The Return

The media liked to call it ‘the Boomerang Probe’, whenever they could be nudged into reporting on its progress. More prosaically, the team of scientists and engineers behind its development had named it the Non-Euclidean Curvature Remote Observatory. It was a marvel of twenty-first century technology, designed to cruise through deep space at near light-speed on a long interstellar loop. The aim was to settle the debate over the origin of dark energy once and for all. Everyone expected it to come back laden with novel and exciting scientific discoveries. No-one anticipated that it would return carrying an unwelcome passenger.