The Reconfiguration

In 2199, a black hole of four point one solar masses will pass inside the orbit of Mars at a hundred and eighteen kilometers a second. Nobody can stop it. Everybody knows the date.What nobody agrees on is what to do in the ten years before it gets here.Naomi Ingram measures the shape of the Earth to a fraction of a millimeter. Her instrument is two thousand three hundred and forty stations on every plate and most of the islands, a hundred and twenty years of accumulated positions, and one number at the center of it that has not moved in her lifetime.It is moving now. Four point nine millimeters, and rising every quarter.A hundred and seventy-one governments read her number, reach the wrong conclusion, and vote almost unanimously to strip two point four times ten to the eighteenth kilograms off the surface of the planet. It is the largest thing the species has ever attempted. It is aimed at the wrong target. And the treaty authorizing it defines her instrument as a constant, which means the program will measure its own progress with a ruler it is quietly bending.Naomi can prove it. She cannot prove it quickly, and proving it will cost good people their work, their standing, and their certainty, and not one of them will have done anything wrong.Then comes the second plan. Eighty-eight bodies moved out of the deep system and set at dynamically privileged points, to a tolerance of forty thousand kilometers, at one specific instant four years out. Everything after the twenty-third century turns on hitting an empty point in space inside five minutes and thirty-nine seconds.On the morning the second treaty is signed, Naomi sits at the technical table with a folder she does not open. On the page inside it is a number that says the instant has moved.THE RECONFIGURATION is hard science fiction about committees, arithmetic, and the distance between being right and being believed. No villains. No conspiracy. A species doing its honest best against a deadline it did not set, with instruments that were never built for the question.Book Two of The Black Hole Trilogy. Book One, THE APPROACH, is available now.