Fiction: The Window to Nowhere

Captain Ross "Rosie" Sherrif and co-pilot Marsha Ismel were ferrying a repair crew to moon base. On a beam shuttle that rode the thread of resonating photonic energy like a cable car.

Welcome to the wildest ride in space, said Rosie. What's your name, old timer?

Hector, said the foreman, and thanks for the lift.

My pleasure, who's the girl?

My apprentice, Dinah, said the old man. She's quick with her fingers. The young woman pulled off her glove, revealing her cybernetics.

And your tool specialist -a monkey-type revision A. How do you do?

Dinah put an arm around Resh the simian droid who began to gibber pink noise. His circuits were almost fried in a freak accident that lost me my hand, she said.

The lunar giga-generator beamed a resonance laser at the high Earth orbit relay. They called it the photon buster, the window to nowhere. The stretch of vibrating energy coursing along a harmonic distance of almost 400,000 km. It could be seen in the night sky as a silvery thread hanging off the moon.

Marsha checked the quantum compensation systems as the shuttle vectored into the path of the energy beam.

Mass warps space-time, said Rosie. We sit in stagnant wells of our own gravity, all our lives, like an ant who doesn't care that the Earth isn't flat and the moon, maybe made out of cheese.

The small capsule craft flickered visibly as super-fast quantum AI merged it with the lunar laser. After 3 years of captaining the dimension-shifting Albatross, Ross Sherrif had decided not to be a man any longer.

There's something beautiful about closing your eyes, Marsha, he said, and opening them to see the moon filling the portholes. Sometimes it changes you -forever.

That's a lot of shit, Captain, laughed Hector. Their eyes locked for a moment. See this belt?

An energy belt.

An external pacemaker for the colloids I took before I went under cryogenic. What will happen to all this when we go lightspeed?

That's up to the AI, Rosie looked impassively at the old man, you've read the trust clause.

Girl, I hate to tell you now, but Resh bit off your hand after you were hit, said the old man. I had to tase him 9 times before he let go. Then the freakin' AI put me up for sleep in the Polar Ark.

Seems to know something, doesn't he? They looked at the monkey-type who had obediently shut himself down prior to the jump.

Window to nowhere, sighed Rosie, as he okayed the beam merger.