This is a podcast extra from Nature. Each week, nature publishes a science fiction story in its

future slot, and each month we read you our favourite. This month's is Beyond 550 astronomical

units by Mike Brotherton, published on the 3rd of December and read by Charmoney Bundell.

Gliding through the cold silence of deep space, I considered my burgeoning collection with great enthusiasm.

With less than 15% of my galactic plane survey completed, I had scored 111 classical gas giants,

67 hot Jupiters, 72 super-Earths, 47 terrestrial worlds worlds and even a handful of dwarf planets.

My favourite was a low-mass super-earth sporting a unique aquamarine spiral pattern

that would be a joy to analyse for years to come.

A quantumronic mind lacked a physical face,

but I imagined this kind of feeling might make a human grin from ear to ear.

I made a burn to adjust my course and drifted into the focal beam of the next target.

The otherwise innocuous main sequence K-star and its surrounding planets soon bloomed into

a bright ring, boosted by many orders of magnitude by the lensing of the sun's gravitational

field.

I was excited to see what new planets would join my exoplanetary assembly.

Something was different about this new system.

Processing the infrared through the lensing solution

and correcting for the coronal distortions revealed planets.

No surprise there.

Even spotting the signatures of oxygen in the atmosphere of one of the terrestrial

planets was not unprecedented. Such life signatures did not require multicellular organisms, let

alone intelligent creatures. The differences manifested at longer wavelengths in the radio.

...