Theodora Taylor stared up at the sun, at the blemish-like dark spots adorning its golden surface. Thin wisps of glowing plasma sloughed off the burning disk, surrounding it in a halo of white.
Then she turned the sun off.
In its place, a dull, blurry inkblot of tinged white spread across the low hanging clouds. It cast its pale light across the imposing cityscape. The skyscrapers loomed over her. They stretched high into the drab firmament, parting the clouds as some vast fleet of warships might part the ocean. Some lost their crowns in the thick vapor, fading into the distance, as if they stretched to infinity.
Theodora bowed her head down and started walking with the sluggish current of humanity that surged through the wide streets. Occasionally, a solitary bicycle weaved its way awkwardly through the flood of people. Through the dense throng of humans and the thick stand of skyscrapers, Theodora could see the grey ocean, punctured by thin needles of rusting metal. It heaved and sloshed against the tall dikes that protected the city, perhaps hoping one day to bring them down.
The city of New York bustled as it had always bustled, the millions upon millions of people marching through their routines as they always had. The daily heartbeat of the city had been thumping for at least eight hundred years. Of course, the original city was but crumbling relic under the ever-rising waters. The last remains were the skeletons of the old buildings, some still rising valiantly above the ocean.
Theodora didn't like the appearance of the dreary city, and decided to change it. The people became fish swimming in a slow, Amazonian river, the towers became nonsensically tall trees, taller than the small puffy clouds that punctuated the turquoise of the sky. The sun shined in full tropical glory, dappling Theodora's red canoe with pristine light. At some point, she stopped walking and began rowing.
The fish swam in the slow current, glinting orange and red and yellow, shimmering under the intense sunlight. Lazy crocodiles paddled below the calm, clear water, their backs covered with thin streamers of foliage, followed by entourages of tiny fish. The riverbed, far below but still clearly visible, was carpeted in the same algae, giving it the appearance of some rustic pasture. The trees dipped their thick, dark roots into the broad river. A plethora of rainbow birds twisted and weaved between the great mangroves. Their wings fluttered and caught in the bright sunlight flashing and twinkling, a galaxy of multicolored stars, wheeling through the sky.
Annoyingly, a notification appeared suddenly in the air near Theodora's head, its flashing blue and red and contrasting with the soft tones of her world. It told her that she was nearing her destination and the autopilot was going to shut off soon. She took a longing glance at perfection, then closed the program. The drab skies and glacial crowds returned. The trees morphed back into tall, ominous towers. Theodora found herself standing in front of an especially massive one, with the company name written in a blocky font across the sheer, vertical surface.
Theodora worked for the Exonavis Corporation, the most powerful space manufacturing companies in the solar system. It mostly specialized in asteroid mining, but had heavy involvement in military and corporate contracting, building ships for other organizations. Recent events had cemented its position above any of its competitors. The enormous building seemed to testify the opulence of the company.
Theodora walked through the long bank of doors, and entered the main lobby of EXN New York. The chamber was designed on the same premise as most EXN ships, with white, sterile ceiling and walls. The tall, dark windows gave the aura of some ancient cathedral and flying buttresses splaying out from the walls only strengthened the likeness. In the center of the chamber, a three-dimensional image floated, a holographic representation of the company's most recent triumph. It looked like a dumbbell, with two huge lobes on either side of a thin rod. One side was red, the other blue.
The starship Facem was mostly paid for by the United Districts of Sol. The original contract had been very lax, specifying nothing but the mass of the payload. Any means of propulsion could have been used. It could have easily been a generation ship, flying among the stars for centuries, and still UDS would have been happy. EXN won the contract, and built the machine. With the freedom to do as they wished, the company took an especially unorthodox route when designing it. Instead of chemical, solar sail, or nuclear propulsion, the Facem decided on antimatter. The material was insanely expensive; the company had to buy most of the existing supply and start making their own fuel, at immense cost to itself. To worsen the situation, antimatter was just extremely volatile. A single kilogram of the stuff could contend with the mightiest nuclear weapons ever created, if it were to combust. There were multiple tons of it on Facem. It was a daring concept; even now, with the ship in high orbit, an accident could roast most of the population in the Earth-Luna system.
Theodora, being one of the head engineers for the project, had a good understanding of Facem's inner workings. The ship was fueled by antihydrogen, which was kept in voluminous chambers in the engine blocks. The fuel could not be allowed to come into contact with the walls of the chamber, since matter and antimatter instantly annihilated upon impact, leaving only pure energy. This was avoided by lining the fuel tank with powerful magnets that repelled the substance. By ostensibly managing and tweaking the electromagnetic fields, jets of antimatter could be injected into a combustion chamber, where it combined with an opposing stream of normal hydrogen. The explosive release of energy that resulted was reflected out of the ship using even more magnets. This jet of relativistic plasma would allow the Facem to use a brachistochrone trajectory, accelerating almost continuously throughout its journey.
The use of antimatter wasn't a strict requirement to move the starship. While the vessel was certainly very large, other forms of propulsion could succeed in moving it just as effectively. Nuclear fusion and advanced chemical propulsion could provide the massive force required, at similar efficiencies. No, antimatter was used only because it was flashy. It would burn brightly enough to outshine the moon and be visible by day for weeks on end. Unofficially, the Facem was the world's largest billboard, indirectly screaming the success and power of the corporation to all the inhabitants of Earth. This secondary purpose was so important, in fact, that Exonavis had gone well over the grant in paying for its construction, making the construction of the Facem a net loss with no tangible returns. A terrifying prospect for any investor, but someone must have thought it was a good idea.
Theodora passed underneath the hanging diagram of the Facem. She walked toward the back of the room, toward one of the hovering disks that served as an elevator system for the building. As she stepped onto the obsidian surface, the rainforest rematerialized, vines and flowers sprouting out of the cylindrical walls of the elevator shaft, which itself had become the hollow trunk of a great tree. The sluggish waters of the river flowed through the tall, stilt-like roots, swarming with tiny metallic fish. Far above, the warm sun shined through the open crown of the dead tree, illuminating the interior and lighting millions of dust motes that floated daintily in the air. Through the holes in the bark, Theodora could see the verdant greenery of the forest and the bright, impossible azure of the sky.
Suddenly, the lily pad on which she stood began to glide silently up, buoyed by a crystalline gush of perfect water, spouting forth from an unseen spring. She slowly ascended, accelerating. A hundred meters, a thousand, ten thousand rolled by as she shot toward heaven. As she neared the lofty crown, the lily pad began to slow down. By the time she reached the top, it had halted just as gracefully as it had set off, sliding silently and precisely into place, its black plastic almost flush with the tiling of the floor. The huge windows that served as walls showed mostly the blue-grey haze of the atmosphere, thinning to black, with clouds lurking far below. Below even them, the city sprawled, eventually becoming lost in the darkness of the slowly receding night.
The Exonavis building at New York was approximately twelve kilometers tall. It easily dwarfed every other construction anywhere nearby, and was among the tallest man-made structures in history, second only to the Wen Zhong space elevator at Jing-Jin-Ji. It was truly a marvel of human ingenuity.
It was also, however, utterly impractical. It contained almost ten times more floor space than the company needed. Most of the structure was either empty or rented to other companies. Of the tiny fraction under Exonavis use, about half was purely residential quarters for employees, who took the elevator to their place of work, living their entire lives within this one building. Theodora was not one of them. She chose to live in her own apartment, adjacent to the looming spire, and made a short walk to the building every morning. A petulant gesture, perhaps, but she didn't want to be owned, at least not completely, by the company.
Theodora worked on one of the higher stories of the building, and had begun to take the vertigo-inducing height for granted. She stood a mere meter away from the window, beyond which was a near vertical descent of several kilometers, and gazed at the gently receding line between night and day. The city was a fuzzy grid of grey and black lines far below. Eventually, she broke her stare and retreated to her office.
As one of the lead spacecraft engineers for Exonavis, Theodora worked in the higher tiers of the building. Many found such a prospect alarming; this building rivaled even the tallest mountains in height, and wasn't nearly as sturdy as they. The sight of clouds roiling like some angry silver ocean far below often induced horrible bouts of vertigo in unprepared visitors. Theodora felt no such terror. She had long since grown used to the rolling motion of the floor as the tower yielded to the wind, and the vast expanse of open, clear air that went on forever in all directions. It didn't faze her when the tower bent so far that her chair began sliding toward the polished windows and the cityscape far below. It was more of an annoyance at this point.
She reached her spacious office and began working. The celebrations after the launch of the Facem had ended a few days before, and the company had returned to normalcy. In fact, there had been a dullness as of the past few days, since Exonavis had no large projects to work on after the intensity of building and launching the huge starship. For the most part, Theodora's life had been nothing but busywork.
For hours she sat alone at her desk, staring at nothing, as numbers and words flew in front of her eyes, most of them signifying nothing. Occasionally, she entered a flurry of information into the physical computer in front of her. Then, as the sun set over the hazy Appalachians, she was interrupted.
A man stepped into her office. He was tall and thin, with a chiseled, perfect face, an exact replica of all the other corporate elites, wearing stiff, professional business attire. He nodded at her, then threw a thick pile of papers onto her desk. On the front, in the thick, bold font that smelled of confidence, was the word "Vesparum", as well as the nine-leafed olive branch of the United Districts of Sol Navy.
"It's a new proposal," said the man.
"For what?"
"A warship. The UDSN wants a new one. ¨
"Really? Since when has the Navy...?"
"Since when did you have the authority to ask? They want this vessel built, you do it. Said to get it done in less than two years."
"Seems rushed."
"Don't care. Contact your team and get cracking".
With that, he left. Theodora was left staring at the stack of papers in front of her. She picked it up, and began looking through. What she found was an extensive list of design parameters. There were specific requirements for size, crew accommodations, fight AI capabilities, gyroscopes, and propulsion. Really, there wasn't much left for the design team to do. The desired weapons system though, was not nearly as straightforward. The document was very direct in what it wanted, so in that sense it was as simple as following a blueprint. But the weapon it called for were simply absurd, well beyond anything she had ever been asked to do. Indeed, the specs were well beyond anything she thought physically possible, but she would have to design it anyway. Theodora sighed and put down the thick mass of paper.
She scanned the document into her computer and sent it off to the small group of associates that she worked with. She accompanied it with a short apologetic message, explaining the ordeal ahead.
Theodora looked out the window. The sun had set behind the mountains, leaving a warm afterglow of purple and red and yellow against the darkening blue of the earth. The sky above was already swarming with stars, each glittering bravely despite the dying flames of the sun on the horizon.
She walked along the bough of the tree, making her way down to the hollow trunk. The faint song of the rainforest echoed from the canopy far below. At the end of the branch, a great harpy eagle waited, majestically surveying the landscape with its bronze eyes. Theodora climbed onto its broad, grey back, and the dream of a memory raised its massive wings.
The forest passed slowly below, as the great hollow tree receded into the distance. The eagle soared silently on wings of night, its crested head cocking into the wind. The ground below was littered with just as many lights as the night sky above; bioluminescent fungi and calm, reflective ponds shone through the thick foliage.
The stars crawled across the wide, black-grey sky, blinking white and red with precision, slowly fading to blissful black as Theodora fell asleep.
One of the stars, a trembling speck in the grey firmament, was not blinking. It shone bright enough to be seen through the thick layers of haze and vapor and obscuring light that the city produced, one of the few extraterrestrial objects that could still do so. Even Sirius, the dog star, the brightest star visible in Earth's sky, had withered and died as humanity slaughtered the night.
And yet this solitary star persevered and managed to cast its faint light onto the watching eyes of Earth. A thorough analysis would have determined that much of the light had an extremely high energy, with only a relatively small portion shining in the visible wavelengths.
Further and more detailed study would have found that the star was no further away than one of the planets.
The Facem thundered its way through the asteroid belt, already moving at several thousand kilometers per second. It burned its way through the obsidian of space, cutting the glossy darkness with a searing blue luminance. The seconds and minutes poured like sand through its hourglass structure, accumulating along with the kilometers, flowing at an ever-slower rate. The sun dimmed to a solitary snowflake in the vast, swirling blizzard of the cosmos. The vessel accelerated, faster and faster, until it approached the speed of light. The topography of the universe twisted into convoluted disarray, protecting the sanctity of that apex velocity. The heatshield, wide and mighty, glowed as its surface was worn away by a furious barrage of particles. The stars rushed by, in a swirling, chaotic swarm, threatening to swallow the ship along with the tiny planet that was foolish enough to create it. Infinity spread out before the Facem in all its majesty, and the ship was unable to illuminate any of it.