I knew from a young age that I would probably end up in space. My earliest memories are playing rocket games with my father, and a house full of space books. Plus I was interested. Dinosaurs and superheroes were fun, but space was better.
I was born at a time when there was renewed interest in spaceflight, with billionaires toying around with their own rocket companies. I didn’t understand it at the time but with the pressure of climate change it was inevitable - there would be many who would seek a new frontier.
Unfortunately, I was too young to be a pioneer going to Mars. The moon felt too staid for my adventurous soul. I didn’t want to be digging Mars rocks or Moon stones, I wanted something more exciting.
But life takes over and I ended up studying science. Drifting around the fringes of AI and quantum research I settled on neither but knew a lot about both.
A chance encounter created a sliding doors moment in my life. An acquaintance at a party doing physics and maths was following up on the theoretically possible, pragmatically way-too-difficult concept of warp drive, as we call it. The ability to jump from one place in the universe to another by opening a worm hole.
Serendipity they call it. Our knowledge overlapped like a Venn diagram. Together we saw the future.
Long story short. We formed a partnership, raised a lot of venture capital on the strength of a clever idea, a lot of presentations, and a fairly nebulous patent pending.
Forty years later we became an overnight success. We had a prototype spaceship and were ready for testing. Coming up to my 65th birthday and remembering my childhood, I pulled rank and insisted on being on the first flight. My partner, who had never kept as fit as me, was happy that one of us would prove the hypothesis we had formulated four decades earlier.
Technically it wasn’t the first flight, nor my first time in space. With a low earth orbit factory, I had visited many times. The ship had a shakedown trip to Mars, and let me tell you turning six months into six days travel time changed the economics of the space industry. And my bank account! With nothing left to prove I put myself on the first extra-solar system flight.
Just the three of us, the ship’s captain, the navigator and myself, the subject matter expert. The ship wasn’t that small, but the accommodation was. The bulk of the mass was the warp drive, the quantum computer doing the calculations and the fusion reactor powering it all. It’s a prototype after all.
The destination - Proxima Centauri- was obvious. Go there, take some pictures, return. That’s sounds like catching the tourist ramjet to Australia and being home in time for dinner after snapping the Opera House.
The worm jump, the bending of space and time is not, as shown in endless movies, just a moment.
It took time, at least time in the way we measured it. A light year in a day, Einstein telling us we would have near infinite mass at that speed. The worm hole protected us, the calculations said, and we would find out.
The trip was not that long. Three days getting enough inertia to open and slip into the wormhole, four days in transit, and a couple to slow down at the other end. There and back, three weeks.
Arrival at Proxima was uneventful. With no maps we emerged a long way out - like Uranus distance from the Sun - so the triple star system was just bright dots. We turned on the sensors, captured a lot of data and some photographs and turned the ship around. We didn’t need to, I think now, it just felt right. We had our pictures from the top of Everest, as they say, time to call it a day before the weather turned.
With the Sun a twinkle straight ahead, we built up momentum and jumped. Everything working flawlessly. No drama despite the historic nature of our jaunt.
Emerging from the worm hole we were lined up on Earth approach, a green planet straight ahead with its single moon.
We agreed we would come around the back of the moon to replicate William Anders’ Earthrise photograph taken from Apollo 8. As we slowed the dark side of the moon obscured the planet, which would make the earthrise even more memorable.
The navigator counted down. It should be rising in five, four, three, two…
I had the camera ready, captured the photo.
“This can’t be right. Are we in the right system?” I asked.
We were not home.
Technique: #digital
Theme: #abstract
Highlight colour: #green #black
Series: #space #mini-sci-fi
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