerce proteins of the first kind into becoming proteins of the second kind. The similarity between this protein and the prion-proteins of the Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease couldn’t be well explained by random chance. Possibly, because both proteins were descendants of the same, 4.5 billion year old molecular predecessor.