The Greatest Commodity (First Draft)

Toils of the last Terran

Planet Odysseus, Approx-201,000AD (Old Measurement) As recorded in the journals of Captain James Nevil:

Nevil toiled away for months, the base had everything he needed to survive. But his crew was dead, and he had no way of knowing if the human race still existed. As far as he was concerned, he was the last human being.

He spent his time studying the design of the gravitic drive. How did it work? He rescued the blueprints from a data drive in the ruins of Halsey's quarters and uploaded it into the main computer of the base. Then he recreated the simulations used by the original researchers. He began to do experiments.

Initially tweaking minor variables, he learned to control field size, direction, and speed, with relative ease.

After months of haplessly toying with gravitics, he made a mistake in calculations -- Having typed in the variables with one hand, the other holding a cumbersome plate of food -- He accidentally input the wrong variables into the simulation. Rather than moving itself, the simulated gravitic drive stayed still... While everything else moved.

In sudden astonishment, he dropped his plate. It fell to the floor and exploded into a thousand shards of glass, spreading ruined food and sharp debris everywhere. The service robots sprang into the cleanup operation. Nevil barely noticed any of it, his eyes were fixed on the display in front of him. He had projected gravitics!

With further experimentation, he learned to control it, he picked up virtual objects and moved them, controlling their movement exactly. Gradually he scaled up, further and further. Until he began to move asteroids.

The virtual asteroids were blank spheres, rendered to an average size and mass. But that didn't matter. He moved them.

One night, taking a break from experimentation. He stepped outside of the base.

The sky was stunning, a disorganized medley of stars and nebulae. And spiral looming in the distance, home. He was 199,000 light years away from it. And 199,000 years into the future. Lost. He felt a mixture of grief and anger at the vista of eternity. Who was responsible? Was it himself? Had he doomed himself and everyone under his command to this fate by not paying attention? Could he have caught Alvis' mistake?

Could he have turned around? Could he have returned to Earth? Perhaps there might have even been a human race still there. Or at least something left of it.

Alvis was responsible for his mistake. But who had allowed him to? Halsey? Halsey had trusted Alvis, his partner for over a decade, not to make such a silly mistake. Nevil accepted that he, himself, was responsible. As Captain, it was his job to watch over his ship and his crew, not to nervously avert his eyes. He should have stood over those meddling two and educated himself on the subject so he could catch the mistake. But he didn't. His entire crew dead, his ship ruined, marooned on an island in a Sea of Stars because he failed to do his duty. Perhaps he could have awoken them? Rather than leave them in stasis where they would die if the machine failed, as they did. Yet another tragedy of his fault. Had he done his job, everyone would still be alive, and would never have become lost. The mission would have finished successfully, and they would all have returned to Earth, and sparked a glorious revolution in motion.

Instead, they came here. And they died here. Eons beyond home and time. Millennia of history, skipped, like jumping from the first page to the last. A bitter waste.

Could anyone consider such a jump to be trivial? Even now, the constellations back home had already shifted into an unrecognizable jumble. He doubted he could even locate Earth now, even the Pulsars had moved. 

He felt a need for some sort of reparation. To somehow make up for everything.

Finally, he went back down into the base and slept for a while.

Upon awaking, he returned to the computer to continue his experimentation with gravitics. Moving up from Asteroids to Planets, each upscale theoretically requiring more power than before. Up to Stars.

With further experimentation, he learned to use subtle gravitic pushes in different directions to reshape soft objects.

But the bigger the object manipulated, the more power it took. For the purpose of amusement, Nevil sought out a solution.

To this effort, he spent nearly two months, cataloging every attempt, recording every theory. Until he finally hit jackpot. 

Gravitics was more than simply a method of propelling objects, it was a hack to the source code of the Cosmos. A cheating of reality, he created an infinite loop of energy, a perpetual motion machine.

He realized the universe was like a computer program. Everything came down to a code, existence comprised a one, and non-existence comprised a zero. By manipulating the code, you could do anything. Nevil realized he could change the nature of everything. He could change the coordinates of a particle, teleport it across the universe. He could do this to a whole series of them, a whole object, a person. He wanted to try it in real life, what else did he have to live for?

After a week of tinkering with the hardware of the gravitic drive, he completed the modifications necessary to create the infinite-energy-loop, and to project masses of choice.He searched the sky for a suitable target, eventually, he found one. A small Asteroid passing Odysseus, he locked onto it and began his experiment.

The asteroid immediately began to shift in its orbit. He controlled every aspect of its motion, he fiddled with it until it was maneuvered into an extremely close orbit, just above the atmosphere. From his vantage point outside the base, Nevil could see every crater on the lumpy rock, its gray surface shimmering in the sunlight. Then he put on a massive surge of velocity and thrust it out of the solar system at quarter-C, it disappeared in a blink. He knew where it was going, he sent it home, to his home. Someday it would pass like a bullet through the area of space where Sol had been, so long ago.

Eagerly, he searched for more things to play with. It was then that he set his sights on the fifth planet.