The engine startup was as simple as hitting a few buttons on my screen. I could hear the magnetic coils winding up. The electric fields will start switching from positive to negative to make radio waves to accelerate the fuel. It was not a hum I would enjoy, but there was nothing I could do about that.

  I could see the power core stabilizing, although we were still increasing the percentage of power inside the power core. It no longer jumped too much. It will stop the accumulation of power at about 30% and try to keep it around there. That seemed to be the sweet spot for efficiency, at least according to the simulation.

  That would, of course, require some testing to see if it was actually true, but that didn’t matter right now. From the readings I was seeing, we could increase the power generation of the power core by about 40 to 45% more. That would easily cover all three engines at full power which they currently were at as the startup took the most power, as well as the estimated power draw of the FTL.

  The FTL was quite a small device. It was rather flat, only about 20 centimeters tall, although it varied a bit. Other than that, it was about a meter and a half wide and two meters in length. It was mounted above me on the ceiling. It needed to be in a central location, as it sort of created a layer around the ship, and it would be best if it was as uniform as possible.

  If I understood it correctly, the bigger ships had multiple of these to cover their entire hulls. Technically you could even go into FTL with an entire fleet. But you would need a better design than the current one for that.

  The reason why it could work like that was because of how the FTL device worked. It was a practical use of the quantum mechanics infinite paths theory. Everything has a path it will travel, but when you take point A to point B, there is an endless amount of pathways you could take, but you will take the most probable one.

  The larger the energy that thing has, the more probable a path is. The opposite is true on the other side of the scale.

  What the FTL device does is make the most probable path a path to a side dimension, where, as it turns out, distances are shorter than in our dimension, giving us FTL.

  Fucking genius who ever came up with that. But the question who? No one actually knows. A group of corporations took credit, which means that poor bastard will never go down in history for discovering something so monumental.

  The first question I asked was: does that mean we could go into a different dimension of our universe like in so many stories? Technically yes, but actually no.

  The thing is, to make the transition or jump into the side dimension, you need a certain speed and energy. Energy—not a big problem. Speed—even speed is not too big a problem. It’s that getting to 7.7% of light speed will take days or weeks, depending on your acceleration.

  Theoretically, there should be more side dimensions, but only this one is confirmed, as each one needs greater speed and energy.

  So now we have come to the problem of why we can’t enter other universes. Using the infinite paths theory, everything could take a path to another universe similar to ours where a version of you exists that made, at some point a different decision to you, but you would need to be moving at a speed a few times greater than the speed of light and produce enough energy to rival a few thousand suns.

  So, while in theory possible, those infinite versions of us do not exist because those paths are so unlikely that they will never happen.

  I kinda like that.

  There is only one of me, and there only will ever be one of me.

  It’s also been made incredibly clear that it’s not possible to go faster than light because of the infinite paths theory—somehow everything goes back to this. At such speeds, time does not pass, and you can’t go into negative time—otherwise, you do not have a path, and if you do not have that, you cease to exist.

  Funnily enough, the power core kind of works on the same principle. The nanomachines, instead of making the most likely path possible at point A they do it at point B. They make themselves so desirable for all the radiation, heat, and everything else that it’s most likely all those things will go into them. The nanomachines then work in clusters to process and convert everything into electrical energy, which now allows me to power everything on the ship.

  I took one step upward to go back into the pilot seat, but I decided on one last look outside my ship. The engines would still take some time to spool up enough to get any thrust out of them.

  I walked past Bob, who was still busy moving the last of the crates. Most of these were filled with the most expensive materials I had salvaged. There was once a junkyard quite close to here where I got most of my stuff, but I had basically emptied it out. I even found this ship hull there.

  Now that I was outside, the noise was quite loud. My entire base was in full operation, but the loudest thing was the ship. The noise of the engines, while a bit annoying, was also satisfying.

  From my breast pocket, I took out an old-looking pack of cigars. I took one out and lit it, taking a deep drag in.

  These small little sticks were responsible for so much death, yet my lungs were fully cybernetic, and this type of smoke wouldn’t hurt me even a bit. I didn’t have many of these left, but this felt like an occasion to celebrate a bit. It was one of the few things that actually tasted good with the sense of taste I had.

  Then I felt another type of shaking. It seemed like I had overstayed quite a bit. It’s kind of funny that it seems like I won’t actually have to rush escape where the ship barely takes off while the ground underneath falls into the abyss.

  With one last drag before the filter, I threw the cigar to the ground and stamped it out. The engines were now properly ramped up, and from my wrist device, I could see the hydrogen slowly being trickled into the acceleration bay.

  Immediately, the engines started to make a different kind of noise—a lower one that wasn’t as annoying. Small mercies, I guess.

  Just before I stepped onto the ramp, I watched as Bob hauled the last of the boxes, then set himself into his nook and locked himself in.

  “Lola, go through the checklist one more time and see if we’ve missed anything.”

  I did the same and tried to go through the list of everything I needed—because there was no coming back.

  “Everything mission-critical is on board,” she answered back.

  With that, I hit the button, and the ramp started to close. It wasn’t fast-moving, but it also wasn’t too slow. Finally, it closed up, and I could feel the locking mechanism clamping down. Then the ship started to pressurize properly, and I headed to the cockpit.

  Looking at all the readings here was incredibly simple as everything was displayed. The particles inside the engines had reached near 10% of lightspeed. The main engine could get the hydrogen particles a lot closer to lightspeed, but theoretically, the side engines could only get to about 30%. But that should be enough. They were not there for efficiency—they were there so I could get the hell off this rock.

  There were many controllers, but almost everything here was electronic and controlled by screens. There were a few exceptions. One was the main flight stick. It wasn’t like a regular joystick like most everything flying nowadays had—it actually had a more wheel-like design, I think it’s called a control yoke.

  To the right side of me, there was also a more traditional joystick. That was to control the ship’s orientation in space.

  “Lola, go over the weight calculations one more time to see that everything is in the correct position. If we mess that up, we will run out of nitrogen for the RCS system quite fast if we want to go in the direction we want to go.”

  “Everything looks within error parameters.”

  Well, that was good enough, I guess. The pressurization was good, everything seemed green, so I hit a flick switch. The ship's klaxon went off throughout the ship, and every hibernating drone and anything else that could move woke up for a moment and went through acceleration protocols. When this thing started to move, I couldn’t have things flying around if I needed to make high-G maneuvers.

  “Lola, open the hangar doors and start the base leaving protocols.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Everything was going to go down in flames here, just in case and every drone not coming with was going to be wiped.

  The doors opened slowly, and the grinding was quite loud. Yeah, this place was starting to shift quite badly. The doors did eventually slide open enough that it was time to start moving. I pushed the thrust levers on the side engines to about 10%, and I immediately felt myself start to move forward.

  I looked to the sides where the screens showed me the external view. The engine started to expel hydrogen at incredible speeds. Immediately after they were exposed to the atmosphere, they caught fire and left a huge trail of flames. My base was already going up in flames.

  Heading up the gentle upward ramp, I could see how the trail of fire curved into the metal surface of the floor and, as I continued to move forward, it started to cut into the concrete. One thing was clear—these engines would not be good for any runway.

  The slope upwards was quite gradual and at an angle, so I needed to pull back thrust on the left engine and push it up for the right one just a bit. I didn’t have any real steering, but I did have 40 high-impact, high-durability landing tires that should easily carry the nearly 200 tonnes of this ship to the speeds at which I could actually take off.

  Getting airborne would be a lot harder, as the air was so much thinner, but speed was going to be my ally here. I had kept the road from here to the megacity like it was after everyone died, but during the week, my drones had cleared it. Hopefully, no one had noticed.

  The ship emerged into the sunlight slowly, but I was already pushing about 10 kilometers an hour. There was no time to waste, but I did enjoy the sunlight that I would never feel again. Even if I was able to feel sunlight, it would never be this sunlight.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Goodbye, Earth.”

  With that, I pushed the side engine accelerations to about 40% and raised the fuel input a bit. That should be stable enough. The main engine's fuel was already at about 60% light speed, but that should be enough. Pushing the main engine throttle to 5% already caused me to feel quite a bit of acceleration.

  Slowly, I pushed it up and up, watching as I gained more and more speed. I put the flaps down and could kind of feel the ship getting a bit lighter. I pushed the throttle to 30% and increased the fuel amount flowing into the engine. It was a delicate balancing act, but everything still seemed in the green, and I was getting the thrust I was expecting.

  “It was actually working.” This made me want to cackle like a villain.

  I looked backward at the screen that showed me the view from the back of my ship. There was a line of fire coming from the engines. The hydrogen particles were flying so fast that they were combusting immediately when they hit the atmosphere. The line of fire was quite impressive.

  It didn’t take long before our speed reached 100 kilometers an hour, but when I tried to pull up, nothing really happened. It still wasn’t fast enough. I pushed the throttle to 35 and the side engines to 50. We were really picking up speed now, but it still didn’t want to go up. Time to tilt those engines.

  I felt the pistons moving the engines, and immediately, the nose started to pull up. Pulling back on the flight controls, I finally achieved liftoff at about 250 kilometers an hour. The megacity was incredibly close now, and I had to bank a bit to the left so I would miss some of the standing skyscrapers. The acceleration felt amazing, but my joy was ruined when I heard a voice on the communications array.

  “Unknown vessel over the megacity forward horizon. You are ordered by the Terran Empire to identify yourself or be shot down.”

  They found me faster than I expected. I hit the button to close the windows, and armored plating slid in front of them. Then there was no more natural light, and most likely, it would be a while before I saw it again.

  What I wasn’t going to do was answer them—that would allow them to get a target lock on me a lot faster.

  I got a warning notification on the side engines. It seemed like with the tilt they were at and the acceleration, the housing of the whole engine was stressed. I moved them back to their horizontal position, as I didn’t need them tilted downwards any longer, and activated the travel mode, which locked them down properly. Immediately, the warnings went away.

  Still, I couldn’t push those engines more.

  I was already under about 6g of acceleration, but I fiddled with the main engine to bring it to 10g. The ship shook a bit, and I was going at quite a shallow angle, but I would eventually reach space. The longer I stayed in the gravity well and the interference the atmosphere provided, the longer it would take them to get a target lock on me.

  Experiencing 10g constantly was not nice, but I could push myself even harder if needed. That was the advantage of my cyber modifications, and I even purposely made some more so I could withstand more G forces. Currently, however, it would be too dangerous, as we were still in the atmosphere.

  Finally, they stopped giving me the same line about identifying myself.

  "We are not registering a fusion core. Do you really think that you can get out of the solar system without it? Answer back, and we will be lenient."

  They waited for quite a bit. Once again, I didn’t have any desire to answer back.

  "You are one of those fallen humans, aren’t you? How much of you is machine? Scum like you shouldn’t have survived. How are you even alive? C-Day should have ended your existence."

  Well, now that bastard made me angry. Yet I still did not answer back, can’t let myself be controlled by anger.

  Cybernetics were an answer to a lot of things, but the early days were bad. There was little regulation, and people went way overboard with the modifications before they understood what those modifications would mean.

  If you chopped your arm off and replaced it with a cybernetic one, it would never feel the same. Some were never meant to get any cybernetics—they will never be able to handle it. They went mad quite fast, and in the early days, the connections were bad, not refined like they are nowadays. Many, many people died from those madmen.

  Ever since then, if you had too many cybernetic modifications, people looked at you differently.

  C-Day, as it’s called now, was when the corporations left. About ten years ago, a collective shutdown/kill order was broadcasted for anything they had licenses to—which was basically everything.

  A reminder of that day was always in the lower-left corner of my vision.

  He continued to spout hate. That dude was truly mad about people like me. I never understood that type of hate, and I even worked with a lot of people trying to get used to their cybernetics. I even wrote a few papers on it and helped quite a lot of people. Those days are unfortunately long over.

  I had quite a lot of bad experiences myself, as I needed to grow up with cybernetics. It was a difficult time, especially during school. I only went to school up to the legal requirement; otherwise, I continued to study by myself. I couldn’t handle the constant hate towards me.

  Then I heard another voice.

  “Don’t listen to them. He seems to particularly hate your kind, but not everyone is like him.”

  That sounded like a kind voice, but I didn’t respond. My choice seemed to be the correct one, as it turned out they were just trying to do a good guy, bad guy routine.

  Unfortunately, they were getting close to getting a target lock, but I was almost out of the atmosphere.

  In a few more minutes my cockpit turned red as the ship’s sensors detected incoming missiles and a positive lock. They were moving fast. I didn’t have much armament, but I did have some.

  At the sides of the wings, there were two auto-loading tank barrels. Unfortunately, both of them only had ten shells, and I couldn’t reload them because the only way to do so was from the outside of the ship.

  Those two tank barrels should have the power to get rid of anything in front of me. They had about 10° of adjustment in every direction, which wasn’t the best but should be good enough. Those, however, wouldn’t help me here.

  I was about to activate my two point-defense turrets but decided to wait a bit. They were also projectile-based. Although they had a lot more ammunition and, technically, I could reload them. I, however, didn’t have any extra bullets simply because I didn’t have room to store them safely. But what they had should be enough.

  On the front screen, where my current path was, there was a red dot closing in. That now changed into four dots. So, four missiles incoming. One of my turrets should be able to take out six missiles, so do I risk it to show I had less defensive capability than I actually had?

  Nothing in battle was certain, but I decided to only activate the upper turret. It pushed itself from the smooth armor layer at the top of the ship, revealing itself and orienting toward the incoming missiles.

  They were still about half an hour away from me. Space was big. And the effective range of my point defense turrets was only about 20 seconds from impact at the speed those missiles were accelerating at.

  “Lola, activate evasive maneuvers.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  The ship used its RCS thrusters to start adjusting our relative position, even while we continued our planned orbital path. This would not do much—most likely wouldn’t even slow the missiles down a bit—but it would make hitting us with high-velocity projectiles from a long distance extremely unlikely.

  As time moved forward, the screen in front of me continued to populate. More and more of it was turning red as more enemy vessels or stations were confirmed. Some kinda did look like gun platforms. Just in case, I lowered my acceleration to 5g. That should also mess up intercept calculations.

  The missiles were now very close. I had a targeting system that Lola was currently using to run simulations of the upcoming exchange. Something seemed to be off, as the missiles kept getting through.

  “Lola, take over in the simulation.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Now I watched as nothing got close.

  “Lola, oversee controlling of the point defense turrets. Log your actions and calculations so we can update the point defense system.”

  It would take too much of her to do this every time, and she needs to keep monitoring other things. She isn’t an AI that can handle running everything by herself. In fact, every AI at her level can only multitask a bit better than humans.

  “Acknowledged.”

  On the right side of the main screen was a closer representation of my ship and its surroundings. I watched a 20-second ring appear around the ship, with red dots—now in the shape of missiles—closing in. They were about to cross that line.

  I heard the point defense firing. That thump thump thump was felt throughout my body. It wasn’t the fastest firing, but it also didn’t have a normal firing mechanism.

  These projectiles didn’t have casings. Instead, the barrel and the system behind it had their own compartment filled with a pressurized mix of gas that was ignited. Only then did it open up to the waiting projectile, shooting it out at incredible speeds. Then it cycled, and the process started all over again.

  It could fire about 200 bullets per minute. The projectiles flew from the twin barrels that were about a meter apart. Because of the flight distance the missiles had chased me, they were almost perfectly tailing me. That was not perfect, as I did have a tail section.

  “Lola, log that if one turret is in use, the bottom one should always be used.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  On the screen, fast green dots moved towards the red ones. While the missiles were still about 20 seconds away, they were actually tens of kilometers away—it’s because they moved so much faster than me at the current moment that this distance was a matter of seconds to cover.

  I saw the missiles start evasive maneuvers. Fortunately, these projectiles were designed for just that. While a direct hit would be best, even when they got close, they exploded, damaging the missiles enough or disrupting the targeting systems, which caused the missiles to explode. One by one, they exploded—the closest getting to about 9 seconds from impact.

  Then a huge red dot appeared, larger than my ship. It was moving so fast, but only a moment later, the huge red dot changed to a lot of smaller ones. At the same time, it got a designation of high-velocity buckshot. If my acceleration had been 10g, I think that might have hit me.

  “Lola, log visual data on current flight to look for more projectiles that might have been shot and add that to the list of secondary tasks.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  That was a damn close one. Hopefully, I won’t have to worry about that again. It shouldn’t take me long to get away from Earth’s influence, as I was already past the moon’s orbital path. I pushed the ship into 10g acceleration once again and watched as I reached 0.1% light speed, which was just over one million kilometers an hour. To reach that took almost an hour.

  7.6% to go.

  Unfortunately, there were some problems. For one, I didn’t know what kind of safeguards the Terran Empire managed to build, but I did know that every ship like mine had only one direction they could go in.

  Of course, logically speaking, I should have been able to leave the solar system from any place I wanted, in any direction, but I wasn’t going to. Now, I don’t know why, but every nation's ships and every company's ships all left in one direction.

  That was not a coincidence. It did vary a bit, but all of them were heading toward the core of the galaxy. So I was doing the same, just in case. There had to be a reason; otherwise, the companies certainly wouldn’t have taken the same route as the nations did.

  It had been about an hour, and I was well outside Earth’s influence, heading out of the system on a curved path that continued to straighten the further away from Earth I got. My sensors continued to gather as much information as possible, turning more of the solar system red.

  Then, not too far from my path, red dots appeared, classified by the computer as unknown stations. I used the RCS to adjust my course to go as far in between the stations as possible.

  Unfortunately, there was only so much distance I could get from each station, as they were in a grid pattern, and it was too late to truly adjust my heading.

  Nothing seemed to happen, but those stations were under the highest monitoring protocols when they were at about a 40-degree angle to me. Two of them fired missiles—both, 20 of them.

  Now I got it. This was a wall to stop anyone from getting past here if they came from Earth.

  My turrets would not be able to stop so many, and they were moving faster than the missiles near Earth, at about 50g of acceleration.

  I did smile when I saw this. If they had fired earlier, I would have been fucked. There is only so much delta-v those things can have. That’s the problem with solid fuel—you simply won’t have enough for long distances at that acceleration.

  Let’s see if they can catch me.

  “Lola, prepare for high sustained acceleration.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  My arms were locked down. So were my legs. What followed was stabilization on my head and then my body. My vitals were displayed, and needles pierced my neck, starting to pump in the synthetic blood I was running on, but properly oxygenated and kept at a higher pressure than my heart could manage.

  When the preparations turned green, I spoke out loud. “Gier five.”

  The ship started to accelerate, taking us from 10g to 30g of constant acceleration.

  The ship groaned, and some structural warnings climbed near yellow. The algae in the hydroponics was doing the worst, but it should be able to survive. Diagnostics were run constantly, and Lola went through all the internal and external cameras to see if anything was wrong.

  The energy output of the power core seemed to be dropping.

  “Lola, display power core full readout.”

  For some reason, the power output seemed to lower, but I couldn't quite understand why. Then it hit me—the gravity was 30 times stronger than on Earth. It would be harder for the nanomachines to hold together their clusters, which would consume more power, making it more inefficient. Moving the radioactive materials to the correct positions would also be more intensive.

  “Lola, increase the power output of the power core to match the loss of efficiency under heavy gravity load.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Now there was nothing else to do but suffer the horrendous pain of having to endure this much acceleration.

  It seemed that my plan worked, as the missiles tried to adjust to my acceleration, but from the current calculations my computer was showing—and that Lola checked—they weren’t going to hit me. Although, they were going to get to about 100 kilometers from me at the nearest point of convergence.

  In the end, most of them ran out of fuel about 250 kilometers away, the closest getting to about 190. All of that had taken about an hour, and I was in serious pain. I was long past the line of missile stations.

  I wondered why they didn't have projectile weapons, but I guess under more normal acceleration those missiles would certainly catch any ship. Normally, ships would run about 3g to 5g acceleration.

  So yes, speed was the answer to this particular adversary. Perhaps there were more of these types of stations further out, but I should be able to reach the needed speed before that, as I was accelerating a lot faster than other ships that would try to escape.

  To my surprise, I actually received a message.

  AI, you won’t find the universe welcoming to your kind.

  That was all the message said. Well, that was cryptic. But fortunately, I wasn’t AI—still, something to keep in mind.

  It was hard to speak, but I managed to say, “Gear 4,” which brought acceleration down from 30g to 20g. I would still need to be hooked up to the support system, but this was a lot more manageable.

  “Lola, put me to sleep until we get close to the correct speed or if anything happens. Also, start logging the communications we are detecting throughout the solar system, but don't actively connect to anything—only use passive means.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  It didn’t take long for me to fall into blackness.

  I woke up completely sweaty and thoroughly exhausted. Being under so much acceleration was not good, but when I looked at it, we were quite close to our goal.

  “Gear one.”

  The acceleration continued to drop until we reached 5G. The high-G system released me, and I could finally move myself once again. Basically, every other ship entered FTL at this acceleration, so I wanted to mimic them as best as possible. I was under for about 28 hours.

  Damn, space travel took a while.

  When I looked at where I was in the solar system, I was well past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, getting very close to the orbit of Saturn which was from the sun about 1.4 billion kilometres away. Of course, the planet itself was basically on the other side of the solar system, which was actually good news because there was plenty of Terran Empire activity there.

  When I reached the correct speed, I heard a different kind of humming coming from below. It seemed like the FTL device was powering up.

  The power core increased energy production, and everything seemed green. I was amazed that nothing seemed to have been working incorrectly. I guess it was time because I didn’t want to go over the correct speed. So I pushed the button.

  The FTL device activated, and I felt as the bubble passed me by, enveloping the entire ship.

  Then the surroundings morphed, and the screens showed blackness around me.

  Immediately, my flight stick tried to jump out of my hand, and it was like I was once again in an atmosphere. There seemed to be a heavy wind coming from behind and a little bit to the side of me. The ship was groaning and shaking quite heavily.

  “Lola, get readings of the outside space!”