Jo and the impossible shot

The red light flashed on the intercom as the aliens chittered away. They were asking if she was sure this was a good idea. Jo looked at her watch.

“You have 8 seconds, do not deviate from the plan.” Jo chittered back in the alien’s language. The novelty of understanding and speaking in every language without thinking about it had long passed for Jo.

She watched as the seconds ticked by. Exactly on the deadline she heard the air start to hiss out. She made a complex series of hand motions, explaining in precise and horrifying detail what would happen if the aliens deviated from the plan. Unlike verbal language she had had to learn this exact cultural signing. She knew the aliens had their reservations about what she was asking them to do but she had paid them an awful lot of money to do this.

The red light started to flash again but the air in the room was already too thin for Jo to hear. She pointed at the camera and then her watch, indicating that the aliens should continue with the plan.

The plan had taken years to formulate and it was by far and away the most ambitious interplanetary journey she had devised. Experts from numerous realities had been consulted.

Before the route could be calculated a computer needed to be created. This had been done creating a new universe solely housing a quantum computer sitting within the 4th dimension. This meant that not only was quantum superposition possible but so was temporal, meaning that the concept of ‘before’ and ‘after’ were folded on top of ‘now’. Which in turn meant that any calculation undertaken had in fact already been completed.

Jo had to be honest with her limitations, she understood the principles but not the working method, hence the experts.

The door to the airlock opened at exactly the right moment and Jo stepped onto the precipice. The view in front of her was stunning, she loved the void of space.

Calculating the route had been a simple matter of first mapping the reality from its moment of inception to the point in time that Jo wanted to get to her destination and then using a time-space-mass coupled algorithm to plot possible routes. From this a statistical analysis was complete highlighting the feasibility of each route. Until there were only two choices left.

Jo choose the option where she got to jump out of spaceship.

The watch ticked down to the last second and Jo carefully stepped off the edge and into the nothingness of space. The space ship executed its precise flight path, ensuring that no excess kinetic energy was passed on to Jo.

And then Jo was left completely alone.

Instantly the doubt started to sink in. Had she stepped off with the right velocity? Did she step off perfectly perpendicular from the spaceship’s own vector? Was her mass correct? A deviation of a thousandth of a percent could send Jo soaring pass her final destination by several light years. That was before you even started thinking about the accuracy of the planetary model.

Well it was too late to think about that now. Jo placed her hands behind her head, without a reference point she could only imagine that she was lying down on her back. She had roughly 8.2 billion years to enjoy the views, if she missed the destination at the end, she could always try again.

What would you do before a 8.2 billion year drift through space? Empty the bins and get a house sitter I guess…