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The sentience, once known to its family and friends as Y-a-prut, or more simply as Y, drifted lazily through the void we know as Space. A manifestation of pure energy, it needed neither sustenance nor fluid to survive. Whenever it felt its energy levels dwindling, it could simply absorb some of the electromagnetic radiation which flowed from the stars like wine from a bottomless ewer to fill the voids of Space.
Y had been adrift for such a long time it could no longer recall how long ago its home system had been destroyed by the rogue solar flare which had consumed the inner planets of its star system.
Its home had been a small planet, the third (or fourth, if you counted the large rock in orbit between the first and second real planets) orbiting a small to medium sized yellow sun.
He was off his home world, visiting friends on the next outer planet, when he received an alarm call from his forebears that something was happening with their sun. He immediately boarded his ship and took off for home, ignoring the warnings of the interplanetary flight officials at the launch facility
As soon as he was clear of the space dock, he could see the solar flare boiling off the sun and realized there was no way to rescue anyone from his planet. He was nearly home, about a third of a light-minute (11.5 M miles) away, when he saw it happening on his view screen.
It looked like the sun was executing a polo pass. The flare just seemed to come through Space and slap his home planet, not only knocking it completely out of orbit, but also totally incinerating the small planet and all of the life it bore.
What Y had not considered, if he was even thinking at all as he saw his home obliterated, was the ion cloud boiling off the plasma flare. In his shock and grief, he never slowed or veered from his flight path as he watched the tragedy unfold, and plowed into the cloud of charged hydrogen atoms, totally unaware the superheated ions and free electrons were disintegrating his vessel.
It was not until he lost the view on his telemetry screen that he realized what was occurring. A sense of panic began to set in, quickly replaced by rage. Yielding to an instinctive, primal impulse, Y reached to switch on his defensive system, just as the safety by-passes were destroyed by the ion storm, sending a surge of plasma-intensity electrical current through his nervous system.
Expecting to join his family, Y was surprised, when the pain abated, to find himself hurtling through space, disembodied but aware, a tiny speck of ultraviolet energy, bouncing from solid to solid across miles and millennia, resembling nothing so much as a Brownian particle in the soup of dynamic energy filling interstellar space.
With no way to estimate time, he had no idea how long he traveled before he learned to control his direction. Once he had mastered that skill, he decided to try to find his home, or its remnants, and began to search out small yellow suns, as a place to begin his quest, to see if he could find the star which had destroyed his home.
On his journey, he encountered a wide variety of life, some sentient, most not; most corporeal, more than a few, like himself, not; some open and friendly, most, not. One race, in particular, located in the Burkisian System, had a profound effect on him. The System lay a few light-months outside the influence of the Singularity comprising the mammoth black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Suffice it to say that, from that troubled race, he learned to communicate with, and control, inhabitants of the corporeal realm. He stayed with them for several trips around their star before setting off once again on the search for his home. Catching a ride on a high powered photon, he skirted the Singularity and became aware of a number of small to medium yellow stars scattered across what the Burkisians termed the Dracon sector of the galaxy. One, toward the far, outer edge, appeared to be promising.
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Eighteen year old Albert Goode (pronounced Good-ee) sat on the last seat in the back of the school bus, dealing with the not very original thought that life wasn't fair. That morning, Kelly Davis, a seventeen year old junior, had asked him to take her to the Junior Prom tomorrow night. Yeah, she was so skinny she needed stones in her pockets if there was a strong breeze, to keep from being blown away, and if she was standing sideways you could barely see her, but she had hinted that there would be no limits after the dance. The problem was he didn't have a car, and she didn't drive.
He'd had a car, or at least access to one, before his dad had died two years ago. But with the lousy medical insurance they'd had, his mother had had to sell almost everything they had to cover the medical and funeral expenses. And with her job, the only house they could afford was the share cropper's house on his uncle's farm, causing him and his sister to change schools.
He glanced across the bus at his twin, Anni. Like him, she was sitting with her back to the window, her foot on the seat, supporting a book. He shook his head and reached out with his foot and knocked hers off the seat. When she looked up with an angry frown, he just shook his head, and said, "You were flashing me."
She put her foot back up, and pushed her skirt down between her legs. "So? It's not like you haven't seen my underwear before, on or off me."
"Yeah, but the, uh, the part that covers your, uh, um, lady bits, uh, wasn't covering them very well."
"And you don't like looking at...uh, lady bits, huh." she commented, laughing.
"No, I mean, yes, I do, but you're my sister, and I shouldn't be looking at yours."
"Doesn't stop you at home, trying to look down me and Mom's blouses, or trying to peek at us in the shower."
"I...I..I don't either," he said, blushing bright red.
She smiled, knowing he actually did try to avoid doing the things she had accused him of, wondering how she had gotten such a straight-laced brother when she was constantly pre-occupied with sex lately. If her mother hadn't reined her in, she would have run around inside the house, and out (given her druthers), in her underwear or less, just to tease him.
She knew he masturbated; she could hear him at night, but when asked directly, he'd either deny it outright, or change the topic. She had confessed to him once, recently, that hearing him at night often helped her reach her own climax; God, he had turned as red as a beet when she told him that.
She slid down slightly in her seat and surreptitiously pulled her skirt up, hoping she had revealed her panties again. His glance and turning to look away told her she had been successful. His blush and tightening of his jaw when she laughed confirmed her success and elicited another audible chuckle,
"Here's your driveway," the bus driver called, interrupting her game of show and tease.
"Aww, Ms Barrett, can't you take us to the door. It's gotta be another half mile..." came the familiar plaint from Albert.
She sighed heavily and started her usual answer, "You know I can't pull into a driveway that long..."
"Unless there's a turnaround." Anni finished for her. "He knows, Ms Barrett; Bert's just pulling your chain. Thank you. See you Monday," the blue-eyed brunette said as she got off the bus.
As he approached the exit, Bert flashed the driver a warm smile and said, "Thanks, Ms Barrett. Have a good weekend."
In spite of herself, the buxom driver smiled back, thinking, "Sonny, if your sister wasn't on this bus, I'd yank something of yours." Immediately she chastised herself, "Edie Barrett, behave yourself. He may be old enough, but he's still a student," as she put the bus in gear and headed for the bus garage.
In the exchange, no one noticed the slightly purplish light which seemed to bounce off the bus into the oak tree which marked the driveway. On Y's trip from the Burkis System, where he had learned how to enter and control a humanoid body, he had encountered a veritable river of electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio and TV signals, all streaming from a small planet revolving around a smallish yellow sun. He had absorbed and studied the information, and was familiar with the major languages of the planet, on which he had recently landed.
He had chosen to land in the area which had, roughly, the same coordinates as his family's home on his own planet. He recognized that he was on one of the larger land masses, slightly North and East of its center.
He was surprised at the similarity. It was pleasantly warm, and mildly humid, with a steady breeze. The surrounding land was rolling and appeared to covered by a new crop of some grass related plant. If Y had had eyes to close, he could have imagined he had found home.
Anni waited for her brother to get off the bus so they could walk together up the nearly quarter mile long lane which led to their house. "Something wrong, Bert? You were quiet almost all the way home. Some one, or something buggin' you?"
