axlerowes's Profile

'I keep my sanity tied to my hip with very thin thread. Somedays when I am pushing through the throngs of people all staring at tiny screens in their heads or in their hands I start feel that thread slipping. On those days I know that my only salvation is docked at the spaceport. My savior is not some luxury liner or high speed transport filled with perfectly balanced environments and a history of 'punctuality'. This man's spaceport messiah is more often than not a century old craft whose airlock is caked with the mud of a hundred worlds, with a computer programed in a dead language and a captain that makes his living looking for the slimmest trade margins in the most distant stars. When I sign on to the crew of such a craft I feel my thread of sanity tighten. I know that when we break through that blue ceiling we will be passing the soul crushing civilized worlds and heading for the fainter stars.'

-J. Mitchell Overnantuck, Unlicensed Jump Drive Navigator

Most of the other old men I talk to about life discuss defining days that separated their lives into a before and after. My life does not have any such days, no single event changed the way I lived my life. This life of mine is one unbroken field, different crops have been planted and reaped, but the ground has remained the same. There is one day though that scars that field like a stump or stone that cannot be plowed under. I have spent many seasons pondering that day, but have never found a comfortable place for it.

When a future imagines something as fantastic as faster than light travel it has also to imagine a fantastic power source.