ADELPHI

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

"I guess we'll find out soon enough." you mutter to yourself while looking out of the "window" of your room aboard the Trinity cruiseliner. The stars floating past the digital screen seem to call out, screaming for a response. If only you could scream back your pent up frustration. The view outside the ship is dark, endless, and you can't help but feel tired of the hours we've been floating out here.

Swiping the screen to the Information Hub to see if there are any updates, it looks like the warp drive is still cooling down.

"How much longer do we have to deal with this?" you think to yourself, blaming your parents for being so cheap, taking an outdated cruiseliner for the yearly "family vacation." Once heralded as an innovation in travel luxury, the cruiseliner is now an outdated piece of junk, attracting families with too many children, old centurions trying to save their credits, and your family - just plain cheap and frugal. You wish you could just jump out of the ship and into the empty void of space and scream. It's so boring.

Instead, you turn and scream as loud as you can into a pillow. At least you have a room of your own this year. Last year, it was a cramped bunk with Liam and Asher, your annoying, disgusting, and loud twin brothers. Had they been with you today during the ship breakdown, you might have actually been forced to bash your head into the window screen, wishing it would lead to the void of space outside. Of course, your room was in the middle of the ship with no real windows or views of the outside. Cheap parents.

You had seen what the rooms along the sides of the cruiseliner looked like when your friends had posted a virtual scan of theirs when they went years ago. It was beautiful– instead of the screens you had in your room, entire walls were able to go transparent to reveal the expanse of space. You could see everything, planets whizzing by, clouds of space dust, and it was especially great during a warp.

For now all you could do was switch your lens to holo mode, and look at the scans one more time. Laying down in your bed, it at least felt like you were in one of the luxury rooms your friends had gotten to experience.

You hoped that the ship would be fixed soon and this slow drift in space would end soon. Because, as dreadful as this trip was, you were definitely looking forward to the destination. You had begged and pleaded with your parents to be able to at least go to the most talked about vacation spot this year, which you knew all the popular kids would be going to this star cycle. Especially Karis, your best friend and most popular girl in your year. She was going to be there, and that would make this trip worth it.

Adelphi: The Twin Planets.

A mysterious discovery of the decade, the two planets perfectly orbited each other around twin dwarf suns. Normally, one dwarf would not provide enough energy to support life, but these dwarf stars were so close together that they were comparable to the sun that powered Earth Theta, your home planet. But it wasn't simply the circumstances of Adelphi that made it special. No, it was the strange phenomenon of quantum existence, that occurred when explorers first made discovery of these planets that made it special. Not unlike the double slit observation that of course ended up being the key to warp travel, traveling to Adelphi somehow caused travels to land on both planets at the same time, a sort of mirror world, a duplication, a twin.

You literally existed in two places at once while you were on Adelphi.

Except the best part was that once there, matter was able to act independently of each other. You could do two different things at the same time. Of course, this wasn't realized until the explorers left the orbit of Adelphi and re-merged into one entity (another yet unexplained phenomena) and took with them, the memories of both experiences. Again, discovery of the decade, millennia even.

Since then, it had become the hottest attraction in the galaxy, the explorers becoming extremely wealthy with the sales of visitation passes. And you were on a set course to this amazing wonder. Until that is, the cruise ship stopped mid-warp and you found yourself floating just beyond the edge of the Sigma-91 lightstream, only 20 lightyears away from Adelphi.

You were so close.