My life began as most other photons do in the sun: a lot of fighting and BAM! out came me. Well, actually, it really isn’t that simple. Let me explain. These two protons are just zipping around in the core, right? And all of a sudden BOOM! They slam into each other and create themselves a nice little deuteron. But alas, it was at that stage in my life where I lost two good friends: Neutrino and Positron. Positron left me and was shortly after hit by a drunk electron…such a sad end to such an intelligent subatomic particle. And my good friend Neutrino, he sped off into the wild blue (actually more like black) yonder, and last I heard he got nabbed by some scientist types on Earth somewhere. But I digress. After I became a fine, upstanding deuteron, I found this nice little proton, and decided to settle down for a bit and created some Helium-3. It was at this point that I became very disoriented from all this slamming around (funny, as I had no idea just how much I could get slammed around), and I met up with another strapping young Helium-3, and just like magic, we created some Helium-4, the “noble” gas that I am proud to say I was. Unfortunately, I had to leave two of my best Proton friends, and they sped off again, waiting for the chance to get together with another like themselves and make some more deuterons. Ah, to be so young and reckless, risking life and nucleus to form such simple things, blissfully ignorant of the turmoil that would later surround me.

So there I was, alone in the big Core, a starry-eyed photon waiting to make it big. Well, I realized that life in the core wasn’t all it was cut out to be. I ended up getting into some very rough spots, often getting pounded like no tomorrow (actually, there really was no tomorrow in the sense that the sun never set…odd, isn’t it?). Most of my friends decided to call this the random walk, since none of us knew where we were going, both in life and around the core. But as I slowly began my journey outward, I knew I some direction, less chaos. So I decided to join the CIA, and become an undercover operative. It was rather sad event though, as I was forced to say goodbye to all the people I once knew, and knowing I would never come back to them. I had to change my identity when I entered the radiative zone, essentially radiating my heat outward in the form of an X-ray rather than a gamma ray. This way, no one would really know my true form. Well, I had my stay in the radiative zone, and moved out to the convective zone. Actually, a lot of people were moving at the same time I was, and we formed a large wave that moved outward from the sun and eventually entered the photosphere, the visible light portion of the sun. All the while, I was slowly changing my frequency, becoming longer and longer so that I would blend in with the locals and my cover would not be blown. The photosphere was a very fun time for me, always bubbling and boiling around with very colorful people all the while. It was here that I learned the true value of seeing, as for the first time I could see in visible light. By now I simply did not care for my CIA mission, and began to “experiment”. What a mistake that was. I would up getting a little too exicited and wound up in the chromosphere. This was a very disturbing part of the sun, as I finally began to realize at one point I would never be able to resist those magnetic attractions to go out of control, and I soon gave in.

Here I come to my strange exit from the sun. I was minding my own business one day, when all of a sudden this magnetic charge just jumps out and grabs me. He pulled me into this dark area, where I was at the epicenter of a huge magnetic storm. I was quite disoriented by all of the activity, not to mention the crazed magnetic forces pulling me in directions I had never thought possible. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment, I joined in the storm and all of a sudden WHAM! My sunspot and another linked up, and our magnetic fields became identical. With our fields so far out of whack with the sun, material began to fly all over the place, and then I found myself soaring away from the sun, caught in a massive solar flare. I waved tearfully at the big glowing gas ball that I had come to call home during my million-year existence. But it was too late to get back, and the only direction I was moving was towards Earth. At first when we came to Earth, my group of photons simply zoomed right around the magnetic field of the planet. But as we went by, we got caught in a backwash of energy, trapped in the relatively stable space behind Earth. Here I pride myself at my good choice of where to enter the atmosphere. I chose the northern area of the poles, and found myself as a massive, rippling sheet of energy that I found out later was called the Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights. I made a pretty large effect on the people there, as I shot headlong into a power plant and promptly proceeded to screw everything up, throwing the delicate electrical balances of the facility into disarray and shut the plant down. “Oops” was the only intelligent thing I could think of to say at the time. Today I find myself at the same power plant, but in a less destructive manner than before. I still inhabit the power systems, occasionally popping back up to cause some small mayhem, but never on the scale I once did. Now all I have to worry about is keeping those darn EM waves coming from the computer below me off my precious lawn. I’ll fix those youngsters yet, mark my words.

Me, in my younger and more reckless days