Brilliant Man/Vir Clarissimus (Latin)

Chapter 2 Navigation and Guidance

A jaunty traffic of cabs, buses, and cars swarmed the road while colossal, glassy ships cruised the radiant, Neptune road (Quick note, Neptune's Road wasn't really Neptunian; instead it was the non-reactive, resulting chemical of solar discharge tainting the path between Mercury – where many intergalactic ships offload – and Saturn. Uranus is where the tint wanes and by actual Neptune, the color is entirely gone).

From this traffic, all Ozwald's attempts to separate from the crowded, one-way lane were cannibalized. Neptune's road spanned nearly six whole planets, back from Mercury, through the Asteroid Belt, then all the way to Saturn. This particular aerial crowding usually only occurs on holidays, an example being Saturn, the quinquennial host of the next five years of Hawkings recognitions.

To put things simply, a one-way flight to Pluto just wasn't feasible, same with Alicia's constant questions about space travel - this, however, he could easily ignore. They would make their first pit-stop on Ceres, where their fuel reserves would be checked again. Next, after crossing through the Asteroid Belt, Jupiter's gravitational field and their perfect alignment to the world would be used to sling their craft further forward. Finally, they'd re-enter Neptune's road, using it to smoothly cruise by Saturn before committing to Hypertravel - in use of the tanks Ozwald's father had lended them - for the rest of the journey.

Their final destination would be Space's dead planet. Pluto was where all the oldest men and machines lived. Likewise, it was also the site humanity and Zed desired for its valuable material. Onyx oil.

~

Ozwald curled back the configuration lever, seeking a different output. His vehicle's configurates – both lever and button - could be thought of as just one action system, something which could be programmed to spit out various different outputs from the same configurate. For example, rather than begin configuration by draping their sides in tinted glass and neon-white, Ozwald could instead 'park' their vehicle.

'Parking' was a cost-efficient hack influenced by government which explained that when you slowed your vehicle, the pull of Neptune's road – in part by the Sun's centripetal force – could essentially draw you forward faster than your idle state. This method mimics the two influences for planets orbiting the Sun, inertia and gravity, which explains its breakthrough in the physics world.

How and when exactly was this discovered? Shortly before her death in 2205, Rosalind Dogma theorized this sort of residual Sun-pull, however it was a descendent of Jeppeth Senior Hawkings, Hawkings Senior the 5th CBE, who was crowned discoverer of this pull, and great lobbyist for its use even with avaricious gas-giants onto him.

~

Boredom sipped on the days after the initial thrill of traveling, their vessel lined up with the conveyor belt of parked, slowly-moving crafts drawn towards the Sun. Everything aligned perfectly; their direction, speed, and – in a way – destination were all tipped to this father-star standing forward. Objects further southwest stayed lit for hours before disappearing into infinite oblivion when escaping its line of sight.

Then a steaming cloud emerged.

Out through her window, Alicia watched the grand, silvery entrance of a colossal, alien-owned ship. Intricate details mapped its sturdy, chronium exterior, with its attention to embellishments accentuating the originality of this great vessel. It rose through the spray of infinity, casting its great, midnight specter over the sprawl of cars under it. This elegant welding of lines and almost imperceptible detail lingered for just another hour before the sweeping crest gracefully slipped from sight. The glowing spectacle had gone.