Ending one:

It had been over forty years now since that first day. Twenty years or so since I lost it. Since I thought I heard my dead father speaking to me. I really don’t know what came over me. He was dead. Well, everyone was dead now, so maybe it wasn’t entirely as crazy as I thought?

That had been the turning point for me, though. All of those subjects that I never thought to study became mine, and I ground even more under the climb for the top. It had taken just under ten years by the time I had reached the first space station.

It was worse than I could have expected.

I had forgotten how horrible a corpse could smell, and especially a corpse in such a small isolated place. It nearly made me decide to give it all up, but only for a moment. And then I put my helmet back on, and cleaned it up. I harvested every scrap of anything I could find, and collected the remains that I could. And then I vented the leftover atmosphere a few times through before the smell was bearable.

It took me a few years more to bring all three space stations together. If I had others to help me, I could have done it quicker. Launches were difficult by yourself, and the amount I had to automate was beyond any level of acceptable safety in the times before all of this.

But I had a mission.

Over forty years later, and my bones hurt more and more every time I liftoff. But this would be the last one. The eighty-fourth liftoff, and the last time I would be on this graveworld.

It took me three years to crack faster than light travel. I still don’t even know exactly how I did it, or really how it worked. All I knew, though, is that every simulation I ran showed it worked. Better than just working, it violated the exact law of physics that I needed to violate. It was a causality violation of the first order.

Space and time are directly linked, you see. And there are strict limits to the speed you can go. Try to go faster, and it takes more energy and you experience time moving slower. And nothing with mass could go at the speed of causality, the ‘speed of light’.

I still really had no idea how I stumbled upon it. Perhaps it was a dream. Or a nightmare. But I woke up and spent three and a half days without stopping my typing, without taking a break from welding and soldering, without doing anything except crystalizing the madness that I found in my mind. And after a well deserved eighteen hour period of blissful unconsciousness, I awoke to see that I had invented a space-time machine.

Go faster than causality, and you outstrip it. Go fast enough, and you can return to a time where the past still was the present. Sort of, at least.

It was close enough for me.

Close enough.

Enough.

If I wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t be able to make too many more trips up before the cancer tore me apart, I’d have tested it. I should have spent the time to figure out how to make the radiation a non-issue, but I didn’t. I couldn’t stop.

After getting far enough away from the Earth’s gravity well, Luna well on the other side and Sol hidden behind both, I engaged the drive.

Nothing happened, of course.

Faster than light travel was just a fever dream. How would I be able to do something so impossible? It was already beyond the pale of believability that I was even up in space at all.

As I strongly considered just opening the airlock and ending it all, I gave the button another press. This time no longer a calm and collected press, but an emotional plea. Not for it to work, but for it to do something. Anything.

And it did do something. Anything. Everything.

I just wish it hadn’t. That every particle of my being didn’t suddenly feel like it no longer was in the same place but in all of the places.

Mass was not meant to go faster than causality.

There was so much wrong with it all, and yet it still worked.

Not exactly as expected, not sending the barely-a-ship forward through space, but backwards through time.

It should have ended with me disappearing into the void forever, the movement of the solar system, the galaxy, the galactic supercluster, even hubble expansion should have made this entirely impossible.

If I had more time to spend on it, I might have found out that the device would stay bound to a large enough gravitation field. That if I had ended up rotating the device ninety degrees it would have moved me forward in space. And it would never have occurred to me what the other direction would do, something that I wish I was still able to even think about now as I found myself crashing back down to the planet I thought I had left for good.

Into the middle of roughly nowhere, rural farmland as far as the eye can see.

It was astounding that my body survived all of that, and that I was still both alive and conscious when I heard someone hammering on the side of the ship.

But the shock of who I saw is what killed me. Like Mister Snuggleupagus, I died of fright. How fitting.

My last vision was filled with Barney Simons, someone entirely unknown to the world until he was the first.

“Hey, are you okay? Hey?”

The last voice I heard, over forty years since that day.

Patient zero.