Kaboom

[Tachyon 0]

Note that this log is largely a plot device to sync my following log with our timeline.

 

“Kaboom”

February 18, 2157

Lieutenant (sg) Dave Grey

-------------------------------------------------------

 

Dave Grey was not like ordinary kids in that he did not always enjoy watching things blow up. Oh, he admired the way that the blast pattern could be mathematically predicted using a set of equations. He enjoyed the physics behind the ignition of the explosion, or the chemical equations used to engender the combustion reaction. Yet to stand and admire the beauty of the explosion for sheer pyromania's sake was not something that naturally occurred to him.

 

Novae were different. For one thing, a nova is like an explosion in slow-motion: since they occur so far away, they are virtually frozen in time, the tendrils of the super-heated gases stretching out across the blanket of the cosmos like a vast, hidden message. It was beautiful. It was one of the reasons that Dave had reached into space.

 

Yet in the three years that Dave had been out there, exploring, the beauty of the cosmos in his mind had been tempered by its demonstrations of ferocious—and unfairly—destructive power. Nothing in this universe was permanent.

 

He had always wanted to see a star go nova; it was just one of those things that wound up on one's to do list if one happened to be a fairly intelligent astrophysicist with the ability to travel at faster-than-light speeds thanks to a shiny warp-powered starship. So when the star started to go nova, Dave thought—just for a moment—that this would be one of the defining joys of his life, something at which he could look back in the future and say, “This is why I went out there. To see that. To live it.”

 

Dave was wrong.

 

The star exploded, sending shockwaves rippling across the fabric of its solar system, and so did Dave's mind. And all he could think of was Harriet.

 

The days since they had left Earth had been quiet for Dave. He had not talked to anyone about those few final hours spent closeted in a hospital room with Dr. Tratos. He had, in fact, blocked it out of his memory entirely, so much so that he could recall the simple fact that his sister was. . . . That is, until, the nova reached down into his mind and snagged the memory, dragging it up, kicking and screaming, to the surface of Dave's brain, where it arced across the neurons of her cortex until reaching the amygdalae, which let it pass through the emotional floodgates, straight for the heart.

 

Kaboom. And all the memories came back.