"Hello again, everyone, and allow me to introduce you to Pumpkin.

"There are only so many orange-ish things to name a tug after. She's a good little ship, so my first choice was to name her 'Lollipop', but that was already taken. I thought about calling her Venus, but I knew I'd never be able to live up to the one fabled in song and story. So I decided the most important fact about her was that I was going to turn her into a fine carriage.

"I've got her parked out in the open so we can get a good look at her as I walk around - and so I can do a few pre-trip tweaks a bit more easily - but she spends almost all of her time in vacuum. She's fully atmospheric-flight capable; in Earth-standard conditions, with her wings spread, her stall speed is just one-eighty KPH; though she's a bit sluggish on the ground, and needs twelve hundred sixty metres to get up to that. Once in the air, though, with her wings swept back, she can hit Mach one point four seven at sea-level density... and since she uses a horizon drive, which doesn't depend on an air intake, she can fly all the way up to orbital speeds.

"She can make it almost anywhere in the Solar system, too. She's got insulation and heat-radiators good enough for Mercury - though since that planet doesn't have an atmosphere, she'd need a booster to land or take-off. And she's rated for a minimum of one point six bars of pressure, and can handle up to twice that if I don't mind voiding my warranty; good enough for Titan, the aerostat colonies on Venus, and the uppermost parts of the gas giants. Heck, strap a few tons of ice or rock in front of her for ablation, and she could even make it to Alpha Centauri in just a few decades.

"Not that I get much of a chance to take her out of Earth-Luna space. Even with all the subsidies I could arrange for, and having saved up years for a down payment, and having bought her used for not much more than scrap price, I still had to mortgage myself up to my eyeballs, and I'm going to be paying down that mortgage for the next twelve years. Unless I don't, in which case I expect to be bankrupt and back to driving other peoples' ships until I can improve my credit rating again.

"So here we are, back around the front again. I don't usually keep the pointy nose bit in place, since it's only good for atmo flying, so let me just send the command to Cindy to get that folded away. Cinderella's her autopilot AI, by the way. And here's the main airlock and entrance. It's also got the mountings, cradles, and other fittings to push against any cargo that doesn't fit inside. Her main drive provides eighteen kilonewtons of thrust, which is enough to provide a fifth of a gravity of acceleration with a standard cargo load - that's around ten tons, gross weight - but away from a planetary surface, thrust is thrust, so she can push hundred-ton weights as easily as ten-ton ones. Just, you know, more slowly.

"Getting up closer, you can see some of the layers of her hull. Over on the wings, and on top of the body, you can see some of her heat radiators, which need a clear path to empty space. Over the rest of her is a Whipple shield, a couple of layers of thin material with gaps between them; they're so that any tiny micrometeor or bit of space junk hits the outer layer and turns into a harmless plasma, instead of punching right through. Below that is the main protective and structural layer, eight millimeters of that mostly-carbon wundermaterial that's got a complicated scientific name, a slightly-less-complicated trademarked name, and that everyone just calls 'diamondoid'. Under that is five millimeters of insulation, mostly aerogel; then a Faraday cage mesh, to help isolate the interior from weird and unexpected EM fields; then a thin layer of barely-hardened goop with encapsulated other-goop, which automatically oozes, spreads, and hardens if any holes do get punched through.

"And here we are in the airlock. Officially big enough for three people, one of whom is in a stretcher. Her model was originally designed to be a space-ambulance, one cheap enough to be bought by any and every habitat and colony. Caldwell Aerospace was able to pack a heck of a lot into her while keeping the price under a million euro... if you're not familiar, even a one-man workpod is usually over three million euro, and the Mercury-class spaceplanes, lifting six-hundred-thirty tons of cargo, are fifteen million. And prices just go up from there. Anyway, when ISRO, the international space rescue organization, got their act together, including full-fledged dropships that had better acceleration, could reach anywhere in Earth-Luna space in a jiffy, and had enough rescue stations to be able to take advantage of economies of scale, the market for super-cheap ambulances dried up. Caldwell tried rebranding the line as simple, cheap orbital transfer vehicles, but the tradeoffs they'd had to make meant the model wasn't popular, so you can mostly find Pumpkin's sisters' hulls in scrapyards. That is, in fact, where I found Pumpkin herself. And, fortunately for me, I'm enough of an outlier that I'd made a variety of business notes to take advantage of my particular oddities, and when I added some notes to my spreadsheets on Pumpkin's capabilities and the price she was being offered at, out popped a business plan, ready to go. Mind you, it took me another two years before some other necessary prerequisites of that plan were also ready, but here we are.

"Here, just past the airlock, and 'up' while Pumpkin's sitting on her wheels in gravity, is the cockpit. I don't actually need to be in this control station to pilot her, but the insurance company insists on keeping at least one dedicated control interface location, and I agree with them. One of my philosophies is that it's impossible to have too many backups, just backups that you can't afford. So the main computer is here, there's safety harnesses and other crash-survival features, a full day's worth of bottled air with independent environmental control, and displays that directly funnel Pumpkin's radar, lidar, passive opticals, comms, and internal status displays. Oh, and in case the cockpit gets knocked out, over in Engineering is the backup computer, and hardline links to the backup sensors and comms. And if even that gets eliminated, by a hacker or virus or something, Pumpkin's engine can be run in a brain-dead, point-and-go-thataway method; I've gone through the extra-credit courses for navigating with my naked eye. And if the main drive's destroyed, I have a small backup drive. And two backup power-supplies good enough to run that backup drive if the main plant goes out. And if somehow all of the above gets knocked out, I've got enough life-support to last me a good long while, and I know how to build a directional radio from scratch and scream for help. And if enough of the ship is scrapped so even that's not possible, I'm pretty sure my own body and brain-computer are also going to have been reduced to atoms - and I've got multiple backups of my mindstate spread across a variety of locations. Security by obscurity may not be very much security, but I think you'll understand if I still don't actually describe where all of those backups are.

"Going back down, behind the cockpit is my main living area. I've pretty much stripped this section down to the hull and rebuilt it, since I spend a lot of my time actually living here, instead of rushing to somewhere that needs an ambulance and then to somewhere with a hospital. Two bunks with smart mattresses, two independent air- and water-recycling plants, the secondary backup horizon generator, galley, shower, toilet, laundry... I splurged on the mass for a water-tank big enough to take actual hot baths in. If you've never spent much time in an RV, or in space, you might not believe how luxurious that feels. And in a spacecraft, it can be handy having some extra water to pump around - it can be used for makeshift shielding, or coolant, or even last-ditch emergency reaction-mass. Almost every surface is covered with display-screen; I know that I could just apply augmented-reality inside my own head to produce the same effect for me, and I'm almost always the only one here, but the screens inflict the tiniest of mass-penalty, and mostly came along with the fittings when I did the refurb.

"Not all the fittings are standard; over around the bunks, here, you'll see some weird wiring-looking stuff. That's some hand-built magnetic-field waveguides, to help reduce the radiation when I'm in the bunk. It's not as effective as a standard storm-shelter, but most of those shelters use enough water that the shelter alone outmasses Pumpkin. And since I don't usually get closer to the Sun than here, and there's usually good warning of solar flares before they arrive, and one of the upgrades I ordered when my body was built was the standard set of DNA hardening and repair upgrades, I don't pick up any more radiation than my body can handle. The fact that I can get away without a storm-shelter is one of the reasons I can make a profit with Pumpkin, and just about everyone else wouldn't even try to.

"Over here is the exercise-equipment nook; my muscles and bones might not atrophy in microgravity the way a baseline human's would, but I still like keeping up my strength. And just opposite it is a new addition, the relaxation nook. I'm going to be spending a year or so inside this tin can, and maintaining my mental health is going to be a non-trivial task. So I spent about twice my body-weight on games, toys, bonsai tools, a selection of items that are supposed to improve the quality of meditation, and other hobby gear. If I want to try taking up juggling, or calligraphy, or magic tricks, I'm all set. I thought about getting a small pet, but decided that I wouldn't want to have to deal with being depressed if it died while I was farther from Earth than Pluto. But a couple of small cactuses should survive even my extremely non-green thumbs, and I've got some seeds for a few plants some of my friends have recommended. And I've got a few small musical instruments that I've kept meaning to learn, since not everybody appreciates the one I can already play, a harmonica.

"Moving back out... welp, looks like it's time to introduce you to Huey, Dewey, and Louie. If you know your classic cinema, you'll recognize them as red, green, and blue recolours of Wall-E, a classic fictional robot. There was a small fad twenty years back for making real robots out of stories, but then they became passé, so I picked up their frames from another junkyard for a song. And then put in a bunch of sweat equity to make them actually useful. I took out their trash-compactors, and built some modular units to fit in its place. Usually, Huey's got the emergency and first-aid module, which can unfold some extra arms with medical tools and scanners; he's also got a fire extinguisher, six hours of air, a few other gadgets, and I squeezed in the tiniest horizon drive I could get with some extra batteries, so he could move around in freefall. Dewey's module is a lot simpler to describe, even if it was just as hard to figure out how to assemble - he's the walking toolbox, with everything I could think of to fit in that helps me while I'm trying to salvage or repair something. Louie's got another horizon thruster, and as wide a variety of sensors and scanners as I could afford and fit in. Honestly, the three of them together could just about do all the physical parts of my job as a vacuum cleaner all on their own; fortunately for my sense of self-esteem, even after I upgraded their CPUs for something modern, without an actual person directing them, they're no smarter than any other robotic drone.

"Leaving those three to keep recharging, we've got ourselves the ship's medical bay, which I've left pretty much untouched from Pumpkin's original design. Just because my brain's a computer and my body was built from cloned tissue cultures doesn't mean I enjoy getting hurt, and I spend a lot of my time hours, or longer, away from the nearest hospital. I couldn't afford an actual cyber-doc, but this nook's got everything needed to act as a surgical theatre, and I paid for the best medical AI that'd fit inside Huey's RAM.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Moving back past the safety bulkhead, we're in what I've usually been using as a cargo bay, but I've been filling up with gear in preparation for the trip. Three hundred fifty kilos of tools, a one-eighty kilo clothing fabricator that can make anything from a bullet-proof bikini to a full-fledged vacc-suit - I bought it more for the latter - a one-fifty kilo biosynthesis station that can produce just about any organic goops I might need, including glues, soaps, aspirin, vitamins, and a variety of carbon compounds that various parts of the ship are made of. And the fabber station, with the multi-material three-D printers to turn feedstocks into any replacement parts.

"Back past them is what I suppose still counts as a cargo hold. Various kinds of feedstock, including printed parts, sheet metal, circuit boards, raw chemicals, liquid plastics, epoxies, metal powders, and a selection of flat fabrics. A year's worth of meal-packs, which are a lot tastier than what comes out of the food-fac. Ah, and here's my personal gear for when I'm working - vaccsuit, toolsnake, wrist-tool, rocket broomstick, and other such things.

"Moving through the pressure hatch, we find ourselves in the engineering section. The one point two megawatt fusor and the point-two gee main drive are stock designs; I installed the primary backup horizon generator and the backup drive. If main power's out, the backup generator can only energize the main drive at one-tenth output, one fiftieth of a gee instead of one-fifth. And if the main drive itself is out, or if main and primary backup power is out, the backup drive only provides a thousandth of a gee. I would literally get more acceleration if I had Huey and Louie get out and push... but if things ever get bad enough, a thousandth of a gee can be infinitely better than no gees at all.

"And we're at the stern, so now you've seen what's going to be my home for the next year. Oh, hold on, I just got a text that I forgot to mention one thing - Pumpkin is, in fact, equipped with a couple of anti-micrometeor defense lasers. One emitter's on the port hull, one on starboard, and either one can draw up to sixty kilowatts of power. They're only around fifty percent efficient, the rest of the power ending up as heat that has to be radiated away; but any would-be impactor that's small enough to creep up dangerously close to Pumpkin before being detected, either one is more than powerful enough to vaporize. The larger bits, it's easy enough to dodge by flipping the engine's power for a few seconds. I'll be doing a bit of rebuilding on these during the trip; the threat-profile from dust-grains while I'm in Earth-orbital space isn't quite the same as when I'm two hundred seventy-five AU away, at a peak of around four percent lightspeed.

"I should also point out that there are a few things I'm not bringing. I'm going to be going hundreds of AU out, far beyond the reach of the Ríos de Luz network; so I'm going to be saving a bit of space and mass by leaving behind my optical gear. I know that a laser-entrained aerosol lens doesn't weigh very much, and I'm going to be spending a few weeks of the trip close enough to get some megawatts of tightly-focused solar power aimed my way if I ask; but I can't think of anything I'd use it for. I'm not going to be melting hardware, or ablating one side of something to kick it into another orbit, or vaporizing anything to analyze its chemistry, let alone doing anything bigger or more specialized.

"Okay, I think it's time to open up for some questions.

"Alright, someone wants to know about my costs. Not counting the hours I put in, I got all the hardware for Pumpkin for about four hundred thousand euros. Almost all of that cash was actually from a bank loan, from NKRK, the Nacia Konfederacio de Reciproka Kredito; I only had to pay a down payment of about forty thousand. Taking advantage of some government subsidies for small businesses and for a ship that can be called up for us in case of an emergency, my monthly mortgage payments are thirty-six hundred euros a month, and I'll be fully paid-off in twelve years. My usual living expenses - food, shared rent, everyday expenses - is twelve hundred a month. On average, my highly-variable income from salvage, charters, and other gigs is roughly five thousand euros a month. That doesn't give me much leeway if I get a couple of bad months, and is noticeably lower than NKRK and I projected, which is why I hired Francesca. And why I started planning on spending a year to collect what would very likely have been something like a hundred thousand in salvage from the gravitational-lens observatory. When that was the main plan, I had to make special arrangements with NKRK to defer my monthly payments. At the moment... well, everything's kind of up in the air, and could change on me yet again without any notice.

"Really? You want the person who was born more than a century ago, and only has two years of formal modern schooling, to explain the engineering of an engine based on a weird corner-case of a unified physics that didn't exist the first time I was alive? ... Fine, I'll do it under protest, but don't expect it to be accurate, or to make sense. Let me see. There are things called 'cosmic horizons', which are bits of geometry of space that light can't get through. The event horizon around a black hole is the one I'm actually familiar with. Another is the visible cosmic horizon, which has been expanding since the big bang. A weird third one is the Rindler horizon, that comes out of relativity; if you accelerate a particle to the left, then way off to the right, just inside the visible cosmic horizon, there's a new, extra volume of space from which light will never reach that particle, so that's a new horizon. There's at least three different ways to explain the next bit, and I still haven't passed any physics tests based on understanding it, so here comes what I'm sure is going to sound like nonsense. When that particle is accelerating to the left, then there is more 'visible universe' to its left than to its right; that extra horizon has effectively cut it off from a bit of the universe. The universe surrounding that particle is now uneven. Some complicated math now happens, which can be described as Unruh radiation, or as vacuum energy, or as the uncertainty principle, or as information theory. When you finish with that math, you end up with a force acting on that particle... which, it turns out, happens to be exactly equal to the inertial mass of that particle, pushing it back against whatever force accelerated it in the first place. Sorry, when I said 'equal to' the inertial mass, I meant 'is' the inertial mass. Inertia is what happens when you hide a bit of the universe behind a Rindler horizon; gravity is what happens when you hide a bit of it behind some particles of matter. Feel free to make fun of me for having paid attention, during my first lifetime, to hypotheses of dark matter, dark energy, superstrings, and stranger things; those theories may not have been as bad as the aether, phlogiston or epicycles, but I've had some unlearning to do.

"Anyway, if you poke at that complicated math about horizons, you end up with something that's almost like Einsteinian relativity, only not quite; there's an absolutely minuscule difference, which is related to the inverse of the size of the visible universe. By forcing particles to experience extremely high accelerations, that minuscule correction factor can be effectively magnified, to the point that it visibly breaks the law of conservation of mass-energy. I know it doesn't break the more fundamental law of conservation of mass-energy-information, but we don't really care about the information that's balancing out the energy-conservation violation; it's that extremely distant part of the universe that will no longer interact with the particle. When photons hit a mirror, they go from travelling at light speed in one direction to travelling at light speed in the other direction, which is a pretty high acceleration. By arranging an optical cavity to reflect each photon many, many times, and arranging it so they bounce slightly more in one direction than another, all those accelerations provide an energy-conservation-violating force, without needing to push rocket fuel out one end of a ship to accelerate the other way. After a lot of computer time, and doing a lot of testing, it turns out that the best shapes of optical cavities look something like a teardrop with multiple points, or a fractalline crown-type thingy, with all the pointy bits pointing in the direction you want to go. Applying this principle to generate electricity instead of thrust is left as an exercise for the viewer. Hint: nano-scale cavities. ... And now I expect all the high-school physics students to laugh at my poor excuse for an explanation, and to get a deluge of well-meaning emails as people try to correct my poor, primitive misconceptions.

"Have we got another question? Okay, physics crossed with the legal system. Yes, as a ship with a horizon drive, Pumpkin can accelerate as long as her fusion fuel holds out and her parts don't wear out. With the right programming, and having her push enough ablative shielding, it's entirely possible to send her a couple of light-years out, turn around, and accelerate all the way back towards Earth, where, if she impacts, she'd cause an extinction-level event. And all of that is under the control of me, who's taken a two-year course and has three years of seniority. Fortunately for everyone on Earth, you don't have to rely on my trust-metrics being accurate. The space traffic cops are armed with nukes, and aren't afraid to use them. I'm only going to mention two of the pieces of hardware that the Earth-Luna Treaty Organization has at their disposal. Somewhere around a third of an AU out from Earth are a shell of sensor platforms, which use extremely sensitive gravity-based sensors to pick up masses at ridiculous distances. And they've got a variety of shells of high-acceleration missiles in various orbits, which are more than capable of intercepting any such high-speed impactors far enough out to turn them into rapidly-expanding clouds of plasma, long before the now-dissociated atoms would pose any danger to the planet. They've got other tricks up their sleeves: a few I know of, and I'm absolutely sure many more that I don't.

"Have we got any questions that don't involve things the viewers can look up at least as easily as I can? Okay, I plan on covering the plans for my trip, and apparently some other folks' parallel trips, in the next vlog. Anything about me or Pumpkin? ... That doesn't involve my sex life and-or lack thereof? Francesca, I thought I asked you to filter those out. Ah! That works. We have at least one viewer who's not clear on where I actually get my money from. A term from my native time is 'gig economy'; instead of having one steady source of income, I have a lot of little ones, most of which are irregular. I think of myself mainly as a 'vacuum cleaner'; there's a lot of junk in various orbits, and if it ever builds up too much, we'll end up with a 'Kessler cascade' where one piece of junk will impact with something and knock off a few more, which will impact and knock off even more, until everything orbiting Earth is getting sandblasted by larger and smaller particles. Which would be a pain and a half to clean up. So my usual gigs are when some piece of hardware stops working, to go over to it and either fix it, or haul it back somewhere to salvage the parts, or arrange to push it somewhere safer, like into Earth's atmosphere to burn up. There are plenty of other vacuum cleaners, both companies and individuals, almost every one of which have larger ships and larger crews than me and Pumpkin - which also means that they have larger overheads, and that they have to focus on high-reward gigs. Which leaves me fairly free to pick and choose between gigs with lower profit margins that it's just not economical for the other vacuum cleaners to try for. My lower costs also mean that I can offer rock-bottom prices for people who need to move low-mass items, such as a one- or two-person charter flight, or some relatively urgent mail. And with Huey and the surgical bay, Pumpkin still qualifies for a few ambulance gigs, if I happen to be closer than an ISRO dropship. I'll admit it's not glamorous; I'm literally a space garbageman. Garbagewoman? Garbagerat? But it's what I want to do. And if I manage to last the next twelve years without going bankrupt, my overhead expenses are going to drop even further, to the point where I'll be able to really reinvest in my business and improve my profit margins. Well, I suppose that besides succeeding through hard work or failing and trying again once I'm able to take out another loan, there's also a chance of making a lucky strike, or picking up some other jackpot charter, which would cut down my loan-repayment time. But I'm not planning on that, and I'm not going to rely on it; my bank manager is quite happy with my solid, steady, low-risk plan.

"Say, Francesca? Any chance we can finish up with something more interesting than interest rates and payment schedules? ... Hunh. Okay, well I supposed I asked for that one. Lemme just head up front to the meditation nook... here we are. I'm bringing along one of my singlesticks to practice with, as much as I'll be able to in the confined space and in a fifth of a gee. And here's one for Dewey. Cee, load up Dewey with a training program? There we go. En garde! Prêtes? Allez!"