Despite optimism, it took another two days before the dry run was ready to go. Janus arrived early as was his habit, and in the company of Charlie who had not spared his usual lunacy even in light of the ominous occasion. The status report on all systems was a go, to put Charlie's twenty minute rundown of all systems into its most abbreviated form. The entire team was there, all ten of the scientists and astronauts who had been sent up two years ago for the implementation phase of the most scientifically audacious engineering project since the Manhattan Project had ushered in the atomic age.
FTL. It was simple enough three letter acronym in the veritable alphabet soup of three letter acronyms of which humanity in general and government in particular were so enamored. Faster than light. Three little words, three little letters, but they spoke of ultimate audacity. Where every step of human progress to that day had been awesome in the sense of explaining and exploiting nature itself, this was the step that went beyond nature. The engine itself was supernatural when boiled down to its essence. It was greater than nature, doing what nothing in nature had managed, despite its billion light year majesty and nanometer details. Today, mankind broke the accepted rules.
Janus remembered the day he had thought of it, while doodling on the white board in his temporary office in the dacha buried in the Caucus mountains. It had been his retreat while Sylvia ministered, helped build houses and teach English and the like. She took her faith seriously, so much that she had dragged him to those cursed Russian towns on his sabbaticals from Embry-Riddle. Janus remembered bitter arguments on the matter to no avail. Regret could not begin to describe the memory of those arguments. How many people wish their last words to their wife had not been in anger? The compromise, if you could call it that, was that he would go along with her but would not participate. Janus stayed in the dacha and worked.
The moment when everything clicked with an almost audible noise of all the tumblers of all the locks in the universe rolling home at once still hung in his mind, always would he supposed. It took ten minutes before he even realized what bridge his mind had built. It took another hour to write a ten page description that he still remembered almost word for word, the brilliance of that moment burnt into his brain. He was not a humble man, he knew that paper was the best thing since Einstein, but he also knew that nothing he had done until that day had really mattered. Despite the invitations that in the end bordered on demands, Janus had never returned to Embry-Riddle. That was his old life. That was where he had been mediocre, plowing through semester after semester feeling that there was some research he was supposed to be doing, some breakthrough he was supposed to be finding, even while he zoned out for a year at a time. After Russia, there was no going home.
FTL. It was simple enough three letter acronym in the veritable alphabet soup of three letter acronyms of which humanity in general and government in particular were so enamored. Faster than light. Three little words, three little letters, but they spoke of ultimate audacity. Where every step of human progress to that day had been awesome in the sense of explaining and exploiting nature itself, this was the step that went beyond nature. The engine itself was supernatural when boiled down to its essence. It was greater than nature, doing what nothing in nature had managed, despite its billion light year majesty and nanometer details. Today, mankind broke the accepted rules.
Janus remembered the day he had thought of it, while doodling on the white board in his temporary office in the dacha buried in the Caucus mountains. It had been his retreat while Sylvia ministered, helped build houses and teach English and the like. She took her faith seriously, so much that she had dragged him to those cursed Russian towns on his sabbaticals from Embry-Riddle. Janus remembered bitter arguments on the matter to no avail. Regret could not begin to describe the memory of those arguments. How many people wish their last words to their wife had not been in anger? The compromise, if you could call it that, was that he would go along with her but would not participate. Janus stayed in the dacha and worked.
The moment when everything clicked with an almost audible noise of all the tumblers of all the locks in the universe rolling home at once still hung in his mind, always would he supposed. It took ten minutes before he even realized what bridge his mind had built. It took another hour to write a ten page description that he still remembered almost word for word, the brilliance of that moment burnt into his brain. He was not a humble man, he knew that paper was the best thing since Einstein, but he also knew that nothing he had done until that day had really mattered. Despite the invitations that in the end bordered on demands, Janus had never returned to Embry-Riddle. That was his old life. That was where he had been mediocre, plowing through semester after semester feeling that there was some research he was supposed to be doing, some breakthrough he was supposed to be finding, even while he zoned out for a year at a time. After Russia, there was no going home.
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