a starfish.
“Have you thought about what could happen if this alien stuff goes wrong?” Owen asked, taking the conversation back to its starting point. “You and Ishmael could get in serious trouble.”
“I really don’t—”
“You could screw up your chances of getting into MIT.”
I was doing this for MIT, though. Without the hoax, would the admissions board see me as extraordinary enough to accept? I wasn’t like Sara Kang, my competition for valedictorian, who had perfect grades and tennis trophies and a charity she started, on her own, during fifth grade.
Jealousy welled up inside of me and I tried to push it aside. Letting envy consume me would only hurt my focus and productivity.
“Well, I don’t intend to get caught,” I told Owen. If the hoax went according to plan, no one would ever realize my involvement in it. My sociological paper would be through the eyes of an innocent bystander, simply observing alleged alien activity.
There was a long pause before he spoke again. “I guess what’s bothering me is… Does it make you feel good to trick people?”
“What?” I sat up and Owen followed. “No. It’s not like that.”
“What it’s like then?”
“I…” I looked around, as if there was something in the field that would save me. The arrival of a UFO would’ve been very convenient. “I feel like you’re judging me right now.”
Owen let out a breath of exasperation. “I’m not judging you. I just want to know what’s going on in your head.”
“You know more about me than almost anyone.”
“If that’s true, it’s really sad,” Owen said.
I looked back at the sky, where, despite the complexity of the universe, things seemed so very simple.
After a long silence, Owen said, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly.
“Do you even care?”
“Of course I care. I just… This conversation is making me uncomfortable.”
The same way I got uncomfortable every time I was expected to articulate my emotions. It inevitably ended with me feeling like I was only pretending to be a person. Like I was the alien, trying to participate in human rituals I didn’t understand.
“Well, it makes me uncomfortable to not know where I stand with you—”
“You know where we stand,” I said.
“Since when?”
“You want me to tell you those feelings in words. That’s not how I express myself.”
Owen rubbed his eyes. “Whatever. You win again. We’ll drop it.”
It was the part where I was supposed to say no, we should keep talking. That I wanted to. I should’ve told Owen everything, how much he meant to me, how I hadn’t felt the same way about anyone else, how scared I was of losing him even though I knew it was unavoidable.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Instead, I gazed at the sky, and thought about everything above us that was unseen.
“Want to know something cool?” I asked, knowing he didn’t want anything of the sort. “Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was visually spotted.”
“Wow. Fascinating,” Owen deadpanned.
I plowed ahead. “See, the orbit of Uranus was defying the laws of Newtonian physics. This mathematician realized the weird orbital behavior would make perfect sense if there was a similar-sized planet nearby. He did the calculations, figured out where the mystery planet would be, pointed a telescope at that spot, and lo and behold: there was Neptune.”
“That’s great, Gideon.”
I pretended not to hear the hollow tone of his voice.
I pretended I knew how to be the person he wanted me to be.
Interlude
The Great Filter
Perhaps it’s time that I, Gideon Hofstadt, address my thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrials.
First, the facts:
• The Milky Way Galaxy contains more than 400 billion stars.
• About 20 billion of those stars are like our sun.
• Approximately one fifth of those sun-like stars have an Earth-sized planet in their habitable zone—an area favorable to the formation of life.
• If only .1 percent of those planets actually contained life, there would still be 1 million planets with life in the Milky Way.
With those odds, aliens must exist.
Yet…we have no evidence of them. Oh sure, there are claims by UFO hunters, but there’s no hard evidence. According to the previously listed points, extraterrestrials should be an undisputable fact.
This is where the Fermi Paradox comes in. The Fermi Paradox essentially states this: there should be aliens out there—so where are they?
Something must be stopping intelligent life from colonizing the universe. A barrier, or filter, if you will. The Great Filter. An event in the timeline of a planet that life simply can’t overcome.
If this