[Bale, Wayward Cosmos – 4]

The second I could stand I rushed, well barely shambled really; over to the main flight console off on the far left of the main external camera screen array and lightly pushed the makeshift not-so-big yellow button. This instantly switched all systems back to their normal running state including standard cabin illumination, which made my already pounding head that much worse…

After exactly 2.437 seconds I felt the ship push its momentum forward causing my stance to sway ever so slightly. Even though my eyes were throbbing I looked back and smiled painfully at the yellow button with the word “Yay!” scratched in its sloppily applied paint. Much like its counterpart the “SHIT” button, the “Yay!” button was tied into dozens of subsystems throughout the ship. The “Yay!” button was hooked to one long piece of linear code that had hundreds of subroutine calls (which triggered off millions of lines of sublibrary code) controlling everything a systems engineer could imagine; from the obvious such as life-support to the not-so-obvious such as returning power to the 112 toilets.

Oh and yes, the last item in the extremely long chain of event triggers was propulsion (which occurred exactly 2437 milliseconds after start) – thus my slight sway.

Sitting down hard on the floor I realized everything hurt, and I mean everything. My head, my eyes, my stomach… hell I think my organs hurt somehow…

“What the hell was that…?” I said to the floor with my head in my hands.

I felt completely exhausted, “I think I need to go back to bed…”

Craning my neck backwards, oh man that had hurt too, to look at the main impulse displays, I saw with some relief that the ship was back to its normal course and heading; Course = zero, Heading = forward. Another glance at the diagnostics display confirmed what I had hoped: no damage that the ship could recognize. I’d spent countless hours programming the ship to self-assess and alert me to any issues it understood. Thankfully, all indicators were green. But that didn’t mean everything was perfect; the ship could only tell me about problems it was programmed to recognize.

You see typically a ‘course’ in space means you are following a projected line in a 3D coordinate system via a mapped gridded volumetric area. Mine was set to zero, well (0,0,0) actually, as in I had no actual course. Additionally a ‘heading’ is the direction at which the ship is pointing. Mine was originally set as a normal vector from where I started – meaning straight away from my origination point.

Yes, that’s correct. For 3,414 days (or 9 years, 4 months and 6 days) I had been going toward nothing, in as straight a line as possible, away from Earth.

[900] Words : Forever?