"Hello, world, and welcome to launch day.

"I know that might not seem to be anything special to you, who grew up with a ticket from Earth to Insulo Tri only costing forty euros. But even in my first life, every so often I'd compare my world to the one that would have been experienced by, say, a French peasant a couple of centuries previous, and re-ignited my sense of wonder at all the marvels that so many people took for granted. So today, when the costs to move around the Solar system are a millionth what they once were, I still like to make a special occasion of it, whenever I start a trip. And given that this trip is particularly novel, I'm trying to make it particularly special. Sure, I could just create a public augmented-reality layer to share some fireworks with, or have a virtual party while the light-lag times are minimal... but where's the fun in that?

"I thought about ordering up some real fireworks near the station, but the procedures around getting safety permits for that sort of thing are unreal - and expensive. I thought about homebrewing a tiny, personal interstellar probe, and launching it at the same time... and couldn't think of a single reason not to.

"And so, I now reveal what I've been spending most of my non-vlogging time putting together: Amicitas One. Its datacore contains as complete a cultural database as I've been able to fit into a tenth of an exabyte, plus a copy of my own full-exabyte mindstate - all of which are safeguarded by a variety of checksums, and then nonuple redundancy. It has the smallest horizon drive I was able to find plans for, and a small, fuelless horizon generator, and a ridiculously primitive-and-ruggedized computer and radio. ... Actually, the hardest part of the build was getting certification from Traffic Control that the piloting software is safe. Anyway, long after the initial rental booster nudges it safely out of Earth-Luna space, in about a century, it'll make it all the way up to one percent of the speed of light - and that's as fast as it can handle, without its surface layers getting ablated by interstellar dust. In ten thousand years, it's going to come close to a star that's a hundred light-years away, and try to say 'hello, world' to anyone in the neighbourhood. If nobody answers, well, it's going to keep trying different places, for as long as the hardware lasts. Which, since it's all solid-state, could be a very long time indeed.

"Which brings us back to the sense of wonder. I'm barely doing better than the classic archetype of a starving student - but modern-day technology, and the current economy, is so spectacular that I can make a time-capsule like this, something beyond the dreams of nearly any astronomer from my birth era... and I can make it in my spare time.

"Now that, dear viewers, is something worth hitting AR and VR for fireworks and a party.

"Just because I can, I'm going to be launching Amicitas manually. By which I mean taking advantage of my body's upgrades, and not putting a vaccsuit between me and the void as I carry her out. I don't care what the VR-maximalists say, but knowing that it's my real body out in the real vacuum of outer space makes stepping out like this an entirely different subjective experience, even if all the physical sensations get duplicated perfectly down to the last detail.

"I'm about to pump the air out of Pumpkin's airlock, so there won't be any audio feed. To entertain you for the duration, to accompany me while I dance in the black, here's a ten-minute performance of Strauss's 'The Blue Danube'; I know it's more traditional for dockings than takeoffs, but I think it's still a good match.

"...

"And I'm back. That was fun, even if I did have to cheat a bit to recover from that one big bobble, and give control of my body for a second to a dance-training puppet program.

"I see Francesca forwarded a question to me... No, I don't have any impossibly-tiny horizon drives implanted inside me. My jewelry, especially my forearm bracers and anklets? Compressed atmosphere thrusters. So little delta-v that they're useless for anything practical, but when used right, they can add just enough torque to pull off, well, what you just saw. For example, this wrist thing? Holds about four-twenty-five millilitres of compressed air, at a pressure of two-eighty bars, and the valve produces about forty-five newtons thrust for four and three-quarter seconds. Pushing my whole body in a straight line, that would be good for, oh, a hair over three metres per second. When I hold my arm out, and that force adds angular momentum instead of linear? Well, that's pretty simple physics; why don't you try solving it without getting an AI to tell you? If it helps, I usually estimate my overall bodymass, including carried stuff, at seventy kilograms.

"With Pumpkin floating outside Insulo Tri, I've got just about all the mass I'm going to for the trip, and I don't want to puff away too much of my breathing air using these, so I don't expect to be doing too many repeat performances. I plan on swinging by Saturn on the way out - it's close enough to the direct line to Observatory B that it makes a nice landmark. And I've always wanted to go. And if I realize that I forgot something absolutely essential, I can pick up a delivery from one of its moons in passing, from a high-gee courier.

"While I had Louie orbiting around me as my camera, you might have noticed a couple of ships nearby. Over to port is Gerard's ship, 'Testbed Six', three times the dimensions, ten times the mass, and zero point zero one times the naming originality of Pumpkin. And to starboard is Guy's, another refurbed Caldwell ambulance just like Pumpkin; fortunately for me, Traffic Control gets annoyed at too-frequent name-changes for ships, and he's settled on 'Solitary Confinement'. I'll probably just call it the 'Sol'.

"I've been having Cindy, Huey, and Dewey run through the final pre-flight checks. I've already done my personal visual inspections, and gone through a whole checklist that I haven't bothered to vlog. It's somewhere between pointless overkill and barely-sufficient preparation for a year-long trip, depending on how paranoid you are. Gerard and Guy are doing their own final preps; we're scheduled to fire up all our drives at the same time, in just another minute. We're planning on keeping identical vectors, so it'll be easy to visit each other for tea.

"I'm strapping into the cockpit's seat, I've got the physical displays all fired up and have even more virtual screens in my AR, mostly displaying camera views from the trio and Pumpkin's cameras.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"And now for another ancient tradition that so many of you feel is a silly anachronism - the final countdown. ... Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ignition!"

"Emergency. Emergency. There's an emergency going on. It's still going on, and it's still an emergency."

"Cindy, switch audio to serious mode. Viewers, something happened to the Solitary Confinement. I'm in fast-time VR, getting ready for search-and-rescue, and letting Cee pilot my body right now. Looking at the sensor data, it looks like Sol's drive powered up, starting to push as hard as it should, then there was a moment of freefall, then some off-axis acceleration, and then freefall since then. Given my own experience with this class, I'd guess the drive unit broke free from at least some of its mountings, hit the side of the ship, and then stopped working. I'm getting telemetry from Guy's medical sensors, and he looks to be doing fine. Emergency pressure doors sealed. Main power's down, his backup generator's keeping air-recycling running. Mmmight be a pinhole leak or two in his engine room, too early to tell.

"While I was saying all that, I've cut my drive so I don't get too far from him, and I'm prepping the trio to go over to assist. They're also bringing my broomstick-rocket up to the airlock so I can go with them. I don't want to bring Pumpkin too close in case something else goes wrong, but I want to get there as fast as I can so I can head off any secondary problems as soon as possible. I'll pull my vaccsuit on while I'm on the way, mostly in case any unpleasant chemicals are leaking over there. Sol's internal sensors aren't reporting any, but a cracked seam might suddenly burst, or the sensors might be damaged. Okay, all the S-and-R gear's ready, so I'm hitting the airlock, and switching the broadcast's audio to radio comms.

"Guy, I'm on my way over. Can you start transmitting all your interior cameras? I can start analyzing that data as soon as you can get it to me."

"Muse, do that."

"Are you in... a rescue bubble?"

"It automatically deployed. My suit's down in the airlock, and the bubble won't fit through the hatch, so I'm just going to slice it open to get down there."

"Don't cut the bubble, there's a zipper. And what do you mean, you're not wearing your suit?"

"Who bothers wearing a suit? It's listed as purely optional in the flight manual, and you're not wearing one."

"I've got biomods that let me breathe vacuum for three hours. You don't. Okay, you've definitely got a pinhole in your engine room, but the pressure's holding elsewhere. I've got enough sheeting to throw up a makeshift airlock over the pressure door to that section, so you don't lose air from the rest of your ship, and so you won't have to worry about a blowout. Why don't you start pumping down the pressure back there, to minimize your loss of atmo?"

"I'm not suited up yet."

"Not the whole ship, just the stern section."

"Let me just look up how to do that."

"... Could you send me the command-codes to your ship's computers?"

"Don't worry, I got it. Pumping down rear-section pressure now."

"Alright. I'd like you to stay in the front section. From the camera feeds, it looks like your drive unit impacted your fusor, and at the least broke its vacuum seal. I know that the sensors say there's nothing radioactive, but I've seen faulty sensors before. I've got biomods to handle a few rads, you don't, and it looks like everything's settled down."

"I've been taking anti-rad pills, to handle cosmic rays."

"Those are only one or two rads a week. I can take twenty rads a day without blinking. Are you absolutely sure that you want to trust your unmodified human genes to however much radiation your ship's internal sensors might not be picking up?"

"... Fine, I'll wait up front."

"While you're doing that, could you tell one of your repair drones to shine a flashlight into your fusor's inspection port? I'd like to get a better look at what happened when atmosphere hit the plasma."

"Why bother? You're not qualified to fix it."

"Honey, I can not only fix it, but give me the parts or budget and I can build it from scratch."

"No you can't."

"... Is there something odd about your generator you're not telling me?"

"No, I've got your list of qualifications right here. You've passed the tests to be an officer and a captain, not an engineer."

"Hunh. It looks like a modicum of privacy still exists after all. Guy, I've been studying this model of ship, and its parts, and everything associated with it, for the past two years - twice that time, counting fast-time. I just didn't bother taking the official tests, since I didn't need those quals to get my business running."

"Why the hell would you learn to do something and not prove you can do it?"

"... Because I'm an ancient throwback with peculiar notions. I'm almost at your airlock, so can we save philosophy for... hold on, I just looked at your quals. You only have the basic shiphandling set. Are you telling me that you've been tested for everything you know how to do with your ship?"

"Well, of course."

"... This is where, if I were an earthier person, I would start swearing at you for how unprepared you are for this trip. I'll try contenting myself with a simple word, instead: Oh, mercy. Now, would you please either hand over control or get that inspection drone started inspecting?"

"Fine. I've told it to look in. Happy?"

"Mercy. Again. Let me guess. You looked me up, saw that I didn't officially know how to replace a fusor's confinement grid, and that I'd never hired anyone, and that I'd been approved for a year-long trip... so you never bothered doing anything beyond the officially-mandated maintenance."

"... Yeeeesss?"

"Just from a glance, I can see enough weathering of the grid's metal to say that it'd fail in no more than three months... which would have been awkward for you, if you'd still had two months of acceleration built up."

"That can't be right. I had the whole ship inspected and certified."

"Caldwell Aerospace saved a few euros by using some cheap alloys inside their fusors. Good enough for everyday work, with regular maintenance and replacement - but they never bothered mentioning, in their official manuals, how those alloys age, especially where they're in contact with each other. A bit of vacuum welding, a bit of each alloy's atoms drifting into the other, mix in the occasional impact from the lithium-six and hydrogen fuel, and let the result stew for ten, fifteen years... I wouldn't have touched Pumpkin without completely replacing her generator's grid. I don't even want to imagine what in the world you did, or didn't do, that let your drive's mounting brackets fail so spectacularly."

"Now see here!"

"Look, all you future people are supposed to be able to switch masks to have the perfect personality to handle whatever the situation is, right? I suggest you turn off the British-styled stiff-upper-lip indignant testosterone and pick something more abstract and intellectual. Maybe even go take a nap. You will not be going to space today. And neither will I, thanks to you. As the vacuum cleaner on the spot, and having accepted all sorts of government subsidies in exchange for promising to deal with situations like this one, it's my job to make your ship safe to be towed to dock. And then to fill out paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork.

"You do have one decision to make - I just noticed I'm still live-vlogging. Would you like me to apply my antiquated notions of privacy, and stop broadcasting before I board your ship?"

"... Yes."

"Alright. Sorry, world, no launch today. I'll post something when I find out when my next launch window is."