PROSE It was beautiful when I first saw it. The Great Conjunction. A reassurance to all my doubts, a blanket covering up any regret. This was what I had waited for, what I had chosen to see. This was the reason. This, and so many other phenomena most people would only see once. Hell, most wouldn’t see them at all. But me, I’ve seen it twice now. Before, I was ecstatic about it; but now, watching the very same event that had fascinated me, that had comforted me, now, it is a reminder of the past. Of the losses. Of the mistakes. Of my mistake. When I was a kid, I was the ultimate space nerd. I was the most excited one when we went over our astronomy unit in school. I knew the names of so many constellations, I lost track how many somewhere along the way. I knew the nature of all the planets, the important scientists and scientific discoveries leading to the knowledge we had back in 2076. I was maybe, 13, 14, at that time. Technology and science had expanded our knowledge of the planet and the universe, even solved some of the problems we had on Earth. With things like man-induced climate change, global warming was reduced significantly—not completely gone, but enough that the planet was recovering. With Earth back in a healthy place, the number of astronomers, astronauts, and aspiring astronomers and astronauts had increased greatly. So did participation in other sciences, of course. But the space beyond our little planet that, ironically, was called space but wasn’t empty at all, filled many minds. Including mine. As I grew, I had one goal: to become an astronomer, specifically focusing on things outside of our solar system like exoplanetology, the study of planets outside our solar system. New planets were being discovered every year by astronomers and they’d found evidence of extraterrestrial life. It hadn’t been certain, still an ongoing analysis, but it was basically the most interesting thing I’d found in high school. It’s not ongoing anymore; they concluded that it was
9|The penchant||JAN 2021
MY ETERNAL MISTAKE by red Murthy, Sumukh, “The Great Nebula in Orion”
real evidence many, many years ago, and right now, we’ve found and are in contact with life forms a few galaxies away. Exciting news, really. This was what I had chosen it for, after all. But at this point, loss has surpassed gain. When I finally graduated college, I was accepted into one of the best space exploration facilities. My dreams were finally coming true. I struggled, fought, and climbed my way up there, slowly, very, very slowly, but surely. And by god, I had made it. I started quickly as an intern, until I finally got a full time job. This was my dream. Studying planets, studying space. It was beautiful. Every day went by and I never felt like I was working. I felt like I was on top of the world. I was proud of myself, my family was proud of me, and I had never felt better. I didn’t realize my love for what was beyond had pushed away everything else. There was a discovery. Or more so, a publication of a discovery. It was a medical one, made when I was in my 30s: a medicine that was
said to prolong life by a couple decades. That stopped the body from physically growing for a bit. When I was in my late 40s, the pills went public. They were tested to the best of their abilities for the past few decades, worked on since 2026. At the time, I had reached a wall in my research. I was observing a phenomenon in the Igeqa Galaxy, the most recently discovered one. It was something like the Great Conjunction, but with 5 exoplanets. I had never seen the Great Conjunction and I would never see it in my lifetime, as it wouldn’t occur for another few hundred years. Obsessing over this event, I spent day and night trying to figure it out. True, it was similar to the Great Conjunction, but something was different. Something big. It created a sort of gravitation field only when the exoplanets aligned. But how? My curiosity and hard work was praised by my team, but it went too far. When the pills went public, at first, they were only given to a select few. They were too powerful to be publicized all at once. Only those
