To Infinity — A Sci-Fi Short Story

This is the first sci-fi short story I wrote in English. Enjoy.

“I told you. I am not your guy!”, Jason said, as he was pushed to sit down on the pilot seat.

No response, except a hard push on the back of his head by something cold. A gun, he assumed.

Then a low voice, “Shut up and fix the control panel. We know you are a mechanical engineer. DO NOT play tricks.”

Jason swallowed and got to work. He didn’t want to die.

He was taken aboard this ship, the RS-170c, three days ago as a hostage, all because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

RS-170c was a prototype ship equipped with the experimental Infinity Drive developed by Final Frontier Inc. The ship was docked at the Europa deep space research station, getting ready for its first test flight, when a gang of armed mercenaries took her and her only passenger.

The secret was out. Someone knew that Final Frontier Inc was working on and succeeded in creating a new type of jump drive that can overcome the hard limit of all jump drives.

256, that was the magic number. All jump drives, regardless of their age, power input, or output, can only jump 256 times before disappearing in its 257th jump, taking the ships with them.

This was not good news for the ships that equipped those drives. So, after a dozen or so incidents in the early days of jump drive development, all jump drives were now manufactured with a hard control unit that will stop its 257th jump.

It has been almost 100 years since the first jump drive was developed, and the scientific community was almost ready to accept that the 256 jump limit number was another physics constant, just like the speed of light, even though no one has been able to explain why.

Jason very much did not like to be yet another unlucky person to find out what happens when jump drives go beyond their limit, even though he was on a ship with the potential to break that limit.

For the umpteenth time, Jason asked himself why in the hell did he agree to a request from his colleague Bill and went for an unscheduled mechanical check. Hmm…Mechanical check…maybe he can do something to this ship…?

His thoughts were interrupted by an alarm. “We have company!”, someone shouted from behind his back. And he was dragged out of the pilot room.

Another three days, 35 jumps later, the commandeered RS-170c temporarily lost the Final Frontier Inc’s chasing ships by jumping to a place five hundred thousand kilometers away from Earth. Shortly after the jump, a heated argument broke out among the mercenaries.

Jason was ready to escape.

He used the last three days to screw with the ship’s systems, carefully depleting the jump drive’s remaining jumps by performing mini distance jumps while tampering the travel log system, so it appeared that the ship has not jumped at all. He even manipulated the jump drive’s auxiliary control unit, so it still showed more than 200 remaining jumps.

Using stomachache as an excuse, Jason went into a lavatory. There he activated a fake emergency air pressure drop alarm remotely. As expected, the guard outside rushed to the nearest emergency station to get an oxygen mask. At the same time, Jason dashed out of the lavatory and ran in the other direction. He made it to the escape pod and blew it out of the ship in just 10 seconds before the kidnappers were even able to turn off the bogus alarm.

Five minutes later, Final Frontier Inc’s security ships, as well as Solar Pol’s security forces swarmed the area, thanks to the location beacons Jason activated remotely. The chasing ships blocked RS-170c’s escape route. But before they could disable their target, it jumped away.

Jason cursed loudly in in his escape pod, then felt a sudden chill when he saw the signal reading on the escape pod’s panel. No, that was not the usual gamma-ray trace left by a successful jump.

That could only mean one thing. The Infinity Drive had also failed.

“Where the hell is this place?!”, one of the kidnappers asked, while peering out from the ship’s observation viewport.

Outside, the chasing ships were gone. Did RS-170c jump away? No, that couldn’t be. Because Earth is still occupying most of the viewport. But there was something odd.

He couldn’t see any light on Earth or around it. All the city light, light from space stations, all gone. He narrowed his eyes and squinted again. Something else is also different.

Earth’s continents. They were all in the wrong locations.

But he didn’t have much time to digest this oddity before something much more dramatic caught his attention. An asteroid was entering Earth’s atmosphere, leaving a red, then white streak. Seconds later, bright white light radiated from the planet.

The kidnappers and Jason would never know. The scientists at the Europa research station had a vague idea but had no way to prove it. The Infinity Drive, as well as all the other disappearing jump drives before it, did perform as instructed on their 257th jump.

The difference is the destination.

Instead of jumping through normal space, they jumped through higher dimension and ended up in the same space.

Same place, but in a different universe.

They also jumped in time. Backward, always backward.

So, the kidnapper was the first human being to witness the fateful day when the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, from a different universe.

He would be proud.