“Daddy, what’s that mess on the view screen?” Jenny turned to her father, Space Captain Bobby Starshine.
“We’re in hyperspace. It always looks like that,” he answered, without looking up from the control panel.
Jenny wrinkled her nose in disgust, “Well I think it looks like alien vomit or loads of squished insects.”
“Well it might do, but it’s not. Let me explain. As you should know, when we switch on the hyperdrive we enter hyperspace, and in hyperspace we are effectively outside normal time and space travelling at superluminal – that means faster than light – speed. At these kinds of speeds the normal laws of physics don’t apply. We actually catch up with and overtake light waves. What you are seeing is the result of a sort of cosmic soup consisting of superfast particles, known as tachyons, all colliding and bouncing off each other. Every time there’s a collision some energy is emitted in a flash of colour. And that’s what you can see on the screen. A sort of super asymmetrical kaleidoscope consisting of all the colours of the rainbow.”
Starshine looked at the control panel’s readout display. “We’re about to come out of hyperspace. Look at the screen and watch the view magically change into normal space with lots of stars and hopefully granny’s planet.” The control panel emitted a loud beeping, indicating they had reached the end of their hyperspace journey and entry into normal space. “There. See the difference?”
Jenny studied the screen again. “Nope. No stars or planets. It still looks like squished insects.”
“What? Let me see.” Starshine looked at the view screen for the first time since entering hyperspace. “Oh! You’d better turn on the windscreen wipers, Jenny. Damn space bugs.”
My entry in the April 2021 300 Word Story Challenge at SFFChronicles
Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, or other Speculative Fiction
M. Robert Gibson 