Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated with outer space. I think it was when my parents first brought me to our local planetarium that my fascination was awakened. There was just something in the immensity, the vastness, the mysterious majesty of the heavens above that captured my imagination and held on to it throughout the rest of my life. It was sometime around my childhood when I made up my mind that I wanted to study the stars. I possessed a drive that everyone around me was astounded by. Because of my desire to enter the field of astronomy I worked harder than any of my peers in my studies. I excelled in my classes and ended up attending a prestigious university on various scholarships to pursue my passion. My parents were certainly very proud. Once I completed my studies, I had done so well academically that I had my pick of the litter in terms of which agency I would like to work for. Because of the non-disclosure agreement I signed, I can’t mention which one, but what I can say is that it was a secretive wing of a quite famous agency. I took on a role of a research assistant for a top-secret initiative studying celestial occurrences through the most powerful telescopes known to man. Our equipment was more powerful than any member of the public could fathom. We saw everything years before even NASA would. It truly was the job of my dreams. At least, that’s what I thought.
I adored my work for the first few years that I worked for the agency. I couldn’t be happier each morning to wake up, have my cup of coffee, and speed down the dusty highway in rural Texas to our research facility. Now, to be clear, I was still new in the agency, and it often took many years for anyone to advance through the ranks. One not only had to display excellence in their respective field of study, but they also had to prove that they were reliable and could be trusted. After all, we were tasked with studying things the likes of which only a handful of people on the planet could see. We would study celestial formations light years away, and we learned of inner machinations of the universe that would often turn scientific research on its head. I worked under the command of my superiors, their watchful eyes carefully monitoring every word of research I documented. It was Dr. Robert Alder specifically that I worked under. My main tasks for the days weren’t usually looking through any of our dozens of super telescopes, although I had access to a few for specific assignments. No, most of what I did was sort through the data and type up reports for the higher ups. I know it doesn’t sound like the most thrilling of jobs, but occasionally, I got to do some searching through the telescopes and that was more than enough to satisfy my appetite for stargazing. After all, I was making a decent living and, on paper, at least I was doing something that I loved. But it was Dr. Alder who was usually the one looking through the telescopes. I was just the assistant. I didn’t even have access to the farthest-reaching telescopes we had, only Alder did. Being an intensely bureaucratic agency, there were all sorts of regulations that we had to adhere to. I could have charges pressed on me if I were to operate a piece of equipment that I did not possess the authorization to handle. As frustrating as that could be at times, I understood that it was for the best. The equipment we worked with was worth an unheard-of sum of money, after all.
Dr. Alder was a stern calculating man. He wasn’t the most sociable person, but then again you wouldn’t assume someone in a position such as his to be anyway. It was like he was more machine than man. He never used a single word more than he had to when communicating. His notes were clear and concise; his workplace was always immaculately clean. If he were to spill a drop of coffee on his desk, it would be cleaned up within the blink of an eye. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he had some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but even if he did, I would say that sort of condition might even be suitable for someone in this field, maybe even advantageous. But even with his cold demeanor, he was unanimously respected for his contributions to science, his dedication to his job, and how he kept our facility running with the efficiency of a Swiss watch. Everything that went on there, he knew about. He was the glue that held the machine together and kept it running with the precision that it did. He was almost like a celebrity among the others at the lab. Even though he seemed to disdain every other human on earth, it was the research that he conducted every day that contributed volumes to the archives of humanities knowledge. He had done so much for a species which he seemed to care so little for, which I always thought was peculiar but knew it was one of the countless questions in the universe for which I would likely not find an answer.
Over the course of my first few years working under Dr. Alder, we hadn’t always worked well together. Speaking with him was like navigating a minefield. If you faltered in any way and he was aware of it, you would be fired before you realized what was happening. It was as though he had a sixth sense for who was not going to make it in our facility. I had seen plenty of gifted scientists who were there before me and who came after who were sent from our lab with the contents of their desks packed up in a few small boxes. I had come close to being one such unfortunate individual on several occasions, with a handful of near mistakes. There was one occasion where I remember feeling as though my heart had literally sunk into my stomach as I realized that my formatting of a report was incorrect. I moved as quickly as I could to correct the error and I can feel my heartrate increasing just thinking about how scared I was to find Dr. Adler standing behind me, carefully observing my actions like a hawk observing a mouse scurrying through a field, hoping with every cell in my body that he hadn’t detected even my brief slip. It seemed that he hadn’t. Or maybe he had, but he could sense that I was the kind of researcher that would make it and decided to spare me his ire. This was yet another question I had to accept that I would never know the answer to.
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Despite the tense nature of the workplace that Dr. Alder administered, once I had found my footing and gradually became accustomed to the style of leadership he utilized, I grew to have a deep respect for the researcher. Although fear was never entirely out of the equation, I think he knew that having a little bit of tension in the air fostered the ideal sort of diligence that an operation such as ours required. So that’s how things carried on. We would show up each day or night depending on our orders, operate like machines and map the parts of the heavens that no one else could.
At times it bothered me that I was not allowed to use the most potent of our telescopes. The curiosity would eat away at me as my imagination ran wild with the possibilities of what might lie so far beyond the scope of an average telescope. The wonders that Dr. Alder had witnessed that an individual such as myself was relegated to simply typing down the coordinates of and taking down notes would drive me to madness if I allowed it. Often, I would try to distract myself. When I was not at work, being the true obsessive that I was when it came to matters of space, I would be in my own home observatory tinkering with my personal telescopes. I had posters of the constellations, the planets, everything you would imagine a space nut such as myself to have. But even as an adult I possessed the same childlike wonder and fascination with celestial bodies that propelled me past the point of caring about the opinions of others regarding my passion. However, even when gazing through my own telescopes I often found myself wondering about that which I could not observe, about the dark corners of the universe yet to be seen by myself, the corners which essentially only the doctor had direct knowledge of.
The adage, “curiosity killed the cat” comes to mind when thinking back on the leaps and bounds that science has made without perhaps thinking through all the potential consequence of our exploration. But that’s science, isn’t it? It’s always a risky thing to attempt to try something new, to go somewhere new, to embark upon the vast unknown. If you attempt to explore a dark room, you bear the risk of stubbing your toe on an unseen object, do you not? Scientific research is responsible for quite a few dead cats if you catch my meaning. It requires a brave individual to enter a field predicated upon shining a light on the dark corners of our world, because when searching for answers, when shining that light everywhere and anywhere you can, what you reveal isn’t always pleasant.
It’s those kinds of thoughts that never particularly occurred to me throughout my years at the facility. I had always known of risky fields of science, even downright dangerous ones. But I had never considered the work we conducted to have any element of danger to it. Sure, if there was some sort of cataclysmic cosmic event, we would be the first to know of it, but with how vast the universe is, events such as those, and they did occur, rarely posed a threat to our little blue marble of a planet. I had always thought of what we did as quite safe. We were sitting on an isolated island in a vast ocean and were simply observing everything around us with our binoculars. Of course, things that we observed could be awe inspiring, humbling, or even terrifying, there was always a feeling of insulation from the massive events of the universe around us, the feeling that whatever was observed had no way of affecting whoever observed it in the lab. Until quite recently I could have scarcely fathomed how misplaced my sense of safety regarding our work had been.
