Central High has not changed one bit in thirty five years, Heather thinks as she walks down the hall. Same gum-and-graffiti walls. Same scuffed linoleum floor. Same lockers, though significantly more scratched up than when she’d attended.
The auditorium hasn’t changed, either. She steps on stage and takes a deep breath, inhaling dust and long-decayed dreams.
“Dr. Keane?” The new principal strides into the auditorium. He’s gentler than the one she had, or seems it, anyway. Worn around the edges. He holds a hand out for her to shake, and she takes it automatically.
So, back to the start, then.
~
Usually, in this type of story, when someone laughs at you and tells you your goals are unrealistic, you end up achieving those goals in some nice karmic retribution that ties the story up in a little bow.
Dr. Heather Keane’s story is not one of those.
She had thought it was, a lifetime ago when she had been talking to her academic advisor for the very first time. She’d told her proudly that she wanted to pursue a degree in astrophysics and become an astronaut. And her academic advisor had laughed in her face.
And yeah, she’d gotten the degree in astrophysics. And the PhD, which was the biggest waste of time and effort in the world, because then she’d sat behind a desk for the next, oh, twenty-five years. Exactly like her advisor said she would, and isn’t that just the worst thing in the world.
GED, bachelor’s, PhD. Publications, interviews, suffering the slings and arrows of scientific academia. Landed herself a tidy little desk job at NASA where she sits for eight hours a day, five days a week, clicking away at button prompts and emailing people very politely. Two promotions in twenty-five years.
She dreams of the stars, sometimes. She used to have those dreams a lot more often. But it’s been a long time.
~
The presentation she gives is dull.
She has her little slideshow and clicker, and she puts on something that vaguely resembles a smile and a good attitude, and she talks about space. She really does love space, actually, and talking about it, but doing it as a career sucks all the fun out of it, and trying to explain it at a level that fourteen-year-olds will understand makes it difficult to involve the actual fun bits without being hopelessly reductive.
Most of the audience is falling asleep. Nearly all of the rest are on their phones. That’s fine. She talks to herself a lot anyway. She wasn’t expecting much— she’d do the same, in their shoes. Those few that are watching... she can’t tell much from this far away. If they have questions they can tell her at the end, anyway.
(She said that, right?)
(She’ll say it again, just in case.)
She finishes her presentation to a smattering of haphazard applause and pauses a moment. Nobody seems to be making a beeline for her for questions, so Heather starts to head out the backstage door, of which she recalls vaguely there being one.
Instead she feels a tap on her shoulder.
“Uh, miss?” She startles and turns around— she really hadn’t been expecting interest.
The kid is tall, taller than her, and looks... invested, for lack of a better word: his eyes are fixed directly on her face, without wavering a moment, and his jaw is set. Faced with all that, she doesn’t expect the next thing out of the kid’s mouth to be “Do you think aliens are real,” but apparently today proves full of surprises.
“I—“ She almost says no, as a knee-jerk response. Something about the tension in the kid tells her that it’s not teasing, though, so she considers, and says instead, “...Yes. I... I think that statistically speaking, the chances of organisms existing elsewhere in the universe at large is non-zero.”
“Good,” he says, all business and no hesitation. “Because I think I found one.”
Heather stares for a moment, then— she can’t help it— snorts. She’d honestly thought he wasn’t pulling a prank, but oh well. She turns to leave.
“No, no, miss— er, doctor. Dr. Keane. I’m being honest, I swear.”
“Listen,” she says, stopping and wheeling around to face him. “Every kid I’ve talked to has had that song and dance. You got proof, you show me it before I even begin to entertain it.”
She’s expecting him to laugh or look vaguely annoyed or something along those lines. Instead, his face hardens into a determined scowl. “I’ll prove it.”
“All right,” she says. Hopefully the kid gets proof, looks at it, sees it’s a weather balloon or a weird cloud, and gives up, because that’s almost certainly what’ll happen. “You get back to me when you do.”
~
Three days later Heather gets an email in her work inbox with the subject line I found them.
She almost deletes it offhand, expecting it to be a hoax or a scam or some Trojan horse. The trash button on Outlook, however, is close enough to the email button itself that she clicks the email by accident instead.
Inside is a picture of the boy who’d stopped her at the school. He’s blurry, as if he had been running while taking the selfie, and behind him is a distinctly humanoid— but not human— figure.
“What is that,” she mutters. It looks... real— the picture was clearly taken late at night, and it doesn’t have the weird lighting or distortion of Photoshop. It casts a shadow. The thing doesn’t look human, but it does look real.
There’s a line of text under the picture, that reads i took it home what do i do its eating all my food.
She closes her inbox, and then, on second thought, her browser window. And then her laptop.
Then she reopens her phone, replies to the email—
Hi,
If it’s real, you won’t mind letting me over to see it, right?
Thanks,
Dr. Heather Keane
Senior Research Lead
NASA Department of Aeronautics Research
—and decides to take a half day.