It started as a slider on a web page nobody was supposed to take seriously.
One civilian, one laptop, one stubborn idea about the number 126.
Twenty-three years later something fell in from between the stars, and its light carried a color that wasn't on any chart.
Designation 37I/Kaimana. Inbound at twenty-six kilometers a second. Not stopping.
Three governments did the same arithmetic on the same night. Seven years in reach. Then gone.
Nobody announced a race. Everybody ran one.
The drill went four meters into the crust. Then the drill bit started to glow.
Everyone agrees on when the shooting started. Nobody agrees on who fired first.
When the Moon pointed a rail at the Earth, the arguments got very short.
It ended with a signature on a page that said the rock belonged to no one.
That signature is the only reason you are allowed to read this.
Four days to Mars. That is what all of it was for.
Read this
before you
touch anything
Recruit,
You have been issued this manual because someone has decided you will work within a hundred meters of Neodanium. Do not be flattered. They issue it to the cooks.
You've seen the newsreel. What it skips is the chemistry. The 3.1 grams the drill probe Tern carried home in 2056 were element 126.
Nobody has ever made element 126. Theorists have suspected since 1966 that something out past the end of the periodic table might hold together far longer than it has any right to, and 126 protons wrapped in 184 neutrons is near the top of their list. What they did not predict was that it would superconduct at the boiling point of water. It does. That fact reorganized every navy in the solar system inside a decade.
And the rock was leaving. Every gram we would ever own was passing through once, on a hyperbolic orbit. The full account, with the parts they still won't print blacked out, is in the Record.
The physics in these pages is real: every slider, every number, every simulation you can grab and break. The element is the one thing we made up. Press R and the manual will mark every line as real, modeled or invented. We already fought one war over what was true.
Dn-310
Every gram humanity will ever hold came off one interstellar body, 37I/Kaimana. You cannot make more. Slamming two nuclei together hard enough to build element 126 works about as often as two thrown darts landing in each other.
- Atomic number
- 126
- Mass number
- 310 (126 p + 184 n)
- IUPAC placeholder name
- Unbihexium, Ubh
- Half-life
- Stable, > 10²⁰ s
- Superconducting below
- 371 K (98 °C), ambient pressure
- Upper critical field
- 240 T
- Density
- 38.6 g/cm³
- Appearance
- Dull pewter. Glows violet when it's carrying a field, which is always.
- Synthesis
- Not on any timescale you'd survive. Fusion odds ≪ 1 femtobarn.
- Total inventory
- 41.7 tonnes. Ever.
- Smell
- Reported as “hot pennies.” Do not smell it.
Five briefings
Each briefing is a live simulation running in your browser. Read them in order. The cadets who skip to chapter 3 are the ones we lose.
The Kaimana
Record
How three governments chased a rock across the inner solar system, what they did to each other when they caught it, and the treaty that made the whole thing nobody's.
Open the record