My crew is gone. They didn’t die. They were… unwritten . Because we arrived at a coordinate that had no mass, no matter, no ship. The error wasn’t just in space. It was in the ledger of existence. We subtracted ourselves from the equation of the future.
I have only one question left: if we subtracted the distance… what did we add to the void in its place? -14003 parsec error
And I am the ghost of that mistake, drifting in a year where I have not yet been born, carrying a logbook that will not be written for another four decades. My crew is gone
Fourteen thousand and three parsecs. That’s over forty-five thousand light-years. That’s nearly halfway across the entire goddamn galaxy. And the number is negative because our arrival timestamp predates our departure. Because we arrived at a coordinate that had
We left the Sol Anchorage on 2187.04.12 at 14:00 Universal. When the Event happened—when the Hartmann drive hiccupped and the quantum foam frothed into something that looked like a wounded eye—we emerged into realspace exactly 2.3 seconds later, ship-time.
The Long Subtraction