A Sci-fi short

Allow me to introduce, Bridget McMillan.
"Thank you" said the young astronomer.
"I'm here today to talk to you about recent images in visible to low infrared wavelengths of the black hole M82 X-1. There, circled in green, is the object that has come to be called "The Dollop" due to its resemblance to a dollop of whipped cream. It was thought to be an hunk of ice in the accretion disk of the hole, but I am here to show you otherwise. Once the gravitational lensing effect of the hole is accounted for, the dollop appears as a crescent shape. What you a looking at is really a planet orbiting the star HD 10864. Due to these lucky circumstances caused by the black hole, we have the highest resolution visible light image of a extra-solar planet to date."

McMillan beamed with enthusiasm. The already impressed crowd of professors and lecturers, all at least twice her age, had no clue what she still had in store for them. She could not possibly have prepared them more than she already had.
"Now direct your attention to the three dim stars just above the crescent. They are obviously no closer than HD 10864, but if they were farther away, they would be occluded by the planet, Thus, I humbly suggest that these lights are not stars, but cities."

The air conditioner hummed in contemplation in the silent auditorium. Skeptical whispers seeped in and gradually, a commotion grew unstoppably louder. After about thirty seconds, there were people almost shouting at each other. Some were drafting unlikely theories to explain the dim lights, others whooping about aliens and parties and probes.

The transit time was 2442 years. 2002 to get the probe to the planet, 440 for the light to get back to us. That was with the the most powerful propulsion system we were capable of: the nuclear pulse drive. Even then the proposal seemed absurd. The amount of refined uranium consumed by the probe's journey could power an entire city for several years. Were we willing to spend all that to see what had emitted a few photons on the dark side of a distant planet 440 earth years ago? What if the civilization was gone by the time the probe got there? self-destructed, ousted by parasites, meteors, or who knows what else? What if we suffered the same fate before the light got back to us? Would our decedents even care enough to be listening when the signal arrived?

While the world's government's and other powerful institutions were weighing their options, astronomers were blasting signals at HD 10864 as loudly and as brightly as they possibly could. People were sending everything from simple blinking light, to multi-channel compressed video. The news media milked the story for three months, while also broadcasting its own signal into space. the noise subsided and only a few dedicated dishes and orbiting mirrors still repeated their signals. eventually people returned to their lives and could extract no more excitement out of the dollop lights.

440 years later, over a dark and desolate wasteland where fires burned constantly and the sky was blacked out by toxic clouds, while observing a black hole, an orbiting satellite took note of a sudden muffled cacophony of jittering light from a main sequence star just behind it. It anxiously relayed the aberration to its surface laboratory with mechanically unwavering hope that it would respond this time with instructions, but none came. Inside the laboratory, the tiny delicate body of a long extinct thing sat perched on its control orb surrounded by lifeless machines.

A context free grammar defining 90% of my voicmails

<message> ::= [<greeting>] [<rationale>] [<request>] [<bye>]

<greeting> ::= <hellotype> [<recipent-name>] [<identification>]

<hellotype> ::= "hi" | "hey" | "hello" | "sup"

<recipent-name> ::= <name>

<identification> ::= ("its" | "this is") <caller-name>

<caller-name> ::= <name>

<rationale> ::= <reason-for-calling> | <statement-of-fact>

<reason-for-calling> ::= ["I" ("was" | "am")] ["just"] "calling" ("because" | (<to-inform-you-of>)) <statement-of-fact>

<to-inform-you-of> ::= "to tell you" | (("to let you know" | "to inform you") ["that"])

<statement-of-fact> ::= "you suck" | "your rent is overdue"

<request> ::= {<connector>} <suggestion>

<connector> ::= "so" | "just" | "please"

<suggestion> ::= "jump off a bridge" | "call me back"

<bye> := (["good"] "bye") | "later" | "peace"

My Opinion of Relativity

1.) The correctness of someone else's opinion is inversely proportional to the square of its difference from one's own. 2.) One will adopt others opinions in proportion to their precieved correctness. 3.) Opinions cannot travel between people at infinite speed, therefore black opinion holes could exist. "Truth" is but a tear in the fabric of opinion-space where correctness approaches infinity.