After checking the air pressure gauge, Flash opened the hatch between the TNI2 and the Mother Ship.  Flash could immediately make out controls, tubing, and everywhere the glint of silver.  

Upon seeing the ship for the first time, he realized that this would be his home for the foreseeable future.  K. D. Bazinga had instructed him, so he knew and understood all of the equipment aboard the ship.  Still, he was entranced by the sheer beauty of it.  Floating through the hatch, Flash had a palpable sense of hatching or being reborn into a new phase of his life.





The one thing he knew for sure was that adventure awaited him.  The details of that adventure would just have to wait to be seen.  Once again, Flash sped through the void of space, yet had no sensation of that speed.  While machines buzzed and clicked softly, the effect was calming to Flash who felt more at home here than he ever did on the Earth.

MEANWHILE:



Ash Lander had been called to a relations campaign in Viet Nam, and with the setbacks due to problems with the original, renovated TNI, he had decided to go.





K.D. would remain in close contact with Flash by means of an automaton fashioned in her image, and linked to the vast archives of human knowledge.  Her face became Flash’s interface with all that was known and his adventures would  certainly add to that wealth of information.

Flying a space ship is very different than driving a car. Not confined to roads, Flash set his sights on the distant Cornerstone region, and more specifically, on the tiny planet Olo.  Space travel reminded Flash of rowing a small boat on a lake at night. Heading toward a distant star was like coming around a peninsula and seeing the light of your own cabin on the shore. As a child in Michigan, Flash had noticed the stars reflected on the surface of the dark lake and had felt as though he were floating through the heavens. Now that feeling was reversed. The heartbeat of his space ship became the lapping of warm lake water as he fell asleep.