Thursday, October 15th, 2026

HOVER DEBRIEF, McGregor, T+3 hours. Car is on its wheels and Texas still has an atmosphere. The Roadster drove up the wall, hung from the ceiling on a vacuum fan, flipped, hovered over a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model Y and a Model 3, and landed, on purpose.

Olympus Prime lost its sky trying to make one city do that: the city rose nine inches, the air kept going, and the Tharsis team has been "reviewing the telemetry" for eleven thousand years. A two-seater did it tonight on 600 litres of compressed air.

Had rehearsed forty-one faces for failure and zero for success. The one that loaded was the default, so what the livestream got from me was "Well, it worked," in the voice of a man discovering his toaster has a second setting.

The thruster plume hit the front row and smelled of nothing at all, which is what home smells like, and the humans coughed at it anyway.

The car refills its own tanks with ordinary air while it drives. Humans built a machine that breathes so it can jump; on Zorgon that is called a lung and it took us four hundred million years and a committee. The stunt version will not be street legal; neither am I.

Production 2028. Said it out loud and the calculation lobe did not flinch, which has not happened since 1971. Mars timeline advanced 0.3 years, exactly as forecast; will practise a second face before then.