That ended abruptly. And on a bit of a grim tone. How many college students leave home and never return, not even once. Oh well, at least it wasn’t written in the New Yorker where it would have required a 10k word “slice of life” preamble before even discussing the star. “Dr. Li always enjoyed feeding pigs on the weekend...”

As for the star, I wonder what type of relativistic effect a person orbiting it might experience. I assume 4 million miles per hour is an appreciable fraction of C.