Using #vim is easy once you learn a few basic keybindings.

h and l - move left and right
j and k - move down and up
η and λ - move backwards and forwards through time
ξ and κ - translation through additional temporal dimension (if applicable)
ᚻ, ᛄ, ᚳ and ᛚ - moving left, down, up, and right through celestial spheres
𐤄 and 𐤋 - switch deity to pantheon member to left or right
𐤉 - supplicate to chosen deity
𐤊 - challenge chosen deity (dangerous)
:q - exit

@tinker and Libby is an excellent way to support your local library as well - each time you borrow a material from Libby, the library whose card you borrowed it under gets to add that 'circulation' to it's stats.

Proving use of services to governing bodies (County/City Council, other municipal bodies) is how libraries justify their funding, and every little bit helps!

"So why *is* it called Dropspace, anyhow?"

Stevens turned from the nav board a moment, face half-lit by the calculations scrolling by on the center screen, to flash his far younger compatriot a grin. "You remember that first time you crossed a Dropspace aperture?"

"Yeah, I spent about half my duty shift coughing in technicolor. Felt like my stomach just-"

"-Dropped." Stevens finished, a little smirk on his face. "One of the downsides of Dropspace. Something about the interspatial shift makes it feel like the floor falls out from under your belly, and your lunch tries to space itself. Usually succeeds."

"So, wait." The young woman's face slowly screwed itself into the sort of horror that only came with the realization of an ugly truth. "...You mean to tell me that that pre-Drop meal everyone insisted was traditional... was specifically so I could throw it up?" She heaved a frustrated sigh at that. "I should've crewed up on a slipship."

"People are assholes." Stevens agreed, a grin on his lips. As if on cue, the math on the nav console's screen blanked away, replaced by a star map to their destination. "Dropspace calculations complete - feeding them to the aperture generator." The newbie got one last look, grin stretching just a little wider. "How was lunch?"

"Fuck you, Stevens. Push the button."

Moments later, a yawning void opened, swallowing the ship entirely.

#flashfiction #shortstory #scifi

There's a funny thing that happens when you go superluminal - Time, as far as radio waves are concerned, travels backwards.

A few minutes in dropspace will take you back decades. A few hours will get you centuries. Too much longer, and you transcend a civilization's history, or at least their transmitted history, altogether.

The first expeditions to Archon Prime found a society dead of a plague; it didn't affect our scientists, of course. Their biology was simply too different. What wasn't different was their radio technology - transmission frequencies, as it turns out, vary shockingly little, and our explorers found the documentation for the underlying technology fairly readily.

The Archon expedition launched a secondary effort, then - a cruiser, rigged for silence and fitted with the most sensitive receivers possible. It departed Archon, into the darkness, skipping between dropspace and realspace by seconds, hours.

As it turns out, the Archonians' (File a complaint with the Archaeological Board if you dislike the name) language was melodic in nature. We heard them sing their final song before their first, listened to them die before we listened to them live. Children born before their grandparents, wars ended before they began.

Skip by skip, the cruiser went, until finally, it found silence - and then history began to play out, one transmission at a time, in the right direction.

Knowing how a story ends devalues the beginning not in the slightest.

#flashfiction #shortstory

Confession: I look for this setting before toggling dark mode in every new app install that it’s relevant to. More applicable to desktop than mobile, but I still appreciate the consideration.

Surely I’m not the only one out there that loses all focus with gifs and emojis looping in my peripheral vision 👀 (or for one of a billion other reasons, but I can control this one!)