Yesterday I began to think about space. Although I'd ventured to relatively high altitudes, I'd never been to space. In a vehicle, the highest you can go is the mysterious vehicle barrier at 4,096 meters, where all vehicles mysteriously vanish. I'd flown with a flight-assist device to about 10,000 meters once, but rumours say that there's something strange far, far above the hills of Second Life. Some say there's a region where physics are not the same, and where distortions in space-time lead to insanity... and death.

I had to find out if these rumours were true. I strapped on my "skydiving badge" for lift and wore some clothing appropriate to a trip into space -- my Starfleet uniform. My destination: one million meters above the ground.

All the way to 750,000 meters over Abbotts Aerodrome, the ascent was fairly predictable. As the ground fell farther away over this flat land, a strange band of darkness developed between the edge of the ground and where the sky began. Overhead the sun was bright, and the sky a dark blue.



Then, suddenly, there was a change. At about 768,000 meters, the sky and ground vanished, thrusting me into utter darkness. My avatar began to shake violently and became somewhat distorted.



I put on my flight jacket, partly to keep out the cold, but also for comfort. Up here, I was utterly alone and in the dark. After a while, the shaking stopped, and everything took on an eerie silence as I watched the digits on my altimeter rush towards one million.

I had made it to my target. I was one million meters above Abbotts Aerodrome, although not quite in the same shape as when I left it.



My return to the ground was less dignified. I flew into Cordova and began to fall. Impatient to reach the ground, I re-logged to find my avatar lying on a Cordova hillside in a puddle of its own blood. No matter. I have seen space, the final frontier.