Interspersed amongst this carpel tunnel inducing work, he would somewhat diligently log the trajectories of random debris in the solar system, most of which would never come closer to Earth than our nearest planetary neighbors. Every few months he would track an incident, typically a cluster of rock and ice that would come close enough to be pulled in by our orb’s mass, only to be consumed in the atmosphere like fireworks. So Neal was not particularly excited when his computer automatically shifted his view to the system monitoring control screen, interrupting his typing into Google search so that “…orority web-c…” appeared in the control field before he stopped his left-handed typing and looked at the data on the screen.

The screen was now filled with two windows. The largest one contained an inverted triangular graphic, which was an interpretation of the 3-D space in the hemisphere viewable by the array. To its left was a scrolling list of data apparently designed to be as unintelligible as possible, but which conveyed vast swathes of information to the educated eye.

The graphic showed the various objects being tracked by the system, at least those not denoted as ‘classified’ by the system’s all-seeing military operators in another part of the building. At the extreme range of the device, a small cloud had resolved itself, highlighted in red as a new/unidentified/unclassified object.

The list of information on the cluster was lengthening as more data became available. Speed, estimated origin, estimated volume, estimated track; the last of which was bolded, and was the reason the system had automatically flagged the record and notified Neal’s team. Collision potential: 16%. Neal was intrigued.

Clearing the command field, he typed “execute collision parameter analysis” and sat back. A new box overlaid the last with the automatically assigned number of the incident, the date, and the title of Neal’s request at the top. The rest of the window remained blank while the system gathered more data. Normal turnaround time would be about forty-five minutes for something this far away, so Neal decided to get some shut-eye while the system worked.

After thirty-five minutes the phone rang. Neal started, it was now nearly four in the morning, and the only noise in the cramped space was the whirring of his antiquated hard drive and some Kings of Leon playing through his media player.

Neal put his circa 1975 brown office telephone to his ear: “Yup?”

“This is ANFPS85 control, please confirm identity.”

“Errr, I don’t mean to be a dick here, my friend, but didn’t you call me.”

“We have a system request from your terminal, please confirm identity.”

“Neal,” he said, then, “you need my number, wait, err…ID number: ANFPS85…err…65239.” ANFPS85 Control waited a moment while Neal figured out that there was something else missing. “Oh, right, the cool part, right, yeah. My clearance ID password thingy is eleanorrigby66.”

“Identity confirmed, please state the reason for your bandwidth request.”