In only a few hours, Max was on the other side of the heliopause.

The heliopause is an imaginary line in space where the amount of photons received from the Sun drops dramatically. It's one way to define the edge of the solar system.

While traveling through folded space, the ship had no working sensors. You couldn't see anything out the window, and there were no telecommunications from Earth. The ship was in total blackout.

Max didn't know how far to travel. After the initial excitement of a working folding space drive wore off, he checked and re-checked all of the systems. He set a goal for himself to be the human who had traveled the farthest from the planet, and he didn't know how long he needed to go to do that. He had no concept of how fast he was traveling, so when he eventually stopped, he had no idea where he was.

The onboard AI, Lexi, used advanced plate-solving to determine his exact location in space. And it was official. He had left the solar system. He was outside of the influence of the Sun, far beyond the orbit of Pluto.

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Up til that moment, Max did not have a destination in mind. Other than being the farthest human from Earth in history, he had no goals.

His mind pondered what he had done. He had effectively stolen this ship, and its groundbreaking drive. On an impulse, after being fired, he took the thing that was most important to him away.

"I probably should return to Earth," he thought. He proved his ideas were correct. He set a new human record for spaceflight. He could go back and face the consequences. Chances would be decent that he'd be labeled a hero and celebrated instead of being arrested and vilified.

But another part of him wanted to go explore some more. He could always return to Earth tomorrow. Could he go be the first human to orbit Pluto? Or even orbit all four of the giant planets? Surely he could do that for a few days and it would be the same as if he came back today?

Or should he keep going? Go outside the Oort cloud, and go visit Alpha Centauri? That would be awesome! He was currently 18 billion kilometers from Earth, he figured. But Alpha Centauri was 40 000 billion - so it might still take a year to get there! He had to decide a next step.

He pointed the ship towards the closest star to Earth - Alpha Centauri. And pressed the big red button that said "Go!"