DIARY — 31 JULY, 2025
Weather: Predawn chill. Up here, the air is thin and bites. Down below, the coast is probably already sweating. A truly schizophrenic island.
Telescope Status: Assigned to the IAC80. Apparently, I’m sharing. More on that later.
Mood: Jet-lagged. Anxious. Running on fumes and coffee that tasted like a science experiment gone wrong.
[06:30]
iPhone alarm. That bloody marimba. Thesis nightmare again. Christ.
The drive up the mountain in the pre-dawn dark was terrifying. The rental car, a yellow Seat I’ve nicknamed ‘The Bumblebee,’ whined like a tortured droid. Then, I broke through the treeline.
And stopped the car.
Below me, a literal sea of clouds, the mar de nubes. Endless white, catching the first light from the sun still hidden below the horizon. The sky above shifted from deep indigo to the pale, fierce blue-white of an O-type star. For a moment, the anxiety vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated awe. This is why I’m here. Not for the bureaucracy or the bad coffee. For this.
[09:30 — The Observatory]
Got hopelessly lost the moment I walked in. The observatory is a labyrinth of white corridors that all look the same. Eventually found a security guard studying a sunbeam with the intensity I usually reserve for stellar spectra.
“Lost?” he asked, without turning. His name tag read Miguel.
“Is it that obvious?”
He finally looked at me and smiled, a slow, creasing smile. “Tranquilo, hombre. The mountain likes to hide the path. Everyone is lost at first.”
His name is Miguel Santos. His tour operates on what I can only describe as geological time. He seems to know everything—not just about security protocols, but about which domes have the best echo and where the kestrels nest. A calm island of mañana in my ocean of first-day panic.
He led me to the IAC80 dome. My new home. “She is a good telescope,” he said, patting the console. “Listens well.”
And that’s where I met her. Dr. Isabella Reyes. She didn't greet me, just glanced up from a monitor, one eyebrow slightly raised. She was already there. At my telescope.
“You’re Sterling,” she stated. Not a question.
“Adam. Yes. And you must be Dr. Reyes.”
“Isabella,” she corrected, turning back to the screen. “There’s an artifact in the calibration frames. A spectral ghost.”
I peered over her shoulder. The data was clean, but for a faint, rhythmic ghosting in the background signal. Periodic. Almost like a 21cm hydrogen line, but wrong. All wrong. “Probably just thermal noise from the CCD,” I said, maybe a bit too dismissively. My PhD was on signal processing; this was my turf.
She froze, then turned to look at me fully. Her eyes were dark and incredibly sharp. “Thermal noise isn’t rhythmic, Dr. Sterling. And it doesn’t look like that.” Her voice was quiet, but laced with something hard. Steel. “Perhaps you’d like to check my work?”
And there it was. Not a welcome. A challenge. We spent the next twenty minutes in near silence, running diagnostics. She was right, of course. We couldn’t find the source. The ghost remained.
“Odd,” I finally admitted.
“The mountain has secrets,” she said, her expression unreadable. She started to pack up her bag. “I have to run my data on CARMENES. The slot is yours now. Try not to break it on your first day.”
[13:00 — Cantina]
Lunch with Miguel. He made me try the papas arrugadas con mojo. Potatoes boiled in salt water until they look like tiny, shrivelled brains. Served with two sauces.
“Careful with the red one,” he warned. “Pica.” It bites.
I ignored him. My mouth is still on fire. A pain so exquisite it borders on a religious experience. As I gasped for water, I saw Isabella across the room. She watched me, took a slow sip of her own water, and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. It felt less like mockery and more like… acknowledgement. A shared trial by fire.
[20:00 — The Flat]
Back in the flat. The boxes are still here. Mocking me. A profound, hollow sense of being an absolute stranger on a strange rock.
I keep thinking about that spectral ghost in the data. And a fleeting shadow I thought I saw in my bathroom mirror this morning. Just tricks of the light, a jet-lagged mind playing games. Rational explanations. Of course.
Still. Miguel said the mountain likes to hide the path. And Isabella said it has secrets.
First day: Met a man who moves at the speed of continental drift and a woman who is almost certainly smarter than me. And the telescope is haunted. The stars had better be worth it.
