Celeste

University of Chicago - September 17, 1984

Celeste had traveled with her mother and father to the University of California Medical Department in 1900, when her mother first became ill. That university had been a single, imposing building, austere and self-contained. She’d heard that the newly built Stanford was more similar to what she saw now, but she had never been there.

The size and feel of the University of Chicago were almost overwhelming. She couldn’t imagine having to attend classes here, to navigate such a vast campus.

“I almost would have liked to go to college,” she said, watching students move about the walkways, laughing and calling to one another. The thought didn’t change her first impression of the school, but it stirred something deeper—a sense that everything she had believed about the world before meeting James had been so small compared to what the world truly was.

“I went,” James said, leading her according to the map toward the Department of Geophysics, “but wanderlust made me drop out. That’s how I ended up in Europe when Grady visited Pompeii—how I met him.”

She had wondered how it was to complete strangers had come together in such a place. Sure, strangers passing on the street had done great things, but what had actually brought them together? That it was all just a cosmic coincidence was amazing.

As they crossed the main quad, Celeste noted the near castle like architecture of the buildings. The whole area had this feeling of being ripped from time and placed in this modern future making the buildings feel both storied and honored as well as lost and detached from the world they were in. They reminded her of herself.

Though people can grow and change. She thought to herself. She’d began to use the computer at home more comfortably; even if a book or encyclopedia felt more familiar and trusted. She’d driven James’s car a couple of times now and they were talking about eventually having her work on getting her a driver’s license.

But she hated these jeans; her go to outfit was still a practical dress, often with hand stitched pockets with sensible shoes. And no fancy modern undergarments. Some of her underwear was easy to adapt to with modern ‘upgrades’, but bras felt constricting and uncomfortable. Her corsets and bodices were at least more easily adjustable, and of course their familiarity played a huge role. James had laughed at her when he had finally taken her shopping and said she should get at least one for fitting in to the modern world and argued that corsets changed how the ribs looked with how tight they were pulled for shaping.

“Mine were not so tight. And besides, did you ever see me wear one once we left San Francisco?” She countered though the department store changing room door, tugging at the elastic bra strap.

And so, unlike these magnificent buildings, born of stone in a style of decades gone by, she had changed and grew.

They crossed through the Quad Portal of Levi Hall and onto Ellis Street. A half a block up was the building James was guiding them to.

“That’s the Geophysical Sciences building.” He said pointing with the map still in hand. “The satellite will still be in there.

Celeste immediately noted that this building was not as…pleasing as the buildings that surrounded the Quad. It was concrete with four pillar like structures on the facade and sharp angles. It had this vague look of a castle, but one that seemed to want to be both a castle and something quite different as well.

“Well, that’s quite a difference in styles.” She noted as they approached the building. “Those other buildings were much nicer.”

“What’s funny is that when researching this building, they said that this was supposed to be a futurist vision of that Gothic architecture style.” James laughed as they reached the steps. He turned and looked back at her. “Some of the later 20th century’s architecture was more about the art, even when brutal and cold, than anything else. Some just kept the same functional styles.”

The front door to the building was open and free to enter, as it would be during the day while classes were in session. The building no longer existed in 2058—replaced by a much larger, more advanced structure with key-card entry, AI-assisted facial recognition, and sensors to detect evasion techniques. Compared to that, this one was an unlocked door with the keys hanging in the lock.

Until they reached the lab.

Here, because of the presence of a NASA satellite, security was tighter—both in obvious and, as James whispered to Celeste, hidden ways. The first was the uniformed security guard at the door, armed and unfriendly-looking. The second was a bulky mag-strip lock next to him. Cameras covered the hallway.

“Keep walking—I’ve got an idea,” James murmured before they got within earshot of the guard. They passed by casually; the guard barely registered them. At the far end of the hall, a small sign pointed toward the bathrooms.

As they reached them, James turned and walked backward into the men’s room. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” he said with a quick wink. “Give me ten seconds.”

Celeste smiled, folding her arms as she leaned against the wall. She only had a faint idea of what he was planning, but she assumed it would be something impressive.

Almost on cue, the lab door beside the guard swung open about thirty seconds later—longer than she expected. James stepped out wearing a lab coat and an ID badge that clearly wasn’t his, but it would get them inside.

“Hey! You’re the new intern?” he called out.

“Yeah, but my—” she stammered, picking up the ruse mid-sentence.

“Leave ‘em, he’ll figure it out,” James said. “I need you in here, now.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, moving quickly down the hall.

The guard blinked in confusion. Celeste was certain they were caught, but he said nothing—his brain unable to reconcile how the man who’d gone into the restroom had just come out of the secure lab.

As she passed him, though, his gaze sharpened. He took an extra moment to memorize her face. Celeste shrank slightly.

“Excuse me,” she murmured, brushing past him through the open door.

“Grad students,” James muttered, as if that explained everything. When the guard didn’t react, James slipped inside and closed the door behind them.

Only then did they breathe. The lab was dark and empty—no signs of anyone at all. James had lucked out completely.

“I was hoping I’d appear at the door unnoticed,” he said, removing the coat. “Imagine my surprise when there was no one here at all.”

The lab space was broken up into two spaces, separated by a wall the top being an unbroken series of large picture windows on top of a solid bottom, like a hockey rink wall.

On this side was a series of work stations, plotting tables and a few of these massive cabinet sized devices with lights and switches. There were ancient dot matrix printers as well, which only existed now in museums; locked behind class and long since obsolete. there was a coat rack where James was hanging the borrowed lab coat back on. All of it was completely foreign to Celeste.

“What are these machines?” Celeste asked, running her hand over the top of one of the devices marked VAX-11/780. “Everything looks so new and shiny, but feels old for some reason.”

“Those are super computers.” James said navigating back to her through the workstations. “But that cell phone I got you would do in a second what this entire room would take hours. But in 1984, they were amazing tech. That’s probably why it feels old, we’re in the ancient world of computing still. It all changes soon though.”

The other side of the glass was a bright white space with bight overhead lights. Sitting in the middle of this space was what looked less like the weather satellite they expected and more like a tinfoil wrapped play tube with these large flat panels sticking off the side of it.

“That’s not a weather satellite.” James said walking up to the window wall. Celeste noticed that there was some dread in his voice. She barely understood what this thing was, but how did he know so quickly that it wasn’t what they were looking for? I mean they had a picture of the space machine, but that dread told her that he recognized this being something radically different than what they expected.

“What is it?” Celeste asked. There was nothing here that she understood that well; to know when something was absolutely not what it should be. She was adapting well enough to the 2050’s, so much was user friendly and James was always by her side, but this middle generation was it’s own museum without labels that even James wasn’t a master of.

“It looks like a space telescope.” He said, not turning away from the window. “Except we know the telescopes that were launched. Hubble was launched at around this time, maybe a few years from now, and then there was James Webb launched in the 2020’s and the Maria Mitchell True Color Telescope launched in 2045. This is not a space telescope. It’s a space camera. A spy satellite.”