The stars above, that’s where we were headed. Not in our near future, but in the far future, when humanity has figured out how to fly, how to soar, how to be what it needs to be to get there. I was sitting in a classroom. It always feels like the inventions that would carry humanity into the future would be made by someone else, right? That the great ideas and inventions are only and solely the domain of the great people. I thought that until I had that invention.

My class was at university. It all bored me to tears. Another teacher droning on about something that they themselves were barely knowledgeable in. I wasn’t bored out of an apathy spawning from my knowing everything there is to know. This was an apathy born from me not being able to follow on in the slightest. I always figured an engineering degree was the way to go and that I could parlay that into something I actually wanted. After all, there’s not exactly a defined job for “person who likes to tinker in their garage and use physics but not by any of the standards used by everyone today. And I invented it the day after I finished my university class. I stood there, amazed, the world folded around me. I took individual steps forward, holding my device, and it may well have looked to any onlookers, had there been any (It was the dead of night, I like to look at the stars) they would have seen a warped creature taking great strides across the road.

In an instant, a million possibilities flashed before my eyes. Money, selling the invention to the highest bidder, patenting it immediately, who knows. But the thoughts of money were fleeting. I thought about humanity traversing the stars. I thought of my friend Fred, who I could rely upon to build a craft that was star-worthy and travel the cosmos with him.

“Jesus,” he said, being the second person to walk faster than the road’s speed limit. It was 3 in the morning, but we rarely got sleep and were always down for a midnight hang if it meant some shenanigans were going down.

“What are you going to do with this?” he said, gesturing down and staring at it as if staring would unlock the secret of how it worked.

“Honestly?” I said, “I want to see the stars. I want to be the first person to see the stars. Would you like to be the first with me?”

He looked down, then back to me, then back down, then back to me again. The midnight wind trickled through and elicited a slight shudder from us both.

“It’s certainly easier to make a craft space-worthy than sea-worthy, though you don’t know if you have a leak until you’re usually gasping for breath. So I should be able to make you something sleek and wonderful for us to travel in.”

I watched him work. I thought about joining in but that was well beyond my expertise level. Warp drives? Yes. Building a hull that won’t explosively depressurise or suck us out into space in bits? No. So I watched. My hard work was over, but Fred’s was enrapturing. Before long, he had something that looked amazing, like an X-Wing from Star Wars minus the wings. There was little in the way of propulsion but a small jet at the back. Fred had just finished holding a candle to all the joints where the plates met. The smoke stayed true, and didn’t get sucked out of any of the plates. It even caused a problem as it got too smoky for him to stay in there and we had to spend a moment, sitting on the garage floor like a couple of children, contemplating what we had made.

“It’s ready to go, and I can’t wait to be in space with you,” Fred said.