Gary L Beer
2012
Chapter One The magnetic field of the passing asteroid is generating enough energy to pull Grailem towards it. Waking from an aimless sleep he tries to use his precious energy to move closer. It has been eons since he had stood on, or even felt a solid surface beneath his feet. Grailem has been drifting aimlessly through space since the spacecraft, with him inside it had exploded, for what seems to him eternity ago. The exploding fuel tanks had thrown him out into the cold of space with such force that he continued to accelerate to beyond the speed of light. Travelling so fast like many charged particles are able to do altered the aspect of time for him. The material universe continued to measure time in its inevitable fashion like it had done since it was created over fifteen billion years ago. Grailem’s measure of time was infinitely slower due to his incredible speed. His artificial body did not decay and he still maintains the same amount of energy as he had acquired from the moment of his ‘Big Bang’ when the fuel tanks exploded. The spacecraft had been especially designed to go beyond the speed of light and had been mankind’s dream to achieve true interstellar travel. The power system relied on a continuing increase in pressure of its fuel to propel it to this fantastic speed. Man had been aware for many millennia that to go beyond the speed of light, effectively would put the spacecraft and its occupants beyond the known physical universe. The designers had thought they had solved the materials problem and created new metals and materials; but the explosion proved otherwise. The spacecraft did achieve the speed of light and passed from the universe we all know to one of a higher energy. Tachyons and other high energy particles, that have no real mass in our universe, take on different forms in a higher energy universe and reacted with the binding energy of the new metal that enclosed the spacecraft. The new fuel, also designed for this expected higher energy,
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