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to set the images back in time by one minute. The view was automatically recorded by a separate device, so he could rewind the footage without causing any problems. He stared intently at the images, trusting himself to pick up whatever it was that had given him pause.
    “What?” Mark said aloud, leaning in towards the monitors. He rewound the footage by two seconds, then played it back again, in slow motion this time.
    A tiny dot of light vanished quietly from the screen. As clear as day, the footage showed a magnitude-three star on the opposite side of the Milky Way’s center that was there one moment, and the next, gone. And almost exactly one second later, a nearby star also vanished. Two stars located fairly close to each other had disappeared, one after the other.
    Stars gave off light due to the nuclear fusion reaction taking place at their core, and the lifespan of a star depended on its size and the amount of matter it contained. That was not to say that a star with greater mass had a longer lifespan. In fact, in a star with more mass, the greater gravity would accelerate the process of nuclear fusion, causing it to burn out sooner. Stars with less mass underwent fusion more gradually and were therefore longer-lived. Our sun was somewhere in between, with an estimated lifetime of around ten billion years. When we see a star disappear from our vantage point on Earth, it had actually met its demise long, long ago.
    The first possibility that popped into Mark’s mind was that the stars had met their end by way of a supernova explosion. He couldn’t say for sure without analyzing their non-infrared electromagnetic profiles. In any case, it was extremely rare to witness a star’s death, and he could barely contain his excitement. On the other hand, deep inside, Mark harbored a flickering doubt. The stars had vanished so suddenly, without any final flare up. They didn’t appear to have been enveloped in some enormous astral phenomenon. Rather, they had simply, spontaneously and irrevocably, ceased to exist.
    If he could pinpoint the location of the missing stars and their distance from Earth, he would know how long ago the event had taken place. He had probably just witnessed phenomena that had taken place thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.
    Quickly, Mark reported what he had seen to the Hilo Base Facility, making mention of the fact that the electromagnetic waves required analysis. The Hilo Base Facility in turn fiber-optically transmitted the report of two successive star disappearances to NAOJ headquarters in Mitaka, Tokyo.
    Fifteen minutes after Mark had reported his observations, the footage came to the attention of Dr. Jun Urushihara at headquarters. Urushihara went through very much the exact same thought process Mark had, only to wind up equally perplexed.
    It isn’t normal for stars to just blink out like this
.
    Urushihara felt a tickling sensation deep in his nose and sneezed loudly as was his habit when he smelled something odd.
    December 19, 2012
    The day after the Stanford University Linear Accelerator Center obtained its new computer, the IBM Green Flash, the first thing Gary Reynolds did was to run a program designed to calculate the value of Pi. The program made use of the newest algorithms and was expected to be able to calculate Pi to several trillion decimal places.
    Calculating the value of Pi—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter—produced an arcane string of numbers. It was fair to say that the history of the pursuit of Pi was the history of mathematics itself. Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians calculated Pi as 3 1/8, and in the third century B.C. Archimedes had already arrived at the value 3.14163. Pi enchanted mathematicians over the ages and was proven to be an irrational number in the eighteenth century and a transcendental number in the late nineteenth century—a value whose decimal representation never ends or repeats, with no patterns arising no