The Flashing Light Journey

The sun was setting over the Atlantic Ocean. It was a gorgeous scene, but I was too focused to really appreciate it. My name is Branson Lee, I'm nine years old, and in less than an hour I have to be at my piano lessons. But there are more important matters to attend to first.

I've lived in this house for almost my whole life. Being born on Earth has made me very curious about space. My parents always told me that we weren't allowed to leave the planet's atmosphere because of possible dangers from the universe. They said Earth was safe and protected by its magnetic fields, which are why we don't see any solar flares or coronal mass ejections near our planet.

But they can't keep me here forever. I want to explore the universe! There are so many things out there that I want to see: black holes and nebulas and really big structures called 'galaxies.' The only thing stopping me from going into space is not understanding how gravity works.

I remember once asking my mom what would happen if I fell into a black hole, and she had a fit about it and said "never ever think about such things again." That wasn't very helpful at all!

Anyways, I've been thinking about these issues for a while now. Most of the people where I live have some kind of genetic defect that makes them immune to radiation - those are the people who get to go into space. All the science fiction stories I've read involve exploring other planets and things like that, which means they were written by people who must have visited space at some point! It's obvious that something is up with Earth, so I decided to take advantage of one of our laws: you're allowed to break into someone's house if you think they're in danger.

My hand tightened around the doorknob as I thought about what could happen if this went wrong... but then again, maybe it'd go right? It had been working fine until yesterday afternoon; today it was locked. If whoever lived here wanted to make sure no one could get inside their house without breaking in, they wouldn't just lock their front door, right? So now I had to break it down - but gently enough so it didn't look as if someone had broken in. That's when I remembered that my dad kept a spare key hidden outside somewhere...

For a moment I thought about looking through their mail or something like that - but no, if the person whose house this was came home while I was still inside they might think that *I* broke in! They might call the police or something! And thus begins another week of cleaning up after myself...

The spare key worked perfectly, thank goodness! Now all that was left was going upstairs and finding whatever evidence there was of people being allowed into space...