Nova Arcis C 5
The Witness
The Lightbridge Prototype incident—a single, battered escape pod tumbling through the distorted spacetime in void between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, its occupants forever changed by their brief, terrifying glimpse into the universe’s forbidden speeds.
Here in the space-museum the great, scarred piece of the prototype’s hull now stood behind Cokas Bluna and LYRA.ai, a silent, grim testament to the story they had just told.
Cokas stood for a long moment, looking not at the relic, but at the reflection of the museum’s visitors in the polished floor, their faces a mixture of awe and sober contemplation. The story of the Lightbridge was a foundational myth on Nova Arcis, a local tragedy that had become a universal lesson.
“It’s a difficult story to watch,” he began, his voice a low, empathetic murmur. “It’s a story of failure. Of ambition outstripping understanding. But it’s also, in a strange way, a story of hope. The data from that disaster, the painful testimony of the survivors… it was the final, necessary piece of the puzzle. The price of that failure was the key that finally unlocked safe, stable FTL travel.”
He turned and began to walk, leading them away from the exhibit of technological marvels and catastrophic failures, and into a different, quieter wing of the museum. The camera drones followed, their movements fluid and unobtrusive. “During times of such rapid, chaotic change,” Cokas continued, his tone becoming more philosophical, “the engineers and the scientists are not the only ones whose work is essential. When a civilization is in the midst of a paradigm shift, when the old maps are being burned and the new ones have yet to be drawn, the role of the witness becomes paramount.”
They entered a new gallery. This space was not filled with massive engines or scarred hull plating. It was a more intimate, reverent hall, lined with 3D-stream displays showcasing the written words, the recorded voices, and the unvarnished images captured by the great journalists and chroniclers of the space age. It was a library of perspectives, a hall of voices that had given a human scale to the inhuman vastness of their expansion.
“The storytellers,” Cokas said, gesturing to the exhibits around them. “The reporters, the artists, the documentarians. The people who were there, on the ground, asking the difficult questions, and recording the small, human truths that are so often lost in the grand sweep of history. Without them, all we would have are data-logs and casualty reports. They gave the past its voice.”
LYRA.ai, walking beside him, paused before a display dedicated to a single, unassuming figure. The media-stream showed a man with a thoughtful, weary face, his eyes holding the quiet intensity of a lifelong observer. He was dressed not in a pristine uniform, but in the simple, functional jumpsuit of a working-class freighter assistant.
“And for the next, crucial series of segments in our chronicle,” LYRA announced, her curatorial voice lending a special weight to the introduction, “we are fortunate to have access to a truly unique and invaluable source. The restored archives of a man named Gensher Kissinger.”
She gestured to the display, and it expanded, showing a brief, text-based summary of his life. “Kissinger’s biography is, in itself, a perfect microcosm of the era. He was not a celebrated academic or a high-level official. He was, for a time, a displaced person, an exile from Earth. One of the millions who found their worldview and their skills made obsolete by the planet’s own internal crises.”
Cokas picked up the narrative thread, his voice filled with a storyteller’s appreciation for a compelling character. “He was a ‘Neon-Techno,’ as they were called back on Earth in the 2370s. A believer in technology as a solution, who found himself on a planet that was beginning to deeply distrust its own technological fixes. His critical voice got him banned, forced to leave. He was, in a sense, a refugee from a failed idea.”
“A refugee who, by a remarkable twist of fate, ended up on a freighter heading for the absolute furthest edge of the human world,” LYRA continued. “The Oort Cloud Main Station. His journey was not one of choice, but of necessity. He worked his passage as a live-support assistant, tending to tea plants in a hydroponics bay, a journalist reduced to the most basic form of manual labor.”
The image of Kissinger shifted, showing him not in a studio, but in the cramped, green-lit confines of a ship’s agricultural module, his face smudged with soil.
“And it was this experience,” Cokas said, “this humbling journey from the intellectual halls of Earth to the hard, practical reality of a deep-space freighter, that gave him his unique and powerful voice. It stripped him of his old ideologies and gave him a profound empathy for the ordinary people caught in the great currents of history. He was not a powerful man. He was simply… a human of his time.”
LYRA brought the point home, her voice precise. “And it was this perspective, the perspective of an outsider who had seen both the old, dying world of Earth and the new, burgeoning reality of the deep-space frontier, that made him the perfect chronicler for the dawn of the FTL age. He wasn’t just reporting on the events; he was living them, with the same fear, the same hope, and the same bewilderment as everyone else.”
Cokas gave a final, warm smile to the camera. “For the next part of our journey, Gensher Kissinger will be our guide. We will see the final years of the pre-FTL era through his eyes. We will witness his conversations with the brilliant minds who shattered the light barrier, and with the determined families who made the first, audacious leap to another star. He was not a man who made history, but he was one of the few who was there to write it down, honestly and with a deep and abiding compassion for the human spirit.”
The image of Kissinger in the display seemed to look out at them, a quiet, humble witness to the great events he was about to narrate.