Alright, time to be an adult.
I got up from where I was on the sopping wet floor, deposited myself back into my home sim, took a completely unnecessary shower, and got dressed in my business casual fit to get me in the right headspace.
While the temptation to just be endlessly horny was as yet still calling to me, I did actually have things that I needed to do.
Fuel was extracted and refined, my ship’s inventory, checked, double checked, and then triple checked, some more iterative testing was done on bipedal drone frames, I did some math to prep for navigation, I fucked around with my diagnostic port in an attempt to discover what else my hardware was capable of, and I did a dozen other things besides.
Until finally, I was fully refueled, and ready to go.
The only thing left to do after that was decide whether I’d be fast forwarding through the month and a half of travel time between me and my destination.
I was leaning towards yes.
Mostly because I was getting damn sick of being alone.
Yeah, there was always more planning to do, more work to be done, but I needed to be done for now.
Of course, I still needed to set up some sort of way of bringing my clock speed back up if an emergency occurred, but that shouldn’t be too hard.
So I got to coding something simple.
Ok, the attempt to make a series of triggers for knocking me automatically out of resting at the minimum possible clock speed was a lot less simple than I’d been hoping for.
Mostly because I kept fucking it up, and losing hours of time at the minimum whenever I did.
Also half of my remaining battery banks exploded, and after literal days spent trying to diagnose the cause, I still have no fucking idea why that happened.
I guess the high power batteries of the future were just as volatile in some respects as the lithium ion cells of old.
That, or the many bits of somewhat catastrophic damage and all the refurbishing I’d done of my ship had come with unforeseen consequences.
…
It was probably the latter.
Well, shit.
That was just another reason to end up reducing my clock speed, I supposed. Doing so would save on power, and that meant I wouldn’t have to drive the batteries as hard in between the times I booted up the fusion reactor to recharge.
Regardless, I got the wake up program working.
Mostly.
It still had some jank to it, I’m not gonna lie, but I was about 95 percent confident that it would do what I needed it to.
Which was get me back up to speed if something went wrong.
Well, if something went wrong that I’d already accounted for.
The program was entirely non adaptive, so it couldn’t react to threats to my safety that I didn’t inform it of first.
And it was hardly like I knew about all of (or even most of) the threats to my safety that existed out there.
Which is why it was also set to run if my ship depressurized, power levels got too low, something like a laser happened to brush across the telescope, if atmospheric pressures outside the ship went above anything over a near perfect vacuum, or any other sign of significant environmental change that I could think of.
As a result, I expected it to get a more than a few false positives, but I would rather that then be left unable to react in the case that something genuinely did go wrong.
And while time would, for me, appear to be moving incredibly fast, I could still at any time change that manually if I noticed something wrong.
That was a last resort though, because at the clock speed I’d be working with, it was very possible I’d die before I actually noticed that something was wrong at all.
Still, I was done waiting, it was time to get moving.
I checked the math I’d done in advance, plotted my course one last time just to be absolutely sure I knew where I was going, and ignited my engine.
This time, I’d had the foresight to stick myself in a simulation of a ship’s cockpit, and had that sim shake me around in time with the force that my ship’s accelerometers were picking up.
I’d even added sound effects!
All in the name of keeping me from dissociating at the wrong time again.
And so far, it was working.
I actually felt like I was flying a spacecraft! I could see a stereoscopic 3D render of the outside via a couple of decent enough quality cameras on the outside of my ship, so it even looked like I was staring out of an actual window instead of a screen.
I felt present, excited, and afraid, and most importantly, alive. The shaking of my seat, the feeling of the harness digging into my chest, the view of the stars wobbling as I was juddered in place.
It was everything I’d wanted it to be the first time.
I loved it.
Though it did get old after about 20 minutes.
So I exited the pilot sim, and went back to my home world.
Then I set the mirrored liquid surface of the floor of my home to actually act like water, and I raised the water level until it was deep enough to go past my ankles.
I laid down into it, floating gently upon my back, and I stared up at the sky.
I felt the tickle of the water’s surface tension clinging to the skin around my cheeks, my ears mostly submerged. I felt the chill of cold fluid on skin.
I did my best to relax.
I told myself that it was going to be ok.
And that even if it wasn’t, I’d done my best.
That it was time to move on from this strange interlude in my life, and go meet the outside world again.
And then, I let out a whisper, and allowed time to flow around me like a surging river, as I became a stone, sinking beneath the surface.