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anything after this is brandy new, like the ocean-

“But how does that relate to what Mindy is doing?”“When she left, she started to move away from us and has been speeding up faster and faster. Her ship slowly, and I mean that in a sarcastic sense, sped up to near the speed of light and once she reached 99.99% she will turn her main engine on to push her beyond the established speed limit of our universe and then turn around”“Why would she turn around?”“To get back to us.”“That still makes no sense.”Chapter 2:On board her ship was Mindy was never really lonely but there were times she questioned why she was doing what she was doing. “You know, I love cooking and I know I can drink this liquid and never have to worry about cooking.” The computer whirled as if in response by beeping and twirling yet she could never seem to be able to have a conversation with it. “Mindy? What are you thinking about?”“We have these gel packs which provide all of our daily nutrients but they can’t even make them taste good.”“What does taste have to do with eating?”“I loved my mom’s cooking. She said that her grandmother taught her everything there is to know about how to make an egg.”“What is so difficult about making an egg?”“Really? Have you ever made an egg before?”“No”“Let me explain, first you need to get an egg.”“Okay”“Then you need a heat source”“Okay”“And then you need something to put between the heat source and the egg so that you don’t burn the egg”“Okay”

“After you got your heat source, the boundary and your egg, here comes the hard part. You need to break the egg”“Why would you break the egg?”“To make an egg! Jeez, you know you really aren’t that smart.”“So you are saying to make an egg: You need to break an egg”“Among other things…”“Please continue…”“Okay, so after all of the preparation is done, you break the egg and you must be certain to not let any piece of the shell onto the barrier of your heat source”“Why?”“So that you don’t eat the shell!”“Why wouldn’t you want to eat the shell?”“Because it’s crunchy”“Toast is crunchy and I’ve seen you eat toast before”“But toast isn’t an egg and you are getting away from my point.”“Sorry”“Good it’s about time you apologized to me. Now back to making an egg. After you apply the egg on the separator, you have to wait and watch it cook.”“Why would you watch an egg cook?”“Can you please stop interrupting me with more questions? I am trying to explain why it’s so difficult to make an egg and you are making it worse and worse for me to explain.”“Again, sorry. Please continue”“Like I was saying, you have to watch the egg while it cooks because over enough time the clear part becomes white but the yellow part cooks more slowly. So you have to ask yourself: When do I stop cooking this egg? Do I want ‘sunny side up’, ‘over-easy’, ‘over-medium’, ‘over-hard’ or do you give up and scramble it to make it easier on yourself.”“Why wouldn’t you choose the path of least resistance?”“Ahhhh!!!”Mindy proceeded to shut the speakers off to get some peace and quiet. While a messages read on her screen: Please continue speaking, I’m always listening. She stared at the screen for a while, blinked three times and closed her eyes.

Chapter 3: “Time travel is weird. You could be standing still to watch the world go by or you could be moving so fast the world stops moving”Waking up to the sound of her automatic alarm, it was time to slow down. She had spent seventy-seven days accelerating away from her home planet with her photon engines and the next step in the designedprotocol was to do something no one has ever done before. To go faster than the speed of light is a theoretical physicist’s dream-scape, opening a frontier that wasn’t possible with the understanding of modern physics when Mindy launched. She had spent thirteen years working on a solution yet no calculator was able to rationalize an infinite solution. Consulting the brightest minds of the day was to no avail. Being laughed at by the “gentleman” with their pocket protectors only served to fuel the fire she had in her heart to keep pushing. The funniest thing is, the faster and faster you go in any medium the more and more the medium pushes against you. A German scientist once postulated that the speed of light is the universe’s ultimate speed limit. Even if you are within the smallest fraction of going that fast, you could turn a flashlight on and you would still will measure the light as the same speed. “Crazy right?” said Mindy.“What is?”“This whole trip. We weren’t meant to travel this fast. No one has ever gone this fast. After seventy days of acceleration, I am supposed to slow down, check in with home and see if they figured out how to use this thing.”“What’s on your mind?”“I want to turn it on.”“You do know we aren’t supposed to yet.”“I know but if I see a button that says, ‘Don’t press’, I want to press it.”“Mission protocol states to accelerate and then to slow down.”“If I’m going this fast in relation to home, everyone that I know is already dead. It’s not like the person on the other end is even going to know me. For all I know, I’d be talking to the mission director’s great-great grandchild or who ever got the job while I have been traveling.”“You knew the consequences when you left home”“Seventy-seven days might not seem like a long time to you but it is to me. I’d like to know how my dog at home is doing, how my cats are. It should be spring time now anyway at home. I haven’t even started to plant my garden yet.”“You do know that by my calculations one-thousand nine-hundred and sixty nine years have passedfrom where you left”

“Oh! That reminds me! Did you know that we landed on our first celestial body 1,969 years after we started to count how many times our planet revolved around the sun? Jeez, so you are saying that it’s the year 3938?”“3942 now”“How fast are we going?”“About the speed of light”“I think that’s the first joke you told this entire trip.”“”“Didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”“We have been talking this entire time. I’m learning a lot from you.”Mindy proceeded to take a look outside. Outside being a weird term in the vastness of space. Normally the stars are white but she noticed faint hints of blue and red that she has never seen before except in pictures of the most distant stars. Funny thing is, it all looked still. She didn’t recognize any sort of patterns out the window. As a child she spent endless nights laying on her back staring “up” at the stars. A mind game she used to play with herself was trying to imagine laying down on the ground looking at the stars and pretending she was looking forward instead of up. When she would do this, it would cause a perspective shift that one could only understand if they had experienced ‘low-g’.“Which way is up to you?”She pointed perpendicular to the floor she was standing on. “That way” “You are also pointing to what your planet calls your ‘North Star’”“Are we already under Sirius?”“Relatively speaking”“I’m actually starting to like you more and more.”Back at home in the year 3942 a single message was sent in the direction of Mindy’s ship:“Do not turn it on. Come home now”Chapter 4: Electro-magnetic interference“In the vastness of space, a single beam of light can be twisted by any sufficiency massive object.”The mission was designed for one-hundred and fifty six days. Seventy-seven to accelerate in a straight line, two days to change direction and then seventy-seven days to deaccelerate to arrive back at home. What was imagined before Mindy left was the physical device to allow an object within a given volume to step beyond the universal speed limit. Spacetime has a way of fighting when being pushed to its limits. To go beyond the ultimate speed limit, you only needed a simple push from the rear.

The physical device was designed by the greatest minds of the time but the limiting factor was the computational time to factor in the calculations to use it. Leaving the device on the planet makes it useless unless it had the proper instructions. Mindy had spent three years of her life writing algorithms in an attempt to solve the problem elegantly but in all simulations, once the device was turned on, the programs would never halt with an answer. “Pi as always bothered me.”“Apple pie?”“Ha! I made that last week. No, I mean Pi as in the circumference of a circle.”“Pi is only one number. What is so wrong with a number?”“My issue with it is that I have never been able to memorize it.”“Why would you want to?”“Well, it’s impossible!”“I don’t understand”“Ha! You don’t understand something? That’s a first. Allow me to explain: Pi is an irrational number so even if I used ‘long division’ to help me memorize the number, I’d never finish”“I can recite the number for as long as you ask me to”“Well, I want to recite the number for as long as I can. But if I do that, I’d grow old and probably die of boredom.”“So why would you want to memorize Pi?”“I can’t memorize the whole Pi but I can stop after a certain decimal point. Look how far I can get: three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two…”“That’s pretty good without using a calculator”“You do know: The original term for someone who could do math in their head easily was called a computer”“I do know that.”“Well, of course you did”On the seventy-seventh day, when Mindy was to start changing directions she was supposed to get an alert with a message from home with the calculations. It never came. “Weird…”“What is?”“Today is the 77th day of my journey and I was supposed to get a message on how to use this thing. It’s strange that they didn’t send me a message yet. What year is it?”

“To you? 2035”“No, I mean back home”“3989”“I wonder if they forgot about me. Or maybe something happened while I was away? If I can’t get their instructions then I will never be able to see my family again. Let’s wait one more day and see if they say anything”Chapter 5: Irrational decisions“Do you know how much money we have put into this thing?”In the board room of Enterprise Industries the Chief Financial Officer asked a rhetorical question. After thirty years of crunching the numbers the computer warehouses have not been able to find a solution to the faster than light travel problem.“When we sent Mindy up there, we promised we would bring her home. Jeb, how far away is she now?”“That’s a stupid question. A better question is: “When she is now?”“You humor isn’t appreciated right now. The drive was designed to work and we have proven the math. Could someone tell me exactly why we can find this solution?”In the back of the room, Siad put his head down.“You! Over there… you’ve been working with us since this whole thing started. Do you have an answer for me?”“No, sir”“Can you give me a bit more?” The CFO looks at Siad’s name tag. “Mr. Sayadd, care to elaborate?”“It’s pronounced Siad.” The CFO rolls his eyes. “And I don’t know. Mindy and I worked on the algorithms for three years in a think tank. We had the models tuned, all the features set and the only thing left was to let the computers churn through the numbers.”“So what you are saying, that today, more than thirty years into the ‘information age’, that this is a problem no computer can properly model.”“That’s correct, sir”“Back in my day, we called them analytical machines. There was nothing that couldn’t be solved with good old fashion math. I remember working as a computer when I was a child. We were paid to push a pencil on a piece of paper, perform calculations and send it up the chain. Calculators powered by a battery weren’t even a thing. Tables and tables of numbers were referenced.”“Sir, the problem isn’t math. It’s something else.”“Explain”

“I can’t. We have millions of individual computers working on the simulation with penta-flops of cycle time and not one of them has been able to model a solution. Twenty-seven years ago, we asked the public to help share in the resource requirements. Even scaling up our data centers with the newest GPUs and quantum computers, we yet been able to figure out a coordinate system to allow her to come back.”“So what is keeping us from figuring it out?”“If I knew, sir, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We used a neural network with how ever many nodes required to finish the problem in 3 years. After 3 years of ‘thinking’, if you could call it that, there still remains no solution… It’s a black box, sir, we can’t peek inside to figure out what’s wrong.”“We designed the architecture and I have personally seen the source code. What’s there to figure out?”“Time, sir”“Then it’s a bug. An illogical statement within the code that’s keeping the computers from finding the solution”“No, the code is sound. If I may take a guess, I’d say that it’s a matter of time until EI’s computers figure it out”“It’s taking too long Siad. We are 30 years into this problem if you can really call it that and we need to send her a message on what to do forty-seven years from now. Will we be ready?”“It should be a matter of time”Chapter Six:Being on a spaceship reaching closer and closer to the speed of light changes your perspective. It is easy initially to speed up but the faster you go the more space pushes you back. The weirdest thing is that when you look back at your home world, time is slowly speeding up. Back home, Mindy’s mother build a large LED display on the roof of the house which would display the date and time that was current to those on the planet. Training her telescope back home after seventy-seven days in space, she couldn’t read the display anymore. The planet was moving too fast in time relative to her speed in space. Siad took a vacation shortly after the meeting with the CFO, working with Mindy had passed time on the planet quickly, and he felt that time was slowing down for him. The three years working with Mindy on “the world’s most difficult problem” wasn’t so hard with her humor around. Arriving home to his significant other and children, he decided to train his telescope towards Mindy’s ship. “Siad, what are you doing out here in the dark.”“Focusing this blasted thing on Mindy’s ship. I want to see if she is all right.”

He felt a loving hand on the back of his head. “She hasn’t moved since the last time you looked at her. They explain it on her feeds. Once she reached a certain speed, it would look like time had stopped for her.”“I know I know, I just can’t help thinking about her. We had a meeting last week to discuss how we are to bring her back home and the computers are nowhere close to an answer.”“You and Mindy took three years of your life thirty years ago to design the program, how can you not have any answers to give her? You once told me that mathematics are the language of the universe. Did you do something wrong?”“I don’t know. It bothers me that we practically have every computer on the planet working on this problem. Even with the advances in machine learning and neural nets, we are no closer to the problem than we were twenty-seven years ago.”“How can that be?”“Well, it is either something we missed or it cannot be solved. If it’s something we missed, then we catapulted Mindy four-thousand years into the future to her seven-seven days. I hate being wrong.”“Honey, you have been fine tuning Mindy’s algorithms for what seems like forever now. Maybe it’s time to start from scratch?”“I don’t think that’s it. When we were working together, we looked at the problem in so many different ways that I highly doubt it. Like the great philosopher said, ‘When you are wrong, you never truly know why. If you did, then you wouldn’t have been wrong’Training the telescope was a honed skill. Siad preferred not to use a digital one and instead bought a large ‘analog’ one. So it took about twenty minutes to get the picture just right. Because Mindy was traveling in a straight line for the first quarter of her journey, all Siad needed to do was to find her location and zoom in on that. The ship was designed so that there was a large window facing back towards the planet so that anyone with the time could take a look at a clock on board and a bit inside the ship.Getting into focus, he saw that only thirteen days had passed on Mindy’s ship and she left a note in large letters.“Hello World”A smile came across his face. Those are the worlds that any programmer worth their salt does first in any new language they learned. Console.log(“Hello World”) or print(“Hello World”) was Siad’s first and second languages. Taking a peek at the second note left:“Siad – I am fine.”

Chapter Seven: It was all a blurMindy sat at the control board of her ship contemplating the silence of not receiving an answer from home. “It’s not like they can’t find me, the trajectory was planned out way before I left and Siad made certain that the digital telescopes would never cease communication with the ship. With the planet spinning around its axis, having only one telescope trained on the ship would not account for a complete communication channel. Siad told me that he commissioned eight devices to track me but I could never really follow what he was saying”Mindy started to assume perhaps they haven’t arrived at an answer. She thought to herself, “What would keep them from sending a message?”The computer on-board the ship blinked with a noise of an incoming message: Lunch is ready.Making her way down to what she called the mess-hall. She walked through the corridor like it was the first time she had. “Something feels different.”“Why would you say that?”“Everything has been going according to plan. In the first quarter of my journey, time back home was speeding up but it felt normal, something to be expected. I’d get letters from friends and family telling me what they were up to and the next day, I’d get another letter telling me how much time had passed and what they were doing to pass their time.”“You still haven’t answered my question.”“You do know that pauses aren’t always an invitation to speak right?”“What do you mean?”“Never mind… To protect me, the communication channels with letters from friends and family were turned off. By the time thirty years had passed, we had an almost certainty that the equations would have been able to give us an answer. You said it was the year 3989, which means that one-thousand nine-hundred and fifty four years have passed and we get silence as we started to slow down. It’s weird.”“The message got lost.”“How? We tested everything in the experimental phase and we ensured we had proper handshakes of the communication packets while we started to accelerate.” Mindy sat and pondered.Chapter 8: Unplanned ExplosionsSiad woke up with sweat on his face five years after Mindy left. “Siad, you were having a nightmare. What’s wrong?”

“I was had the strangest dream.” He said with eyes towards the celling not looking at anything. He pressed his fingers between his eyes trying to recollect sleep’s events. Looking over to his wife, “I’m not sure. I feel like we missed something”“Honey, you have been stressing about this for a while now. Surely you haven’t. It’s not like you can plan the future exactly.” Siad sat up with eyes wide. “Trish, I have to go.”“Not before you have had your breakfast, I always have to remind you. I love you. Let me make you some breakfast. What do you want?”With a small smile, “Eggs.”“I know just how you like them”After eating breakfast, Siad kissed his wife on the mouth, told her he loved her and got into his transport to head into the office. On his way, he received a call from a technician working in Mission Control:“Sir, are you on the way to the office?”, Siad paused for five seconds as this was assumed.“Sir, please come into SatCom before you sit down.”“What happened?” The longest pause was felt for another five seconds and the call disconnected.Not needing to hurry up to get there as his transport was on automatic pilot, Siad sat back in his chair and pondered what could go wrong. The mission was in a monitoring phase and only needed to keep track of Mindy’s ship for the time being. He thought about what could have gone wrong. He closed his eyes and started to picture Mindy on the ship listening to her favorite music, dancing like no one was watching. He had met Mindy at a cello concert his son was playing in when she was nineteen years old. He saw her completely enthralled with the music, staring blankly at the musicians, taking it all in. Watching her from afar was like looking at someone invisible as if any movement would disrupt the players from playing their melody. She sat alone next to the speaker with a trained ear and a honed eye to the players on the stage.After the first set was done, he saw her jump as if electrified then proceeded to bee line right for the door outside. She passed by him with eyes staring miles ahead and his eyebrows ticked up. “I wonder what she is thinking about.”Siad scanned the room for his wife and saw that she was chatting with an old friend about the concerts their children had been in over the years. His son was nearly fourteen and had already been named as ‘first violin’ in the local orchestra. Seeing that he had a few minutes he decided to walk towards the stage and sit where Mindy had been sitting.The seat to his left was a young couple about her age pinning over each other. He sparked up a conversation with the boy and asked him what he did for a living.With narrow eyes the boy said, “For a clothing store.” Then immediately turned back to his date. Siad introduced himself to the couple but they were only interested in talking to each other. Looking down,

he saw the boy was bouncing his leg as the girl played with her hair. “Young love,” he said to himself quietly. “So, how did the two of you meet?”“We go to college together.” The boy said“Oh? Which one?”“State College” the other said. A figure came up to him and stood in place a few feet in front of Siad.Siad chuckled, the boy turned back to finish the joke he was telling. The couple clearly lacked interest in speaking to him. “Excuse me?” said a voice and Siad turned his head.“Oh, sorry. Were you sitting here?”“I was, yes”“No bother, let me scooch over.”“Tell me about yourself.” Siad said with a smile on his face.“I’m Mindy. What’s your name?”“My name is Siad and my son in playing after this.” Mindy’s eyes widened.“Has he been playing long?”“Oh yes, when he was very small,” he said with a chuckle, “my wife and I gave him a choice. Either TV or music. He chose music and, as they say, the rest is still on-going.” Mindy looked at Siad and gave him a gentle smile.Your destination has been reached said the transport. Siad opened his eyes, walked out from the transport and stared up at the skyscraper alone amongst a city of buildings. Chapter Nine: Waiting for an answerMindy woke with a start in her bedroom. It was a polished white walled room with decorations and personal effects she was allowed to bring with her. Being in low-g was an experienced that took a while to get used to. On her home planet, she always had the sense of which way was up. A sense she called that was beyond the five normal senses. “I had the strangest dream…” Mindy said to herself quietly.“Tell me about it.”“Back home, whenever I’d look up at the stars I’d always lay down to try to take it all in. I remember the first time I saw the outline of our galaxy, I never knew that there were so many stars.”

“You’ve read books before on astronomy and read once that there are more stars out there than grains of sand.”“But to see it with your own eyes is something else. It makes it more real to you than numbers. Two to the power of thirty eight plus or minus a lot is hard to take into your heart.”“That’s 274,877,906,944 plus or minus a lot. It’s not that hard”“Calculating a number and knowing a number is different.” Pondering on how she could explain it.“What do you mean?”She looked around the room for inspiration. The floor was the floor, the walls were the walls, her bed was on the floor, and the ceiling above the bed. She pointed a finger up and smiled. “Ah ha!”“I sleep in a spinning ship to simulate gravity but my perception of up is in reference to where I am” her smile deepened“Okay.”“So, whenever I point up the vector of my finger is actually constantly changing in reference to the axis that I am spinning around”“Sounds like a carnival ride.”Standing up as if electrified, “Exactly. My parents once took me to the county fair and they had a centripetal motion machine. People would step into the circular chamber, stand against the wall, and the machine would start spinning. After so many rotations, it would pick up speed and you’d feel a force keeping you stuck to the outside walls. Raising your hands was difficult because the direction of your body’s velocity vector was being moved by the angular acceleration of the ride.”“What does this have to do with numbers?”“Imagine this, you are laying in a grass field looking up at the night sky with gravity keeping you down. Now try to pretend that you are not looking up but forward.”“I don’t get it”“Try it sometime.”Chapter Ten: Plotting the futureCharles greeted Siad as he walked into the building. Marbled, dark gray walls surrounded the lobby and walking through the security check point, he nodded his head to the security guards checking visitors’ passes. Upon looking down at the polished floor he noticed the reflection of the lights from the ceiling.Scanning his badge to call an elevator, he felt a light tap on his shoulder. “Good Morning, How are you doing on this fine Friday?”

Turning to look at who was speaking, “Great as always, thanks for asking.” He turned toward the elevator doors and they opened. At the back wall, he saw a polished silver surface which doubled as a mirror. Walking towards himself, he turned and voiced, “Forty Second floor, please”“Mind if I ride with you.” Said the earlier voice.“Not at all.”“Sixty sixth floor, please”The elevator started to move up and Siad felt he weighed just a bit more. As the elevator slowly started to pick up more speed, he thought in his head, “If this elevator’s velocity was suddenly arrested and I wasn’t buckled in, I’d shoot through the ceiling.” A small smile of entertainment crossed his face.“Are you smiling at the news this morning?” “No, I haven’t heard any details.”“Oh! Anastasia came out with a new album and it was released today.”“Ah.” Siad said with an almost sad look on his face.”“If it was anything like the last one, this is sure to be a hit.”“I bet.”The elevator door opened to floor 42. Siad wished the young man well and walked down the hall….

5/31 and I didn’t leave a voicemail this time