One speck of light is much like
Day 1: System Processing
Transcription of an Audio Note from Mary Anders’ Personal Files
The problem with new things is that they aren’t usually broken. You run your program and then, while it works, you wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The captain has spent the last few hours in the telescope pod. I think she simply enjoys looking at the stars, but she says she’s trying to locate familiar features. More luck to her. And our birthday girl (she did bring cakes with her, but I guess there’s no way to collect on that bet with Irma now) is of course finding out as much as she can about the planets in this system. The sun is a white dwarf – a blue one – making the system too cold and uninhabitable for humans at scale. None of the planets are any closer to it than Jupiter is to our own sun back in Sol. Probably, judging from the astroid belt in the inner system, there were closer planets once, long ago. Destroyed in the ancient death pangs of the star. Like Earth will be when the sun finally gets all red-giant-y.
Still waiting.
I never expected an analysis to be more stressful than the jump itself, but at least when we were prepping for jump and jumping there was a lot to do: re-running simulations and overseeing system outputs. And gate outputs. The actual event was rather disappointing. No noise, no whirling lights, no horrific sensation of otherness. Just the dimensional energy field of the gate itself, wrapping around us in invisible wisps of ionized vacuum, until, pop! We were out the other side. Only, you know, thousands of trillions of miles away.
Ah, finally. The analysis is done. Unbelievable but done. And I have something to do, namely figure out how our blind jump was so off from all the predictions. I doubt I’d be lucky enough for this mission to reveal the full workings of quantum mechanics. Or shake the foundations of physics. But if our understanding is this off, will we be able to blind jump again, safely?
By “safely” I mean, of course, without accidentally jumping into a planet.