Captain’s Log: Disappointment

Grandfather’s journeys went down in history as unmarred successes, full of bravery.  He spent his family’s fortune building what he thought was a transportation device and what everyone else considered a madman’s last legacy.  There are stories of how even his workers laughed at him, how they joked and snickered behind his back.

But then he activated the Gateway, found that it read a number of IDs, and flew his ship through the active maw.  He and his ship disappeared, and were considered dead.  There’s another story to be told about my father, who kept the gate online, even while everyone else moved to scrap the massive device, or at least power it down, so it didn’t use up fuel.

And then, at the 11th hour, as these things seem to occur, grandfather shot back through the gateway, flying an improved version of his ship, and bearing stories of wondrous civilizations, all linked by a set of identical Gateways.  He had also brought back engineers to improve and maintain the Gateway, and an envoy from the Linked Worlds.

Now his story is told in classrooms throughout the Tian Terra system, of a daring hero who defied convention wisdom and risked his life to bring us in contact with other elements of humanity.

I wanted to do the same, to discover new worlds, bring us into contact with elements of humanity we thought beyond our reach.  But how will my story be told?   Will the first chapter be how I spent my meagre fortune to fly out and find a world destroyed by its own technology?  What if Susana’s suspicions are borne out, and our great tale of adventure is merely finding a hundred corpse-worlds, and a form of transportation slower than the instantaneous travel of the Gateway system?

Of course, aliens do exists, and they don’t use the Gateway system, so that is an avenue of exploration.  But we know now where they came from, save that one ship landed on Telivoni.  I am urging the ship to set course in that direction, but Telivoni is far, even by our FTL standards, and currently under heavy government scrutiny.  The Zephyr’s plan was to buy and sell with the people on Colony-131, and make enough money to be remodeled as a proper exploration – only then set out for deep space, or potentially search for the aliens.