-14003: Parsec Error

And I am the ghost of that mistake, drifting in a year where I have not yet been born, carrying a logbook that will not be written for another four decades.

I was the one who typed that number into the incident log. My fingers trembled then, and they tremble now, not from fear, but from the sheer, impossible poetry of it. -14003 parsec error

I have only one question left: if we subtracted the distance… what did we add to the void in its place? And I am the ghost of that mistake,

A negative distance. A parsec is 3.26 light-years. We didn’t just overshoot our target, the Gliese 667 Cc colony. We didn’t just fall short. I have only one question left: if we

The error wasn’t a navigation failure. It was a subtraction. The universe, for one blinding moment, performed arithmetic on our trajectory. It took our intended destination, folded it through a dimension we have no name for, and subtracted forty-five thousand light-years from the journey.

We left the Sol Anchorage on 2187.04.12 at 14:00 Universal. When the Event happened—when the Hartmann drive hiccupped and the quantum foam frothed into something that looked like a wounded eye—we emerged into realspace exactly 2.3 seconds later, ship-time.

Fourteen thousand and three parsecs. That’s over forty-five thousand light-years. That’s nearly halfway across the entire goddamn galaxy. And the number is negative because our arrival timestamp predates our departure.