Immediately the flow and ebb of the computer system, familiar to me as a life-long friend, pulled me into its embrace. I wrote a core shell, extended it to transmission preparation, added flange modules and self-regulating failure-coherence blocks.

But then of course, as I carried on, flinging out code at a rate not quite comparable to my earlier out-of-control musings, a suspicion planted itself in the back of my mind. As I reached some of the initial direction sequences, the suspicion grew and grew until I gave in and hand-drew the symbols into the console, giving it a placeholder tag of “target”. Of course, since the jump target had to be validated against the ship’s database there was no harm in this; I could just pick it up and examine it after the validation had rejected it.

To my great surprise, the dozen-symbol string stood there. The computer helpfully left a green icon blinking above them to show me that they were valid destination co-ordinates in a known format.

I smacked my forehead. Of course!