As a four-meter telescope slowly, carefully tracked the movements of two mysterious X-ray sources across the night sky, faithfully attended by Lauren. The only light in the telescope room was her laptop softly illuminating her face as it crunched the raw numbers collected by the telescope in real time. She struggled to keep her eyes open as she faced the glowing rectangle in her lap like it held all the secrets of the universe. She heard the faint sound of footsteps crunching on the gravel outside, and then the door swinging open. “Hi Scott!” she said, without turning around, stifling a yawn.

  “Hey, guess what? We have the rest of the night!” said Scott cheerfully, plonking himself into a chair next to Lauren.

  “What? How?” asked Lauren, “I thought someone else booked this telescope.”

  “I may have talked to some people and traded some telescope time to hog it for a bit longer,” admitted Scott slyly.

  “What? You didn’t! Thank you!” said Lauren.

  Scott shrugged. “I wanna see where this is going. It’s interesting,” he said.

  “You’re interesting,” said Lauren.

  The minutes and hours ticked by in the darkness with only the tapping of keys and the occasional tiny movements of the telescope repositioning itself. At some point, Lauren drifted off and Scott reached out to grab her laptop before it fell. As he watched the latest batch of numbers come in, his eyes steadily grew wider and his fingers flew over the keyboard, running scripts and plugging numbers into the calculator. At last, he stopped, slack-jawed, and a palpable silence fell over the room, punctuated only by Lauren’s deep breathing and the occasional mechanical noise from the telescope.

  Scott reached over and touched Lauren’s shoulder, gently shaking her awake. She felt warm somehow, despite the chilly wind outside. “Hmm…what? Oh shit, did I fall asleep?” she said.

  “I think I’ve finished triangulating your X-ray emitters. Their current position is over 100 AU from Earth. Oh and both of them have an identical heading,” said Scott.

  “And?” said Lauren. Scott could practically feel her eyes boring into him in the dark.

  Scott took a deep breath. “The current velocity is roughly one percent of light speed,” he said.

  “What?!” said Lauren. In a quick motion, she snatched the laptop back from Scott, looking intently at the screen. “What the hell…,” she murmured. At last she turned back to Scott. “There aren’t many natural objects that move that quickly. Even fewer that fit the profile we’ve seen here. Maybe a pair of primordial black holes orbiting each other,” she said softly, almost reverently. “That somehow got, I don’t know, ejected from the galactic core without losing each other and just traveled across the galaxy together. I’ll have to run the numbers and see if that’s possible or…” she trailed off.

  “Or it’s a new type of celestial object entirely. Xie-Watson Objects. XWOs. Has a nice ring to it,” said Scott.

  Lauren facepalmed and let out an exaggerated groan, though Scott caught a hint of a smile. “Give me a break!” she said.

  They continued tracking the pair of X-ray emitters until they disappeared below the horizon, and then begrudgingly vacated the observatory and continued crunching numbers in the office for the rest of the night. At some point, Scott made a LaTeX document entitled “A Pair of Co-Moving Hypervelocity X-ray Emitters in the Oort Cloud”-- “such a momentous title”, Lauren had said.

  By sunrise, they found themselves in town, ordering coffee and breakfast from a random diner. Much to Scott’s chagrin, there was no indoor seating, but at Lauren’s suggestion, they sat down at a bench in a small park, watching the sunrise trickling through a stand of pines. “I think we gotta tell someone, Scott,” she said. “I don’t know, NASA? The government? This could be bigger than us. We know it’s moving straight towards the inner Solar System. That there’s a nonzero chance that whatever it is, it could hit Earth. And with how fast it’s going…” She shivered, and it wasn’t entirely from the early-morning cold.

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  “Ten to the minus five percent according to my simulations,” said Scott.

  “That’s not zero,” said Lauren.

  Scott sighed heavily and took a bite of his bagel, staring moodily into the trees. “Have you ever been scooped, Lauren?” She shook her head. “Good. I hope you never do. Really. I mean it. You deserve better.” Scott went on, “But trust me on this. I’ve been doing this a while and when you find something big–and believe me, this is big–you publish early, publish often, and don’t let anyone take it away from you because if they get a chance, they will.”

  “I thought we were all supposed to come together and figure out the universe and our place in it,” said Lauren.

  “Yeah, I thought so too,” said Scott bitterly, “You’re special, you know that? We need more people like you. A pity they all get crushed these days.” He drained his coffee cup and crumpled it up. “It’s a rat race, that’s what it is. I had a call with my department chair yesterday, you know. Apparently my publication count ‘needs to be higher to be considered for tenure’. Did it matter what’s in those publications? Do you think anyone reads them? No. They just count them. This is all just a dick-measuring contest.”

  Lauren slumped backwards against the bench, wrapping her arms around herself, her face bearing an expression of utter defeat. Scott inched closer, unable to take his eyes off her face. A million thoughts raced through his mind like trains on a tangle of crisscrossing tracks until at last, in one abrupt, jerky motion, he put an arm around her shoulders. She slid closer to him, wordlessly.

  “But we’re in a good position. I know we have something real here,” said Scott. Lauren glanced at him. “We can dash off this paper before anyone else does, and you know what? With everything we have, we can break it down into at least two or three publications in top journals. Maybe more, if we keep looking into this.”

  “I’d like to keep looking into this. But we’re gonna need a bigger telescope,” cut in Lauren, “And more time on it.”

  “I can get us that. It’ll take some schmoozing, but I’ll do it,” said Scott.

  “Thanks,” said Lauren. She shifted uncomfortably, looking for words. “But still…this might not be just a weird blip in the sky. It might actually matter. For normal people, not just us. And dealing with that as just the two of us…it scares me. Excites me a little, but also scares me.”

  “It won’t be just the two of us,” said Scott, “as soon as we publish the results. It’s a win-win situation. I get tenure. You get a tenure-track position at a top university.”

  “Is that really guaranteed?” asked Lauren warily. “I’ve tried so many times and it’s just…nothing, anywhere. Tenure-track, not tenure-track, whatever. It’s like screaming into the void and getting radio silence back. And I’m almost done with my dissertation and it just feels like I’m hurtling towards a cliff at one percent of light speed and now there are these things hurtling towards us at one percent of light speed and…” she trailed off into silence.

  Scott wrapped his arm tighter around you. “No. Nothing is. But I meant what I said…you’re special.”

  Lauren was silent for a long moment. “Okay,” she said at last, quietly.

  Scott nodded. “Great. So for the related work–”

  “Not now. Let’s just enjoy the moment,” said Lauren. She stared at him. “Do you play RPGs?”

  The conversation swerved to lighter matters until they finished their food and stood up, stretching. “I have to get some sleep, but do you wanna meet up later and start writing?” Scott said.

  “I can start. You should get more rest. And maybe check in on your son?” said Lauren.

  “Ah. Right,” said Scott, “Tomorrow then?”

  “Tomorrow,” agreed Lauren. Just before she turned to leave, Scott stepped forward and wrapped her in an embrace. As they held each other, he stared into her eyes, his thoughts once again like too many trains on intersecting tracks. He felt like many forces were pulling him in mysterious directions, but before he could solve for all of them, Lauren solved them for him with a quick peck on the lips. “Thank you,” she said, “For being you.” And with that, she was gone, leaving Scott with his thoughts to derail and crash into each other.