The Eclipse Of 2044 : a short story by: GF Willmetts
‘You’re going to make the sun disappear, just like that?’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘I think people will notice. Darkness. Break in orbit. Lots of minor things like that.’
‘Not in a solar eclipse. They’ll expect it to vanish, especially in the USA.’
‘Why America?’
‘Look at how many believe the Earth is flat. They probably think there’s a new sun every morning, let alone we rotate around it. Just make sure the audience is made up of people like them and we have a susceptible audience who will be amazed when the sun returns.’
‘But that can be anything up to 12 hours where it is. Early sunset. Early sunrise.’
‘I’m sure we can keep them amused for that length of time. Do it at a weekend party. They’ll sleep over. Have an end of the world party. They probably won’t notice the hours go by and rejoice when it comes back.’
‘And how do we tell the rest of the world?’
‘For podcast, we just show a limited time version later. We shouldn’t do it live.’
‘What if its cloudy the next day? It could even rain.’
‘But it’ll still be daylight. Everyone believes in that. Even they should be able to tell the difference. Better than having a drone go past dragging a light behind it. That would look…’
‘Fake?’
‘And too fast. At least we won’t have to rely on a rotating stage like that Dickens guy did with an elephant. Are you going to dress it up a bit?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, look at it from my point of view. You have an audience there to see an event. You give them all the protective glasses, ISO specific, so at least they have the right protection. You announce the solar eclipse. The sun vanishes behind the moon. Sunset and the sun is gone. How are you going to convince them you vanished the sun and not something that happens every night. Smoke and mirrors?’
‘What do we get from the sun apart from light and heat?’
‘Gravity.’
‘Eight minutes before the Earth, its moon and all the planets and their moons zipped off to parts unknown.’
‘Except we’re dealing with the fantasy of flatearthers. It would be a stretch to explains real science to them. Some of the more extremes might not even believe in solar eclipses. Let them rationalise it for themselves. We’re magicians, we don’t have to explain.’
‘The last thing you want to become is a guru to them. You’d never get any more work from anywhere else. At least not from bigger audiences.’
‘This is strictly a one-off. Well, until the next solar eclipse or some other cosmic event.’
‘Maybe not even from them if they realise they’ve been fooled.’
‘I ride on their euphoria. Initially, they’ll think they were right and we’ve run out of suns to fly overhead. I imagine some of them will wish it came back, so we ride that out. Time it right and I vanish into the crowd. Someone will probably think it was my sacrifice that got it back. All a matter of staging.’
‘And the alternative?’
‘A lot easier than shifting 5.97 sextillion tonnes of planet Earth.’
‘Not sure I have a big enough lever to do that one.’
‘We could always move one of the Hindi elephants and tilt the Earth.’
‘There’s supposed to be four of them according to the flatearthers. It would take two to really tilt and show at least one of the elephants for them to believe that.’
‘Where can we get a couple of elephants that size?’
end
© GF Willmetts 2026
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