Read Part I at ForthMagazine.com/Charlie-Thomas

Not involving himself in the mess of reporters frothing over Tony Growen upon his release from the hospital—a local miracle by any standards—Chester Goldsmith focused rather on the young man standing next to the newly awakened coma patient. Seventeen-year-old Tony stood now in front of cameras and questions, bright-eyed and freshly recovered from his head injury, while his friend Daniel Rogers was quietly ushered to the outskirts of the frenzy by a woman in large sunglasses, pulling the teenager by the hand. Chester squinted from a distance, trying to make out the face of the woman. Ah yes, he smiled. That was her indeed—Daniel’s mother, Bobbi, to whom Chester hadn’t spoken in several years, not since the release of his book on Daniel…the Wonderchild. While the ignorant local press affiliates drooled over their supposed miracle boy, Chester slipped back into his car and carefully followed Daniel and his mother away from the scene.

Daniel Rogers was born on March 22, 2012 at 6:23 a.m. at St. Andrews hospital in Rochester, Minnessota. All the papers had reported it accurately. A picture of the Baby Rogers was on the cover of every local, national, and foreign newspaper, under large headings that read “Wonder Baby” or “Lone Rogers” or, according to translations of the foreign papers, something like “Miracle Baby.”

In the year 142,304, the original human star called “Sun” finally burned itself out, becoming the white dwarf it was always destined to become. Life on the original planet persisted for almost two millennia, adapting as it were to the cold, harsh climate of the planet they still called Earth. But finally, in Cosmological Decade 18, two full space decades earlier than expected for the Degenerative Era’s birth, the Sun’s dwindling energy had completely defused, and the original planet called Earth became uninhabitable.

Kendra immediately shot up and turned back to the Home. The man from the day before in the Eating Hall—the one in the long coat, turning his head about the Homers, with the strange, transparent contraption resting on his nose, making his eyes appear double large—stood now in front of the Home’s entrance.

Kendra hardly slept at all that night. Falling in and out of consciousness, her insides twisted with nervous anticipation, and liquid dreams brought her in and out of imagined crevices within the dark surroundings—a place of distant birds calling to one another, of small animal feet crackling twigs underfoot, of Top Fire only knows what else. No one ever spoke of what existed in the Surrounding of the Home.