Short stories of the cosmos: A solarpunk creature, Comet Izumi, observes the Earth’s changes

No cosmic drifter is an outsider in the spherical spinning shell of dormant comets, the dark Oort Cloud, which encases our disk-like solar system. This frozen frontier, about two light years away from the Sun, does what borderlands do: accommodate other abandoned aliens. Vagrant wanderers from distant star systems who have travelled, occasionally streaked by starlight, through the spreading hand of space fit in like a missing part of a swirling jigsaw puzzle.

The Oort Cloud formed gradually, after the planets had jostled into place some 4.5 billion years ago, commingled the rolling, roiling remnants of the solar system with leftovers from other proto suns which our newborn Sun captured while whirling away from its birth cluster. These discards – hundreds of billions, even trillions of them – are a cosmic balancing act, poised at the heliopause where matched solar and interstellar winds create equilibrium. Its lip hangs open to the vast partial vacuum of interstellar space that is scattered with speckles of drifting dust, gas and smidgeons of rays. The dwarf sun, red Proxima Centuari rotates nearby, merely some 2.24 light years away.

Occasionally, something disturbs one of its torpid comets. Cosmic snowballs of gases, rock and dust, they then begin their journey...

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