The Approaching Planet

"Between commercials for brain insurance, the only major news channel still remaining..." An excerpt from an abandoned version of the 1st draft of the novel that would become Void Corporation.

This deleted excerpt was originally published as a short story in an issue of Fence.

PUNDIT: What do you recall about the darkness?

THE OLDEST LIVING ASTRONAUT: Absolutely everything.

Between commercials for brain insurance, the only major news channel still remaining reports the discovery of a significant new planet: one, they say, that on its surface looks exactly like our own. It seems ridiculous at first, seeing photos so much like those we have come to know as Earth presented onscreen as somewhere else, somewhere unknown, and alongside infographics that explain its present distance of hundreds of millions of light years away from where we are; and yet the longer that we look and listen, absorbing the information, we can’t help but grow concerned. As though the planet appears to be exactly like ours, visually a perfect copy, so it appears, average surface temperatures on the twin are estimated at an average of just under 200 degrees F. Furthermore, in zooming down to surface level through animated cells accessed onscreen, though we do find certain remaining manmade structures—lengths of scaffolding organized around large pale windowless cubes; long strips of railways devoid of markings, exits; remainders of cities that resemble ours but never quite the same in their design—no life has as yet been recognized, the pundits report. It is like our Earth but remodeled, and then evacuated, or exterminated, at least so far as we can tell.

More important than its matching image, they inform us, is the path and rate of the twin planet’s present approach. It is aimed directly at us, by all most scientific of accounts, moving at an unprecedented speed for what an object of its size should yet be able. The planet has, since first becoming known less than a month prior in only our most protected sectors, traversed nearly a third of the distance remaining between us and it, continuing to gain ground by the hour, showing no intent of wavering. Within weeks it will be visible to the naked eye, and not long after, barring an adjustment in its approach, it will pass our planet at a distance closer than halfway to where the moon was believed once to have been, right through all that empty space we’d been trying for so long to pass the laws allowing advertising to command, said stalemate about which has nothing at all to do with anything.

And but so there is no need right now to panic, the pundits submit, bearing the same flattened expressions by which they’d told us of the War for Empty Space, of the outbreaks of immediate aphasia among survivors, of the patterns of disappearance and reappearance of major landmarks. We have come to rely on their poise amid these times, their refusal to overreact, the plastering feeling of how their voices set onto us, settle in. And though we know the planet is approaching, we do not anticipate it to wreck into us head-on; we only expect for now it might affect our weather systems, and so our crops, and so our ways of life amid its presence. We do not believe that we will die, only that we will be significantly affected in numerous and unpredictable ways of being, some of which we have already long foreseen, and are preparing in the near future to remedy in equally unprecedented fashion, to the benefit of all.

And now the last thing you and your family should be sure to know about the approaching planet, they continue, is that no matter how close it comes, how hard any one of us might wish to understand and accept the present science, not all persons will be able to see the planet with their own eyes. Something about its light, its all too familiar shape and brand of color, based on our testing, allows only, we estimate, one in seven citizens to see and understand that it is there. Only citizens of exceptional intelligence and keenest sense are believed to be able. Do not be alarmed if you are among those who for whatever reason yet cannot; it does not mean you are any less a person than the rest, only that you might require their assistance in application of prevention behaviors as we come together as a nation to deal with this unprecedented threat, which we surely will, because we must, because we have the gift of information.

Going forward, the following PSAs take over to explain, all citizens are advised and bound by Congress to extend the periods through which we wear our National Masks, which were previously only required during working hours, throughout all hours, day and night, mostly because we are not sure yet of what effect the approaching planet’s makeup and decorum might have on our atmosphere, our outlooks. Additionally encouraged are an array of presently non-mandatory products by the makers of Error Gel and X-All-Eyes-Out, ranging from swimsuits that simulate the presence of actual water to peppermint candies known to have mostly pleasant-dream inducing and extra-spiritual effects, all of which each household will be auto-subscribed to in lieu of manually opting out by handwritten statement of hesitancy, some of which you may or will still be billed for and have installed without permission; as by the time we realize there is something we should fear or prevent, it may be too late, a smiling model offers through her expensive silver teeth, it may be inside us, it may have become us.