Daryl Pac was a man with a mission. He had a plan. He wanted to do something that no-one had ever attempted before. He wanted to test an FTL drive outside the universe Therion was in. One must imagine the audacity!

To make it even more insane, he wanted to test a lot of the failed attempts, or rather those failed attempts where there were leftover materials. Or at least that was what he told himself in front of the mirror, because it was, almost certainly, a spectacularly stupid decision and waste of resources.

Luckily he did not order that much for this experiment, so he should not get into trouble from that angle. That he did it during work times was significantly more problematic. That he told nobody about what he was planning (besides an automated message, which would help solve the mystery if he blew himself up), was even more of an issue.

He went through the Gate to an unnamed earth, and brought all his materials with him. This was already were first problems were showing, demonstrated by a rather big explosion in one of the containers. Luckily he had kept things far enough apart so this was not that dangerous, but it did not bode well for his experiments in this universe. Well, what’s done is done, so he continued to soldier on. Hopefully no other unforeseen circumstances will make his experiment unlikely to work.

He began setting up his tools and found out that some of his materials had evaporated either into nothing ness or something that they were not before. One thing became something that looked suspiciously like a stable form of uranium. Which was weird, but maybe there was a stable form of that in this universe. It was not particularly explored after all, just logged as having no higher level life, beyond plants and so on, and having a breathable atmosphere. No dangerous predators, but also not being forced to wear an space suit, was a great thing in Pac’s opinion.

He began experimenting, considering he had a beyond tight schedule. After all, he needed to finish today, and he had 30 different experiments to go through, even if he included those that became unviable. Which, considering that were another 40 helped his schedule a lot. The name of the game here was parallelization, which generally was easier if you had help. He had none, not even some higher level robots, which did not make this any easier. But he made do.

Daryl Pac was running himself ragged. He had now worked for over 3 hours, jumping between experiments, analyzing readouts, adjusting things, dodging the odd explosion (two of those had happened during experimentation, luckily, the only one who had done any damage at all had hit an experiment that was already completed). Until now, there was no positive result, although some of the reading he had taken, if compared to the original readings suggested interesting things. He thought at least, because he really had no time to check. The next issue was right around the corner, the next step needed to be done now, and he did not have twenty hands with unlimited reach, which would come in handy somewhere around right now. But he continued. He would not give up, he would show them all - what would he show them all? He could not remember, or actually had ever really thought about it.

4 hours in, he went more and more crazy. It was far, far too much work, But he needed to do this. It was his chance to shine. Another, more logical part of his brain was thinking that in 8 more hours he needed to return, or face even worse consequences. And it would be better if he returned in just four hours. But he needed to finish this!

Tritt minutes later, he had managed to get to his stuff in one uninterrupted minute, and opened his lunch box. With the somewhat predictable result that he was trying to eat his bread hands free, while trying to get a machine from doing what he wanted it to do. He really should have done more beyond just skimming the manual, which meant that he was currently searching for that. At least he had been smart enough to download every manual he might need in this operation. Still, it was not fun or easy to do.

And now his bread had fallen into the dirt. Oh well, it certainly would be fine. Or at least he hoped so. The initial probe did not find any dangerous microbes, so it must be fine, right?

Ignoring here that those probes were not that complete, which made it very possible that something had been missed, he was on the other side of the planet, and still, from a study that had been done during the early four thousands, it would be fine in 99.999% of all cases.

In this case, it would not be fine. Or at least not completely. There was poison in the dirt, not much, but enough to make him very ill. Luckily, it was slow acting, his medical implants could keep it at bay, and when, 5 hours later, he returned to Therion, a modern hospital could take care of the issue in ten minutes. But it would still mean that he would have more and more issues as time went on. His coordination would not be perfect. He might need to do a double take on one read out or another, wasting valuable time. But he made do.

He was still mostly on schedule an hour after he poisoned himself, when he slowly began to realize that there was an issue. As time went on, it became more and more clear that the forty experiments he could not set up were a godsend. If those had been there, he could have never managed this. Even so, before the medical issue cropped up, he already had problems, and now, it was nearly impossible to manage everything. But he made do.

A decision, which in retrospect had been rather stupid, was to take care of some of the more dangerous experiments towards the end and not at the beginning, when he was still fresh and capable of concentrating on things. Admittedly, hs reasoning for this was not completely stupid. There was a series of experiments that needed very long times to work, but toward the end he did not need to care for those that much anymore, which in turn meant that he had more time now than before. Still, if he ever did this a second time, he would do those experiments as early as possible. And get help. Another hand would have solved so many of his issues…

Well, he had decided to do it this way, so he would do it this way. Who cares that his coordination and concentration was shoot, while handling dangerous substances? Well, he cared, but he was on a mission and would the ignore the problem until it came back to bite him (or, more appropriate, blow up his) arse.

Still, because of divine intervention or something, because there was no way in hell that this was normal, nothing to bad had happened. Oh, he had to replace a number of glassware and so on, but nothing that had not been anticipated had happened, and the damage had been minor, which was a win in his book.

Two hours later, he began to rejoice. The most difficult part was nearly over, soon it would just be packing everything together, going home and hope that the readings he took were interesting enough to prevent a punishment. But suddenly he stilled. One of the many modifications of the good old classic Alcubierre drive was going into the main test cycle and the readings were anormal. What did this mean? He began cross-referencing, because the readings were not just interesting or weird, they were flat out impossible. And he began to cheer, because this likely meant that the test apparatus broke light speed. Larger scale tests, not supervised by one tired and completely overwhelmed man, would be necessary to confirm, but this changed everything. Even if it was something different, it would likely change a lot. His experiments were validated. He had made the correct choice.

Which was, of course the point when one experiment exploded violently, because he forgot that he needed to take care of those. Which activated a chain reaction. But he had won. While he hid himself during the explosions, after he was reasonably certain that they were finished, he began the absolute minimum of clean up necessary to leave those machines alone for the next day or two. He needed to present this discovery to everyone. The UE finally had an FTL drive. Or at least it will have one if there are no unexpected problems. Which he did not think about, really, because he was to exited.

2 hours later he made it back, and his implant flashed him that he needed to go to the doctor right now. Which in turn meant that he called his boss while going to the local hospital to get his strange medical issue sorted out. That boss was not to happy about the call, and his mood did not get better considering the rambling and exited structure of it. But as he slowly began to understand what Dary Pac had managed, even though he never got the specifics of it, he got exited as well and began moving to the hospital, hoping that that issue was unconnected or easily solvable.

A day later, they already had the confirmation: the FTL drive that tested positively was usable and scalable. The medical issues were in deed a contamination of the dirt on the place Daryl had chosen to do his experimentations.

Daryl Pac of course got a lot of praise for his forward thinking and great discovery. But, considering how blatantly he broke the rules to pull it of, he was not promoted. At least not yet. Still, he got no black marks in his resume, which considering this achievement guaranteed his promotion in the next year.