This is the beginning of a much larger work. I welcome your feedback.

-1-

Peter

August, 2020

It would be the last good morning in Peter's life. Peter lay awake staring at the ceiling and wondering if space aliens would really be capable of interstellar travel. Then his alarm buzzed, letting him know it was 6:30 am.

Peter Felton was a graduate student in physics, and he was spending a lonely summer at school completing an internship for a little money and a little school credit. The last Friday in August was also his last day as an intern. Next week would be a break-week then school would start again. It would be Peter's fifth year at the University, and his first as a graduate student.

Having been raised in Massachusetts, and then spending six years in the Southern California coastal college community, he had grown to appreciate the stretches of weather where it was warm at day break. If you worked late and needed to rise early, the warm weather made it easy. Not at all like the cold weather of Boston where the last thing a body wanted to do was take the covers off in the winter. Even worst was the summer, where you didn't want to leave the room with the AC. Southern California weather was bliss.

Peter rose from bed wearing briefs-once white, now grey and maybe beige. He put into the same pair of khaki shorts he wore everyday for the past two weeks. His favorites black tee-shirt lay on a bean bag that was by the window. The shirt was crisp and dry, like it had come from a dryer, except it had only sat in sunshine the previous day. The sun evaporated the sweat, leaving behind a little salt. It smelled clean enough, and it was black, so it was good enough to be worn. At least he had another week before Melinda came back, then maybe he would need to hit the laundry mat. The fashion faux pas was complete with white socks and sandals. He combed his hair to the side and used a little gel because it was too long. Breakfast was a cup of dried fruit loops. At 6:45, he was out the door into the still and lifeless college town, only one-quarter occupied with summer school slackers and late night party animals.

Outside, Peter unlocked his bike and slapped the bike lock in his backpack with a couple of fluid hand movements. He rode through an unkempt lawn, jumped over a curb, avoiding a dog pile and rode in the street.

The ocean had its unseen presence, behind a row of houses that lined the road to campus. Peter came to college with issues- too tense, too moody and a little unhappy. Even though he spent every minute of his student life just yards from the ocean, he hardly ever went to the beach, never went in the water, only actually saw the ocean water maybe every other day. But he loved the ocean because he could feel it, hear it, and all this made him less tense, less moody and more happy. Maybe he would actually spend a day on the beach if he could do something about his white skin and featureless body.

Greek letters lined some of the homes. None of the Greek letters had ever been relevant to Peter in his six years of college. Pack living, or "duding it" as his friend Matt would say, was not his style.

It was 7:00 am and somewhere a sorority girl was walking home. One of the geeks against Greek jokes. For all the geeks knew, sorority girls were chaste. He had no way of knowing. No geek did. In his mind, Peter was the ultimate of geeks, and he was lucky he had a girlfriend, let alone one that was actually something to brag about. Melinda was smart and strong. And pretty.

Four and a half years ago, Peter arrived at the University, an east coast implant who could have gone to more prestigious universities closer to home. But a whim had taken over when Peter was in high school. He had no friends, at least none that he liked all that much. No girlfriend. And if he stayed near home, it would be more of the same. Worried parents, worried about his social life, worried about his depression. Most of all, he had gotten bored, like depressed people do. He thought he would try something new and different. So he applied to a southern California University, a public university with a beach front. He had never seen it in person, just online, and it had looked fabulous. He told his parents he was only applying for fun, as a backup. But he had made his mind up a long time ago to go somewhere far away and try something new and different. A change from the everyday habits that had made him a depressed withdrawn geek that underperformed at school. He never thought about whether he made the right decision, but years later, when it came time to leave, he didn't want to. He was still withdrawn and geeky. But he had discovered his intellectual passion, at least for some subjects, and he had a girlfriend, something that was inconceivable to him just a few years ago. In college, he majored in Physics, and along the way, he discovered astronomy and theoretical physics. "The science of prediction," his favorite professor had said. "We don't observe our environment, we imagine it."

In his final year, he had applied for the doctorate program. Peter told friends and family that he stayed for his doctoral degree because he wanted four more years of sun and the ocean. But that wasn't true. His school was one of the top programs for astrophysics, and any aspiring student with his interest would want to attend the school. That was more true, but maybe not the whole truth, because Peter could have gone to an even better program. The whole truth was that Peter's girlfriend was still an undergrad, and he was not ready to move away at the risk of losing her. Maybe she was not his last girlfriend, but he couldn't think past her. That was the secret. He wasn't sure if he fooled his parents, but he sure hoped he fooled Melinda, because he suspected she was not nearly as attached as he was. Peter had been Melinda's private math tutor more than two years earlier. They had started dating soon after she got an A in the class. Now, two years later, he was fully vested. She probably wasn't. She had no problem going home to San Francisco for the summer. She was good at calling every couple of days, but she didn't like talking every day. When they talked on the phone, she had no problem switching over to another call, and then telling Peter she had to go. She was definitely not as attached as Peter.

Now Peter was a graduate, waiting for the start of the graduate program. At the start of summer, Peter had the choice to stay on campus, or go home. But he chose to take an internship with Plaxx Labs, at a local office that was just a mile and a half from the University. The internship was not prestigious by any stretch. Peter suspected they only had 1-2 applicants each year. It was a low paying job, but came with units which he could presumably use for his graduate studies.

His bike rattled and shimmed, having been beat up and destroyed over the past year by party goers and other bikers. But he moved fast. Skinny kids always knew how to pedal fast. When Peter hit a curb, he fell off his seat and landed heavy on one testicle. He decided to slow down a little, riding in pain and with a grimace. Within five minutes he was through campus and cruising the bike trail next to the freeway. By 7:20, he was in the parking lot of the Plaxx, its brown featureless buildings looked like something from an Army camp. Plaxx was an institution that emphasized its academics, but it had many centers across the state, and it's most noteworthy accomplishment was the research some of its scientists had done in the field of nuclear fission. The building in front of Peter, however, contained no such controversy. Rather it contained the scientific arm that studied images of the sky.

Peter knew of another guy named Cliff who had done the same internship a year earlier. Cliff had been a Junior, not a graduate student like Peter. He had told Peter that he drank coffee all day to keep awake because he drank beer all night every night. Peter wanted to know what it was like to work at Plaxx. Cliff said "I changed paper and toner."

But summer slacking was not in Peter's DNA. This was going to be Peter's first real opportunity to study the universe. This was his passion. Plaxx operated one of the largest infrared optical telescopes in the world, situated on the top of the Andes Mountains in Chile. They had a small team of astronomers on site in Chile to operate the telescope. An academic could have access to the telescope if they prepared a proposal that was reviewed and approved by Plaxx researchers. Peter wanted to learn how to write a proposal, to see how they were peer-reviewed, to see the raw data, to understand the process for being able to use the powerful telescopes of the world. He would have his chance soon, as a PhD student. But Plaxx was a primer, if even that. Little of what he really wanted to do was available to him as an intern. Peter recalled his first day, when the Director Henrik Klaus loudly welcomed him to Plaxx and introduced him to his team. He pointed Peter to an intern binder. The binderwas filled with little work sheets that identified intern projects. The projects were written in paragraph form and were filled with condescending questions, like what could be learned, what changes could be made to verify the results and on and on. Kind of like third-grade science workbooks for adults. Out of determination to work with telescopes, he started his own project.

The project had started with a story Peter had heard that was more like an urban legend. An urban legend for astrophysicists. The story went like this. A few years back, two Italian astronomers ran into a well respected Japanese astronomer. They were at a conference in Milan. The Japanese astronomer excitedly told them that he had observed something relatively large and massive, more like a black hole than anything else, just outside of the solar system. He had promised his colleagues he would send them information, but when he left the conference, his plane crashed and he died. His colleagues were intrigued enough to look at the quadrant the man had mentioned-he had, after all, been a well-respected astronomer. But no one was able to see what he was able to see. There was nothing there. But then, the solar system was a very large area. The Japanese astronomer had pointed to a region in the interstellar medium, almost five times the distance between Pluto and the Sun. Peter recalled an educational demonstration that served as an intro to the size of the Solar System. The sun was an orange, the Earth was a peppercorn several paces from the orange. The interstellar medium where the object was supposed to have been seen would be 2.5 miles from the orange.