Cosmonaut's Lament

Major Dmitri Sorokin had volunteered for the mission because he had nothing left to lose, which was the unofficial qualification for every one-way trip in the history of space exploration. The official qualifications — flight hours, psychological stability, expertise in experimental propulsion systems — he possessed as well, but Roscosmos had learned decades ago that the people who performed best on missions with no return trajectory were the ones who had already, in some essential way, left the world behind. Dmitri's wife had died two years ago. His daughter lived in Montreal and called on birthdays. His apartment in Star City contained a bed, a shelf of books he had already read, and a photograph he could not look at. He was, by every measure that mattered, ready to go.

The ship was called Lermontov, after the poet, which Dmitri appreciated — there was an honesty in naming a doomed vessel after a man who had died in a duel at twenty-six. The Lermontov was small, built for a single occupant, its interior a compromise between functionality and the minimum space required to prevent a human being from losing their mind over an indefinite period. The experimental drive occupied most of the ship's mass — a device that the engineers described in terms Dmitri understood were metaphors, because the actual physics had not been translated into language yet. The drive did not burn fuel.It did not generate thrust. It did something to the fabric of space itself, something the theorists called "metric manipulation," which meant, as far as Dmitri could determine, that the ship did not move. The universe moved around it.

He activated the drive at 14:00 Moscow time, with Mission Control watching through a transmission delay that would grow longer with each passing second. The activation was anticlimactic — no roar of engines, no thrust pressing him into his seat, no sense of motion at all. The stars in the viewport did not shift. The instruments showed no acceleration. But the distance readings began to change, climbing at a rate that should have been impossible, and Dmitri understood that the ship was not travelling through space. Space was being generated — new space, created by the drive, inserted between the Lermontov and everything behind it. He was not moving away from Earth. Earth was being pushed away from him, separated by a growing expanse of freshly made void.