Ficlets

The Future: A beginning

Engineers gotta engineer somethin’.

What else is left to build when you’ve conquered disease, starvation, space, and time?

The tachyon phase drive, quite a piece of machinery, and of course the key to FTL travel. The hyperdrive was the key, it took folding space to capture those buggers, and to make the jump.

So now what? Unlimited potential. Acceleration wells. Inverse rod efficiency. The faster the cheaper. Until you want to stop.

It’s a leap, to cross that barrier. And the optical boom is fantastic. Cherenkov radiation times, red shift, blue shift, the ship…just shifts.

But we’ve got that dialed. Now it’s Cirque du Soleil, Ringling Bros., bending and flying for the masses, taking our visions and turning them into parlor tricks and con games.

Building seatbelts for the regulators and streamlining for the efficiency buffs.

Over lunch, the restaurant modeled after Earth’s ancient Chinese civillization, I pondered.

And the cookie read: You will never see your greatest failure approach.

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