"No star formation detected. No landmarks detected. Source of disturbance to ship cannot be found. Pressure sensors indicating wind-type pressure from behind and slightly to the right."

  The pressure thing was interesting, but we were flying blind. It just took a few corrections of the flight controls, and everything started to stabilize—until it felt like we were trying to move through something that continued to get thicker and thicker.

  "Forward pressure sensors indicating increasing pressure. With current mounting pressure, in one hour, the front of the ship will sustain structural damage."

  I noticed that we were still increasing in speed. I pulled back the throttle from 5g to 4g. Lola had displayed the pressure sensors so I could instantly see how the increasing pressure in the front started to slow down. What I did next was continue to lower acceleration even further. Eventually, at 2.335g, we stopped increasing pressure.

  Sometimes there was still some turbulence, but it was minor. However, it also meant that I needed to constantly hold the flight stick to keep control of the ship. While we continued to hold this acceleration, we started to run every other diagnostic possible.

  The FTL device was still consuming power, but from the looks of it, when we made the jump, it fluctuated a bit and also started to draw more power as the speed increased. Although now, it seemed to be stable. This was not what I expected this dimension to be like, and we still had no idea what was actually causing the effects we were feeling.

  Out of curiosity, I decided to lower the acceleration after we had been running stable for about 10 minutes. To my surprise, I started to see our speed slowing down. It didn’t take too long for us to drop below the speed required for the jump.

  The moment we fell underneath that number, all hell broke loose.

  There was a spike in power draw from the FTL, and we could see the field it projected starting to destabilize. We also experienced a lot more turbulence. Then the FTL device started to show warnings of imminent failure. In the manual, that warning meant you were going to drop out of this sub-dimension.

  Immediately, I increased the throttles, bringing us back to the correct speed.

  So 2.3g constant acceleration was needed to keep flying through this dimension. This was not at all how I thought things were going to go. I expected to make the jump and then be able to cut off the engines and just continue to coast, possibly for a few years, until I was quite far away from Earth.

  Of course, we had the first jump protocols, and the 24-hour timer was already counting down.

  We didn't know much about this space, but from what we had heard, there were no stars or anything to orient yourself with. The 24-hour timer was there so we would drop out of FTL so we could pinpoint our location and calculate how fast this FTL travel actually was. Then, we would go back into FTL and stay there for a while, but that was no longer going to work.

  The problem was fuel. In fact, the problem was so dire I needed to act immediately.

  So I pulled the throttle on the side engines down while slowly increasing the main one. Eventually, the side ones were at zero thrust, and I started the standby protocols. They were going to stay in standby mode, but it would still take some time before I could get any thrust from them once they were properly in standby, even more if I were to fully shut them down.

  Then I started to fiddle with how much fuel was inserted into the main engine and adjusted the throttle to get the best efficiency possible.

  “Lola, continue to monitor the efficiency, and if you see small changes that could be made, make them.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  It didn’t take the computer long to run the numbers. I had about a week of travel like this.

  This was bad. Really bad.

  Hopefully, we could travel enough distance to reach a solar system that was hopefully not occupied and hopefully had either water-bearing asteroids or other places to get hydrogen.

  Fortunately, this acceleration wasn’t too bad, and I could actually move around. I did want to stretch, but then came another problem.

  The main flight controls were all tied to the flight stick, but there weren’t any electronic controls tied to it that I could use to make an autopilot control the ship. And I sorely needed one because I did not fancy flying this thing for the next 24 hours and constantly having to fly it after that whenever we were in FTL.

  There was the joystick to the right of me that had electronic inputs. It was used to control the RCS system, but technically, it didn’t have to be tied to that. It could work just as well as a full flight stick.

  In fact, if I remember correctly, it was the backup in case something went wrong with the main one. It took me only a moment to find the correct command to change the main controls from the flight stick to the joystick.

  “Lola, start programming an autopilot and use the current inputs from the joystick as a guide.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  I hadn’t trained much with the simulations on the joystick, but just in case, I did have about 40 hours of flying on it, if I remember correctly. The ship was a bit unsteady for just a bit, but I got it handled soon enough. It took two hours of flying before Lola was confident in the autopilot.

  I hit the button to switch to the autopilot and watched as it took over controlling the ship correctly. Just in case, I continued to observe it for another 10 minutes, but then I finally stood up to stretch. But everything was awkward. Because of the current acceleration, everything was sideways.

  The front of the ship was now the ceiling, and the floor and ceiling were now walls. It was messing with my brain a bit, but we had prepared for this. From the floor, slits extended creating steps I could use and handrails to move around while gravity was in this orientation.

  First things first—bathroom.

  The toilet swung from the wall. It could be used in any orientation and used suction to get rid of everything, and all of it would be processed and purified completely. Can’t have any wasted resources in a spaceship.

  In the hangar, there was a lot more room to stretch about. After I did my basic exercises, I started to feel a bit better, although they were a lot more intense in this gravity.

  Lastly, I checked the hydroponics. The algae were doing fine enough. It should replicate itself fast enough to replace the portions we lost. I got my nutrient paste, which was made into a shake with extra stuff added in. I downed the entire two liters in one go.

  Then I headed back up—or sideways if you were to go by gravity.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  I did not know how sleeping in this kind of gravity was going to feel, but I guess it was time to find out because I was incredibly tired.

  My sleeping quarters were quite special. I had expected to have to sleep under acceleration, so with a simple button, I watched as my bed flipped to what was now the bottom of the sleeping quarters, allowing me to sleep like I would on Earth.

  Lying down felt so amazing, although I did wish I had a bit more legroom. I didn’t go to sleep immediately, as I was a bit too nervous about all of this.

  I also had an idea.

  “Hey, Lola, so something is still pushing us, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “We also have no way of sensing anything out there with our current capabilities?”

  “Correct again.”

  “But we can sense the pressure this effect is having on our ship?”

  “So, I’m guessing you want to monitor the changes so we can figure out what is causing this?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible. What I’m thinking is that this pressure will not be constant throughout this dimension. I want you to run models and see if we could fly against this tailwind we are having, and also see if you could figure out how much faster this tailwind is making us move—if it’s at all possible. But please don’t make this your first priority. Monitoring the ship and keeping an eye on the autopilot is.”

  “Understood, Master.”

  “Please don’t start, please.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  I let out a deep sigh, and after that, it didn’t take long for my exhausted body to finally sleep.

  I was woken up by alarms.

  I startled awake, almost falling out of my bed, when everything came back to me. Was I really in space?

  “Lola, what alarm is that?”

  “It’s the alarm you set for one hour before the 24-hour timer elapses of us being in this side dimension.”

  I wiped my face and decided that I was not going to go to the bathroom before we dropped out of FTL because, logically speaking, in regular space, I should be able to be weightless when I cut the engine.

  So, I made my way to the pilot chair, and then started to look over all the readings. Everything seemed fine enough. What I did notice was that I forgot to close the side engine’s shielding to prevent any radiation from getting to the acceleration chamber.

  Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any radiation in this dimension, which kind of made sense… kind of didn’t. But I corrected my mistake and put that on the list of standby protocols and shutdown protocols.

  What followed was quite a boring hour of me going over everything.

  Finally, however, we were reaching the 24-hour mark.

  When we were a few seconds from reaching it, I dropped our acceleration to 2G and watched as our speed immediately started to drop. The ship started to shake.

  This type of shaking—I was certain the autopilot was not equipped to handle. That was why I was once again in control, using the main flight stick.

  Almost immediately, the alarm of the FTL went off, and the bubble around us started to destabilize. The turbulence got worse, but nothing this ship couldn’t handle. Then, all of a sudden, the turbulence stopped, and we were most definitely back in the universe proper.

  Immediately, I cut the main engine’s thrust, and happily noticed that the speed we were going didn’t drop or accelerate. It was good to be back where physics made sense.

  The armor plating slid down, covering the exposed part of the engine so that the cosmic radiation wouldn’t hurt it. In fact, I needed to cover up quite a lot of sensors, as we were now in open void with no star to protect us from the truly awful radiation. Our shielding, however, was doing its job—keeping us operational and alive.

  Everything was returning green once again, which I simply couldn’t believe.

  Damn, do I know how to build a spaceship—even if this was my first.

  For the first time in my life, I was also weightless. I much preferred this to the higher G.

  “Triangulation in progress,” Lola announced, and I waited to hear the verdict.

  The minutes continued to go by without any results, and I started to worry until finally, she spoke.

  “Triangulation completed. Current location: approximately 490 light-years from Earth.”

  My mouth fell open.

  “There’s no way we could have covered that much distance.”

  “Triangulation is 100% confirmed. We are approximately 490 light-years from Earth. From the information I have gathered, I believe that the tailwind—or at least what felt like it—is responsible for such a result. This is just a guess. Without further data, it is impossible to come to a conclusion.”

  “I have also been able to confirm that we would not be able to fly against the tailwind. Our ship couldn’t handle the frontal pressure, although with modifications and strengthening of the hull, it could be possible.”

  So, no going back to Earth. That explained why no one had returned, and if someone had, they must have gotten their hands on a better ship than humans could make, at least not as fast as the formation date of the Terran Empire suggested. Well, there was a lot to think about.

  “With the tailwind, could you calculate a precise jump to the nearest solar system?”

  “Calculations possible. Accuracy not guaranteed, but should be able to get close enough to successfully be captured by the solar system’s gravity, making gathering resources possible.”

  “Go through the database we have and see if you have any concrete information about the solar systems around here, and if not, make educated guesses on which systems might have the resources we require.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  There were plenty of solar systems near here. One was about 2 light-years away. Fortunately, our fuel situation is not so bad that we won’t have hundreds of options as to which solar system to go to.

  What I did next was, once again, stretch, but it was weird to do that without gravity. Now it was time to go to the bathroom and then head to the workshop.

  I had a date with some nanomachines to see if I could fix my cybernetic problem so I could get that sword off my throat.

  When I reached the printers to make nanomachines, I tried to make myself as comfortable as possible. I was not so used to zero gravity, so I couldn’t quite get situated the way I liked.

  So instead of starting to work, I continued to try to figure things out. Eventually, I found myself strapped onto a chair that I had screwed some magnets onto so it would stay in one position and wouldn’t start floating when I moved.

  Now then, it’s time to start working.

  There were screens all over the ship, all of them with touch capabilities. This way, I didn’t need any keyboard or mouse—although if needed, I could bring them over.

  There were a lot of things I wanted to do with my body, but the first thing we needed to make sure of was that my body had a way to fix things wrong with it that didn’t have anything to do with cybernetics.

  Lola had done a lot of the heavy lifting, but currently, she had other things to do, and it was good to know exactly what was going to go into my body.

  These nanomachines would work as an additional helping hand to my body. They would fix what was wrong. Technically, I think they could even eliminate cancer if I had any. Also, they should be able to do a much better job at monitoring for anything out of place or wrong.

  So before I started programming, I pulled up a music player and hit shuffle. Music started blasting from the speakers, and I let myself be taken into the world of programming.

  So much was done, and a lot of the programming itself—how the nanomachines should function—was already on the drives taken from the laboratory. That really was a miraculous find, without which I would not be here.

  So, in two hours, after changing just a few things and making sure to eliminate all the licensing stuff in the programming, I fired up the nano printers. All of them were not exactly designed to work without any gravity, but it seemed like whoever designed them at least made it possible to still run them, even if they were slower.

  It would be a bit of time before the first patch was done. Then I would just have to add them to my protein shake, and they would get to work inside my body, scanning everything and fixing things. I would still have a connection with them, so I would get real-time feedback on anything they found and could direct them to what needed fixing.

  The next step would not be as simple. Fixing the cybernetics couldn’t be done piece by piece. What I needed to do was rip everything out and then replace it with new versions that I would need to design and make better than the current ones.

  The problem was, I didn’t actually have any truly top-of-the-line cybernetic blueprints like the ones inside my body, but I hoped that the nanomachines I would soon be consuming would be able to get proper scans of everything.

  That would allow me to copy and change them into something that wouldn’t try to kill me if I wasn’t constantly running a shutdown loop under the current program to stop them from destroying themselves and with the rest of my collected database combine everything into something more.

  I leaned back on the chair and enjoyed some music as I tried to think things through—what I should upgrade and what I shouldn’t. When all the bad hardware is out, I should also upgrade all the other cybernetics to hopefully better versions. Then came the question—should I do the same with the rest of the organs and perhaps even muscles?

  I was pretty sure that in the Nano Tree server, there were some references on how to make bio-cybernetics. That was supposed to be the next big thing before the world went crazy. I had some other collected data on that as well, but I should let Lola go through all of it, as it would take way too long to do that myself.

  Speak of the devil—the music turned down, and I heard her voice.

  “Detected a repeating pattern coming from the FTL device.”

  I immediately straightened up from my relaxed position. What I was expecting was a report on the nearby solar systems and what resources they might have.

  “Show me the data. Bring it up on this monitor,” I said while pointing at the monitor I was using to program the nanomachines.

  Immediately, a new window popped up, and I started to go through it. It seemed to be a repeating pattern that repeated every 32 minutes and a few seconds.

  The funny thing was, it kind of sounded like Morse code. There was a short and then a long gain. It was showing up in one of the monitoring systems that kept the FTL device on the correct path when trying to make a jump.

  “Could this fluctuation be used to stop us from jumping?”

  “Negative.”

  Well, small mercies, I guess.

  If I presumed this to be some sort of message, then I wouldn’t know the language anyway, and I really doubted it would be any human trying to deliver some kind of message to anyone who made this far.

  Now that I thought about it, perhaps that could be a possibility.

  “Lola, run the message through decryption software and pattern recognition. Perhaps we’ll figure something out.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Okay, it’s time to get back to...

  “Pattern recognized. It seems to be binary. Running this through known binary libraries... No matches found. Running through decryption...”

  There was silence.

  “Okay, now—let’s get back to—well, I can’t put Lola to do anything. Her processing is full right now. Perhaps it’s best to go through things myself, at least get a cursory understanding of this bio-cybernetic stuff.”

  “Match found. Starting decryption protocols.”

  What? If it was humans, it would have come through one of the libraries and found a match. There is no way we would know an alien programming language—or whatever language they were using—unless it was purposely designed for anyone to understand, as long as they had enough scientific knowledge to build an FTL device.

  “I am assuming you need to use the periodic table of elements to figure out the message?”

  “Correct, Master.”

  I was about to correct her, but she continued.

  “Displaying the message now on your monitor.”

  I’m pretty sure she tries to sneak in that word whenever she’s at least a bit confident that I won’t have the desire to correct her. In this case, she was completely right because I couldn’t believe the message that was being deciphered in real-time from a binary message pulled from one of the FTL device’s monitoring systems.

  The message seemed to be a blueprint of a device that, if I was understanding correctly, would allow for instantaneous communication throughout the universe.

  “Lola, do those look like plans for an instantaneous communication device?”

  “Yes, Master, they do.”

  “Please stop doing that.”

  Well, I guess the project to fix my cybernetics is put on hold because—what the fuck.