Final Destination, Chapter 3: December 15, 3093

“We’re halfway there,” Al announced this morning.

“I know,” I said, “I’ve been counting off the days. Do you have any idea how boring this flight is?”

“No. I am not programmed to experience boredom. I am just programmed – ”

” – to induce it, I suppose. Look, people must have made long trips like this before. What do people normally do, anyway?”

“This trip is highly unusual, Miles Porter. Regulations – ”

“My name is Miles,” I said for the thousandth time. “Please, please call me Miles.”

The computer continued, ignoring me. “Regulations state that voyages conducted in single-person craft by pilots not in suspended animation should never exceed five days.”

“Well, your suspended animation machinery is broken,” I said. “What do you do then?”

“Why, you fix it, Miles Porter. What else?”

“Of course,” I said. “I don’t know how I could possibly have overlooked that.”

The trip was pretty boring, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The ship came with a huge on-board digital library, and there were all sorts of things to watch and read. I spent my time reading up on the history of Larson’s Folly, trying to piece together any information I could find about it. I knew very little about it when I left, other than it was supposed to house the leprechauns that guarded the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I was slowly becoming an authority on the subject.

It seemed that Larson’s Folly was founded about five hundred years ago (that would put its founding about a hundred years before the war broke out) by a bunch of academic students. Back in those days travel was done in generation ships, and it took them a hundred and fifty years to get out there, way beyond any other settlement. No one else ever built a colony anywhere near them, and I’m not surprised: it would have taken more than the lifetime of a human being just to pay them a visit. I guess they wanted their privacy.

You know, I am so glad that faster-than-light ships were invented. They were developed just before the war broke out, so they weren’t ever in wide use, but man did they ever make traveling easier. I still wished that a two-person ship had survived, but I doubted that many of them were ever built.

The last recorded communication from Larson’s Folly was dated March 16, 2714, the day the war broke out. Nothing else had ever been heard since, but the war destroyed all of the tachyon communicators so that wasn’t surprising.

That brought up a question, though.

“Tell me, Al,” I said aloud. “Why is it that you can’t transport people via a tachyon matter transporter?”

“No one ever found out, Miles Porter. Exhaustive experiments were conducted that conclusively proved that living creatures which were transported via tachyon particles to remote destinations arrived dead on the other side. Only non-living items could be transported.”

“Like bombs,” I said. “Tell me, are there any surviving tachyon transporters?”

“No, Miles Porter, there are not.”

“Ok, here’s another question for you. The zero-point-energy power plant on this ship: where did it come from?”

“It was manufactured on August 30, 2701 on the planet Larson’s Folly by the SCI Corporation.”

“Tell me: were there any zero-point-energy plants that did not come from Larson’s Folly?”

“Not to my knowledge, Miles Porter.”

That was their great secret. The scientists on Larson’s Folly could produce the most powerful sources of energy that mankind had ever known: a reactor that could produce an inexhaustible stream of energy. No one had any idea how they did it, although many people tried very hard to find out. There was nothing more prized after the war than one of their zero-point-energy plants: a single one could run an entire city as long as it didn’t break.

Which, eventually, it did.