[Editor's Wife's Note: It's BRAZY, not CARTAN. If he wants to change his name, fine, but I'm not changing mine.]

. . .Such were the thoughts of one Mousey Betsy Cartan, one beautiful Indian summer afternoon in the year 2049. If you were to pass by her that day, looking at her as she sat in nostalgic revelry remembering the fun and hijinx that surrounded her wedding day 57 years earlier, you would not think that she had led the life she had led.

Betsy, a.k.a. Mousey, did not look a jot of her 93 years (in fact she didn't look a whiff over 50), as she sat on a park bench in Golden Gate Park, as she did every sunny afternoon since that fateful day, Oct. 24, 2017, when her husband, the fabulously wealthy and famous John Cartan, had jetted off into outer space at the behest of a grateful world as "interstellar" ambassador, as it were, to make the first official contact of the human species with a civilization of another planetary system.

But to understand the present of Betsy's conundrum, you must first understand her past and go back to 1992, the year of John and Betsy's wedding, when NASA began an experiment to reach out to intelligent civilizations in other reaches of our galaxy. You must begin with that phone call that Christmas Eve., that unseasonally warm night before the earthquake. . . .

(OK - I pick John and Yumi to continue this tale, in separate branches, of course)