Hayden Planetarium, New York City

July 2023

The office was small and cluttered with hundreds of memorabilia collected over the decades of being a public icon. On one side, barely holding for its life on the wall, there rested the 2017 Stephen Hawkins Medal of Science. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the large black man walked in, coffee in hand and pulled the blinds up. The cup read Science This Way.

He was one of the few in the world to still receive paper mail. On the desk were a couple of large envelopes and a thick box. Someone had taken the care to open it up. Once he opened and discarded most of the mail in a real trash can, he flipped open the box. He pulled out two large books, tomes 1 and 2 of some series. The title was The Attractor, he did not know the work but it came with a hand written envelope.

“Dear Sir, I am such a fan, I included you and Mister Sagan as protagonists of this long series. If you find time and courage, please honor me with a read. Sincerely, Alain Villeneuve.”

This was way too much. The Physicist would not read the work but out of respect, he at least opened the front cover to see if it contained a signature.

Instead, there was a flat memory card topped on the upper corner of the first page. Below it a hand written note: “Mister Vouvelakis, please upload this book onto your project, Alain.” This had to be for someone else.

Printed on the first book, was a dedication, it read simply:

To my father Georges Vouvelakis

“The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.” — Frank Herbert

Who was the man, he wondered. The Author’s name was French. This was intriguing but the set was heavy and spanned over thousands of pages. He smiled at the morning puzzle, took a sip of the coffee and slid the work into a shelf next to another pile of works he received graciously.