The Unification Chronicles

I got  a whop­ping 352 words yes­ter­day, all of it at Chipo­tle before going over to my sister’s to watch the Bron­cos lose in the final minute of a game for the sec­ond week in a row. But hey, at least it’s some­thing, and I think I’m ready to pull out of this malaise and get back to work. My mom is feel­ing bet­ter, there’s every chance that she’s cancer-​​free, and if even if she’s not, what she has is eas­ily treat­able. The hol­i­days are behind me — I get to work New Years Eve and New Years Day, so noth­ing to look for­ward to there, and frankly I’ll be happy just to leave the 2000s decade in the dust­bin of his­tory, thank you very much — and my mind is turn­ing back to Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles with some­thing that almost feels like eagerness.

One cool idea I’ve been bounc­ing around for a while is the idea that the super­nova trig­gered by the Guardians to end the Eter­nal War is actu­ally seen from Earth. This involved doing some math to make sure the dates all worked out. I’d already decided that I wanted Daniel Cho’s final vic­tory over the Archangel Michael to hap­pen on 21 Decem­ber 2012, really soak that “dawn­ing of a new age” thing for all it’s worth. So what would I need to have that event her­alded by a new star in the sky, so bright that’s vis­i­ble dur­ing the day and out­shines the moon?

I know that Book 4, Mis­taken Iden­tity, takes place about 100 years after Book 3, Jihad. In that book, we meet the Sendeni, the most pow­er­ful race to sur­vive the Eter­nal War. They tell us that the Guardians ended the war a thou­sand years ago by induc­ing a star to go super­nova with the Neme­sis nearby, destroy­ing nearly all of the Neme­sis before chas­ing what was left out of the galaxy. Nei­ther race ever returned. If I want that explo­sion to be Daniel’s Star, where does it have to be?

Accord­ing to the Sendeni, the explo­sion would have occurred in the Earth year 1112 CE. If the star was only 500 light years away, I could make it the super­nova doc­u­mented by Johannes Kepler in 1604. But in order for it to be Daniel’s Star, vis­i­ble to us in 2012, it has to be 900 light years away. This is fea­si­ble, con­sid­er­ing the Eter­nal War ranged all over the galaxy and it’s far enough from us that the det­o­na­tion wouldn’t affect Sol oth­er­wise (if Alpha Cen­tauri, only 4 light years away, went super­nova, it would com­pletely destroy our ozone layer and kill all sur­face life on Earth).

Who knew writ­ing fic­tion involved math?