Elon's Ring

The news hit X-tube like a comet: Elon Musk, the man who’d already reshaped Earth and Mars, had quietly funded a new X Prize—one that dwarfed all the others. Tens of thousands of innovators, me included, got the call to action: master the solar system, then push beyond. His earlier prizes had already cracked recycling tech—air, water, food, everything a human needs to survive indefinitely. His colleges churned out brilliant oddballs, X-pedia rewrote knowledge with crowd-sourced truth, and X-games? That open platform was everyone’s obsession. But this—this was different. This was cosmic.
I was part of a small team at one of his orbital labs when the order came down: move a minor planetoid, a chunk of ice and volatiles the size of a small moon, to Venus’s Roche limit. Let it fracture, ring the planet, and watch it die a slow, beautiful death. Astronomers lost their minds—light pollution, they screamed, would ruin their stargazing. But Elon didn’t care about their telescopes. He saw something bigger.
“Cooling,” I said, staring at the holo-model in the lab. The planetoid’s orbit was locked in, a faint ring already forming as tidal forces tore it apart. “Earth had a ring once, back during the glaciation. Dropped the temperature hard.”
My teammate, Priya, spun the model with a flick of her wrist, her eyes gleaming. “Exactly. Venus is a pressure cooker—460 Celsius, acid clouds, the works. A ring reflects sunlight, shades the surface. Cools it enough to kickstart terraforming.”
“How much water’s in that thing?” I asked, nodding at the shimmering blob on the screen.
She tapped her tablet. “Enough to drown a continent. It’s mostly ice—H2O, CO2, some methane. When it breaks down, those hypercanes’ll churn the atmosphere into something we can work with.”
I grinned. “Elon’s insane. Brilliant, but insane.”
“Always has been,” she said, laughing. “Let’s just hope the astronomers don’t sabotage it.”
The planetoid’s demise was a spectacle. X-tube streams showed it fracturing over weeks, a glittering arc stretching across Venus’s sky. Storms erupted below—hypercanes, winds clocking thousands of miles per hour, their colors swirling like oil slicks under the planet’s thick haze. The ring stabilized, a pale band of ice and dust circling at the Roche limit, and the data poured in: temperatures dropping, vapor condensing, the first hints of a shift.
I caught up with Priya over a call a month later, both of us glued to the feeds. “It’s working,” I said, pointing at the numbers. “Surface temp’s down twenty degrees already. Those storms are monsters.”
She nodded, her face lit by her screen’s glow. “Modeled it out—hundreds of years to cool fully, maybe thin the atmosphere. But once it’s done? We sweep up the ring, recycle it into sats, habitats, whatever. Venus becomes ours.”
“Ours?” I raised an eyebrow. “Elon’s got dibs, doesn’t he?”
“Nope,” she said, smirking. “He sent a memo. No cities named after him. Says Mars already overdid it with the Muskvilles.”
I laughed. “Humble for once. Wonder what he’ll call this trick instead.”
“Dunno,” she said. “But X-games is running a poll. ‘Ringmaker’ is winning.”
Years later, I stood on the deck of an orbital platform, Venus looming below. The ring was brighter now, a steady glow against the planet’s churning storms. I’d moved up from the lab team to mission oversight, and Priya was planetside, running sims for the next phase. We patched through on a secure line, her voice crackling over the hum of machinery.
“Raj, you seeing this?” she said. “Hypercanes are slowing, but the colors—reds, purples, golds. It’s hypnotic.”
“Better than fireworks,” I replied, leaning on the railing. “How’s the cooling?”
“On track,” she said. “Another century, maybe two, and we’ll have a shot at landing. Atmosphere’s still a mess, but the ring’s doing its job. Reflecting, shading, breaking down into vapor.”
I glanced at the ring, its edges shimmering. “And when it’s done? What’s the plan?”
“Recycle it,” she said. “Elon’s orders—every gram gets repurposed. Satellites, shields, maybe a space elevator if we’re feeling fancy. No waste, just like the old X Prize days.”
“Poetic,” I said. “Turn a planet-killer into a planet-builder.”
She chuckled. “That’s the Musk way. Speaking of—heard the latest from X-pedia?”
“Hit me,” I said.
“User vote bumped his bio again,” she said. “Top entry now reads: ‘Elon Musk—built Earth’s future, Mars’s present, and Venus’s tomorrow. Hates city names.’”
I snorted. “Fair. Wonder what he thinks of it.”
“Doubt he cares,” she said. “Last I heard, he’s eyeballing Alpha Centauri. Venus is just a pit stop.”
Centuries passed—simulated, of course, in the labs, but real enough in the data. By 2425, Venus was unrecognizable. The ring had faded, its remnants harvested into a constellation of orbitals. The surface temp hovered at a balmy 30 Celsius, the atmosphere thinned and seeded with oxygen. Hypercanes were a memory, replaced by gentle rains over nascent seas. I wasn’t around for it—retired and gray by then—but Priya’s grandkid, Anika, pinged me from the first Venus colony.
“Grandpa Raj,” she said, her voice bright over the holo-call, “you should see it. Lakes, Raj—real lakes! The ring’s gone, but the storms left these crazy canyons. We’re calling the capital New Terra.”
“No Muskville, huh?” I asked, smirking.
“Nope,” she said. “He’d hate it anyway. Got a statue of him, though—ring in one hand, Mars in the other. X-games sculpted it from recycled debris.”
I leaned back, picturing it. “Sounds about right. Tell me about the sky.”
“Blue,” she said. “Not Earth-blue, but close. Pink at sunset from the dust. You’d love it.”
“Wish I could,” I said, voice soft. “Your grandma and I dreamed this up in a garage, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “Her old notes are in the museum here. You’re both legends on X-pedia.”
I laughed, throat tight. “Good enough. Keep building, kid.”
“Always,” she said. “That’s the X way.”