Pulsar Read online

  Pulsar

  DRACONIS - Episode 1

  ETHAN STAND

  Copyright © 2020 by Ethan Stand

  Ethan Stand owns the content in this book and reserves all his legal rights of ownership. ‘Pulsar’ is published for your personal enjoyment. He allows quotations in book reviews and social media posts. In fact, if they are positive reviews, he encourages their use. If you want to use it for some other purpose, then email him and get his written permission, if you don't then you may not reproduce or use it.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-922336-05-7 (E-book)

  ‘Pulsar’ is fiction, Ethan isn’t writing about real people and doesn’t intend in any way to point the finger at anyone. If there is a similarity, then it’s unintentional and a coincidence. Some of the places, nations, corporations, institutions, public figures, books, movies and songs Ethan mentions are real. Ethan has used them in a made-up story (fiction), i.e., IT ISN’T REAL.

  Ethan designed the cover using Photoshop. Vellum was used to prepare the e-book.

  Published by Ethan Stand in 2020

  You can find out more at www.ethanstand.com or write to Ethan at [email protected].

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  1

  Zhenyi Hypatia Drakos often questioned her parents’ sanity when it came to her name. They had met at Harvard while enrolled in their doctoral studies. Her mother, Biàn Bīngqīng, was from mainland China. After getting her primary and Master’s degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing, Bīngqīng had been accepted to Harvard to further study the relationship between dark matter and gravitational waves. Zhenyi’s father, Evangelos Drakos, was from Crete. He did his first degree at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens before earning a scholarship to Harvard where he did his Masters. Finishing that, Evangelos enrolled to study astrophysical fluid dynamics and the associated relativistic effects.

  Strangely, the first time the two met wasn’t on campus, but was when they ended up working together for a bicycle courier service in Boston. They lived together for the last two years at Harvard but separated for work reasons. BB, as Zhenyi’s father called her mother, spent three years doing post-doctoral work at the VLT complex on Cerro Paranal in the Chilean Andes. Ed, as BB called Evangelos (mainly because it annoyed him), found a teaching job at MIT doing more focussed research into fluid dynamics and relativity.

  Despite the physical separation, BB and Ed stayed close. They often texted and emailed each other and once or twice were able to catch up while on holidays. Each time they found that they easily slipped back into the intimacy of their old relationship. After her time at VLT, BB applied for a teaching and research position in the Physics Department at the University of Queensland in Australia. Two years later, the department expanded. BB sent the position descriptions for the new jobs on offer to Ed. Two years after that, Zhenyi was born. Both BB and Ed eventually became Australian citizens. BB had to give up her Chinese citizenship but Ed was able to keep his Greek one. Zhenyi had passports from both Australia and Greece.

  Zen, as everyone except her parents and the bullies called her, received her first adult telescope when she was three. She could name the constellations and pick out the planets in the night sky before she could read. Besides the usual kindergarten education, followed by preschool then primary, or elementary school, she was enrolled in both Greek and Chinese schools on the weekends. When she was alone with BB, Zen would talk in Mandarin and while when she was with Ed, she would speak in Greek. When all three were together, they would talk in English.

  Even though the family owned a small car, both her parents usually rode their bicycles to work and they would often tow Zen in a bicycle trailer when she was young. As she grew, she progressed first to a child seat, then to a towed training bike. Zen rode herself to school on her first day of primary school after assuring her parents that she knew the way. The teachers didn’t know what to do as none of the other students rode, and none had arrived alone. Fortunately, two teachers rode, and Zen was able to lock her bike with theirs.

  Zen’s first few days of school had a significant impact on her scholastic life. Not only did she arrive on her own bicycle and carried the helmet into class with her, but she also wore glasses and had a weird name. It was considered weird even in what was a supposedly a tolerant multicultural country. In addition, she already spoke three languages, could read and had an almost encyclopaedian knowledge of everything associated with space. In other words, she was an instant bully magnet. By the time she rode home on that first afternoon, she’d been teased about her name, pushed over several times and had her glasses broken. Instead of making friends as she’d hoped, and despite the efforts of her teacher, she’d already been isolated by the other children. By the end of the week, Zen had learned to sit silently, not answer questions unless forced to and that the only truly safe place was the library.

  BB knew what was going on, and although she discussed it with Ed, their experiences at school had been pretty similar, so neither was too disturbed. After all, they’d both turned out well adjusted. Still, they agreed to keep an eye on Zen, and they hoped things would improve as she made friends. Instead, things got worse. On the second Wednesday, Zen came home with her newly repaired glasses, broken. There were also grazes on her knees and hands from when she’d come off her bike. One of the older children had pushed her into the road on her way home. Zen was so embarrassed the next day when, as Zen later described her mother’s actions to Ed, BB went ‘full-Asian’ in the school office.

  Ed and Zen laughed at that, but then Zen was even more embarrassed the next week when Ed went ‘full-on-Greek’ in the corridor outside her classroom. Several more weeks of the same cemented Zen’s isolation from the other children, even though the overt and physical bullying ended soon after. The physical bullying didn’t stop because of her parent’s actions. Instead, it ended because she’d kicked one of her tormenters in the balls, then broken his nose as she swung her helmet into his face. This was the first of many times she managed to earn herself a suspension from school over the next few years.

  Not surprisingly, her parents didn’t scold her but instead took her to her favourite restaurant that night. The next day, BB, unbeknownst to Ed, enrolled her in a Monday night beginner’s course in Taekwondo. Ed, without discussing it with BB, arranged for Zen to be introduced to the secrets of boxing on Wednesdays with a Greek friend of his. Despite her general unhappiness at school, Zen stayed at the same school through primary school. While the bullying stopped, she never managed to find a close friend. She worked hard not to excel and maintained what might be known as a c-average. Besides this academic ruse, she also wore clothes a size too big and let her hair hang over her face. The kids, and to be honest, the teachers, thought of her as stupid, ugly, and easily prone to violence. Most of her time at school was spent in the library pursuing her own academic interests in mathematics, computers, physics and astronomy.

  Fortunately for Zen, life outside school was the total opposite. While in Chile BB had enjoyed mountain climbing, and every Tuesday night she would take Zen to an indoor climbing centre several suburbs away. In the beginning, while BB climbed, Zen played in the small section set aside for children, but she soon graduated to the bouldering area. By the time she was sixteen, Zen had won several state titles. Ed could climb, but his passion was football, or soccer as they called it in Australia. Each Thursday night he played in an indoor competition near the university, and most Sunday afternoons he competed in the outdoor competition. Subsequently, Zen not only had a poster
of Sokratis Papastathopoulos on her wall beside her poster of Sam Kerr, but she had been known to stay up all night to watch Arsenal, in the men’s competition, or Chelsea, in the women’s, to watch her heroes play in their respective leagues. Zen played as the principal striker in the same club her dad was a member of.

  When she was ten, Zen’s parents arranged for her to get access to the university’s feed from the various international astronomical observatories it used for research and teaching. Then, on her twelfth birthday, her Chinese grandparents set up an account with a private consortium who leased time from various observatories. They included enough money in her account to buy one hour to examine whatever part of space she wanted to. Wanting more sky-time, as she called it, Zen set up a website for students who wanted someone to do their assignments. She also opened several accounts on fiverr.com. She offered her services for translation work involving Greek, Mandarin and English as well as editing scientific papers, especially ones on Astronomy.

  At thirteen Zen was earning enough to pay for a regular hour of sky-time every month, with extra put aside into an investment portfolio she’d arranged with her Greek grandfather. Her thirteenth year was a big one for Zen. Not only did she achieve her second black-belt, this time in Aikido, she also started studying Brazilian Capoeira. Her boxing had improved to the stage where she was able to enter her first ‘legal’ boxing meet, where she came first in the Under-15 mixed-competition. At school, this was the year she made her first real friend who was the same age as herself. It should be noted that in the process, Zen also earned a two-week suspension. During her suspension, Ed took her to Coonabarabran to visit the Skymapper Telescope and the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

  Her first friend, Sahara Al-Katabi, was a new student at the school whose parents had moved up from Melbourne for work. Both Sahara’s parents were from Syria and had arrived as refugees ten years previously. Sahara had been born in a refugee camp in Southern Turkey. Zen happened to be late to class after lunch and found four boys in Grade 11 cornering Sahara in a corridor—they were trying to remove her hijab. In the end, Sahara managed to keep her hijab. The boys, on the other hand, all suffered from significant body and facial bruising, two suffered mild concussions and another had a ruptured left testicle. Regardless of the reasons, Zen would most likely have been expelled except for the arrival of Ed, whose ‘full-on-greek’ was soon eclipsed by Sahara’s father’s ‘pissed-off-Syrian’, and his lawyer.

  When Zen returned to school, she found that Sahara had also been exiled. Exiled, firstly because all four boys were on the school rugby team and had been kicked off it. Secondly, and more importantly to most, she’d been saved by the school’s biggest troublemaker and unrepentant outcast, Zen. They considered that Sahara didn’t have what it took to be a companion if she was unable to follow the crowd in their communal condemnation. Instead, and despite of everything Sahara had been told about Zen, she had staunchly defended her in the two weeks Zen was absent. Sahara specifically sought Zen out when she returned.

  Sahara later told Zen that her father had said that Zen had seemed to him as the embodiment of the ancient Syrian Queen, Zenobia. He suggested that Sahara would be blessed to be friends with someone like her. It turned out that Sahara’s parents were secular in their beliefs and that Sahara had worn the hijab that day because it had helped her to fit in at the previous school in Melbourne where there were a lot of Syrian refugees. In the end though, Sahara continued to wear the hijab to school as a protest. Sahara herself was hard-working and academically gifted, and she was used to being at the top of every class she attended. After all the stories, she was surprised to find that Zen was not only her intellectual equal, but in most areas was light-years ahead of her. Zen decided to start learning Arabic and to Sahara’s surprise began to talk with her exclusively in that when they were alone or at school.

  Four other changes happened that year which influenced Zen greatly. The first was that BB gave birth to a little boy who, against Zen’s strong and even vigorous objections, was called Thales Song Drakos. Hal, as Zen called him, was something she’d always wanted, a sibling, and she did everything she could to be a part of his life. In return, Hal, in many ways, responded to her as he would to a second mother. As Zen’s life and interests continued to revolve around BB and Ed, though in larger and larger orbits, so Hal’s revolved around Zen. She was his earth and he, her moon.

  Second, Zen was targeted by a new form of bullying. One of the older students at her high school kicked her phone and after stealing some photos set up a fake social media site in Zen’s name. For over a week the student found ways to humiliate and ridicule Zen. BB eventually found out and had the site taken down. Zen not only withdrew even further from her fellow students but she also began learning everything she could about computers and the internet. She was determined never to be put in the same situation ever again.

  Third, in one of her monthly sky-time sessions, she observed a previously unidentified millisecond pulsar while looking towards Edasich, or Iota Draconis. After reviewing data using her University of Queensland access, she submitted her finding and named it PSR J1525+5858. Her submission questioned the general theories surrounding the formation of pulsars as there had been little or no evidence of PSR J1525+5858’s existence until that year. Her submission was reviewed by several astronomers, and although they noted the discovery they took little notice of her questions or observations.

  The fourth influential change, though not recognised as significant for several years, was a byproduct of the second. Zen did more research into PSR J1525+5858 and found that, after several months of data, it had a stable rotational period of approximately one point eight milliseconds. The signal from the pulsar was at the limit of detectability even though it seemed to come from the same distance as Eridanus. The actual figures Zen measured, she found to be accurate and consistent to eighteen decimal places. Zen used the findings, and the feed from one of the permanent satellites covering that area of space, to construct her own pulsar-clock. This she displayed on the wall of her room above that of the International Atomic Time. Every morning she would wake up and grin as the two kept perfect time with each other.

  2

  On the first day of Grade 11, Zen woke early, as usual, then glanced at the two digital clocks displayed on her wall. She started to smile, then paused when she noticed her pulsar time was two attoseconds faster than the atomic clock. She would have understood if there had been one attosecond difference as they were as close to the limit of accuracy she could expect, but two didn’t make sense after the precision of the last two-and-a-half years. She quickly logged in to the feed covering that part of the sky and was still working through the data when BB called her down to breakfast an hour later.

  Even then, it took her father coming and knocking on her door to get a response. After being told to come in, Ed expected to find Zen dressed and ready but instead found her still in her pyjamas and working. She was staring at her monitors. He opened his mouth to tell her to hurry when she pointed at the clocks. Five minutes later, BB, having called out several times, was ready to go ‘full-Asian’ on Zen and Ed for not coming down. She was particularly upset because she’d had to carry Hal up the stairs with her. She was surprised to see Ed sitting on the edge of Zen’s bed and looking through a feed from one of the satellites. Both had paper and pencils and were scribbling away furiously.

  She managed to get out Ed’s name, then stopped as he pointed at Zen’s wall. It took her a few seconds for the difference to register, then bending to put Hal down she sat beside Ed, looking at what he’d written. Who knows how long they might have sat there if Hal, finally getting hungry, hadn’t tapped Zen repeatedly on the leg and said, “En, beckfast.”

  Zen looked down, then shook herself and paused the feed, breaking both BB and Ed’s concentrations. Zen said, “Sorry, um, Hal needs breakfast, and I need to hurry and get ready for school. I promised Sahara I’d be a model student this year seeing as how it
counts for university entrance. She wants me to go past her house so she can check that I’m presentable.”

  Both Ed and BB shook their heads, then Ed said, “Do you mind if I look at this during the day? I know it’s your discovery, but I won’t be able to think of anything else until I check a few things. I wonder if anyone else will notice?”

  BB frowned and said, “If anyone does I bet it’s that sleazy guy at Cambridge. He was such an ass about having to review Zhenyi’s findings.”

  Zen smiled at her mother, secretly pleased at how irate BB got if anyone tried to minimise Zen’s discoveries. Zen said, “I don’t mind at all if you work on it. Don’t worry, Mum, I already added an official note to the records referencing the change. All I know is I’ll find it hard to concentrate today.”

  Ed was nodding as they left Zen’s room and said, “Then don’t. Stay home and work on it. The school will understand. Besides, if they don’t, who cares?”

  Zen sighed, “Sahara will. She’s determined that this year will be different. I’ve provisionally promised not to be late, not to sleep in class, and not to fight. Instead, I will do my homework, answer the occasional question and not blow off the tests and assignments.”

  BB started praising Sahara while Ed tried to suggest ways around the stipulations. In the end, Zen left only five minutes after she’d planned and arrived at Saraha’s house five minutes after that. Sahara met her at the front door with a frown and said, “You’re late. I need at least twenty minutes to make you look pretty, and we need to leave to catch the bus in ten. At least your uniform is the right size this year.”