One Last System

"What should I start with, then?" I raised my eyes and graced Mia with a small, cheeky smile. "The past? Who was the original Musk? Or maybe the details that I have yet to figure out?"

There was simply way too much for me to explain everything in a single breath, in a single sitting.

From the history that developed the world all the way to the peace after the third world war that I was born into, through the turbulent period of social engineering that brought humanity to the brink of extinction in more ways than one...

'Damn, just talking about the stuff that I knew before reincarnating will be a massive pain,' I thought, raising my hand to hide my face in it for a moment.

"Start with whatever you are most comfortable with," Mia suggested, reaching out and grabbing my arm, only to bring her hand down and entangle her fingers with mine.

"I think starting with Elon Musk and his heritage will be the easiest," I started, turning my thoughts towards those long-forgotten memories.

"Elon Musk... was a man who died several years before I was born. Yet, he was the pioneer, a single popular soul that was more focused on expanding the reach of humanity as a whole rather than fighting over the limited resources of the planet." I intentionally omitted a massive crowd of various people who did their own small part in the development.

It wasn't Elon Musk that first stepped on the Martian soil. It wasn't Elon Musk that brought an end to conventional power production.

"He wasn't the only one to work in several important fields, but to make my explanation easy, you can consider him both a leader of the change and its main proponent," I explained, only for my thoughts to suddenly take a turn towards the darker emotions.

"It was his ideas, his leadership, his pressure that brought a man from the surface of this planet and allowed him to settle on Mars," I took a little break, swallowing a bit of my saliva. "I'm sorry, but to explain the level of struggle that people had to overcome just to achieve it... For people without a technological background, and even for most of those who study the field through their entire time, when it comes to cosmos and the universe at large..."

I took a break. Not only because I needed to take a breath but also because I could feel my emotions getting out of control.

The situation on earth before the third world war was extremely taxing to think about. Not only because it was arguably the brightest period in the whole of humanity's history but also because it was the direct reason for the disaster that followed.

"Planets, universe..." Mia muttered. She then rubbed her head against my shoulder. "Can you use words that I can actually understand?" she then requested.

"Oh, sorry for that." I quickly reflected on the silly mistake I had made.

For someone born in my time, it was kind of basic knowledge. What's more, the fact that I was personally interested in the topic only served to broaden what I knew about space.

'And, in turn, it's super hard to operate around someone who knows close to nothing about it,' I realized before gulping down my saliva and trying to figure out the best way to approach the topic.

"Tell me, then," I requested. "What do you know about space? Stars? The sun?"

This was the lowest form of talking about space. But as it only involved elements that people of this world could see with their very own eyes, it was nearly impossible for Mia to never hear about them.

"The sun is the sun," the girl shook her shoulders. "And the stars are just... No, I remember that was the wrong way to put it..." Mia muttered, her voice showcasing that she hesitated. "Still, I can't remember the proper form. But the wrong one..." she kept on doubting her own words.

"The stars are just suns but further away," Mia whispered her answer, refusing to look at me as she turned her eyes away.

'Does she think I will make fun of her?' I thought, surprised to see the changes happening on the girl's face.

Her cheeks covered with blush and her eyes turned towards the ground, as far away from me as she could pull them.

'She really does,' I thought, a smile climbing up to my lips.

"That's actually not true," I said, unable to stop myself from teasing Mia a little.

"I know it, all right?" Mia was quick to react, her blush turning even redder than before.

"In reality, claiming that they are just further away..." I took a pause to shake my head. I then turned around and pulled Mia's face back towards me by her chin. "Dearest, you could waste your entire life trying to become the fastest being in the world. You could then spend millennia using that top speed while ignoring all the problems related to traveling through space..."

Once again, I took a pause. For a moment, I thought about explaining the light speed, the concept of a light-year, and just how massive it was...

But if Mia didn't grow up with this kind of knowledge, the common sense of how space's size was simply too massive for a human brain to grasp... There was no point in doing so.

"To make it feel real, let me calculate it for you," I offered before leaving Mia's face alone and focusing on crunching the numbers.

'Proxima Centauri was the closest star at about four light-years,' I thought, squeezing all the juice out of my brain to recall those small tidbits of knowledge.

'A light-year travels roughly three hundred million meters per second. That makes it roughly three hundred thousand kilometers.'

Bit by bit, I changed the type of numbers I was calculating, trying to come up with a viable answer for the girl.

"How far is the outerpost of the Tuxi sect from its lower headquarters, I wonder?" I muttered before running yet another calculation.

"Okay," I finally spoke in a firm voice before slapping both of my hands down at my things. "The distance between Lower Headquarters and the Outerpost is roughly two hundred and fifty kilometers," I gave my estimate.

"Huh?" Mia shrugged, somehow forced out of her shocked state. "It was that near all this time?" she opened her eyes wide only to then raise her hand and bite down on her thumb. "If only I knew..." a look of regret appeared behind Mia's eyes.

"Dear, it's okay," I was quick to grab Mia's hand and give it a gentle squeeze. "But this is a distance you can imagine, right?" I asked, just to be sure.

I was about to drop a massive bomb at Mia's head in a mere moment, after all. It was better to be sure she would understand the scope of what I was going to say to her, even if she failed to comprehend it.

"Yeah." Mia didn't show any sign of hesitation

"Then you would need to travel that distance..." I hesitated for a moment, redoing all my calculations just to be sure. "A bit more than a thousand times over," I explained. Yet, as I didn't want to mess with Mia's head too much, I decided to wait to add the full scale of the problem.

"Only about a thousand times?" Mia lowered her eyes and bit down on her fingernail again. "That would be a long journey, but in a few years, maybe months if we were desperate..."

Seeing how the girl had already moved on to planning the possible trip, I couldn't stop myself from finishing up.

"Dear, you got me wrong," I said as I shook my head. "You would need to be able to travel this kind of distance... A thousand and two hundred times... In a second."

Obviously, this was already a massive simplification. There was the problem of acceleration that alone put a massive stop to human space ventures in the past. Then came the problem of keeping food, water, and, even more importantly - oxygen.

"So if I could reach that speed..." Mia hesitated for a little, her forehead already sweaty from imagining the distances I presented.

"You would still need over four years at that speed to reach the star nearest to us," I explained, only for a small smile to appear on my lips. "Excluding our sun, that is," I added, pointing my head to where the sun... would be if we weren't not only indoors but also underground.

"In other words, rather than being far away, they are so far that I shouldn't even try to write my mind around it," Mia smiled lightly as she turned her face to look me in the eyes. "Right?" she asked, pressing me for an answer.

"That's right." I nodded my head, accepting Mia's gaze, refusing to turn my eyes away.

"Then why did you tell me all of this first?" Mia then asked. "Couldn't you just say there are further than any human could ever reach?"

"That wouldn't allow me to make my point." I shook my head in response.

I then washed a smile off my face before grabbing Mia by her shoulders and looking her straight in the eyes instead of just accepting her glance like before.

"Mia, the distance is one of the greatest struggles one faces when traveling through space. But at the same time, it's the simplest one," I stated before taking a momentary pause both to catch my breath and to let those words sink into Mia's brain.

"What I wanted to ensure is that you are aware of just how monumental of a task it is to send someone to space, especially in a world with no magic whatsoever," I explained my main idea behind my long lecture.

"And yet, that Musk guy... He still did it. That damned son of a bitch did it!"

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