This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/internalized_boner on 2026-04-17 15:01:11+00:00.
The void did not move.
The pin pricks of distant stars continued to twinkle in the distance, unmoving and uncaring as Pinciotti continued pushing the throttle handle forward. It could feel like you weren’t moving, if you didn’t know any better, he thought as he watched the rising velocity gauge while noting that the starfield outside his cockpit stayed as static as a painting. He was traveling over two thousand kilometers a second increasing, yet the stars did not move. To them his blistering speed was utterly insignificant. It would take dozens to hundreds of years to reach the nearest of those little points at his current speed, he knew. The scale of speed and time and distance was comically heedless of human perception and achievement. His ship would max out at around 2900 KPS, a speed beyond the comprehension of any human being just a few hundred years prior, and yet it was pointlessly slow compared to the inconceivable size of space and the distance between the majority of objects.
All that we have achieved, and it still takes literally years to travel to our closest colony worlds from Earth. Significant chunks of our lifespan spent simply in transit. Traveling the universe was simply not meant for such short-lived, slow-moving beings as Man.
And yet here he was. A man. Traveling the universe. Zipping around at mind numbing speed and hoping that the cryochamber wouldn’t be cold on his exposed arms and legs when he climbed in it in a few hours. He had activated the pre-warming feature, but it was finicky and unreliable. The ship would route power away from non-essential systems if the power dropped below a certain level. That was the problem, he had never flagged the cryochambers “extra” features as essential. He kept forgetting to do so, and then he would promise himself he would make a note before he went to the freezer, and then he would forget to make the note and thus this game of Russian roulette with the warmth of his bare ass.
“Not this time.” He said aloud, to no one. He brought up the to-do list on his cockpit computer and began to set a reminder when, suddenly, he died in a horrible explosion as the micro-fusion generator powering his ship suffered a catastrophic containment failure. A failure that had been slowly building for several hours, the warning klaxon and auto-diagnostic feature that should have informed him of the issue never activating. The reason for this malfunction was unknown, would never not be unknown.
The distant stars continued to twinkle. The void did not move. For an instant, Pinciotti’s ship created a new pin prick of light as it exploded, visible only to relatively close by observers, but nonetheless an event on a grander cosmic scale than most humans could ever hope to achieve.
The void did not move.