Wow! Novel Sneak Peek (Revamped)

	Wake up! a voice said, just as he started playing Go with his daughter in the table in front of him.

	WAKE UP! the voice repeated, louder and louder each time as the game played out before his very eyes. The next thing he knew…

	A flash of light! Dr. Bao could barely open his eyes as he saw the display in the computer flash and panels blare about the console he was sleeping in front of. Bao saw his lab assistant, trying to awake him. He was sleeping next to an empty mug, which he drank all the coffee from, a bunch of notes taken from the entire week. After all, this was a search for Earth-like planets, and now that telescopes were even more refined and powerful than they were 150 years ago, they caught wind of a possible candidate every few days.

	A few older notes had been replied to by the astrochemists next door. They were either too hot, too cold, too large, too small… it seemed like the criteria grew stricter every day. After all, when the Breakthrough Starshot team made it to Proxima b more than half a century ago, the images revealed nothing living: just a parched, mostly waterless, world covered in a desert yellow. The water seemed like a good sign, but there were no signs of intelligent life anywhere. The spectra showed a few organic molecules, but nowhere were structures to be seen.

Unwilling to have a media debacle like that, the astrochemists wished only to talk about a world if it had the strictest signs of Earth-likeness. The citizen-scientists in turn, were too optimistic: they sent in any and all light curves that indicated a planet in a very optimistic habitable zone. He and his assistant were the intermediaries, who vetted the data that each day came in from the citizen-scientists, and sent the top 0.1% to the astrochemists: no more, no less.

	“Dr. Bao!” he caught wind of the assistant’s voice as she repeated his name again.


	“Dr.Bao, several astronomers have been noticing a strange object, directly en route to our solar system. This may warrant us taking a look.”

	“How many reports? The last time this happened, it was one report from one crazy dude in the middle of nowhere.” Dr. Bao asked as he woke up.


	“Twenty-two. From Twenty-two confirmed good sources.”

The scientist groaned, but then saw something on his console. The readings were off the charts for the object his assistant mentioned. The light curves were the things that first piqued the interest of the citizen-scientists, who had been notified by their machine-learning algorithms. There had been twenty-two views and twenty-two flags over the last day. At some points the curve rose over twenty percent in less than six hours.  The curves were very faint, as if it were thousands of light years away, but the parallax testing the telescope indicated otherwise. This was something exceptionally close, only 12.3 light years away, and, in the words of one comment, “it wasn’t there yesterday.”

No, this was something that merited observation by other telescopes. He sent his assistant away with a short notice to the engineers to notify the Stellar Interferometry Group to focus all available telescopes on it, and gave his public relations team the harrowing task of explaining this all to the public. He now turned the console off, and began writing his usual notice to the astrophysicists and astrochemists next door. Another note, but this time he had a feeling it wouldn’t be haughtily rejected.

	15 AUGUST, 2119:
		 XWOI-2119-357
			DETECTION TIME: 22:45 HOURS UTC
			ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE: VARIABLE
			DISTANCE (PARALLAX): 12.3 LIGHT YEARS
			RIGHT ASCENSION: 19.6198h
			DECLINATION: +51° 45′ 26.79″
			SIZE: UNKNOWN
			TYPE: ANOMALOUS OBJECT
			ADDITIONAL NOTES: UNUSUALLY EXTREME BLUESHIFTS,
			PARALLAX INDICATES LOW DISTANCE. VARIABLE LIGHT CURVES
			INCONSISTENT WITH KNOWN NATURAL PHENOMENON. SPECTRA
            INDICATE MATTER-ANTIMATTER COLLISIONS; MEDIUM-HIGH
            CONFIDENCE OF ETI ORIGIN. FURTHER ANALYSIS TO BE
            CONDUCTED VIA ASTRONOMICAL INTERFEROMETRY.