"We Are Not Alone"

The teacher quickly glanced at the notes in front of him on his desk. “My man Michael!” The teacher exclaimed, “I see that you have been studying, getting a leg up on the competition, hey mate?”
“Michael, I never knew you were so smart!” The prettiest girl in the class who sat adjacent to him declared, with her inviting—unabashed, sexy smile.
Michael looked towards the girl and smiled stiffly and then faced his teacher, “Actually I didn’t study. I just am really into this sort of stuff.”
He really wanted to blurt out how much he really knew, but the words wouldn’t come out. It would have been embarrassing anyway, he thought to himself.

“There is a video on your laptops that show the design and speak of the facts concerning the Voyager satellites and how advanced they were . . . that is of the time period we are speaking of,” the teacher quickly added, noting in his mind that by the present day’s standards they were really rather primitive; but nevertheless they remained in contact via transmissions to and from earth, and the generators provided power far beyond the time period that they were intended to.

Michael watched the monitor in front of him, but his mind was on its own wavelength. He knew that the probes were designed with identical instruments. They each were on predetermined parallel missions. As a result the probes basically split the exploration duties of Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, Saturn and its moon Titan, Uranus and finally Neptune’s moon Triton, that possessed water in the form of ice geysers. They