The Window

Willie Poor, 16, US

It is cold. Not a crisp, refreshing cold, but a deep, penetrating chill. The wild wind whips mercilessly about the wasteland, finding every crevasse and shelter, and blasting every inch of it with snow and sleet and ice. Visibility is absolute zero. To the human eye, the scene is an almost solid gray-white, disrupted occasionally with a swirling break in the blizzard.

Through this frigid hell traipses a lone figure. Every inch of her body is covered with sub-zero gear, but the cold still feels its way into her very bones. Her baggy defense against the blizzard makes it that much harder to walk, and she stumbles often. She carries only a backpack; "89 degrees 57 seconds North Latitude, due North. Solar Interference- 42 percent. Contact in 6 minutes" it chimes.

Onward, through the bleak tundra she trudges. She cannot gauge time or distance herself. Her backpack is the only proof she has that time itself has not slowed to a quiet halt. "89 degrees 59 seconds North Latitude, due North. Solar Interference- 26 percent. Contact in 4 minutes."

Then, quite suddenly, the howling winds begin to dissipate. The snow slows until individual flakes can be picked out. As the white blinds fall away from the traveler, an extraordinary scene comes into view. An ice plain, a perfectly flat expanse of crystalline beauty, appears. The suddenly cloudless sky glitters with the pinprick light of billions of stars. And at the apex of this vista, directly above the overwhelmed traveler, shines Polaris, the North Star. "90 degrees North Latitude. Solar Interference- 8 percent. Contact In One Minute." informs the backpack.

The traveler stares in awe at her surroundings until her pack chimes "Contact in zero minutes," and she is brought back to reality. At that moment, it begins. The solar interference level ends its long descent and settles at zero. And the traveler is not the only one that knows this. Light years away on the surface of Polaris's planet Terrados, a stream of information travelling faster than light shoots off toward the third planet of the Sol system. And for the next five minutes, the data will meet with no heavenly obstacles as it connects with the receiver in the traveller's pack. The window is open.

And right on time, the most important part of the traveler's backpack whirrs to life as news from the Terrados Colony finds its way to the North Pole. Population stats, food levels and atmospheric updates stream into the pack, at once making it the most valuable object on Earth.

But at 12:02, 3 minutes before the estimated cutoff, an uncharted asteroid flies through the data stream. The traveler's backpack sputters, crackles, and falls silent. The traveler scrambles in a frenzy to fix whatever went wrong, but she can find nothing wrong with her equipment. The window is closed.

By the time the asteroid has cleared the corridor, the backpack announces that solar interference has climbed back up to 15 percent. The crestfallen colonists millions of miles away realize this too, as do all the scientists waiting back at base camp. But there's nothing they or the traveler can do about it. She stands up awkwardly, and begins her trek back to camp.