Read Online Visions of the Future by Joe Haldeman, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kevin J. Anderson, Ben Bova, Hugh Howey, Robert Sawyer, Ray Kurzweil, Martin Rees - Free Book Online Page B

they would read his length as shrunk by 80 percent and his mass increased by 500 percent.
    Why didn’t we invert? Kelric asked,
    We need to get closer to light speed, the Glint told him.
    Starships manage from a lot slower speeds than this.
    Starships have entire systems dedicated to optimizing their inversion capability, the Glint thought . I don’t.
    Kelric knew he should return to the base before time dilation jumped him any farther into the future. He had already gained more than half an hour. But he couldn’t make himself turn around. Up here he could speed away from the grief, the loneliness, the huge emptiness.
    This time when he fired the thrusters, his display leapt to 99.999999 percent of light speed. His mass increased by a factor of seven thousand. The starlight turned into x-rays. In one minute, five days passed on Diesha.
    We still can’t invert , the Glint thought.
    Kelric fired the thrusters again. Centuries passed on Diesha. Now they were all dead. All of them. Everyone he had ever loved.
    Cory, I can’t do it, he thought. I can’t live in a universe where the people I love are gone.
    No inversion achieved, the Glint thought.
    Kelric gritted his teeth and fired the thrusters—
    —and the universe turned inside out, yanking him with it, his body and mind twisting like a tortured Möbius strip.
     
    3
    Beyond the End
    The agonizing sensation stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The stars reappeared, their colors returned to normal but their positions inverted through a point that appeared to be infinitely far in front of the plane. Kelric recognized none of the eerily distorted constellations.
    We inverted, the Glint thought. But it definitely wasn’t as smooth as silk.
    Kelric drew in a deep breath. You’re learning your idioms. That was like no inversion he had ever experienced. He didn’t know if he could survive it a second time.
    I need you to specify a path in spacetime, t he Glint said. We’re supraluminal.
    He struggled to clear his mind. Time and space switched character at faster than light speeds. Now he couldn’t back up in space but he could back up in time. The relativistic equations allowed him to go into the past. A sublight observer would see an anti-matter Glint flying backwards from its destination to its origin. If he worked it right, he could compensate for his time-dilated leap into the future by leaping into the past here.
    If only he could go back to before Cory died.
    Unfortunately, no matter how much he wanted it, the final result of his trip couldn’t violate reality. A thousand pilots before him had verified that law of physics. The best he could do with a starship was come home with the same amount of time passing there as for him. With the Glint, he would be lucky to come out anywhere near the day when he had left Diesha. This morning. Except now it was centuries, even millennia in the past.
    His displays weren’t telling him anything. The inversion had scrambled them. Glint, how fast are we going?
    One trillion times the speed of light.
    WHAT?
    One trillion ti-
    Slow down!
    Silence.
    Kelric blinked at the gibberish on his displays. Did anything happen?
    We slowed to 132 percent light speed.
    How did we get going so fast before?
    When we passed light speed, our mass decreased, the Glint thought. So we sped up, which made our mass decrease, which sped us up, which—
    I get the idea. To himself only, shutting the Glint out of his mind, Kelric thought, Can you imagine a more spectacular way to die? Hurtle along at infinite speed with zero mass and infinite length, your body turning to dust while time stops for the rest of the Universe?
    And then what? he asked himself. You think Cory will be waiting? You think she’ll open her arms wide, welcoming you for the stupidity of killing yourself? He could see her glaring at him, her dark hair whipping in an imaginary wind.
    “Cory, I miss you,” Kelric murmured.
    I don’t understand ‘Cory,’ the Glint thought.
    I never