“Yeah,” I said. “This isn’t Vulcans dropping by to say hi. This is… space algae.”

“An invasive species. Like cane toads in Australia.”

“Good analogy.” I nodded. “And the population is growing. Fast. The more of them there are, the more solar energy gets consumed.”

She pinched her chin. “What would you call an organism that exists on a diet of stars?”

I struggled to remember my Greek and Latin root words. “I think you’d call it ‘Astrophage.’ ”

“Astrophage,” she said. She typed it into her tablet. “Okay. Get back to work. Find out how they breed.”

Astrophage!

The word alone makes all my muscles clinch up. A chilling terror that hits like a lead weight.

That’s the name. The thing that threatens all life on Earth. Astrophage.

I glance at the monitor with my zoomed-in image of the sun. The sunspots have moved noticeably. Okay, it’s a real-time image. Good to know.

Waaaaait… I don’t think they’re moving at the right speed. I check the stopwatch. I was only daydreaming for ten minutes or so. The sunspots should have moved a fraction of a degree. But they’re halfway off the screen. Way more than they should have moved.

I pull the tape measure from my toga. I zoom out the image and actually measure the widths of the sun and sunspot cluster on the screen. No more rough estimates. I want real math here.

The solar disc is 27 centimeters on-screen and the sunspots are 3 millimeters. And they moved half their width (1.5 millimeters) in ten minutes. Actually, it was 517 seconds, according to my stopwatch. I scribble some math on my arm.

At this resolution, they’re moving 1 millimeter every 344.66 seconds. To cross the entire 27 centimeters it would take (scribble, scribble) just over 93,000 seconds. So it’ll take that long for the cluster to cross the near side of the sun. It’ll take twice that long to get all the way around. So 186,000 seconds. That’s a little over two days.

Over ten times faster than the rotation should be.

This star I’m looking at… it’s not the sun.

I’m in a different solar system.

Okay.

I think it’s time I took a long gosh-darned look at these screens!

How am I in another solar system?! That doesn’t even make sense! What star is that, anyway?! Oh my God, I am so going to die!

I hyperventilate for a while.

I remember what I tell my students: If you’re upset, take a deep breath, let it out, and count to ten. It dramatically reduced the number of tantrums in my classroom.

I take a breath. “One… two… thr—this isn’t working! I’m going to die!”

I hold my head in my hands. “Oh God. Where the heck am I?”

I scour the monitors for anything I can make sense of. There’s no lack of information—there’s too much. Each screen has a handy label on the top. “Life Support,” “Airlock Status,” “Engines,” “Robotics,” “Astrophage,” “Generators,” “Centrifuge” —wait a minute. Astrophage?