Telescope

“No one can hide the past. At some point, you’re going to have to stop hiding from yours.”

Even on Charris, the most sophisticated and insulated of societies, there was no guarantee of a happy life. Many of my human counterparts found this reality difficult to process. They lamented the potential of our more talented clients who continuously seemed to “throw their lives away.” Strictly, this was never true. My take, which was not an uneducated one, was that most of the convicts we dealt with simply had a different vision for their lives than their teachers, parents, friends, and lovers would have chosen for them. This was not the case with Edwin Hawk-Marr. He just made a tremendous mistake on a very bad day.

Ed was a surprisingly brilliant man, if a little emotionally volatile under trying circumstances. He’d also trained in the martial arts for his physical qualification as a student, ironically, a choice he’d made to enhance his mental discipline. Thus, he was a tremendously powerful individual and skilled fighter who chose to fight three men on the worst night of his life. “I couldn’t see anything else,” was how he’d explained it in our first meeting. From his perspective, his life had fallen apart. He’d fallen short of his highest aspiration—to be selected as an astronomical surveyor on a colony mission to the Battery systems. Even more devastating to Edwin, his wife, who’d only applied for the mission at his urging, was selected after their separation despite their having applied as a couple. He’d received the news that Tris had accepted her place in the Alpha-Olivier colony group a week following his own rejection, and a night of commiseration with his younger brother turned ugly when Ed perceived that one of the three men he chose to fight had insulted his brother. He broke one of their legs, knocked out a second—inducing a serious concussion—and the third, the judge determined, he may have killed if there hadn’t been security bots so close at hand. The young victim had gone limp, was completely defenseless, and Ed, even with his brother trying to pull him off, didn’t cease pummeling his unfortunate victim until the bots thankfully intervened.

In the early Colonial era, incarceration was a rare punishment on Charris, reserved for violent offenders with a danger of committing future violence. Edwin Hawk-Marr was one such case. And he was the first violent offender in my case log. I met him five years after the offense, after he’d served his sentence in Langdon Hills. He claimed he was a different person then.

“Do I have to explain it to you, Delius?” he said.

“That is part of the entry interview,” I told him.

His eyes wandered around the apartment. Like all the transitional housing in Bruhl, it was a modest, one bedroom unit, fixed in the cliffside rock along the northern boundary of the city proper—a rather lucky placement for a man in his situation.

“As my monitor, though, didn’t you have access to all of my files? That’d mean you must have accessed every therapy session, uploaded every note on me. You know more about my behavior than my own mother, no?”

“I have incorporated all of that data, yes, Mr. Hawk-Marr, but I would like to hear how you talk about it.”

“You mean how I talk about it now?” he said. “Track my progress from yesterday?”

“You must participate in the process.”

“I knew how monumental a mistake it was five years ago, okay, Delius? I get to live with the regret every day for the rest of my life. And now I have to tell another robot about how sorry I am, while you what? Measure the sincerity in my eyes by tracking pupil dilation? Body language? Give me a break, please.”

Decades of data on reluctant participants suggested that Edwin was in for a difficult transition and an even more difficult life following it. Like many others in his predicament, struggling to reintegrate into ordinary life on Charris, he had largely given up on himself. I did my best to coach him through the basics, but initially, he showed no signs of aspirations beyond what would get him emancipated from the program.

Edwin had been in Bruhl three days before his mother appeared. When I opened the door, Ceilidh Hawk brushed me aside, inspected the premises carefully, and immediately demanded to know why Edwin had allowed his monitor to open the door for his mother. She had a different vision for her son. She’d been making calls on his behalf, struggling to find a work placement that matched his prior training as a planetary surveyor. Edwin had laughed at her when she told him so on a visit to Langdon Hills weeks prior.

“If you think any observatory is going to allow me on the premises to do anything other than clean the floors, you’re crazy, mom.”

“Then you’ll clean the floors,” she said, “until you’ve earned their trust.”

The observatory in Bruhl was educational, not functional, and they didn’t need people to clean their floors. That was easier work for our kind. But she’d persisted, making such a nuisance of herself to the director of an observatory in the Saypul Flats, halfway across the planet, that this director agreed to take on Edwin as a daylight-shift observer, which, in Bruhl, meant that Edwin would have to work all night remotely, covering parts of the Saypul relay station. Ceilidh Hawk must have called hundreds of such stations all over Charris to finally get anyone to consider Ed. Somehow, though, within the first few weeks of his release, Edwin was holding a post at an observatory remotely, and it was quite an interesting one for him. The telescope was of novel design to him—the Mayer-Saad scope resided at Charris’s L-3—its reflective surface composed of a dynamic, programmable liquid nano-metal mirror that the operator could re-shape to fine tune the telescope’s optics almost in real time.

During his orientation and training period for the observatory, there were moments when Edwin could scarcely contain his excitement about the scope, stating multiple times aloud to no one but himself, “This telescope is so amazing.” And he was so motivated to keep the job as part of his work release that during his first shifts while adjusting to a night schedule he would stand most of the night, even periodically doing calisthenics to ensure he wouldn’t fall asleep on watch. As it is for most humans, adapting to a nocturnal rhythm was difficult for Edwin, so much so for him, that after three weeks, he insisted that his mother come to visit him in the evening before work, so that his new sleep schedule wouldn’t be upset by her visit.

Ceilidh Hawk, just as she had while Edwin was incarcerated, made a regular visit each Tuesday, settling for nothing less than a thorough report on his week from Edwin himself. She hardly acknowledged my existence. “That bot is not your friend, Edwin,” she would tell him each time she visited. “It is an appliance, just a tool to monitor you. You can’t mistake it for company.”

Of course she was correct. I had a function higher than Edwin’s well-being—reducing recidivism, not for his benefit, but for the benefit of any future potential victims of his violent temper. Whatever psychological rehabilitation programming I helped him through was provided in service of that primary goal. I was not his friend. But as his monitor, I did share many of his mother’s objectives, the first of which, outside of day-to-day concerns, was to find Edwin some human social contact.

Despite having a job that was quite fulfilling to him, he had little else in his life, which was complicated by his schedule. While the rest of Bruhl was asleep, Edwin was working, and during the few crossover hours when he ventured out during daylight, he was on a much different wavelength. He also had limited enthusiasm for life. He didn’t articulate it, but my analysis of his behavior indicated that the sting of his wife’s rejection and subsequent departure from Charris had left him bitter and apathetic. He needed the Mayer-Saad telescope, as it gave purpose to him professionally, but he didn’t have any active hobbies that took him outside that cliffside apartment. In those early weeks, Edwin’s only social interaction beyond his own family came through text exchanges on the Mayer-Saad telescope’s weekly activities reports. He was as isolated a client as I’d ever been attached to. I wasn’t sure it would ever become a problem with respect to Edwin’s likelihood of reoffending, but it certainly wouldn’t make for a happy life if he continued to isolate in such a limiting way. It was a certain truth, though, that not every human, even on Charris, would live a happy life.

Two months after his job at the Saypul Flats Observatory began, Edwin’s mother appeared unexpectedly at his apartment at six-thirty one morning. He was just finishing his shift. She prepared breakfast for him, or dinner as it were, and when the meal had concluded, she presented him with an application for charter.

“Mom, what are we doing here? I couldn’t even get accepted as a surveyor on somebody else’s charter—and that was before I was a convicted criminal.”

“Not for a colony, Edwin, for a telescope.”

“A telescope?”

“Yes, Edwin. I want you to start doing something with your life—to chart a plan in an official manner.”

“They don’t give charters for telescopes, Mom.”

“They haven’t given a charter for a telescope…yet.”

Edwin shook his head and seemed to grow angry with his mother.

“Even if my life were pristine, they wouldn’t set aside charter money for a telescope. They have plenty of telescopes. They’re not going to finance one for a convict—to what? I don’t know anything better to look at than the Saypul scope does anyway.”

He was growing agitated, so I approached the table.

“I’ll thank you to keep your nosy self out of my family’s business,” Ceilidh Hawk said, turning toward me. “We’ll settle this ourselves, android.”

“As if I would ever…” Edwin said.

“I know love,” she said. “It’s just a mindless thing.”

“Anyway. What’s the point?”

“The point is that you used to love astronomy. You had so many great ideas. And I remember you saying as a student that if they spent a tenth of the time and attention that they spent on colonization building a proper telescope we could explore other galaxies without ever leaving our own.”

“Hyperbole, mother.”

“There’s an idea in there, though. Something to get behind. It may not be focused yet, but you can focus it by writing it out, planning. Will it into being, Edwin. You can’t mope around this apartment for the rest of your life.”

After his mother left, I could tell he was upset.

“Would you like to discuss what is bothering you, Ed?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer me. Both programming and experience informed me that people who struggle with challenges grow defensive when confronted with their shortcomings, even from those who mean the best for them, as Ceilidh Hawk certainly did. For nearly three days, Ed didn’t say a word to me beyond what was required by the formal strictures of my monitoring protocols.

When I asked him about it in our next formal interview, he said, “My mother’s right. You’re not a friend. You’re not even a person, just a mildly intelligent bot, programmed to monitor human behavior. You’re a deception.”

“My job is to help you.”

“Your job is to help me by ensuring I don’t hurt anyone else. It’s not necessary. I never will again, Delius.”

“May I make a suggestion, Ed?”

“You can make it.”

“Perhaps, during your downtime at night, while monitoring the telescope, you might turn half an eye toward that proposal template. The call for charter, even if it is unrealistic to think that you will be awarded a bid, may help you to focus an idea. Clearly, your mother thought you had one.”

He shrugged. Over the course of the next several days, though, I found him reading technical specs about arrays, doing math that included numbers on such a scale that even I understood his idea dwarfed the size of any contemporary telescope yet conceived.

When his mother visited next, they discussed it, and it was Edwin’s position that he could not feasibly put forth a bid before the due date, because he did not have the engineering knowledge to design a construction process or even begin to estimate cost. He could only advise on the technical elements of the telescope itself and make the case for its utility.

“Write those parts yourself, and then find a partner,” she told him. “No charter gets written by one person, Edwin.”

He continued to sketch elements of his array, again, never informing me of the details. I did ask him about it over the coming weeks, doing my best to encourage him, even as he received no response from the engineers he reached out to.

With two weeks to go and no engineering advisors and a woefully incomplete proposal, Edwin submitted a bid that contained his personal information and history and a proposal that read in its entirety: “Super Telescope.”

I chose not contradict him the following week when he told his mother he’d submitted his bid. Factually, this was true. It was also true that he’d put an honest effort into the design of his super telescope. He simply lacked the other necessary skills to make the proposal complete. Most charter proposals never made it past the first stage, and likely his, even if it had been proposed by the most esteemed team of respected professionals in their fields, wouldn’t have been looked at seriously. Edwin had been correct from the start. Government charter funds were for colonization projects, not telescopes. Lots of excellent ideas never come to fruition.

As Edwin’s six-month benchmark approached, I was required to report on his general progress. Satisfactory was the word that most summed up Edwin’s situation. I gauged the likelihood of him reoffending at less than one percent but still not zero. Regardless of my assessment, I was still required to monitor Edwin for another three full years from that report date.

On the Wednesday of that week, shortly after noon, quite unexpectedly, a visitor appeared in the building looking for Edwin. He was fast asleep, of course. The woman expressed that she was a government employee working on behalf of the colonization bureau, and she claimed to want to interview Edwin regarding his charter proposal. I told her to come up but to take her time. Then I rushed to wake up Edwin so he could make himself presentable. He was quite out of sorts. I told him to hurry.

She arrived at the door a few minutes later. She had an Alba with her.

“For protection?” I asked her.

The woman shrugged.

“Mr. Hawk-Marr may be a few moments longer,” I said. “May I inquire what this is about?”

“The bureau requires that we investigate all bids thoroughly. His bid was, quite frankly, bizarre. We’ve never had a prank bid before. I think they sent me to investigate whether that might be something we need to anticipate in the future. I thought it was interesting myself,” the woman joked. “Who wouldn’t find a super telescope at least mildly intriguing.

“Do you know why he was so…let’s call it…sparse in his description of the proposed project?”

“I would prefer to allow Edwin to speak for himself,” I said. “And here he is now.”

Edwin introduced himself.

“You look like you just came out of stasis,” the woman joked. “Are you okay?”

“I work the night shift,” he said. “I was sleeping. I can explain. I didn’t think anyone would read any further on the bid than my bio.”

“I did,” the woman said. “I’m Amy Rudin, BoC. I must say I found your proposal refreshingly brief if a little cryptic. Care to explain it further?”

Edwin invited her to sit and offered her coffee, which she declined. As they were seated in the living room, Amy Rudin’s Alba began inquiring about Edwin.

“Your human has violent tendencies,” she said to me. “I am concerned for Amy’s physical safety in his presence.”

“You needn’t be,” I said.

“What is the likelihood of your human attacking her during this encounter.”

“Zero percent,” I told her.

“That’s impossible,” her Alba said. “There must be a non-zero probability with respect to human behavior, especially if the subject has engaged in such behavior before.”

“Humans are not elementary particles. It is precisely because he has engaged in such behavior before that it is impossible for him to harm your charge now, Alba. I must insist that you be quiet while I perform my duty of monitoring Mr. Edwin.”

“I am perfectly capable of processing both conversations at once and will relay a recording of theirs if you cannot.”

I didn’t answer her. Of course, I could process both conversations. This simple Alba, though, was creating an unnecessary distraction within earshot of Edwin and Ms. Rudin.

Edwin had pulled up the specs for his telescope on the table. Ms. Rudin appeared to be impressed by the design.

“Why didn’t you submit this?” she asked him.

“I didn’t have the expertise to fill out more than two-thirds of the template. There are entire sections I wouldn’t know where to begin—estimated cost, materials, production.”

“But your premise is great, even if it’s not for BoC. We build ships and heavy deep-space construction gear. This isn’t too far off base for what we do, but there’s no colonization component.”

“It could be used to survey with better than a million times the resolution of Saypul, for one. Don’t get me wrong, we have good telescopes. They’re just all too close together to see anything in space with the kind of resolution we should be capable of with FTL ships. We just need to do it.”

“Is that why you’re proposing this? To aid in colonization efforts?”

“You could do any number of useful things with it,” Edwin said. “My first thought when I pondered the idea seriously, probably a decade ago, was to look for Dyson spheres in neighboring galaxies. You could do a first pass in the visible spectrum, use software to map the stars in individual plots in the outer bands, then do a second pass in infrared and overlay the two. If there’s a discrepancy in the number of stars, then we could really zoom in, see if there’s a K-2 civilization hiding in plain sight.”

“Hmm,” Ms. Rudin said. “Can I take this? I’d like to show it to a few people.”

Edwin shrugged. “I’ve done some very basic estimates on the cost. I think it might cost a fraction of a colony, and for that price, we could do more surveying from Charris than a thousand colonial fleets could ever hope to do.”

“I’m not going to promise anything, but I will say, we always have a fraction of our yearly budget left over. This is something I could see a convincing argument for funding.”

“I hope so,” Edwin said. “Just please don’t leave me out if you find people interested in developing it.”

“Of course…why would you think we would even consider that?”

“For the same reason you brought your Alba down here with you. I’m used to it, but, I mean, I wouldn’t even ask for a leadership role or anything. I’d just want to work on this.”

“Don’t worry about that part of things. Good ideas are good ideas. I’ll be in touch, Edwin,” Amy said. “I’m glad this wasn’t a prank.”

“Encouraging,” I said to Edwin after she’d left.

He shook his head at me. “My mother is right. This isn’t any of your business, Delius.”

Several weeks later, Edwin received an invitation from a colleague of Amy’s to organize a meeting for a small group of her colleagues. Amy had taken the portion of the bid Edwin had written, shown it to some friends, and collectively, they’d decided on which of their contacts would be best to fill the gaps in the application. Their intention was to re-apply the following year with a complete proposal.

Edwin examined the list of people who’d taken an interest in the project. They were serious people—researchers, developers, engineers, financiers, all extremely well-credentialed. Most had aged out of consideration for colonial resettlement, people who had the future of Charris in mind. It was difficult to tell, as he’d largely stopped talking to me beyond the minimal answers at required sessions, but body language told me there was a high probability he was hesitant to meet with the group. He did, however, tell his mother, Ceilidh Hawk, about it. She encouraged him to reach out and set up the meeting.

“Opportunities like that will not fall in your lap often, Edwin,” she told him. “Do not let it pass by.”

I asked him, several days later why he hadn’t set the meeting yet. He told me it was none of my business.

One of the people on Amy’s contact list was an astronomer named Violet McKey. She was young, but already a top-tier researcher in deep-space imaging. She was one of the developers of the liquid nano-metal telescope Edwin was monitoring nightly through Saypul Flats. I surmised that the group desired a chief astronomer more credentialed than Edwin himself. I began to wonder if this wasn’t part of what had been putting him off calling the group together. She was from Niera, which was quite a long tube ride from Bruhl. Still, she made an unexpected visit to Edwin’s flat early one morning, completely unannounced. She must have gotten word through Amy that I was here with Edwin at all times, because she showed up unescorted.

“I’m Violet McKey,” she announced when Edwin answered the door.

“Please, come in, Violet,” he said. “An astronomer named Violet. People ever give you a hard time about that?”

“What do you mean?” she said, seemingly completely at ease with Edwin.

“Ultraviolet?”

She laughed. “No. Nobody’s ever called me that before. You ever get a hard time for being named Edwin?”

“Most people call me Ed. Why?”

“Hubble? You even look a little like him.”

“I’ve never seen a picture,” Ed said. “I was just about to have dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“I work the night shift on the Saypul Flats relay station.”

“Oh! That’s one of ours,” Violet said. “I’d love to get your thoughts on the mirror sometime, but what I really came to talk to you about is your super telescope, Edwin—Ed, sorry.”

“It’s fine. I like Edwin fine.”

They sat in the living room. Ed’s observatory station was still set up at the pullout desk across from the sofa. Violet let a subtle smile escape as she looked over at the signals still coming in from Saypul.

“You haven’t set up the charter proposal group yet—the meeting. I’ve been waiting, and I have a friend in Bruhl I’ve been meaning to visit, so I came down for the weekend. I figured I’d stop by and see what was keeping you from reaching out, Ed.”

Ed shrugged.

“Is it your background? Because I’m not bothered by it—certainly not enough to pass on an opportunity to pioneer something like this.”

“I was just looking at all these experts, yourself included, Violet, and wondering where I fit in.”

“Are you kidding? You’ve already done at least a quarter of the work. The individual scope design is good. It needs work with the automators and the systems engineers to work through the manufacturing process, but it’s a solid start.”

“I can’t add all that much more, though.”

“I’m going to need help proposing use schedules and developing a process for identifying targets. We need to program the AI in each scope to follow an identical flowchart. That’s just to get started, and it all has to be done before we make a serious proposal, which, by the way, I have to ask—did you seriously submit a charter proposal that just said ‘super telescope’?”

“I did do that, yes.”

Violet laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you, it’s with you. It’s just so perfect.”

“How so?”

“Oh, do you know how many proposals I wished I had the stones to do something like that. Probably the reviewers respected it enough to send out Amy.”

Ed shrugged.

“Are you up for working on this thing, Ed, because I want to see it get built?”

“I would love to be a part of it.”

“You’ll be a big part of it. Just set the meeting. The group Amy proposed is from all over Charris, so we should probably plan on weekly meetings in a virtual space. Then we can plan on a get-together at some point when things get serious.”

“Sounds great,” Ed said. “I’ll set it up.”

Violet got up. “See you out there, Hubble,” she said.

“Later, Ultraviolet.”

“This’ll be so fun.”

The group met weekly for two hours in the first month they were getting established. On his schedule, Ed had to stay up late for that meeting, but he was more than happy to do so as the group got its legs under it. As it was my duty to monitor Ed at all times, I was privy to all of these discussions as well. To grasp the complexity of such a project was beyond my capability. But I can report what was said, and often, I would ask Ed to explain the technical details of the project in terms that I could understand.

The Telescope wasn’t revolutionary in its design. Really, what Ed and the group were proposing was an automated deep-space telescope assembly line. Once the process was up and working, the system would produce as many as a thousand telescopes per year. They would then be deployed by small automated FTL ships to pre-determined coordinates in interstellar space. The ultimate goal of the project, Edwin explained, would be to search for stars whose light may be completely blocked by a civilization using starlight as an energy source. No such civilization had ever been detected in our galaxy of course, but this telescope array, when completed in nearly a century, with a hundred thousand individual scopes acting in unison, would theoretically be able to examine individual stars in other galaxies. They would be able to map a galaxy by plots, count the stars in the visible spectrum, and then find missing stars using the scope’s infrared feature. If there were a discrepancy in the number of stars in a plot, computational analysis would be able to pinpoint the missing stars and then train the scope on that spot for greater scrutiny. Of course, this was only one possible application of such a powerful instrument. It would be, by far, the most potent telescope ever constructed, seeing all the way to the cosmological event horizon with a resolution previously inconceivable.

Creating such an array, though, was no easy thing. The group loved the idea of petitioning the colonization bureau because they were the authority allocating FTL drives, almost all of which were directed toward the singular purpose of colonization. For Edwin’s array, though, only a small number of ships would need to be dedicated to the purpose at first. Eventually, additional ships would be added as transit times increased with the array’s expansion. Relative to a colonial charter, which generally required a minimum of sixty FTL capable ships, Edwin’s cost was small. The production line of the telescopes itself, the group’s financier estimated, would come in between a quarter and a third of a large colonial charter. There were problems in design that had never been approached before, though. Edwin had thought of that as detrimental to the project’s approval at first, but as he came to know the group better, he learned such problems were so invigorating to the systems engineers, mechanization specialists, and production designers that there would be no shortage of like-minded people clamoring to work on such a project. None of them so much as asked about his checkered past once Violet had given her approval.

  In addition to the weekly team meetings, Ed held almost daily briefings with Violet. They worked well together, Violet the early riser and Edwin the night owl. By the time he woke up each evening, Ed had a list of questions to ponder and chores to perform while he kept watch at Saypul. Violet would wake to a new stack of work to review. It was not difficult to see, especially for one specifically programmed to observe the many facets of human behavior, that a deep friendship was developing between Edwin and Violet.

When the team finished their first draft of the proposal, everyone agreed to meet in Salis, because it was spring and the oceanfront on the western side of the continent was particularly beautiful that time of year. Edwin had no restrictions on his freedom to travel so long as he was accompanied. I could read Edwin’s emotions almost perfectly. I knew my presence around the other scientists would certainly embarrass him. I could tell by his body language in the week leading up to the trip that it was troubling him so deeply he was going to back out. Apparently, I was not the only one to notice this.

Two days before the gathering, Violet appeared at Edwin’s door accompanied by that same Alba from Amy Rudin’s prior visit. “For the weekend,” she told Edwin. “Amy loaned her to me to keep Delius company on the trip. Don’t they make a cute couple?”

Edwin laughed. “There’s nothing in the universe that could ever make me describe Delius as cute.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “When he gets that blank look on his face—like it is now, yup, that one right there—and he looks like he’s totally upset but trying not to be upset, I think that look is pretty cute.”

“I thought we were going to meet in Salis,” Edwin said.

“I thought we could travel together, Hubble. Just us and the bots. I hope you hadn’t made travel plans yet, because I’ve got my agency’s short shuttle for the weekend.”

“You weren’t planning on leaving tonight?”

“Tomorrow,” Violet said. “I just wanted to make sure you’d be ready.”

Violet didn’t stay much longer than was necessary to get her point across. There was no backing out for Edwin, and she got her point across to me as she stepped out. The Alba messaged me directly with the following command: “From: Violet McKey. Directive—Do not speak unless spoken to. Duration—Entire weekend.”

Though Violet and Edwin were quite friendly with one another that trip, the pace of the work amongst the group was so frenetic, there was little time left for socializing. And the astronomers were so in demand among the other specialists that Violet and Edwin hardly saw much of each other, save for when the whole group gathered at meals. Again, even seated away from the humans as I and Alba were, I could see in Edwin’s bearing that he was grateful Violet had dragged him to the meeting. It would have been a tremendous setback for him to fail in that moment. Instead, he made strides far beyond what I had seen in months, in confidence, in pride for his work.

One didn’t need to be a specialist in body language to recognize the other emotion he was showing. The familiarity Edwin and Violet had built with each other in virtual spaces had translated to the real world. Even seated at opposite ends of a large table, this much was obvious.

“I’m glad you dragged me out,” Edwin said to her at the end of the weekend.

“We didn’t get much time to work together,” Violet said. “And we still have a million things to tackle. I may borrow the short shuttle again next weekend to visit. Would that be okay?”

“That’d be great,” Ed said. “It’s just…I may fall asleep on you at odd times.”

“Or maybe I’m the odd one. We’re all on the wrong schedule anyway. Charris. This twenty-seven-hour day?”

“Right,” Ed said. “Next weekend then.”

They did have a tremendous amount of work to do. One of the systems specialists, whose background was in mechanical engineering, had asked a question regarding the array’s disk shape that sent the team on a completely different developmental path. “What tradeoffs would we need to make in order to aim and focus the telescope with equal resolution in all directions?”

The team’s initial answer, changing the array’s shape from a disk to a sphere, demanded far more resources. The solution the team settled on was three perpendicular disks on three planes. The three-disc layout allowed the array to function almost as effectively as a spherical grid, allowing them to turn their interstellar eye toward any distant point in the cosmos, again with staggering resolution through every band of the electromagnetic spectrum. But it required a lot of work from the astronomy team to re-write the charter proposal to reflect this change. It was something perhaps only an astronomer would overlook, with their history of fixed scopes in the craters of moons or the early reflecting telescopes looking up at the sky from the ground. Astronomers were used to having constraints on what they could see. Mechanical engineers, however, thought to ask why they shouldn’t be able to point their scope in all directions with equal results at any given time. So Edwin and Violet got to work. And, at first, their time together was strictly work. But as they came closer and closer to completing their proposal, nearly six months prior to the charter call’s deadline, their visits grew more social, personal, and eventually, intimate.

Violet continued to come to visit Edwin in Bruhl, even after the group’s draft was complete. We also made several trips to visit her in Niera, which was quite a long trip without the benefit of a personal shuttle, as Violet had access to.

During that time, the team had outside reviewers in various fields critiquing the proposal, and as those critiques came in, Edwin and Violet would make revisions. All night, Edwin would be working on several floatscreens with alerts for the telescope at Saypul, while on his glasses, he was reviewing aspects of the proposal. Each morning, he’d report his progress to Violet.

In those months, during Violet’s weekend visits, Ceilidh Hawk would sometimes drop in on her son and his new girlfriend. Edwin’s mother genuinely liked Violet nearly as much as he did, if body language was any indication.

One afternoon, while the three of them were enjoying lunch at Edwin’s flat, Ceilidh asked Violet whether Ed had ever met her parents. It was not a comfortable question for either of them.

“I gather from the silence, the answer’s no,” Ceilidh Hawk said after a long pause. “I know it’s difficult, Edwin, but I think you should.”

“I think you should mind your own business mother.”

“You’re right…of course,” she said. “But I was just wondering, if you’re as big a part of Violet’s life as she is of yours, I’m sure they would be looking forward to meeting you.”

She looked over at Violet, who took a deep breath, but didn’t say anything.

“We’ve come a long way, Edwin,” his mother said. “No one can hide the past. At some point, you’re going to have to stop hiding from yours.”

“Mother,” Ed said, shaking his head.

“You are both going to need to stand before the board at the BoC if your charter goes through. Delius will be in the room if that happens, and Violet’s family will be watching every minute of that hearing just like I will, rooting for their daughter. I think it would be good if they were rooting for you as well, rather than wondering about who you are.”

“Okay,” Ed said. “Enough.”

“I’ll change the subject,” Ceilidh said. “I’m sorry, but some things just need to be said.”

Violet didn’t say so, but she agreed.

They argued that night. Ed slept on the sofa. In the morning, before she left, Violet told Edwin that he needed to come to Niera again to meet her parents. “It’s not like I’m not just as scared as you,” she said. “I want them to love you, and I’m scared they won’t. They know about your past, and they worry. I don’t think they will once they meet you. The longer you remain a mystery to them, the worse it gets.”

After Violet left, Edwin struggled to fall asleep.

“Would you like to discuss it?” I asked Ed. “It could help.”

“Delius,” he said. “I wish you would just go away.”

“I will go away in two years, one hundred thirteen days, and three hours.”

Three weekends following that incident, Violet flew down to Bruhl and took us back with her to Niera so Edwin could meet her parents. The visit was far more pleasant than Edwin had envisioned. He was particularly enamored of Violet’s father, who was himself, an amateur astronomer. They spent much of the weekend discussing the possible uses for the super telescope.

“All that can be seen, will be seen,” Violet’s father marveled at one point. “What an exciting time we live in. You kids just need to make it happen.”

The charter proposal cleared all three initial review stages with the highest possible recommendation from the BoC advisors. The quantitative scores were flawless, and the qualitative reviews were glowing, one of the senior analysts declaring it the most original and promising proposal in decades. Everyone seemed to appreciate the super scope’s potential for remotely surveying prospective colony sites, and they loved that it had countless astronomical applications beyond the scope of BoC uses.

As Ceilidh Hawk had predicted, Edwin Hawk-Marr was called to the BoC with the rest of the team to answer questions before the chief advisory board. To express how unlikely it was for a convict to achieve such a distinction, it is probably easiest to state that in the entire history of the Bureau of Colonization on Charris, whose existence spanned nearly nine centuries, Edwin Hawk-Marr was the only such case.

Of course, I was required to accompany him. With us as well were Edwin’s mother and brother, who on that occasion, had their first chance to meet the McKeys, who also attended the review session in person.

These sessions were exhausting by human standards, sometimes lasting multiple days. Each principal investigator was given a list of general topics on which the reviewers intended to cross examine them and an estimated timeframe. Edwin’s cue came back to him with a single word: “Motivation” and the timeframe: 30 minutes.

Ed and Violet entered the amphitheater holding hands. I sat in the back row, doing my best to remain inconspicuous, though the presence of a bot did draw a few suspicious looks, which I ignored.

Almost all of the astronomical considerations were addressed to Violet McKey. These were primarily educational questions from the non-astronomers on the panel. Most had to do with data collection and lag time, as a telescope like theirs, spread out over tens of light years would need to collect data on the same events asymmetrically, and because of the distance between each telescope in such a vast array, there were great logistical problems collating all that data in a cohesive manner. Violet, of course, explained their system of data repository stations in a manner even I found comprehensible. One of the reviewers described it as a deep-space pony express, where the FTL ships deploying new telescopes on the outer periphery would serve as “ponies,” picking up data from relay stations on their way back to Charris. This seemed apt imagery, if antiquated.

After Violet took questions for nearly four hours, the chair of the review board himself, Ryland Eliander, called upon Edwin to answer questions. Based on the single word he received in advance—motivation—Ed expected he would be asked about his character. Ryland Eliander began as follows.

“Mr. Hawk-Marr, it’s my understanding, that this is not your first attempt at being a part of a colonial charter. Is that correct?”

“It is,” Ed answered.

“You applied to be a part of the Alpha-Olivier charter did you not?”

“I did, but my presence here indicates that I was not accepted, obviously, if that’s where you were going, Mr. Eliander.”

“To the contrary. I was seeking to establish your credibility as an astronomical surveyor. That you were considered seriously speaks to your level of expertise. Would you consider yourself a highly skilled astronomer, Mr. Hawk-Marr?”

“I would like to think so.”

“Good. Your work on this charter proposal makes it obvious to the rest of us. You’ve worked on many different telescopes of various design?”

“I have.”

“But nothing nearly this powerful?”

“No, sir. No one has.”

“Indeed this would be the most powerful telescope ever created, would it not?”

“By many orders of magnitude. We could see as far as we ever have with a clarity previously unthinkable.”

“Right,” Chairman Eliander said. “That’s what I was trying to get at. Mr. Hawk-Marr, given your expertise as a telescope operator and your considerable knowledge in surveying astronomical regions, systems, and bodies, approximately how long would it take you, using a telescope of this magnitude, to find Sol?”

“To find Sol? Excuse me?”

“That is my question, sir. I would like a simple answer, please. How long?”

Edwin paused. Clearly, he had never seriously considered the possibility before. He was silent for nearly thirty seconds before Ryland Eliander prodded further.

“Mr. Hawk-Marr, I don’t need an exact answer, just an estimate.”

“I’m sorry. I was doing some math in my head,” Ed said. “It would depend. Return time on the data varies, as Dr. McKey explained, and it would also depend on whether we were focused on that area or happened to be focusing on a more distant part of space beyond that area of the Orion Spur.”

“Let’s say your motivation was to find Earth with your telescope. Yes or no, could you do it?”

“Certainly, yes.”

“Probably you could get a picture of Earth transecting Sol?”

“How high the resolution would be, I can’t say exactly, but, yes, we could see Earth.”

“How long?”

“You’re asking about identifying the location, specifically, or how long it would take to get the data back from the telescope?”

“For the sake of argument, ignore the lag time on the scope. How long would it take a surveyor like you to take a picture of the general area of the galaxy, knowing the characteristics of Earth’s solar system and Sol’s neighbors, and then home in on—well—our ancient home? Your best guess.”

Edwin shrugged, scrunching up his brow. He knew where Ryland Eliander was going with his line of questioning by that point, but there was no hiding reality.

“Four hours, give or take.”

“That fast?”

“I’m good at my job, sir.”

Eliander looked shocked. “Four hours!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. I was expecting maybe weeks. Millions of stars and all that.”

“Alpha Centauri is a trinary, and Sirius is a relatively bright binary. If I set search parameters for that combination as well as Sol’s well-known characteristics, there’d probably only be a few dozen possibilities in each plot to cross-check.”

“Who else could do it?”

“Anyone with access to the telescope would be able to. I mean, anyone being given access to this scope would have that baseline expertise.”

“And the data?”

“If all the data were shared openly, you mean?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hawk-Marr.”

“A clever sixteen-year-old maybe.”

Ryland Eliander sighed and stroked his chin. “What about the columns, Mr. Hawk-Marr. Could you find our direct ancestors?”

Ed rubbed his forehead. “It would be a bit more difficult, and, I’m not sure about the historical accounts. I’d bet a clever researcher and a clever astronomer could figure out a way.”

“Same question. How long?”

“A month? Maybe less. Maybe more.”

“You see the problem.”

“I do, Mr. Chairman, but I’m not sure, given this line of questioning, that you see it as clearly as you may think, respectfully. Obviously, we didn’t think of this purpose, because, as your line of questioning highlights, we didn’t have the motivation to consider it. What if someone did? The answer is that this would be the most powerful tool for that purpose. But it would not be the only one by a long shot. How long do you suppose it might be that the colonies we’ve been sending out—for what? nearly two centuries now—how long before someone properly motivated begins to aggregate data from say twenty settlements? That’s about all it would take for a clever person. Or whose to say a genuinely motivated explorer wouldn’t take a ship back to the Orion Spur. Or take an FTL ship in a great big circle over ten years taking pictures and then aggregating that data to pinpoint a location? With this scope, we’ll have to be very purposeful with anything we want to examine. Nobody’s going to walk up to an observation station and simply turn an aperture. The operators of the array can control what things we seek to see.”

“Ah! That’s exactly what I’m getting at, Mr. Hawk-Marr. Yes. Perfect. Where’s your plan?”

“Plan for what exactly?”

“Your plan to keep people from locating the columns. To keep humanity from using the data your scope gathers to look back to Sol and the Earth.”

Edwin paused there on the rostrum, hundreds of eyes examining his every movement and expression. He took a deep breath.

“Not too long ago, a very wise woman told me that we cannot hide our past,” he said. “Nor can any of us hide from it. Recently, also, a very wise man told me that all that can be seen will be seen.”

Edwin looked up at the crowd in attendance then toward the reviewers seated before all of them.

“I would tell you this: We are here, sir. We are living. I say we live, unencumbered by our past. Let’s do what humans do, build bold, beautiful things. If your line of questioning stands in the way of building the most powerful scientific instrument ever to be constructed, I assure you, we will come back here again with a comprehensive plan that addresses your concerns.”

“I look forward to it, Mr. Hawk-Marr. I truly do. For now, though, at least from me, it must be a no. I am happy to be bold and build, but not at the cost of being reckless.”

Ryland Eliander may have been nearly as successful as an attorney as he was as a scientific advisor. That charge of recklessness fell heavily upon the shoulders of Edwin Hawk-Marr. The exchange was so devastating that there wasn’t a person left in their charter group with even the smallest hint of optimism.

As soon as they’d exited the Bureau, Violet turned to Edwin, told him how well he’d handled the unexpected line of questioning, and declared that they had a few more sections to write for the following year.

“How many centuries must pass?” Edwin asked, shaking his head. “With FTL, it’s going to happen eventually.”

That was how my first year with Edwin Hawk-Marr ended.

The Eye of Charris, as most common folk in the Battery came to call Edwin’s array in the subsequent decades, is the telescope network’s nickname still. Officially, it is the Eliander Interstellar Observatory Network, or EION, as most scientists call it, named in memory of one of the BoC’s longest serving senior scientific advisors.

Even though it wasn’t strictly true, “Charris is always watching,” became a common expression across the Battery in the telescope’s early years of operation, such was the degree to which that telescope deepened humanity’s vision.

By the time the Eye was complete, even among the scientists operating it, few knew the names Edwin Hawk-Marr or Violet McKey, or that their dream of building the Eye of Charris almost never came to pass. It took them four more cycles through the charter application process before finally being approved unanimously by the review panel. By that time, Edwin was free, and I was monitoring a rather intransigent thief, whose life never amounted to much of anything.

Edwin and Violet did live out their days together in Niera, but neither lived long enough to witness the Eye of Charris at full operating capacity. Still to this day, it hasn’t located a single signal for Edwin’s elusive Dyson sphere, not in our Milky Way, nor amidst our distant neighboring galactic cousins. And, as far as anyone outside the government knows, the Eye of Charris has never cast its gaze back to the vicinity of Earth.