To his understanding, his father didn't want to get on the ship off their planet, but the stars had been going out.
Jack had been told by many cooing adults in libraries, shops, and classes that he was a curious child. His curiosity failed him, with the stars going out.
The first time he brought up that Callistosis Five was missing from the constellation of Guttoi, his father had shouted (not at him), begging for an answer as to why nobody would shut up about the stars. Then he went to his bedroom and didn't come out for two days and four hours.
This gave Jack plenty of time to find out what was going on with the stars. They were being exorcised from the universe, leaving gaps in space that affected shipping lanes. Some people were very upset about this. To Jack's eyes, they should be much more concerned about the stars missing than the shipping lanes, but adults had different priorities.
The one thing in abundance were answers. Answers about what stars had vanished, answers about when, what effect they had, but not about how or why. It seemed like stars had just up and walked out of the sky.
Jack didn't much care for the discussions on what to do about the stars missing. He was a well-read kid, but not one that cared for logistics on how to handle affected planets around the stars that vanished. Unbeknownst to him, the parental controls on his father's NetLink device had steered him well clear of videos and discussions on the ships and crew that ventured close to the tears in the universe left behind by the stars.
He would never know to be thankful for that.
Once his father came out of his room, Jack made himself scarce. He kept track of the stars vanishing using his telescope; Callistosis Five was first to him, but then Tarpschri and Hreow III both vanished. Hreow III's coverage on the Net was astounding to Jack; almost nobody seemed interested in watching how the remaining stars of the triad swirled around the torn fabric of space, plasma whirling off their coronaspheres into... the fabric of the universe, he supposed.
Jack was amazed by it, though. And so he began to look further into the stars, planets, and ships (though people were still blocked by the filter) who were torn up and shredded by getting too close to the holes in the universe.
He followed this for a period of two weeks, with his father growing increasingly irate and desperate when Jack mentioned the stars. To Jack, it was fun and games; look at the stars! Look at the holes left behind by the stars vanishing, and how the two mix!
It was fun and games, until the suns didn't rise one morning.
Jack had school that day.
He knew that, because it was a day of the month divisible by two. He knew it was math that day because it was divisible by three, and that science wasn't on the table because it was only in days divisible by four. It was astronomy, because it was divisible by ten.
It was one of Jack's favorite schooldays. He would walk to the schoolhouse for their city-block three streets down, and then work on his numbers (a more advanced copy; the teacher had noticed him bored during the discussion of multiplication, and given him exponents to work on) and talk about the stars.
However, it started off poorly, because the sun didn't wake up him up. His alarm clock had stopped working four days ago, though he wasn't awake to know the precise hour. He relied on the sun (it's a star, did you know that Father?) to wake him up, breaking through his window to strike his eyes.
When he woke up, it was to darkness. Even the room's false lighting was softer than usual, and the street outside had no lamps to light the way of those walking at night.
He had yawned, keeping quiet. If it was still dark out, he reasoned, he must have woken up early. Best not to wake Father up if that's the case. He slid his door open slowly, peering out into the hallway. His father's door is open, which... isn't right. Father has his door closed while he's in there.
Did his father wake up early as well?
"Father?" he called, softly. If his father was awake, he would hear him, and if he wasn't, it wouldn't wake him--
"Jack. Come to the living room, please." His father spoke firmly. He was quiet as well. Maybe it was a night thing.
The television in the living room was on, silhouetting his father holding one of his bottles. A quiet woman's voice came from the television: "--scientists are still unsure of the cause, with major disruptions in traffic and scheduling. Citizens are urged to remain--"
"I can't..." his Father started, over the voice from television. He looked towards the television, and then back to Jack. "You and your stars... I guess this is right up your alley, huh?"
Jack didn't understand. "I don't understand", he said.
"The sun's sure not here anymore, isn't it?" He snorted. "Spent so much time talking about how the stars are disappearing, had to bring it right to our doorstep."
Jack strained to look at the television. "Is the sun gone?" he wondered, talking mostly to himself. His father was still blocking it, looking at him with a strange expression.
"Yes." He drank from the bottle, liquid sloshing. "Yes, it is, fool boy." He stumbled to the side, and Jack got his first clear view of the television.
It showed the sky, someone talking in a box about the sun, and the current time. Eleven fifty four a.m., two hours and twenty four minutes after his favorite day of school.
The sky was black, what stars were left smattering the new daytime sky.
Jack did not go to school that day, but he still taught himself. His father's tablet was available while his father snored on the couch, so he was free to find information about the sun vanishing.
What the lady on the television said was a small snippet of what many people were talking about: the sun was gone, and nobody knew why. Logically, Jack had known... the sun was a star, and stars were disappearing. But he couldn't understand, how could his sun be gone? The one in the sky?
He had calculated the time the sun would be at the top of the sky; high noon, it was called. It differed from the noon he knew, because of how the planet was positioned with the sun. But he calculated it, and took his telescope out to look at where the sun should be.
More stars were missing than he thought there should be. Even without the telescope, he could see them; chunks were torn out of Feller and Juvia, with Guttoi entirely missing.
He dialed in his telescope to the correct angle, and looked through.
He couldn't see any stars. That was the first thing he noticed. The sun was gone, but he couldn't see anything through where the sun should be. The torn part of the sky where the sun used to be was somehow darker than the normal, night-time sky. He was able to find the edge of the missing space, a rough rip in the otherwise flat expanse of space.
In fact... the edge itself moved slightly, as if it were swaying in the wind.
He moved the lens away from the edge of the rip, towards the center of where the sun should be. Jack felt a slight pressure behind his eyes, like someone was pulling them back through to his brain. He moved closer, and the feeling magnified. His eyes were retreating from the sight, but it was just... empty.
He moved the lens further, and the pressure doubled again. He squinted.
Through the pressure and pain, he saw... color. He could only assume it was color. Spots danced in his eyes as he squinted further, but he had to look away. The moment he did, the pressure and pain vanished as if it had never been there. The only sign was that he felt off-balance, like he would stumble the same way his Father did if he tried to walk inside.
His head spun. The sun was really gone. It had been torn out of... the universe, he supposed. Leaving behind... nothing.
Jack didn't know what to do. He sat in the yard, staring off into the distance. He knew that there were people trying to leave the planets without stars, massive ships traveling through space to reach other planets with stars still there, but what if those stars vanished too?
The ground seemed to spin, even though Jack was sitting.
What can even be done?
Jack's classmates had the same question, and the more they asked it, the more his teacher grit her teeth and the shriller her voice got.
Nobody did their science worksheets. Jack didn't like science, so he was fine with that. He just wanted answers about what they were going to do about the sun.
The fifth time he asked, this time before he went to recess with the rest of his class, his teacher slammed her coffee cup like a bottle on the table. "I don't know, Jack! Nobody knows! Stop asking!" she shouted.
He felt a little bad about her coffee cup. "But miss, they have to be doing something. The sun vanished." he said.
His teacher gave a choked up sigh. "I don't know. They'll probably shuttle us off-world, and then I can teach somewhere different." The words seemed to be forced from her, her gaze empty.
She wasn't looking at Jack, he realized. She was looking past him, towards the wall. He turned, but nothing was back there.
"I'm sorry, miss," he muttered. "I'll stop asking."
He went out to recess.
Everyone was like that about the sun, except for Jack.
Jack normally talked to a man in a street stall on the way to school, but his stall wasn't open this morning. The monitor at recess didn't answer his questions, and ignored the schoolyard fights he normally broke up.
The corner shop was closed. His father started staying home during the day, when he would usually be gone when Jack got home from school. He wasn't able to use the tablet as much with his father home, so he spent time out in the yard, looking up at the stars.
He started to keep a record of the stars that were missing. He didn't know all the names, but he knew the constellations. He would number them, record the time and the stars visible. Each day, the number of stars visible were less and less.
Each day, it got a little easier to look at the area the sun wasn't. The pressure and pain didn't lessen, but it was easier to look for longer. He was taking notes on the rip, too. The edge of the rip was moving. It moved differently every day he looked, but it was moving. He didn't know what it meant, but he recorded it too.
When his notebook ran out of space, he tried to get one from the corner store. It was still closed, but the door had been smashed. The store was a mess, the shelves empty with dirt tracks on the floor. His stationery section was mostly stocked, so he grabbed another notebook and a few pens.
With his new calculations, he realized that he could plot the rate of stars disappearing. He sketched out a table of his readings, and counted. Then he worked out the numbers.
It was his favorite class, math. He loved working with numbers. They tell him so much. For example: they told him, based on the current rate of stars disappearing and the stars left in the sky, that he had four days left before no stars would be in the sky.
It was at this point that Jack got access to his father's tablet again. His father entered his room and hadn't left since Jack had asked him if they were going to a different planet on a ship. He wasn't sure why. A ship couldn't fit in there.
The Net told him much the same that he had found. Stars were disappearing at an increased rate, and most people didn't have a sun anymore. But... that wasn't the only thing the Net told him.
The Net told him that some planets were starting to disappear, too.
It was first noticed in a binary planet system, something Jack had to search separately to understand the words. But... from what he could tell, it was like looking up to see your moons, and not seeing them anymore. The suns were known to get up and walk away, but the moons? The planets?
Could his planet disappear? What happened to the people? The houses? The schools?
The Net didn't know. It was the same tears as the ones where the suns used to be.
It was night-time, according to his alarm clock that didn't wake him up.
Jack couldn't fall asleep. Knowing that planets were disappearing, too. Would he wake up to find his planet gone?
He didn't think space was easy to live in. If it was, they wouldn't need the ships to take people to planets with suns still around them, would they?
Could he live in the tears? If a tear swallowed up his planet, would he be able to walk to the corner store and find a new notebook? Could he still do his numbers?
It was fitfully, with little fanfare, that Jack went to sleep that night.