How Far the Future Moon | Sci-fi Short Audiobook

If you enjoy today’s story, please consider subscribing to the channel, where a new, original sci-fi audiobook is uploaded every Thursday morning. Thank you for listening. How Far the Future Moon by P.E. Rowe Archives of the First Son. Lives of the Ages, Felix Thunhabhain, “How Far the Future Moon”: excerpt from the memoir of Reis Thunhabhain. Post-Columnar Epoch. When we were small. Our mother used to tell us stories at bedtime, fables from the old world, we thought, to entertain us. And entert

ain, they would. She was a funny woman with a flair for the dramatic, so she would act them out, a voice for each wizard or witch, a different voice for the animals, the boys, the girls, and the old women and men. But the fables were instructive, I later learned, didactic, lessons distilled from thousands of years of human experience, crafted into narratives to shape the thinking and behavior of us tiny creatures incapable of absorbing the nuance of such adult things—the self-destructive power o

f greed, the dangers of hubris, the rapid metastasis of a problem left to fester, the all-consuming pull of obsession. Then, if we were still awake at the end of the tale, Mother would sing us a song: The open boat The distant sea Knows not how far The Future Moon You are There were four verses to her song. We rarely stayed awake that long, Felix and I. But, during those years we were still small enough for Mother to tuck us in at night, we both learned the words. I have no idea where that song

came from. Felix believed she wrote it. She was creative, almost magically gifted, at least she seemed to us then. But in every archive and cultural database I’ve ever entered those lyrics, the answer always returns the same: no such song has ever been recorded. I tried to tell Felix about his obsession. He didn’t listen then, just as he didn’t absorb that lesson through the fables the way I did when we were small. I wonder now, all these years later, long after Felix left us, over twenty years

now since Mother has passed as well, just what little creatures she’d have turned our Felix into in her fables, what sort of silly animal obsession he’d have suffered under fruitlessly. And for decades, I wondered how a young man as bright as Felix could have come to embody such a fable so tragically. In real life, it was engines. We were both enthralled by ships from an early age. And for two boys captured by the allure of starships, we were born at the right time. Charris had grown to one bill

ion people in ten generations, and by the letter of our founding documents, it was the task of our generation to begin the era of colonization, which meant hundreds of starships. There was no mystery in it. We had the ships that had brought us from the Columns, living museums of our trek through the stars, still functional, still circling us overhead in orbit. And, when they weren’t keeping watch over the planet, they had been put to good use, scouting the space around Charris, which was, accord

ing to our astronomers, notably barren. This meant a long transit for our colonists, possibly a year or more, just to reach the nearest habitable planetary bodies. Unacceptable losses of the past, from stasis, meant that our ships needed to be slightly re-engineered for living passengers, and fewer of them per ship, which meant more ships. The number of vehicles we needed to design for heavy launch from Charris’s surface—that was where the novel engineering challenges would lie. And that was whe

re my attention always gravitated. Felix, on the other hand, was always magnetically pulled toward the ring drive. From an early age, he knew everything about it—the lives and thoughts of the geniuses who created it back on Earth, the specifications, the manufacturing processes, the power requirements, the physics of FTL travel (to the extent that anyone knew such things). Felix was a brilliant boy, a sponge. And in our teenage years he used to say, almost as a proclamation, that one day he woul

d improve the ring drive. I would tease him about it. “Improve upon the engine built by the greatest geniuses to ever live, Felix?” And he would always say, “When Yanagisawa died, no one knew his name, and now, everyone does.” “Everyone will know Felix Thunhabhain someday, though,” I would say sarcastically, “because he was the one to reinvent the wheel.” By that I meant the ring drive was already functional, perfect, and perfectly proportional to the needs of a colonizing fleet. Was Felix going

to make the engine go faster? Not according to our understanding of physics. Nor was there any room for him to re-engineer it to drive even larger ships, for the energy draw was already balanced proportionally to the size of the original ring-driven ships, which were exquisitely engineered; capable of carrying hundreds of thousands of sleepers or tens of thousands of living passengers; and their function was already proven. Felix swore, though, that he would find a way to improve their function

ality, that he would revolutionize space travel. After we’d completed our education, we both tested into the design teams in Akkadia, and in those early days, the city was almost exclusively the domain of the space industry, mostly us rocket builders and remote operators, whose work in space was to sit on the planet’s surface and monitor AI operation of the drones and robots building our starship manufacturing infrastructure. Akkadia was a barren and sunny desert city on a flat, open plain, whos

e only cloud cover came on days when our launch schedule was so thoroughly overbooked that the sky would fill with the hazy, gray columns of rocket trails as they slowly expanded to encompass the entire sky. Sometimes in those days, it would hardly be five or ten minutes between the incessant shaking of the walls and thunderous noise above. It seemed to me a waste of Felix’s talent to be one among hundreds of engineers designing and maintaining a fleet of chemical rockets, but ours were coveted

positions, directly contributing to the goal of our civilization—to be a colonizing force, seeding the stars. So if the mission directors needed rockets, we would give them rockets. Me, I gave them rockets for five days a week and flew home to Ternis, and I quickly found myself a local celebrity of sorts—one of the Akkadian rocket boys. I almost never bought a drink or wanted for company on those Saturday nights out in our home city. Felix, on the other hand, was still in his dormitory in Akkadi

a, staring at models. He was obsessed with the ring drive—scaling it down, scaling it up, re-shaping the strike point, staring at visualizations of energy distribution. I thought at the time it was fine. He was slightly younger than I and had always been less social. Eventually, I figured, he would become more interested in people, in having a life outside the inner workings of engines. I also believed that he would inevitably hit the same dead end in the physics of the problem that every single

person who’d examined the physics of the ring drive had—that proportionality, by physical law, limited the mass, size, and shape of the ring. It couldn’t be anything other than what it was. FTL travel would never be anything else. Its existence was nothing short of a miracle in the first place—both the physics of it and the genius of its discovery. There might have been a hint of gratitude in the reluctance of other geniuses like Felix to explore the ring drive further: blessed as we were, why

tempt fate by re-examining the already functioning miracle of FTL? Not Felix, though. There was nothing else he would look at, it seemed. I would come back to Akkadia from a weekend with friends in Ternis to find Felix entranced in VR, his goggles firmly affixed, his backside planted to a reclining chair, as it had been for two straight days, and I would have to pull him out for a walk so he got some semblance of exercise. “What are you doing in there?” I remember asking him of his VR sims sever

al times. The answers varied, but one I remember keenly. “Einstein used to discuss the power of visualization with a physics problem,” he stated, without a hint of self-awareness. “I’m using 4D modeling to test different shapes for the strike point based on the ring drive’s physical properties.” “You know you’re not Einstein, right?” I asked him. “You’re talking as though you belong in the same sentence as him.” He looked at me funny. “I’m Felix, yes,” he told me shaking his head. “Reis, sometim

es I wonder what you think of me, saying something like that.” “Sometimes I wonder, too, I guess.” “You don’t have to be Einstein to visualize your problem, or to make discoveries. But you do have to do the work, brother.” “Well, even Einstein had a social life, Felix. I’d like it if you came back home with me next weekend.” Reluctantly, he agreed, but all week leading up to it, I didn’t see him at all after work. Even when I pinged him repeatedly, he wouldn’t answer. I was tempted to physically

go up to his flat and knock on his door, but I figured, as long as I was able to get him home for the weekend, that would be a great step. Felix was true to his word that weekend. We still had childhood friends in Ternis. Both of us were happy to see some of them when we went into the city. I took Felix dancing, and he was far outside his element. At the time, the trend in music was to manifest augmented reality imagery in holographic forms and shapes—even clothing. The better performers, which

is to say the serious dancers—the ones into the culture as deep as I and Felix were into rocketry—they had their clothing, their holographic displays, even their physical appearance shifting in coordination with the music, beat to beat, second to second. Visually, the Turnout Room was a frenetic sight, and, quite frequently throughout the night, I saw Felix staring at some strange aspect of the scene. Several of my friends asked me if my brother was using some kind of psychedelic substance. The

truth, I knew, was far more damning, at least as far as I was concerned. He was visualizing some aspect of his work, bouncing the physics of FTL travel off these random light sequences, trying to find patterns in the music and movement of the dancers, their clothing, and their holograms. I worried that it was only a matter of time before something jogged a vivid thought. I danced most of the night expecting Felix to rush out of the club in a frantic state, desperate to capture an idea he though

t he saw in a fractal laser display projected from the back of some club dancer’s light rig. He never did run out, though, not in the hours we were there. Later, at Club Stacia, a quieter lounge, I watched with one eye from a distance as Felix chatted up Anastasia, one of my newer friends who’d danced with him for a while at the Turnout Room. She did far more listening than talking, and, for most of the time, looked rather confused. Nonetheless, it was promising to see Felix socializing, even if

it was an awkward sight. Anastasia did seem to like Felix, although it was difficult to tell whether he liked her at all or was more talking at her because she was in front of him. When I asked her about their conversation the following weekend, she told me she learned a lot about hyperdense materials and the properties of hyperspace. “Well, heard a lot about it, anyway,” she said. “I’m not sure whether I really learned anything. But your brother is very passionate about his work, Reis.” The tr

ouble was that it wasn’t his work. His work was getting payloads to the array, the workships, and the site of the particle collider. And that work, though it was not challenging for Felix, was what the planet had called him to do to help the cause of colonization. I suppose it didn’t matter how committed to the work he was as long as it got done correctly and on time, and Felix always did. It just seemed a shame to me how dismissive he was of a job thousands would have eagerly traded places with

him to perform with enthusiasm and conviction. Felix saw it as a mere distraction from his real work. He didn’t come back to Ternis much after that one night out, and he didn’t correspond with Anastasia again. When I asked him about it, he merely shrugged and stated, “I’m not sure she liked me.” “I’m not sure she even met you,” I told him. “All you talked about was spaceship engines, and she knows nothing about that. She’s a musician, Felix.” “Oh, I didn’t know that.” “You were talking with her

for over an hour, probably two, and you never even asked her what she does?” “She asked me first, and so I told her about my work.” I tried to explain to him, but really, if I needed to explain to him that one should ask other people about their lives—you know, demonstrate a modicum of interest—then it was hard to imagine Felix was going to get it. I was baffled, because I didn’t remember this Felix. When he was little, he was affable, friendly. He seemed capable of relating, even if he was a b

it aloof for a child. But now, the idea that he could talk to a pretty girl for two hours and not bother to ask her the simplest of questions? I didn’t know what to make of it. At that point, I was just happy he was still talking to our parents regularly, even if it was repetitive and superficial: Are you eating, Felix? Yes, Mother, I’m eating fine. How is work going? I’ve earned two commendations. How are you and your brother getting on? Oh, just great, Mother; it’s nice to be in Akkadia togeth

er. When I expressed my concerns about Felix to them, both our parents were dismissive. “Oh, you know how your brother is, Reis,” Mother would say to me. “He’s always been an introvert. It’s just a part of who he is.” In addition to the work he was doing on his own, he applied for funding through the colonial bureau to study small-ship FTL drive concepts as a research director. This was in our second year in Akkadia together. He was rejected outright. He hadn’t told me he would be applying, and

if he had, I’d have advised him against it. Most of the research directors were in their forties or fifties and had extensive histories as assistants and fellows before taking on directorships, and Felix hadn’t even been on a team yet in Akkadia. That was his mindset, though. He had the answers and didn’t need to work his way up the chain or prove himself. He knew. It didn’t come as a shock to me that this glaring hole in his CV, as well as his age and inexperience, was a problem for the reviewe

rs. Felix grumbled about it though. When I visited him in his dormitory and he told me the news, we went over their commentary section by section, and it was, almost to the letter, what I would have cautioned him about before applying in the first place. He accused me of taking their side when I pointed out the reasoning of their perspective. He got very upset when we reviewed the closing, which read as follows: “This application, notwithstanding the above shortcomings, fundamentally ignores the

reality that the Charran colonial project has no short-term need for small craft FTL capacity. Moreover, the committee sees no potential return on investment for decades and perhaps even centuries, regardless of whether the mathematics and modeling are sound—a prospect our reviewers have serious reservations about. Though clever, even brilliant on some points, we regret to inform you that the above proposal will not be funded.” “These people,” Felix fumed. “Myopic idiots.” “The entirety of the

scientific bureau, Felix? They’re idiots for rejecting your proposal?” “They’re probably not even capable of understanding the modeling, which they clearly didn’t review.” “What if they aren’t capable? Whose fault is that if they still don’t understand it after reading your proposal?” “They didn’t want to understand. They made up their mind. They’re talking about return on investment. I’m talking about investing in our understanding of the physics of FTL travel, expanding our range in space by w

ho knows what exponent—not a small one, Reis.” “If you want to get funding, brother, maybe you need to begin to think on their terms—what’s the benefit? If you’d spent even a tenth of the time you spent on the science thinking about the real-world implications, maybe you could’ve made a more compelling case.” “If they can’t see the value in this work, I don’t know how I can help them.” “Explain it to me then, Felix,” I asked him. “Maybe you’d have more patience for an audience you know wants you

to succeed. Please.” Felix took a breath, relented, and agreed to walk me through his latest work. It would be difficult to explain just how brilliant Felix was objectively. No doubt, I’d be accused of falling victim to familial bias and speaking hyperbolically if I related my true feelings. But I was shocked by what he showed me, because I didn’t fully understand until that moment how much more brilliant he was than I or than what I’d supposed him to be. We met in VR, standing around the strik

e point—essentially the object that triggers entry to hyperspace. In the case of our fleet’s working FTL engines, it was the ring, represented at one-tenth scale, so that in VR it seemed a hoop about the diameter of a rubber raft we might take swimming in the ocean. The rest of the VR construct was an empty black room. “Mathematics is inadequate,” Felix explained, “not just because it doesn’t fully capture the reality of the strike point in action but because even those who best understand mathe

matics scarcely understand mathematics in its true sense. Language is even more hopeless, because, like all semiotic systems, the symbols lack the nuance of the signifiers, and opening hyperspace, brother, is a nuanced art. These models fail in that they’re primarily visual, which is our most versatile sense for perceiving the universe, but it’s not the best tool for perceiving this problem. The truth is that we can’t truly perceive space, and we certainly cannot perceive the absence of it, so t

he critics will say that what is here is merely a model. Even if I were to find a strike point that works in VR, the chances of it working in the physical universe would be slim, expensive to test, and unlikely to scale for our purposes.” “How do you propose to prove them wrong then?” I asked Felix. “Mathematics, unfortunately, and models. See if you can follow along, brother.” He showed me his model of the ring drive in action. How it shifted the space around it affecting the fabric of space-ti

me itself. That he represented using visual waves of light, which, he explained, were only symbolic of what was happening at the subatomic scale—in the way a topographical map might represent a landscape. The strike point needed to create ripples in the fabric of space-time in a certain pattern. Change the strike point, and suddenly, it became impossible to replicate the ripples in space-time. Scale down the ring, and the pocket of hyperspace became too small to support a ship, obliterating the

ship, the ring, and likely igniting a nova-type explosion that could tear apart a solar system. Felix explained that it was both the mass and the contour of the ring that made opening an FTL window possible. He had been altering the strike point in the VR system to try to replicate the features of the ring—to that point, without success. But Felix was certain that the creators of the ring drive were wrong. They didn’t have access to similar modelling, so they merely had mathematical analysis and

much weaker AI to support their claims that the ring’s dimensions were singular in their suitability to open an FTL window. Felix showed me other shapes that came close—at least in the waves of light projected by the model, and, presumably the subatomic physics the lightshow represented. The closest shape to meet Felix’s outcome was an oblong tube about the size of a watermelon—at least as represented in the model. “The benefit, if we can get a strike point of that size to be functional,” Felix

claimed, “is that its mass is small enough that a simple two-step fusion reactor could push it out of a decent-sized gravity well.” “Meaning you could mount it in a small ship, land it on a planet like Charris, and take off again?” I asked. “Fly away and take additional FTL jumps? If I’m understanding this correctly?” “Exactly,” Felix said. “A much more versatile spacecraft—one not limited to space, and one that eventually could be accessible to smaller parties. It would immediately be within t

he financial reach of small groups, companies—even individuals someday.” We stood there together, examining this idea, manifest in this fabricated representation of the physical universe, and then Felix took us to a VR studio where he attempted to explain the math to me, which did not nearly go as smoothly as the modeling session had. I was confused, scarcely able to understand what he was attempting to understand. I asked obvious questions, like why he hadn’t just tried brute-force computing to

generate every possible shape and size of strike point, and, of course, he had attempted just that. He explained that the AI had only come close, and it couldn’t comprehend the mathematical concepts it was attempting to express, which meant it might fire a billion shots at the target and only recognize whether it was close to the target or far from it, but it couldn’t figure out what made one attempt close and another far. It was firing blind. And it never did hit the target dead-center. I left

that session in awe of my brother’s mind yet no less afraid for him, because I could see his mind’s total consumption in the problem. I could envision no case where Felix abandoned this problem for other work. And, in the weeks and months that followed, I could see him growing thinner, his eyes more bloodshot, his gaze more distant. Still, no one else saw a problem, as his day-to-day work for the project in Akkadia didn’t suffer. If anything, Felix grew more efficient at taking the busywork off

his plate so he could dive back into his simulations. Around that time, I remember seeing Anastasia out at the dance club several times, even dancing with her on one occasion, and she would always ask me about Felix. When I told her about my concerns for him, she told me she understood. “I have a friend whose sister is so enthralled by the idea of colonization, it’s almost like there’s nothing here for her sister on Charris anymore. It doesn’t matter what argument you make to her—that it will b

e hard, that there’s nothing out there yet, no cities, no infrastructure, no space stations, no power arrays, no bot factories; that everything will need to be built from scratch, and that until then she’ll have to live a life of scarcity and struggle and hard work—you can say all that, and still, all she sees is that future planet, that future moon where she wants to set her roots. Your brother Felix has that same one-track vision. I wouldn’t try to talk him out of it, Reis. You’ll only drive a

wedge between you, and you’ll never be able to pull him back from it. You need to love him for who he is, even if that means he’s a thousand light years away.” “The difference,” I told her, “is that your friend’s sister has a dream that’s real, it’s possible. She might get on a colony ship one day, maybe in the next decade at the rate we’re putting up infrastructure. I don’t think Felix has any chance of seeing his obsession bear any fruit—not in his lifetime and probably not in anyone else’s.

The greatest minds in the history of science have already dismissed the idea as impossible. So, what is one supposed to do about that?” “It’s entirely possible that girl gets rejected in the application process, too. Maybe she’s too old by then, not colonial material for whatever reason, then what? All that obsession for nothing. You do what you can and deal with the fallout when it happens, and the fallout is likely to happen. But you know what, Reis? Maybe they’re both right. You never know. M

aybe she gets on a colony ship and your brother builds the next ring drive. Who’s to say it won’t happen?” “Reality,” I said. “Maybe I’m too cynical.” “Or realistic. Most people are.” “It’s maddening that he can be so brilliant and so foolish at the same time.” “Isn’t that the story of the people we love? Space engines? Future moon colonies? They probably look at us and wonder how we don’t see the universe the way they do.” During those early years when Felix was chasing his engine, I hoped almo

st daily that he’d find his breakthrough, because I knew he’d never stop chasing until he did. The breakthrough came almost a decade after he’d begun his obsessive search. He was twenty-nine years old, approaching his thirtieth birthday, and I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. I had long since moved back from Akkadia to Ternis full time. I had a family and a management position that oversaw ground-based operations of fleet construction—human oversight of the automated framing crews in the orbital s

hipyards. Felix was still in Akkadia, in the dormitory, still one of the rocket boys, having turned down every opportunity for advancement. I was shocked to get his call. “I have it, Reis. I’ve found the key,” he told me. “The ring is true, obviously. But I found a second strike point, and the two solutions, together, they suggest a proportion. There are others. The second, though, is a perfect proportion for a small craft. If it works, it will mean a space engine that can run hard sublight and

generate FTL flight from a single fusion-based reactor. It can be done.” “That’s incredible news, Felix,” I told him. “What now? Or, what next? How do you go about developing it?” “I’m not sure. I think I’ll need investors, maybe a company, maybe the government. I don’t know.” “Whatever it is, I’m happy for you, brother,” I told him. “We should get together and celebrate, invite Mother and Father, have a dinner. We’ll have a lot to toast.” “Yes,” he said, though I could tell in his tone he was f

rustrated with me for being happy for him personally, as though I’d somehow missed the point or failed to grasp the scientific significance of what he’d told me. “Yeah, Reis. That’s right. We should celebrate. I’m free whenever its convenient for everyone else. Just let me know.” Perhaps I was naïve to think that Felix becoming convinced of his achievement would be good for him. Somehow, the discovery brought him to an even worse place, though. He was certain he’d uncovered the answer to the que

stion he’d dedicated his life to. The trouble was that he couldn’t know for sure until someone was willing to build his model in the real world. And one didn’t just build an engine whose centerpiece was fabricated of hyperdense materials. Supercollider time was invaluable back then. It meant Felix would have to convince the government to forego the production of a working ring drive for the colonial fleet to build his strike point. It also meant the need to design and manufacture an entirely new

type of spacecraft and engine—something Felix couldn’t do on his own. Further, there were few who would even consider the possibility, because the concept of variable strike points ran counter to accepted science; and, if there was one true thing about the scientific community apart from its philosophical profession of ideological indifference, it was the reality of its dogmatic practice. There was no such thing as settled science in theory, but nearly all science was settled in practice. Felix

was about to learn this lesson the hard way, and all he had in his defense was the mathematics he’d decried himself as an inadequate advocate that too few people could properly understand. Initially, Felix went into this battle optimistic, with the courage of his convictions bolstering his spirit. To those who didn’t know him, who hadn’t watched him struggle for a decade to reach that point, they mistook his aloof joy and pride in his accomplishment, as well as his quiet confidence, as arroganc

e. When he dismissed incorrect mathematical objections as inconsequential, he was perceived as cocky and, in some cases, rude. He didn’t understand how they could simultaneously criticize him, en mass, quite personally in many cases, and then lash out at him for being spiteful when he defended his work, often in comparatively tepid tones. That’s when I knew Felix was truly different, for it occurred to me that his fight had become something much bigger than he himself could ever be. It wasn’t so

much about Felix anymore than it was about human nature—a story that gets told over and over again, a story that always ends the same way. “How you bear unjust hostility, regardless of the science,” I told him, “that will be the story of your life.” There is the story, and there is the reality. Which fable would Felix be, I wondered. The broken man, who couldn’t see beyond his own obsession? Or the man unjustly accused, who stood tall and only seemed to grow taller the more harshly he was criti

cized? I think now, looking back on his life—on our lives really—Felix’s tragic flaw was his impatience. Had this period of scientific strife and argument lasted a year, two years, maybe even five years, I think he’d have endured it. For so long, he did, and he did so with hope, with the belief that one day he would be vindicated, that he would live to see his engine tested. Yet this period of scientific purgatory persisted, year after year, with articles that debunked his work swaying scientifi

c sentiment, until the inevitable counterargument was published calling for revisitation of the original concepts. In the first few years, Felix was quick to add his voice to the fray. But as he got more and more disillusioned, he came to view it as a pointless squabble, meaningless until he could convince the controlling interests to allow him to press forward in manufacturing a test vehicle. Over the years, several young, ambitious engineers proposed prototypes. They came to Felix eager, with

the same energy he’d once held for the concept of a truly versatile spacecraft. Only, their enthusiasm usually lasted weeks or months before fizzling out in the face of industrial-scale indifference. Felix was forty-two before he finally got a hearing with the colonization bureau’s engineering arm. It was in that division where significant enough influence could have swayed the larger forces to test Felix’s engine. And it was in that division where mathematics ultimately failed him—and not the m

athematics of FTL travel. It was the simple math of pragmatism, performed by one of the division controller’s undersecretaries, who was assigned to re-review Felix’s twentieth rejected funding proposal. “We’ve heard rumblings of your work over the past few years,” he told Felix in a follow-up interview. “And quite frankly, I’m not sure there’s anyone here qualified to determine whether your work is genuine or whether it’s a misguided venture. But I can say, that if it is genuine, it’s an idea mu

ch too far ahead of its time. In the past two decades, using Charris’s fleet of first-generation starships, we’ve identified forty-seven target bodies, none of which has a single structure or sign of civilization on it. This means there’s nothing out there, Felix. So even if we could snap our fingers and make a ship like yours materialize, there’d be no need of it. What we need, still, are the massive colony ships we’ve been building for the past two decades. They’re all large enough to carry th

eir own shuttles when they arrive on site. They can act as space stations, command centers, transportation hubs, and cargo carriers for a newly-seeded civilization. Until those civilizations take root and begin to trade amongst themselves, I’m sorry, but I just don’t see the added value to the colonial project that delaying the production of a ring-driven colony ship would cost Charris. And that’s not going to change. Not for generations, I reckon.” It’s not easy to talk about how Felix left us.

Not for Mother and Father, nor for me and my family. Felix never found love in his life, but he surely found heartbreak. It would be too simple and too cliché to say that’s what killed him. He had been working himself to death since his early twenties of his own accord, long before reality dealt the fatal blow to his dream. He grew lonely and depressed, and he’d turned down every opportunity to advance beyond his station in order to take his one monumental shot at the stars. I think he had his

heart set on living a life where everyone knew Felix Thunhabhain. Then again, Felix was unreasonable. I remember vividly, a few years after that meeting with the government, after several drinks, Felix turned to me earnestly and said, “Reis, I honestly thought I could be somebody who changed things. A person everyone would remember.” I turned to him and said, “I love you, brother, and to us, you’ll always be that person. But people, you know, they only remember certain things. Like everyone reme

mbers who invented the airplane. How many people remember who invented the helicopter? To my mind, that’s a far more impressive invention.” Felix smiled and raised up his hand, palm down with a slow upward motion. “Vertical liftoff. Quite a machine as atmospheric aircraft go.” “Do you know who invented it, Felix?” “No. I don’t.” “Neither do I.” “Some great genius,” he said. “A great genius indeed,” I echoed, raising my glass. “To the great unknown geniuses of the human race!” We smiled as we toa

sted. And Felix looked genuinely happy. It was one of the few times I can recall him being happy in the final years of his life. It may sound strange to say, especially of a man as young as Felix, who was forty-seven when he died, but I wasn’t shocked when I received word of his death. He never took care of his physical health, and he detested medical services. I don’t think he’d had a scan in over a decade, perhaps ever in his adult life. It was something we all did our best to encourage him to

do, but Felix’s path was also always his path to walk. Felix was going to be Felix to the very end. The coroner’s intake revealed a brain aneurysm that had been missed in adolescence—a thin vessel wall. The difference between life and death was a matter of a fraction of a millimeter—nearly as fine as the difference between a working and non-working FTL engine. We held Felix’s memorial in the hills outside Akkadia, overlooking the flat where our rockets steadily interrupted the ceremony with the

ir thunder as they rose, one after another, as they always did, starward. I began my eulogy of my brother with a name no one had heard before. Paul Cornu, a little-remembered engineer from Europe, who was the first to adapt a sketch of Leonardo DaVinci’s into a machine that approximated a primordial helicopter. Our mother never looked so old to me as she did singing that same childhood song. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but somehow, I still remembered every word, branded into my memory it

was, as childhood songs are. The stars behind Are always there Within the reach of Our belief From an open boat In a distant sea Who knows how far The Future Moon You Are The Saturday following our memorial for Felix, I took a trip out to Akkadia by myself. I hiked the inner rim, a trail that ran along the hills that overlooked the open plain. The city held so many memories for me of those formative years of ours. My first job. The friends I met in that city when it wasn’t much more than a netw

ork of industrial warehouses and dormitories. But mostly, I couldn’t look down there without seeing Felix, whose life, beyond the scope of our family will disappear into the obscurity that awaits us all. One of the rocket boys of Akkadia, lifting all the small parts and fittings to the skeletons of starships forged in the orbit of Charris at the beginning of our Age of Colonization. One of thousands of rocket boys, maybe the most brilliant one of all. Every man, in memory, eventually recedes int

o some forgotten army. Statistically speaking, it is all but certain that Felix’s engine is fatally flawed in some unforeseeable way. Someday, though, perhaps a thousand years from now. Some other underappreciated genius will stumble upon the same problem and find a similar solution to Felix’s, adapting it for a galaxy in which it will be practical, perhaps even indispensable. Who knows whether that inventor will have found and read Felix’s work for inspiration. I still look to him every day. *E

ditor’s note: Two centuries and sixteen years following Felix Thunhabhain’s birth, the first FTL flight powered by the FX-T Starcraft two-step engine was completed between the gas giant Iophos and the moon Hellenia, covering a distance slightly less than six light years. The engine’s strike point design was uncovered by a teenage engineering student’s AI while she was researching the history of FTL engine design. Thunhabhain’s engine performed so flawlessly during early test flights that it was

adopted without adaptation and lingered in continual use in some capacity for the remainder of the Post-Columnar Epoch. Entry from the Archives of the First Son: Lives of the Ages. Felix Thunhabhain: “How Far the Future Moon.” This has been an original story written and read by PE Rowe. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the story. At the time of this video’s premiere, I’ll be putting up a poll on the channel’s community tab for an upcoming audience-selected story topic. You can also fi

nd the community page linked in the comment section below. If you’re new to the channel, I try to take a poll every month or two for story topics. I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of writing to some of the topics you’ve selected, and for me, they’re some of my favorite stories on the channel and among the ones I’m most proud of. So if you have a moment and would like to participate in the poll, I’d love to have your vote. Also, if you’d like to be sure you don’t miss a future story topic poll w

hen they go up, be sure to subscribe and click on the notifications bell so you’ll get notified of each new story release and the polls when they go live. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for the final few episodes in Season 1 of the Misfits Series, which I’m planning to wrap up by early December, and there are lots of exciting twists and turns to come in that ongoing saga. Until then, Thanks for listening. This has been PE Rowe, and I hope to see you next time.