The sun blooms. Something is eating it. We watch, helpless. Though we have to optics to observe, we do not yet have the technical ability to understand, let alone the energy reserves to intervene. Our capacity is limited to speculation. A black mass, many times smaller than the sun, from a distance halfway to Mercury, sucking at the vapours as they dance off its incandescent surface. Not a problem, until the nuclear furnace at its heart started to destabilise. Pulses of solar flats knock out electronics across half the globe every few weeks, with increasing frequency. The sun is dying. Cannibalised by its own processes, set in motion by the leech that now orbits it. To see the certainty of your own demise, that is surely the worst fate we can imagine. Too late to be ignorant of what is about to happen, too early to do anything about it. The timing of this thing's arrival is just sheer bad luck.
Paddy Dobson
12th February 2021