In Honor Of

We bought the sky, the greatest ticket the universe had to offer. 100,000 of the best and brightest Terra had to offer. Brave pioneers who sacrificed everything for a chance to make it on new planet, free from the troubles of home. They said we were fools; there was no way to build something that big, that the cryosystems would never work, that our ship would break. They said we were traitors; Earth needed our skills, the resources that went into our ship came out of the mouths of the starving. But we were heroes, out on the grand question for evolution. Some of us died before the work was completed, their children carried on. When the time came, we took the shuttles to geosynchronous orbit, started the fusion Orion/pulse drive, sealed up the cyrochambers, and slept. We dreamed of green fields and blue skies.

A stranger opened the cyrochamber door. “Welcome to Eredani Prime. Please present your papers for inspection?” Not an alien, not a pioneer, just the children of those who had take waited for the technology of interstellar colonization to become accessible to the masses. They had brought everything we hated about home with them. We closed the cyrochamber, turned our ship towards the outer darkness, and engaged the main drive.

Fuck physics, and fuck FTL.