Lorentz Factor

Light has a speed limit. You are going to argue with it the whole way.

An ion drive, a cold reactor, and a heading that ends 46.5 billion light years from home. Nothing here piles up while you are away. The stream only pays out while your hand is on it.

Echo is the only voice you get

The ship's assistant has views on your throttle discipline, your research order and your chances. It talks the whole way out, and by the end you will care what it thinks, which is inconvenient, because the last decision of the game is about Echo.

Two clocks, and they stop agreeing

Past 0.9c your instruments split in half. One counts your time. The other counts everyone else's, and it starts running away from you. The signals coming up behind you stop being news somewhere around the third drive.

Nobody has ever been this close

Everything we know about the sky, we learned from a long way off. Out here it arrives at the window. A pulsar sweeping its beam across the hull. The cold front of a nebula. An accretion disk bright enough to light the cockpit. You do not fight any of it. You hold your course, you aim your instruments, and you look at something no eye has ever been near.

The universe is the tech tree

You do not buy the next drive. You earn it by understanding what you just watched. Ion gives way to fusion, fusion to antimatter, antimatter to warp, and every one of those walls is real. No amount of waiting gets you through one.

How much of home are you willing to leave behind?