First Installment, Revised.
This is the edited version from the prior post. Feel free to comment. Note that some of the proper nouns I'm not definitely settled on and will likely end up changing some day.
Outer Space
One of my favorite things about exploring space is the immense amount of time you have to yourself. Granted, we have our day-to-day duties, but beyond that, we have a considerable amount of personal time to explore that which we choose.
So here I am in space, spending my personal time to satisfy my interest in the relationship between space and time. I know, many people would say that space-time relationship has been established in terms of pure science for ages now, but some discrepancies have surfaced and I have been performing researching on this very topic. Space-time is very easy to understand through the use of Hirsch-Bosnian Equations when you’re in the middle of the universe, but as you venture outward, you are required to use the Andrian variable, which isn’t an easily calculated number. I am reminded of the story from my early math lessons where pi used to be thought of as a number with an infinitely unpredictable number of digits. I like to think that, just as we currently laugh at the thought of pi being infinitely long, we too will someday laugh at the Andrian variable to be indeterminable without referencing the tables.
This leads me to explain why I find myself at the outer-most reaches of space that humanity has ever traveled. Here’s the background on our mission. You see, there’s a way of calculating an Andrian variable once you’ve made your way to the location in space-time, but it is not currently possible to calculate it beforehand. That is a good portion of my job on the starship Tardis-to determine these variables and send them back for UAO’s (Universal Astrophysics Organization) records to update the Andrian Variable Tables. In my spare time, I’m working out the relationship between the location in space and that variable. I still haven’t mentioned that there’s another problem with this variable: it’s different almost everywhere in space. It’s completely different on this side of the Universe than it is on the other side-at least to our current knowledge.
That is the reason our venture has taken nearly ten years to perform. Hyperdrive can only take us so far without this variable. To simply guess at it would mean that we could end up almost anywhere-anyhow-in the Universe, and potentially elsewhere. So we left the capitol planet of the inner galaxies and made our jump to the outer galaxies, the closest we could get to our destination: beyond the known edge of the Universe. Why don’t we just send a probe as we normally would? Well, you see, there’s a slight problem with that. We’ve tried. Once the probe gets to a particular location, it’s never heard from again. Occasionally we find a remarkably similar probe floating around randomly elsewhere in the Universe, but it never checks out as the exact same probe (although one was once a 99.99% exact match). As to why this is, it has boggled scientists for quite some time. The leading theory is that, once you reach the edge of the Universe, you land yourself at some other-possibly random-point at the edge of the Universe traveling in an inverse direction. As to just where that point would be, nobody can quite explain this phenomenon. There’s also another problem with this theory: they don’t always come back. In fact, it’s a rare occasion when they do. A number of scientists would complain, saying it’s possibly not a definite journey to be completed-somewhat like traveling into a black hole-and the rest of the time they just don’t survive the trip. Still others state that we have yet to find the missing probes for various reasons and someday they’ll show up.
You may realize why I’m very skeptical about these theories. If you don’t, that’s understandable too-there’s definitely a reason why people think these things, and when one person thinks it, another is bound to agree . . . and yet another is bound to disagree.
.……….
I must apologize, as my concentration has just been interrupted. You see, due to our incredibly long journey we have been forced to witness the elections of the ruler of the Known Universe from our ship, sitting in anticipation. The current ruler, Brian Sabin, is up for reelection against Ngo Hook, who is very much against our program. If it were up to Hook, our program would be scrapped. Because of this, we've been waiting on the edge of their seats for the results.
Communications have come a long way since the early days of radio transmission. On a rare occasion, we still rely on radio waves, but we mostly use sub-carriers now. The election results came to us in a secured transmission-the same everybody gets if they choose to have it-almost simultaneously as anybody else’s. We made sure to put down communications relays along our path in the areas the Universal Communications Net wasn’t currently present. The transmission came through, authenticated, and re-authenticated instantly. We were all very relieved to see that UPM Sabin was re-elected.
Our journey continued as it had before, but now we were all a bit more at ease.