We had the best intentions. That's the kind of thing you tell yourself late at night when you're feeling particularly self reflective, but only because it's actually true. When you're dealing with infinities, though… it doesn't really matter what you meant. Only what happened.
If you took a poll today among Foundation staff you'd be hard pressed to find a single person who supported the proposal. I'm serious, ask around. Clef'll tell you it's Cimmerian's fault. Cimmerian'll say it's Moose's Fault. Moose'll blame Light. Like it matters.
If you keep following the faults you'll end up with Dr. Oleksei. It all started with his bloody crusade, after all. The SCP Foundation took the exceptionally stupid step of telling him he was to be terminated as soon as he dealt with SCP-096. We put a dead man in charge of saving the world.
Sometimes I think we deserve what we got.
The first rumblings of what was going to happen came to my attention when several million dollars worth of my resources were earmarked for a newly classified project. As the fellow in charge of the Foundation Space Forces, I was a bit used to that. I hardly remember the day I got read in on the details.
It all seemed so pedestrian. I'd seen "let's throw it into the sun" proposals before. I'd even approved one or two. This was just another silly project in a long line of projects from people who think that education and arrogance are a good replacement for actual intelligence.
I told Dr. Oleksei I was gonna say no to his stupid idea and he said he wasn't gonna listen to "an engineer". When he went over my head to get approval, I wasn't surprised. Nor was I surprised when they told me to handle the details. Because Oleksei was an expert in being a pompous blowhard, not orbital mechanics.
You should've seen the look on his face when I told him that we'd need to go out to Saturn in order to hit the sun. He was practically apoplectic.
I told him: Every celestial body is a sphere, as long as you pass over the horizon faster than you fall, the body's surface is essentially falling away from you just as fast as you're falling down. Douglas Adams was partially right: the trick is to miss the ground.
But if you're not moving around the sun at 30 kilometers a second, you're gonna move towards the sun. If you have any leftover momentum from what you started with though, you'll just set up a new more trendy orbit a bit closer to the sun at a different speed.
The problem with the math is that it only takes 41 kilometers a second to escape the solar system. Which means you only have to add 11 kilometers a second to the speed you, your mother, your dog, your house, and the ground beneath your feet is already going to get away from the sun. And to hit the sun, you'd need to lose all 30 kilometers per second of speed.
So paradoxically, it's actually easier to escape the sun than it is to hit it, if you start from the Earth. If you're still with me you're doing better than Oleksei did. And he destroyed the world.
So why go out to Saturn? Well the thing about orbital speeds is that the stuff closer in moves faster than the stuff farther out. So we sent a rocket containing one very unfortunate helionaut to go see Saturn, do several gravity assists to slow down, and come back down. The whole thing took us 4 years and a not inconsiderable amount of resources.
It wasn't the first time we'd crashed a woman into the sun, mind you, but it was a sufficiently rare occurrence that we called everyone in for it. There was a little party, with free drinks (just two) and free food (all you could eat). We treated it as a going away party for Oleksei. Almost no one showed up.
We had our Sun diver look at a picture and boom. 096 took off like a lanky slightly quieter rocket. We calculated that at the speed it was going it would hit the sun, just like we'd planned. All that was left was to listen to the D-Class we'd sent up scream as she was incinerated by the sun. We turned off the feed halfway through.
That was my primary objection, by the way. We'd never deliberately killed someone in space before. You're probably thinking that's a lie, but it isn't. People with the mental stability for years long trips to space are damned rare. When you're pulling from prison populations it's even rarer. I'd love to say it was purely for humanitarian reasons but the truth is we couldn't spare the astronauts.
We tracked 096 all the way. It took 2 more years but he got to where he was going, and as far as we know he was bathed in nuclear fire. He probably died screaming.
They killed Oleksei a year ago. I'm not going to use a euphemism there. It was a murder, justified or not. A month ago they finalized the reports and approved one last test.
How could we know we'd succeeded, really? Maybe 096 was just swimming around in there waiting for someone on the Earth to look at a picture. So they had a D-Class look. One last time.
A week ago we noticed the Earth's orbit has begun to decay. I have no math or science that can explain why… but the sun is moving closer.
