The Juno Contingency (prelude)

"The Juno Contingency" is included as prelude No. 1 in *The Juno Contingency (novel)* and establishes the Juno universe.

## Teaser

Jupiter threatens to ignite into a second sun and decimate life on Earth. With world governments sluggish to respond to the catastrophe, a scientist and a venture capitalist begin developing the necessary solutions themselves.

## Plot

### Prologue

JPL scientist Dr. Leslie Angiers is watching the President give a speech whose contents she has been expecting. The President is disclosing NASA’s findings on what is publicly known as the “Jupiter anomaly,” a series of disruptions to Jupiter’s atmosphere that are visible to amateur astronomers. The President reveals that these are really due to a cone-shaped extraterrestrial spacecraft 2,000 km long that has appeared in orbit around Jupiter. An international space mission, called Peace, is being developed on a crash course to travel there, to make contact with the aliens, and to determine their intentions.

Watching the conference, Leslie and her labmates discuss the latest theories of what the alien spacecraft is doing. The predominant belief is that they are stellifying Jupiter so as to ignite it into another sun. In that case, Leslie is pessimistic that the Peace mission will accomplish anything, as the aliens are so advanced that humans will seem like fleas to them. Her labmates encourage her to join a team that is working on estimating what the impact to Earth would be if Jupiter were to undergo solar ignition.

### 1. “Frodo and Gandalf”

Six months later Leslie is home working late when she receives a call from Ret Feldspar, who introduces himself as the world’s third-youngest self-made billionaire. He wants to discuss her recent scientific paper called “Contingent terrestrial planning for the appearance of a second solar body,” commonly known as “The Juno Contingency” for the name Leslie assigned to an ignited Jupiter in the paper: Juno, after the queen of the gods (as Jupiter was the king). Leslie agrees to meet, whereupon Ret surprises her at the door.

They converse inside, and Ret agrees that the Peace mission is futile. He believes they won’t even be able to communicate with the aliens, let alone bargain with them; and yet he sees no one undertaking the work to prepare Earth for the ignition of Juno. The governments believe the problem will either be so small it’s worth ignoring, or so large it’s worthless trying. Leslie says she suspects there is some government team that is furthering the study she started, but Ret interrupts that there is no secret red team buried deep inside NASA solving this problem: “It’s just us. Frodo and Gandalf.”

Ret says he’s launching a multi-billion–dollar venture firm called JunoFund to develop the technologies and products outlined in Leslie’s paper. Leslie is skeptical that venture capital can solve the problem, but Ret counters that it’s the only solution. The world’s governments and companies are invested in the current world order, but Juno will alter every facet of civilization overnight. The companies that are prepared for that will effectively replace the current world economy and produce “1,000,000x returns.” VC is the only way to find all the other crazy people on Earth who agree with them and to match them with the capital they need to build what’s required. Since Leslie is the lead author on “The Juno Contingency,” Ret wants her to quit JPL and lead technology development at his fund.

Leslie is hesitant and ultimately dismisses Ret. But he pursues her for several weeks and continually hammers imagery from *The Lord of the Rings*, Leslie’s favorite book. After another particularly quotidian day at work, she suddenly decides to join him.

### 2. The Council of Elrond

Leslie quickly comes to regret becoming the scientific face of Ret’s firm as it catapults her to internet celebrity — and to scientific infamy among her peers. She has to appear on multiple podcasts, host livestreamed AMAs for publicity, and Ret even uses her likeness for the emblem of JunoCoin, a cryptocurrency he ICO’s in order to build another fund as a decentralized autonomous organization. During a fight where Leslie threatens to quit, Ret asks her what he could do better, and Leslie simply shouts, “Stop being a meme!” However, things improve after Elon Musk engages her in a scientific dialogue over Twitter and summarily invests $1B into the fund. This causes a huge spike in investment and their fund receives hundreds of pitch decks.

Six months later, Leslie is taking pitch meetings for companies to develop mass-produced personal cooling suits, supercrops that will utilize the 24-hour illumination of two suns, and gargantuan subterranean living spaces powered by small modular reactors. Ret angrily barges in and throws down a new paper with the latest projections for Juno, which now show the artificial star will be several times brighter than the sun and will ignite in only 2–3 years. If true, Ret declares that everything they’ve been doing is pointless as the Earth will be cooked and boiled within only weeks of Ignition — too fast for anything they’ve built to be scaled out and have an effect.

Ret and Leslie lock all of JunoFund’s technical leaders into a war room called “The Council of Elrond.” They ultimately decide there is no practical way to screen the planet from Juno’s light, so the only option is to instead block out all the light coming from the sun. Such an approach will preserve the day–night cycle and limit the rise in insolation. This can be accomplished by building a sunshade at the L1 Lagrange point made up of hundreds of millions of square-kilometer, micrometer-thick autonomous spacecraft. These ultra-lightweight shades will need to be built in LEO at space manufacturing hubs in order to utilize microgravity. The raw materials will be shipped up using reusable rockets and SpinLaunch payloads to achieve economies of scale. The shades will then fly themselves individually out to L1 using ion thrusters. Total cost is estimated at hundreds of trillions of dollars, which is far larger than the current world economy.

Nonetheless, Ret holds a press conference announcing their plans to build a sunshade. Simultaneously, the company will engage in mass stratospheric aerosol injection of sulfur to preemptively cool the planet and buy them more time even after Juno ignites. Yet the populace is in denial about Ignition and the fund is still regarded as a fringe movement.

### 3. ¬Peace

A year later, Leslie and Ret watch from mission control as the company launches a small private space station plus a one-man mission piloted by their in-house professional astronaut, the eccentric Klaus Hollenberg. Upon arrival at the station, Hollenberg immediately switches off communications for an hour, causing panic below. When he finally restores communication, he states that he wanted to claim the first official mutiny in space now that the Skylab mutiny had been debunked. This results in strong condemnation by world governments.

Ret and Leslie are shortly called before Congress to testify to the company’s activities. The politicians object to the sulfur guns the company is operating in Mexico, plus the SpinLaunch’ed payloads accumulating in LEO. They also accuse Ret of being behind a plot by the Independence Party of Alberta to secede from Canada and form a new government more friendly to JunoFund — which Ret doesn’t deny. Politicians also use the opportunity to grandstand and to upbraid Ret for second-guessing the government now that the Peace mission is approaching Jupiter.

World attention turns to the Peace mission as it splits into four separate spacecraft: two redundant science missions to conduct closer scans of the aliens’ activities, and two redundant contact missions. The science missions’ findings only reaffirm the latest projections of Juno’s ignition. The first contact mission then approaches the alien spacecraft. It lands on it but finds no way inside and no way to penetrate the hull. Then it attempts to fly near the ship’s particle stream with Jupiter and is suddenly destroyed.

The second contact mission proceeds on comm silence since the crew is carrying a thermonuclear warhead as a failsafe. They send the command to detonate the warhead, but observers on Earth instead see all three remaining spacecraft disintegrate in the same instant, with no light delay from the alien ship as from a directed energy weapon. It is hypothesized that the ships were disintegrated by an instantaneous foldspace weapon that neutralized the bomb’s fission stage.

After the demise of the Peace mission, Leslie and Ret stay late at JunoFund and get drunk, lamenting “I hate being right.” The next morning their headquarters is mobbed by press and demonstrators as the world flocks to them for answers. They organize a conference where they reaffirm their plans to scale out geoengineering, and they commit to a crash plan to get the first sunshades to L1 within six months.

### 4. The Inevitable

World governments have now initiated their own crash programs for the coming of Juno, with each country appointing its own “Juno Czar” to lead internal efforts. Most nations are pursuing their own atmospheric aerosol injection, since it’s the only thing that’s scalable in the time they have left. Governments market it as a panacea to their populations, though the resulting global climate shock nonetheless causes mass social unrest.

Leslie works relentlessly on the sunshade prototypes. The company’s space manufacturing has produced several dozen, but they are still awaiting a delayed batch of ion thrusters. Leslie okays a risky mission without adequate safety checks to get the thrusters into space, which misses its rendezvous with JunoStation, though it is heroically retrieved by astronaut Hollenberg. The thrusters are mated with the first prototype sunshades and they begin the months-long process of raising their orbits to L1. The news is celebrated worldwide even though Leslie knows their current sunshades will only block out 0.00001% of the sun’s light.

Leslie starts seeing less and less of Ret. When she asks why, he invites her to fly out to where he is in Finland. He shows her the country’s massive underground bunkers, built during the Cold War to shelter the entire population from a nuclear attack. He ushers her past Finnish government guards into a bunker owned by JunoFund. He confesses that he long ago lost faith in their ability to stop the impending cataclysm. With Finland’s high northern latitudes and most bunkers per capita, he deduces this will be the safest place from which to ride out the coming mass extinction. He invites Leslie to accept the inevitable and start making her home here as he and several other JunoFund executives have done.

Leslie is shocked at this betrayal from her mentor, and she finds herself surprisingly unwilling to give up on humanity. Ret warns her that there will come a day when the doors to the bunker will seal for good, but Leslie says she has picked her spot on this side.

*Read the conclusion "5. Junorise" on Amazon, and the sequel The Juno Conjunction.*