First, he had to decide what he wanted to do with the varying topology of the planet's surface. Did he want to leave it a natural "wild and wonderful" or did he want to tame certain elements in order to emphasize others, flatten some mountains in order to make others seem more gigantic, smooth out some surface areas so that other rocky expanses looked more threatening?
Hmm, but what was that buzzing he sensed, that faint disturbance in the near vacuum, amplified at every sensitive receiver it bounced past? As soon as he had arrived at this planet, Dod had set out a swarm of drone satellites to block or dampen artificial electromagnetic waves from any other planets around this star. His professor had warned him about this possible disturbance, but also showed him how to avoid being distracted by it.
Unfortunately, this new radiation was getting past his drones. The electromagnetic waves hit every device set up to detect gamma ray bursts. The devices sent this noise, just like they would with warnings about gamma ray bursts.
This was unacceptable. Unnatural, unexpected, artificial radiation was the last thing he wanted to deal with during his semester of solitude.
Maybe his surface suit and habitat detectors were set at a too sensitive a frequency, but he had to have them that way to detect the planet's natural rumblings which he was going to fashion into a kind of music to accompany his work of art. No, there was nothing he could change at his end. This new electromagnetic radiation had to be eliminated.
First, he had to recalibrate his devices and locate the source of these annoying ping-ping-pings. They were moving away from the star, outward in Dod's general direction. What was moving was still too tiny to be detected and recognized, but it was there. It was there; it was noisy; it was unbearable. Still, Dod didn't yet have enough data to determine how he could stop it.
Nonetheless, it was ruining his solitude, making it impossible for him to get started on the landscape sculpturing he had planned as the next step in his masterpiece. So he might as well divert all his energy and imagination toward determining what this source of annoying, artificial radiation was and how to get rid of it.
He reprogrammed all the devices to point in the direction of the star, hoping his astronomer friends were right and he didn't have to worry about gamma ray bursts surprising him from any direction. Eventually his devices identified the source of this radiation as an artificial traveling machine, a probe examining surroundings of outer space and broadcasting its findings back to the third planet orbiting this star. The probe was traveling at a speed significantly less than the speed of light but would reach Dod's planet long before his semester was finished.
Dod guessed that this meant the annoying pinging noises from the probe would increase in volume and intensity. But that was no longer his biggest problem. He couldn't let the probe reveal his presence to any sentient creatures on the third planet who must have sent it. One of the requirements of a cosmic art thesis project was that no primitive life forms in the vicinity be aware of it.
Mary Jo Rabe writes science fiction, modern fantasy, historical fiction, and crime or mystery stories, generally displaying a preference for what she defines as happy endings. Ideas for her fiction come from the magnificent, expanding universe, the rural environment of eastern Iowa where she grew up, the beautiful Michigan State University campus where she got her first degree, and the Black Forest area of Germany with its center in Freiburg where she worked as a librarian for 41 years before retiring to Titisee-Neustadt. News about her published stories is posted regularly on her blog: https://maryjorabe.wordpress.com/
Copyright © Mary Jo Rabe