How do you kill a star?

Nobody asked that at first, of course. But the easiest, the simplest, the most effective way to kill anything is a virus.

The goop was just that we needed, something to keep the reactors from running amok. New technology and all that, we had no idea where the upper limit was. So then, accidents happen... except these accidents were leaving craters where cities used to lie. Not good for business.

Soon, we managed to make the goop that would stop the minor apocalypses in their tracks. It was simple: the monitoring sensors would detect an overrun, a glorified ketchup bottle would squirt in a little goop, and woosh! the goop absorbed the remaining fuel, acting like a seed crystal and filling the chamber with shiny goodness.

The resulting crystals were beautiful; cut and polished they sold well, once they were carved out of the reaction chamber. It helped pay to get the plant going again (this time under control, knock on wood), but overall using the goop still cost less than the resulting lawsuits.

The goop wasn't a controlled substance, but it wasn't really something useful outside the bleeding edge of science and there was no real reason to actively defend it. It was expensive, though, so we did kept an eye on it. This is why we noticed when some of it went missing. An inventory error, surely.

Then the spot showed up. It looked like no sunspot seen before, and the world of science was ecstatic. And it started growing. From a spot to a blot, a blot to a splotch, a splotch to something larger than any sunspot seen before, tens of thousands of miles wide, the telescopes reported.

We had found out where the missing goop went. We found out that it was put on a rocket, supposedly bearing a satellite to monitor solar flares, and sent into the sky. We found out that it had 'accidentally' lost control and was pulled into the sun and written off as a loss.

Why did he do it? Why infect our lifeblood with the goop? It had to be one person with the big idea, right? No committee would agree to this. Compartmentalize everything, send it in to the sun with nobody knowing. Or was it someone on the ops team who managed to rejigger the flight vector? Was it revenge on the world for some imagined slight? Shits and giggles, pressing the button as their life faded? Did they just want to know the answer to the question, to see what would happen?

Either way, that is how you kill a star; or one way, at least. A tiny prick, inject the contagion, sit back and wait. Simple.

And so it grows, and so it gets colder, day by day.