text: He had never gone so fast before, and he *had* gone fast. He had been on the bridge of new chromium frigates which rent their way through space and pulled the keratin from your fingernails; he had run down the halls of bases stationed on rogue planets, cold, desolate, quick; he had licked and pointed his finger skyward on many a mountain where the wind was hungry to tear at your skin. Still, no ship or meteor was this fast. He liked how fast things got burned into your brain like a lightning bolt not far off, it reminded him that terror and exhilaration were one and the same. He did not like this. “Engaging FTL,” a voice spoke from a black, cross-hatched lattice in the wall opposite him. He felt his heart sink. The steel beneath his feet was jumping away, the only reason he was still sitting was that every manner of strap, bolt, shackle, and strait coil were holding him, and even they seemed loose now that he really moved. “No!” he said, “stop! Stop it!” he screamed, “Mom, Dad, ask them to stop it! Please!” he could hardly hear himself. “Honey are you okay?” asked his Mother. His Father sat closer, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this plenty of times. It’s always shaky, it evens out when we reach light speed.” “No, no! I can’t!” The silver walls on either side of the ship opened up to two great windows, their chairs turned to look out. “3...2...” He knew what came next, he watched as the stars that pierced the sky like earrings, that bejewelled and pearled and rubied the necklaces around Saturnian planets, and the metals which crashed and met and multiplied and turned to dust, he watched his home in the distance as a pale blue dot. They began winking out. He blinked, and there missing was the crab nebula! and there went the Pleiades! and Andromeda too, and Orion packed up his bow and arrow and fell into the black. And Earth, O Earth, disintegrated in shadow, “My God,” he said, as America disappeared, as the Antarctic and Asia disappeared, and Africa gone in a second and the seven seas and the sirens swallowed up as all the world down to the isthmus of Corinth and the buried plains of Doggerland were, he blinked once more, overcome by darkness. “My God.” “Light speed.” It was as if they were bricked behind a wall in an old wine cellar. He put his hand to the glass, pushed up against it. “It’s all gone,” he said. “Oh, shush up,” said his Dad, “we only get a few minutes. You should enjoy it while you can.” The ship had stopped rumbling, chatter erupted between the passengers. His Mother looked at him, “You know that we age differently this way. When we get back home you’ll be a little bit younger than your friends, hardly a second but still!” Another passenger piped up, “I might just stay up here forever! “Friends?” he said, “Where are they?” His Mother looked puzzled, his Father truculent, she said, “On Earth.” “Who on where?” he asked. “Your friends... on Earth. You know, Jason, Bil-” she was interrupted. “Oh for God’s sake their right where you left them, by now sound asleep in their beds and you’re all the way up in the stars going so fast that you can’t even see them. Get out of yourself and look at *that*.” He pointed to the window which separated them from nothing, “can’t you marvel for a second, or do you not know what that is either?” He looked out and saw only a thick sheet of black, “How do you know?” “What do you mean how do I know?” “How do you know that if we slowed down we would see Earth again? How do you know that when we land I’ll be in the same atmosphere as my friends again? Is there a nebula out there now? Or maybe it is two screens fitted into the walls and pointed in, and the ships on mechanical stilts that rock us to make us think we’re in space before they slip binbags or black film over the glow. When we get back to the station, how do we know we ever left?” The other passengers had heard this, their talking gave way to an examining listen. To what? to the noises the ship made, to the particular shade of black they could near touch out the window, to the metronomic hissings and the droning electric shocks that, they were told, commanded the ship to go quicker than electricity itself. They listened for the tap of workers heel on the hull, or a gasp of breath from the person working the legs - it did not come. They stared last at the boy, their faces struck ghostly pale against the immutable darkness behind, and their eyes cut like slid paper. The black lattice spoke, “One minute left at lightspeed.” His Mother spoke, “Please honey, people are staring.” “So that is a no. You don’t know.” His Father, “Shut it. Sit down and look out the window.” He closed his eyes, rested his head against the cool steel of the chair. The murmur again rose in the cabin, this time the inkling of joy and fascination were replaced with sombre questions. They had not found the hints that would have told them where they were or what was happening to them - if they were in space or if they never even left the station - but they might as well have. The ship slowed and pinpricks of light began to appear in the film, in the binbags, in the echoing deeps of space, which? Earth again adorned the bluish, inky horizon, and the many marbled metals touched once more and collapsed. The ship again blocked the view from the windows, they arrived at the station on Earth. The pilot came out of his cockpit when they touched down. “Isn’t it unbelievable!” he said. “Yes,” they said, “it was.