It was a properly cold, rainy and eerie night when the blissful veil of ignorance was lifted from my eyes. This is not a story about astronomy – I am a mere college professor, teaching subjects seldom related to the cosmos. This is a story about how easy it is for unknown forces to manipulate the whole mankind.
If memory serves, Orcus had been one of the first planets to be discovered through modern telescopes; despite its proximity to the Earth, in ancient times, astronomers were unable to see it due to its color that made it blend in almost perfectly with the void around it.
I never gave Orcus a lot of thought, other than when I had to talk about it in my classes – Orcus had a unique, black atmosphere, which had been speculated to be compounded by crude oil decades ago.
Needless to say, a certain country took an obsessive interest on it.
I remember that the exploration of Orcus, initiated no more than a decade after the successful landing on the moon, was very low-key for something this big. You would eventually read an article on new evidences that its atmosphere could actually be a gold mine, and how that certain government was making heavy investments towards sending a manned expedition to it, but back then a lot of other discoveries were being made, from infrared satellites being released to exoplanets being found.
It was a subject of interest for chemistry, but not enough to come up more often than once a year; and every year I showed my first-term students the same PowerPoint presentation about the chemical composition of all planets, focusing on Orcus, unanimously considered the coolest of all by my classes.
Up until 2012, everything went smoothly.
Then 2013 came, and the faces in the classroom were either confused or amused, but in a way that showed I was the butt of the joke.
"What's the problem?" I asked, truly ignorant. I looked at the current slide half-expecting it to show me in my underwear dancing with my dog. But there was nothing wrong with it – it was about Orcus.
"Did you just made up a planet, professor?" one of my most competent students asked.
"Don't be silly, all of you know very well all the planets. Everyone's been on elementary school, right?"
"How many planets are there in the solar system, sir?" another student asked with a tone almost too benevolent, like I was some dying man who forgot his own name.
"Ten. Or nine? Pluto comes and goes, but other than that it's Mercury, Venus, Earth, Orcus, Mars-"
"Sir, why not try googling this planet Orcus?" a third student carefully suggested. I complied, still half thinking they had organized an elaborated prank, but slightly nervous.
No results.
They all looked at me with such pity that I dismissed the class and spent most of my morning crying in the parking lot. I was getting old and mad.
The next day, I was summoned to the dean's office. The university – almost too generously – offered sending me to an isolated research facility where I could develop my studies full-time and still get 70% of my teacher salary.
Twice divorced with no kids and rarely visited by my few living relatives, I gladly accepted it, and in a matter of days I was renting my house while moving halfway across the country to work alone.
Besides, I was too embarrassed to return to classroom.
My lodging was a pleasant cottage, with a great lab for one behind it. My bedroom had a nice view to distant, deep-blue mountains and the university sent me a housekeeper once a week; she even brought me groceries.
From 2013 to 2020, life was a blur of immersing myself in my work, improving my baking abilities and talking to no one – the housekeeper was Russian, and when she showed signs of learning English, she was replaced by a Brazilian one.
It was early February when Sarah knocked on my door; a former student of mine who had become a brilliant astronomer.
"I finally found you. You remember Orcus too, right?"
***
I gladly let her in, the first visit I had in almost a decade, and made us some good tea from the herbs I've been growing myself.
"You sleep with noise-cancelling headphones playing white noise, right?" she asked. I shook my head no, then remembered that I used to before I lived among all this peace and quiet.
Her face switched from determination to a shard of panic, then confidence.
"I know it had to be it. That's how they didn't catch our memory, then", she observed.
She then proceeded to tell me everything she knew about the fourth planet of the Solar System – and it was a lot. The night came, cold and wet, and I had her stay; she didn't protest, in fact it seemed to be her plan all along. Although I was over twice her age, I became her apprentice for the next two weeks.
"When I realized Orcus was no more, I kept my mouth shut. They made the university send you on a retreat and that was clever. You were completely neutralized. But being an astronomer, I'm a different story. People will start to believe the truth if it comes from me. So promise me that if I ever disappear you'll make public everything I told you."
I promised.
"No matter what they do to me", she added, under her breath.
It didn't take long.
We didn't realize that the housekeeper was probably forced to report anything different in the house. On the first week, Sarah managed to hide, but, probably suspicious that things were a lot different in the house, and afraid to be punished, the maid rummaged through the lab until she found my partner in "crime".
It was another cold and rainy night when they came. First, the lights all went out. Then the shadows surrounding us became solid. Sarah let out a pained scream.
An unnaturally raspy and robotic voice, so emotionless that it felt evil.
"Stop pursuing Orcus."
I passed out, and when I woke up in the morning, Sarah was gone. The signs of struggle were everywhere.
Slowly, I started putting back together the damaged furniture.
The next day, as to leave no doubts that they were serious, they sent me Sarah's index finger inside a Tiffany-blue box.
I thought that maybe if I actually made a conscious effort to forget it all, she would be released. I kept my mouth shut and focused my whole mind on my research, although it felt pointless now.
But over the next weeks, I received more boxes with her body parts.
So here's my story – for Sarah.
I don't have a lot of time, as I noticed solid shadows moving around, just waiting until nightfall to catch me, but I'll summarize what I learned from her.
Between the years 2005 and 2011, NASA discovered that Orcus' blackness wasn't due to its atmosphere, but due the singular nature of the planet and the living things on it. It's hard to explain, but basically the beings and the planet are one. A black, sentient mass that can shape-shift on virtually anything. Of course, this information was a secret.
By 2012, Sarah herself had discovered a groundbreaking information: the orclings fed on thoughts and knowledge – they phagocyted all the space probes that NASA sent to Orcus, right after the information was transmitted, indicating that they wanted to be found out.
Knowing that a disaster was on its way to wipe away mankind, a selected group of plutocrats requested a deal with Orcus. They complied.
On December 21 2012, there was a worldwide blackout, although this knowledge was wiped out too. When we woke up, things were off, but similar enough for us to go on about our lives.
Not even Sarah knows how they did that, but there's no doubt.
Take a good look at everything around you. Are things actually normal?
When you turn off the lights and stay very still, don't you feel something solid and quiet moving in the shadows?
I know that your memory was eaten, but if you really put your mind on it, you'll realize that the world you're seeing now is nothing but a simulacrum of how life on Earth used to be.
Because the planet that disappeared without a trace wasn't Orcus.
It was the Earth.
Posted by u/poloniumpoisoning