/sci/ - Science & Math

A few hours after the explosion, a message was received and broadcast to every net node in Sunspace. On the uncensored links, people could hear him screaming in the leaky canister. The transmissions ceased once the Carl Sagan plunged into the Sun. The solar wind blocked transmissions. People thought he was going to burn there, but he was not that lucky.
The battered remains of the great sail did a hyperbolic orbit around the Sun, and were catapulted back into interstellar space. Forever. No man-made ship could catch up to him before the closed-loop life support systems failed. Counting time dilation, he had 40 years for that to happen.
But before it fluttered out, it had passed so close to Mercury (Where she waited for him, in the Mercury Power Project) that they were able to have a conversation, the last one, where lightspeed lag didn't count.
After a few messages, the ship was lost in such dense regions of the solar wind that its microwave laser could not reach the Power Project. All eyes were on her: Chimerical, half-human, impure, meant to be a slave. She was the splice that owned the world.
He had given her, before drifting out into space, the keys to the Von Neumann Corporations: The self-replicating, self-improving, evolving software objects that gnawed at the economies of the world. They were as smart as an insect, but very good at what they did. She owned the total accumulated wealth of Mankind and she could've turned that against her tormentors, but she decided not to, just in case. If they had to fear her to respect her, no, she didn't like that, she wanted to make sure they didn't fear her so she never destroyed the economy.

>>1926960

I see your DeltaGlider and raise you a Bussard Fusion Ramjet.

>>1926964

Nah, to save NASA just hunt down the congressmen who cut its budget and then complain about it "not doing anything".

Gillis absently gnawed on a fingernail; after a few minutes he developed a possible explanation for the switch. Captain Lee and the other conspirators had smuggled almost fifty dissident intellectuals on board just before the Alabama fled Earth; since none of them had been listed in the ship’s original crew manifest, the D.I.’s had to be assigned to biostasis cells previously reserved for the members of the colonization team who had been left behind on Earth. Gillis could only assume that, at some point during the confusion, someone had accidentally fed erroneous information to the computer controlling the biostasis systems. Therefore, although he was originally assigned to C1A-07 while Ensign Gunther was supposed to be in C2A-07, whoever had switched his and Gunther’s cells had also neglected to cross-feed this information from the biostasis control system to the ship’s AI. In the long run, it was a small matter of substituting one single digit for another. . . .

Yet this didn’t answer the original question: why had he been prematurely revived from biostasis? Or rather, why was Gunther supposed to be revived?

Why did you revive the occupant of cell C2A-07?

CLASSIFIED/TS. ISA Order 7812-DA

What the. . . ? Why was there an Internal Security Agency lock-out? Yet he was able to get around that.

Security override AS-001001, Gillis, Leslie, Lt. Com. password Scotland. Repeat question: why did you revive the occupant of cell C2A-07?

>>1604060

This is *almost* grayscale so.

So, /sci/, how do YOU plan to see the morning filled with four hundred billion Suns?

Bussard ramjets? Fusion drives? Coilships? An antimatter rocket, or maybe a comet whose ice was stripped and electrolyzed to make up fuel for an ion drive, or a Total Conversion drive?

Stepping away from the rockets, you have the Starwisp, or the great sails, arguably the most romantic form of spaceflight: The tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars.

Or undiscovered physics: Negative energy propulsion, naturally ocurring wormholes...

ITT: SPACEFLIGHTAN