Heels clacked in a hurried rhythm on the hard vinyl flooring of the old Ernest Rutherford Physics House of McGill University. Professor Therese Thodesen was not a woman easily excited or rattled, but today she was both and more. The old Ernest Rutherford House was a brutalist concrete block that had not seen much external architectural improvement in the past two-hundred years since its construction. While the rest of the McGill campus and downtown Montreal had been modernised and increased in size and scope, the heart of the university’s physics and astrophysics research had remained the same. Thodesen didn’t give it much thought, she was not much of an aesthetician and was generally happy as long as the research labs and the prototype workshops were properly funded and staffed. She rounded a corner and nearly collided with a gaggle of chatting PhD-students, mumbling “sorry”, before hurrying off again, leaving them looking puzzled as to why the lead special relativity professor in the entire North American sphere was so distracted. Thodesen passed down a hallway decorated with paintings of old department chairs and important alumni, running a hand through her greying-before-its-time brown hair and propping up her rimmed glasses, stopping by a security guard standing outside a set of doors. She swallowed an urge to scoff at the sight of the armed man in aramisteel-vest and the red beret of the United Commonwealth military police.

The war had transformed life in many different ways for the people high up in the military and technological food-chain, not to mention the astrophysics departments of the Commonwealth universities. Despite the sides refraining from carrying out actual fighting on Earth, thousands were dying in the black vacuum of the solar system every month. And no one had outlawed espionage, so security measures had to be made to ensure the protection of potential high-risk targets, such as the Ernest Rutherford Physics House. She nodded to the guard and jabbed a thumb towards the door.

“Mind if I go in?” she said with a glance at the doors over the top of her glasses. The guard frowned.

“I don’t think so, ma’am,” he said in a heavy Saskatchewan accent, “Professor Kravchenko is in a meeting with the advisory board to the Naval Technology Group in Parliament, and I’ve been told that no one is to intrude unless it is absolutely necessary.”

“Well,” Thodesen said, straining to her full not-very-imposing height and crossed her arms across her chest, “as a matter of fact, this is absolutely necessary. I need to speak to the head of astrophysics right now, it really cannot wait.”

The guard looked at her, to the doors, back to her and seemed to sigh internally before pressing in a code on the door pad. The wooden doors were, like the rest of the building, old and in desperate need of varnish, but again like the rest of the building, its exterior was but an old shell and the inside had been replaced with modern technology, and opened with a slight creak as the correct code was punched. Thodesen nodded her thanks and stepped into the office. Professor Carson Kravchenko’s office was the usual mess of work stations, paper printouts, books, data models on computer screens and assorted clutter that characterised the workspace of a dedicated academic. The portly professor, for once wearing a dress shirt instead of a faded rollneck, was sitting behind his main desk, deep in conversation with his video call meeting when Thodesen entered. His eyebrows shot up in surprise before turning his attention back to the call again.

“You’ll have to excuse me for a moment, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to his computer mike, “a colleague just arrived and,” his eyes returned to Thodesen and narrowed, “since I made it clear I was not to be disturbed unduly, I guess this is important.” He pressed a button to mute himself, and turned his full attention to Thodesen.

“What the fuck, Therese? I told you I was going to be in a meeting for most of the afternoon. Do you have any idea how important this call is?”

She simply pointed towards his computer.

“Muted audio and killed video?”

“What? Oh, shit!” He pressed another button and had it not been for the important news and the heavy air all over the campus, Thodesen would have laughed at Kravchenko’s clumsy predictability.

“What do you want? Things are about to go down in Jupiter orbit any moment, both the combined fleets of the Commonwealth and the Eurasian Federation are soon engaging somewhere between Themisto and Leda. The advisory board is all a-panic in case it goes south and they want updates on the new magneto-ion prototypes we have over in…”

“I solved it,” Thodesen’s voice was deadpan as she looked him straight in the eyes.

“You solved… wait, what do you mean you ‘solved it’?”

“I solved Deckard-Shikaru,” Thodesen said.

Kravchenko’s eyes became suspicious slits.

“You mean to say you have solved the Deckard-Shikaru Conundrum? The unsolvable, purely academic theorem that quantum laws of physics are possibly not slaved to space-time? You of all people know it’s derived from Armagan ’98, and not exactly Einstein’s GTR.”

“And I repeat, I have solved Deckard-Shikaru, without a shadow of a doubt.” She fished a flash drive from her lab coat pocket.

“I have run the simulations all day, all night for six straight days, may perhaps have overloaded four of the Cousins Laboratory computers irreparably; but every time the simulations have come up with the same answer, more than seven-hundred-thousand times. There is a sub-plane where both relativistic and quantum laws of physics are untethered to actual physical space and time.”

Kravchenko took the drive and started to put it into his desk computer before thinking better of it and slotted into a laptop on one of his workshop benches. The computer made a string of what could be construed as electronic complaining noises as it ran the memory-intensive simulation programme, before producing a diagnostics screen after a few tortured moments. Kravchenko scrolled through the data, becoming more and more slack jawed as he skimmed.

“My God,” he said at length and slumped back into his desk chair. He sat still for a moment before removing a book from his shelf and fished out a bottle of single malt whisky.

“I keep it for special occasions,” he explained to Thodesen as he produced two clean coffee mugs and poured pretty tall drinks into them. “And if you are correct, this is a very special occasion.”

She took the mug offered to her and sipped, swallowing the burning, peaty alcohol without really tasting it. Thodesen had been fond of whisky in what felt like a previous life, but not anymore. She stole a glance at the meeting screen, watching with some satisfaction the confused bureaucrats and so-called technical experts in the video call wondering why Kravchenko had suddenly dropped out. Kravchenko fished out his phone, found a news channel and flipped it onto his wall mounted projector. Long range sensor images from public-access monitor satellites showed the trajectories of large amounts of warships converging into the Jovian System. In many ways than one, Thodesen thought bitterly as she took another swig, this was a monumental day in human history.

The female talking head on CMBC1 explained to new viewers the situation unfolding on the screen. The Commonwealth carrier groups Independence, Ark Royal, Magnificent, and Yamato with their accompanying cruisers, destroyers and frigates were in a boosted slingshot manoeuvre in Themisto’s gravity well, while the combined Outer Belt Fleet of the Eurasian Federation was hurtling in from somewhere around Adrastea. Near Leda or Lysithea, the two fleets would meet for what would be the largest battle of the war. Thodesen knew she should be hoping for a Commonwealth victory, but she had stopped caring about the course of the war years ago. This day was one for the history books, but Marianne had been the historian, not Therese. And Marianne had died when the Eurasians had shot Phobos out of the Martian sky. Her hand went instinctively to the ring hanging around her neck, but she stopped herself. No, her research would make sure there would not be another Phobos.

“If I am correct,” Thodesen said, voice husky, “this will all have been for nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Kravchenko’s eyes were on the display, but his attention was on her. He was having problems wrapping his head around the world-shattering implications of Thodesen’s research. The originally Norwegian professor waved a hand at the news channel, which was showing stylised images of the large carriers that were the primary striking arm of the combatant fleets.

“This war has been going on for the past six years, with no clear victor. Before that, it was the Venus War, where the European Federation and the Eurasia Pact merged into one, and the Commonwealth and East Asia Alliance decided to split Mars between themselves. Humanity is collectively spending hundreds of thousands of lives for the territorial rights to freezing or scorching rocks with atmospheres we can’t breathe, because our cradle has become too small for us.”

“Therese…” Kravchenko began, setting down his mug, “it is true, if you solved the Deckard-Shikaru Conundrum, that we could be looking at a different way to process astrophysics, but…”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” she interjected animatedly, “this changes everything we know about the Universe and the entirety of humanity’s future. Ever since Didier Queloz in the goddamn twentieth century, we’ve known of exoplanets capable of sustaining human life. There are literally hundreds of them out there, but we’ve never been able to reach them, because we have blindly thought that we were limited to a set of rules we cannot break.” She was talking quickly now, pacing back and forth.

“Einstein basically said ‘we can only do this, not anything more, and don’t for a second think that these arbitrary set of laws of physics can be overturned’, just like a parent sets rules for a child. But then the child grows up and realises that the rules it has obeyed for all its life is possible to bend or break, and suddenly the world looks a lot different.”

A pang of loss and the memory of a conversation long ago, just before a hastily planned research trip to Phobos flared up in the back of her mind, but Thodesen suppressed it.

“In fact, many laws once thought to be inviolable pillars of good society are overturned when more enlightened souls start to question them later. Blind obedience to religion, slavery, repression of homosexuality; the examples of horrible human rules are endless. There is nothing to say that shouldn’t hold true to physics as well.” She sat the mug down, conscious that she would break it if she didn’t calm down.

“But now, there is a chance that the rules we had thought bound to this single solar system is nothing but the outmoded ideas of a past that didn’t know any better. Maybe we can finally reach for the stars…”

She picked up and drained the mug, relishing in the burning sensation as it travelled down her throat and oesophagus.

“I think,” she said after a moment, looking at the computer screen still showing hundreds upon hundreds of lines coloured verified-green, “you need to call up the parliament types again.” Her smile was thin, exhausted, but triumphant. “And tell them to brush the dust off the Aurora Project.”

Edward Heatherland watched as wispy clouds almost seemed to frolic across the pale blue sky, following them with emerald-green eyes that were clearly light years away in thought. His stylus danced absentmindedly in his right hand, while the other hand propped up his chin. The pages in his old fashioned notebook were covered with a few notes and whole mess of drawings of spaceships, exotic planet surfaces and uniformed mannequin-like figures. The professor was talking in the background, but Edward was not listening. A slightly curly lock of black hair slipped out of its gelled confinement and dangled rebelliously in front of his rounded glasses. Still he looked out the classroom window as two clouds embraced into a dance of nebulous tendrils.

Edward was a fan of history, and his imagination of the events of that fateful day in April 2181 had more than a few elements of truth in it. However, had Edward been an actual historian, he would have known that the monumental Battle of Lysithea happened five weeks before Professor Thodesen announced her breakthrough in cracking the Deckard-Shikaru Conundrum. And she most certainly had not burst into the office of Professor Carson Kravchenko in the middle of a video meeting. Like most of history, the truth was much more mundane. The computer labs that had been dedicated to running Thodesen’s calculations had been manned by a PhD-student late one night, the girl souped up on coffee and watching a hockey game. She had watched through the entire second period before she realised the beeping noise from the mainframe computer was not the usual slightly insulting and jarring “simulation: negative”, but the upbeat “simulation: positive”, a noise the student hadn’t ever heard emanate from the machine before. Even upon arriving at the scene after receiving a slightly hysterical phone call, Thodesen hadn’t burst down the doors of the Ernest Rutherford Physics House, but had simply got back to the grind. After two more weeks with successful simulations and sleepless nights, her and her PhD-students’ work culminated, not in a grand press conference, but in a fifty-eight page article in the academic journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In hindsight, these might have been the most epoch-changing fifty-eight pages written in human history, but Thodesen was not naïve enough to believe that her research would have immediate impact. The Deckard-Shikaru Conundrum was the combined theories of professors Samuel Deckard of the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Munich and Mifune Shikaru of the University of Wellington School of Chemical and Physical Sciences/Te Wānanga Matū. They had both come to a similar conclusion, based again on ­­the –at the time both pooh-poohed and applauded– dissertation of Nobel laureate Aytek Armagan of 2098. In 2125, Deckard and Shikaru claimed, in short, that there existed a sub-plane of existence to the observable physical one visible to humans, which had been mathematically proved by Deckard in 2113. Shikaru postulated that the laws of quantum physics were not an inherently given set of laws, and could be negotiated or even surpassed if the physical conditions were not slaved to time and space like the corporeal, observable dimension. It was regarded as an unsolvable conundrum by the majority of the academic society, an interesting exercise in quantum physics and mathematics, but not something that could be proved for sure. Not until Therese Thodesen, using a combination of at the time controversial quantum mechanics and relativistic physics, decisively proved the existence of a sub-plane of space, hidden behind a threshold. This plane was both directly observable by human senses, as well as untethered by the relativistic laws of physics. Thodesen theorised that one of the previously considered constant laws of physics, the barrier of faster than light, was not present in the sub-plane; indeed both time and space was relative.

It took quite a while before this became known to the public. In fact, the international academic debate raged for seven months before some of the more major science and astronomy buzz sites caught wind of it. By then the Jovian War had been over for four months, with the Eurasian Federation and Pan Pacific League acknowledging United Commonwealth territorial claims in the Kuiper Belt. The war had been costly for all sides, with scores of major warships lost, along with horrific casualties in the ground warfare on the barren landscapes of Ceres, Europa and Mars. The destruction of the Martian moon of Phobos had caused enormous destruction and the loss of tens of thousands of Commonwealth colonists on the surface of Mars. And by 2182 widespread speculation that all this bloodshed had been for naught was catching on as the idea of Thodesen’s “Light Space” was picked up by mainstream media and influential voices in popular science circles. The idea of expanding beyond Sol gripped the war-weary populations of the colonies, especially with the idea of settling Earth-likes instead of having to spend their lives underneath domes, breathing recycled air and eating vat-grown food. However, the supranational governments that had spent so much money and prestige, and the Earth-based populations that had lost the lives of their loved ones in the vacuum of space to develop and protect these colonies, were loath to jump on this fanciful idea of a “New, New Frontier”. Nonetheless, the same drive that had barrelled the Commonwealth, the Federation and the League to war over the rocks of the system, made them start to look into the practical uses of this new revelation, terrified of what the others could find and make use of. Slowly, clandestinely, the militaries of the three superpowers started to tinker and experiment.

The “Aurora Project” had in reality been named the “Argonaut Project”, after the famous legend of the intrepid adventurers looking for the Golden Fleece, and again Edward had gotten his timeline mixed up. “Argonaut” had been approved by upper political Commonwealth leadership in 2183, and using their secret Argyre Planitia naval yards on Mars, a prototype ark ship christened Providence was slowly assembled. It had originally been envisioned as a long-range scout ship, but influential voices in the United Commonwealth Space Development Directive pushed for the first interstellar ship in human history to be a colony ship, capable of taking volunteering pioneers and visionaries out into the stars. Satellite telescopes were employed around the clock to determine the best potential exoplanet candidates for long term human settlement. Thodesen had by 2184 already been forced to volunteer her services in creating a functioning faster-than-light drive based on her “Light Space” theory (the name of which she absolutely detested), and the Commonwealth was pouring more and more resources into the “Argonaut Project”. This did not go unnoticed by the other superpowers, and soon another space race akin to the one a century earlier when the first space elevators had been constructed, was well under way. In June 2190 the first functional Light Drive prototype was completed, just as the by now massive Providence was finishing construction. Spaceships had until this point been relatively limited in size due to the (again, relatively) short distances between space stations and refuelling bases in the Sol System. The Providence upon completion was a hulking thirteen-hundred metres long, more than twice the size of the largest of the Commonwealth’s fleet carriers that had fought at the Battle of Lysithea. It would still be years before a functioning Light Drive could be fitted in the massive hull, and not until the end of 2196 was Providence cleared for launch. In the end, it proved no difficulty getting volunteer colonists for the Providence, despite the authorities making it abundantly clear that it would be a one-way trip, with no guarantee of finding a world suitable for habitation, and even if one was found, life would be unrelentingly hard with no relief in sight. Millions applied.

With great fanfare, the Providence, filled with nine-thousand carefully selected candidates stuffed in cryobeds and a skeleton crew to man the ship, set off from Mars on 23 December 2196. It spent three months under moderate acceleration to reach the Sol System’s t-limit, some ten light-seconds out from Pluto, before engaging its Light Drive. Cascading blue lights enveloped the ship as charged ion particles began to rip and tear at the fabric of space, and soon the light swallowed the massive titanium construct, removing it entirely from the world. It emerged nineteen months later in a system more than eight-hundred light-years to the galactic “south-east” along the Orion Arm. A massive red giant stood at the centre of the system, shining its radiation down on twelve planets and two large asteroid belts. As soon as the sensors and scopes of the Providence came online after over a year and a half of inactivity, the crew and the awakening hopeful colonists were soon staring at a verdant and cerulean giant of a planet, glittering oceans adorned by tranquil and languid cloud layers that…

“Master Heatherland.” The voice made Edward jump in his seat and he dropped his stylus, clattering noisily to the floor of the auditorium.

“I hope I am not boring you with my lecture. If there is a subject you would rather I talk about, then feel free to speak your mind.”

“Ah, no,” Edward managed to stammer out, reaching down to pick his stylus back up, while the students seated around him in the large university auditorium snickered at his discomfort. “I’m sorry, Professor Kubíček, please continue.”

The greying don nodded in wry amusement before turning back to the holographic slideshow full of dates and portraits.

“As I was saying before rudely rousing young Heatherland there from his nap…” –cue more chuckles from his fellow students– “Sir Louis Morgan-Kahun was born in 2530 here on Aurora and was initiated into the world of the classics at the Maesbury School of Music at the tender age of seven. He then moved to first Antioch, enrolling in the Heliopolis Academy, and then ultimately to New Malta where he would spend the majority of his most productive years. Thus, he was born just in time to become one of the pioneers of the first wave of Avant Neogalant, his initial forays into the style exhibiting a clear carry-over from late Berenice School composers such as Emery, Ozcan, and in particular Hoashi. This influence is most clear in Morgan-Kahun’s Piano Concerto No.4 in G Major, as well as the initial chorale overture and recurring aria leitmotifs of the first and third acts of Alessandra, regina di Astra, his first major opera seria, which premiered in New Victoria on Aurora in 2574, incidentally making this year the 300th anniversary of its premiere… Master Heatherland, are you asleep again?”