Jupiter's Heart

On a large screen in the dark auditorium images of the planets played. All kinds of pictures, some marked with pathways of orbits, artist’s renderings of foreign atmospheres, photos from the various satellites and rovers, picture after picture in rapid succession flew by on the screen. Pausing on a distant shot of a planet and then with special effects that rivaled any sci-fi movie the image zoomed in and faded to black. Slowly the screen was illuminated with the Milky Way and the millions of stars in the night time sky.

She found him in the front row, sitting there by himself in the dark, drinking from a bottle sticking out of a brown paper bag.

“Wow, paper. You do practice what you preach.”

“Excuse me.” He sat up adjusted his tie and tried to hide the bottle which slid through the crack of the folded up seat to the floor. “What's the point?” He picked it up and offered it to her.

“You don't have cooties do you?”

“Cooties, if they do in fact exist, would be the least of our problems.”

She drank and sat next to him. “I was here this afternoon,” she pointed to the empty auditorium, “they don’t believe too much in your theory.”

He laughed, “No I guess not.” He drank again.

“You should know that I am a reporter.”

“Well. Good for you.”

“I'm here to find out about your theory on the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and how it is connected to us.”

“Oh? Yes. Well, if you were here this afternoon you heard my theory.”

“No, I heard you try to speak and then Professor I’mSmartrerThanYou shout you down as a crackpot and organize a walk out of your peers.”

“Did he really say crackpot?”

“No. He used much harsher language, I was trying to be kind.”

“Oh.”

“You have quite a few degrees.”

“Yes, I like to try and understand our world and the universe.”

“Physics, meteorology, climatology, theology, astrophysics, astronomy, and on and on. The list is quite impressive. So, tell me about your big bad theory.”

“Two years ago, the weather started to change. I mean patterns began to reverse themselves. The seasons switched winter for summer, climates changed wet for dry, cold for hot, those kind of things.”

“Yes, I remember, I lived through the Blizzard in July.”

“Where were you?”

“New York City.”

“You were lucky. Not many survived that summer.”

“My sister and my niece nearly froze to death.”

“I was studying the patterns of weather and climate change. The university lab I was working for had access to satellite images that showed the earth from further out. The image was startling, the earth was no longer the big blue marble, but from all the dust storms and thunder storms the sky looked like a big yellow swirling mass.”

“About a week later I went out the university's telescope. The resident astronomer there showed me some pictures he had been taking of Jupiter. He was proud, Jupiter was his hobby and whenever he could he trained the ‘old lady’, that's what they called the telescope, on Jupiter. He was curious about the Great Red Spot, he noticed that it was shrinking. Not the thousand kilometers a year that had been predicted, but almost a thousand kilometers a month. He estimated the spot would be gone entirely in two years.”

“I took his photos with me and did some research and find a correlation to the weather here on earth. It seemed that when he photographed spurts of shrinkage on Jupiter it was mirrored here with severe and violent weather. During the weeks of calm here, the change in the Great Red Spot was minimal. I researched every one of his photographs for the next two years. Every season of violent weather here was marked with great upheavals there.”

“I call it the sin-eater effect”

“Sin-eater?”

“Yes, an old tradition where someone in the village would feast the night before a funeral and take on the sins of the deceased allowing him or her to get in to heaven. Transferring the sins of the dead to the living. My theory is that there is a balance in the universe and for some four hundred years Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been the yin to our yang so to speak. And now the opposite is happening. As our weather deteriorates the atmosphere on Jupiter is clearing.”

“Wait a minute. If that was true we would know about it. Wouldn't we?”

“You’re smart, use your phone and look for pictures of Jupiter.”

She pulled out her phone and soon she was scrolling through pictures of Jupiter with its Great Red Spot, that storm of all storms highlighted in picture after picture. “Looks good to me.”

“I will show you a trick. Click on the picture. You see those numbers, recognize them?”

“They're dates. Damn, these are all five, ten years old. What's going on?”

He used a remote and pictures flashed on the screen, images of ice sheets sliding in to the ocean, sandstorms, floods and hurricanes. Displaced people and bodies. “Do you remember these?”

“Last month wasn't it?”

Next a fast moving slide show of images of a planet going from blue green to skies of yellow hazy clouds. Below what use to be the equator a large hurricane type storm was building, orange in color.

“Why is the storm orange?”

“It's pulling all the sand and dust from what was once the African Savannah and throwing it up in to the upper atmosphere.” The image changed to an enormous blue green planet with wispy clouds.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Earth.”

“No, this is what Jupiter looked like last week.”

“What can we do?”

“Nothing.”

She started to cry. “It can't happen this way.”

He handed her the bottle. They could hear rain pounding on the ceiling, thunder shook the building, and the lights flickered and went out.