The emerald island a step back in time

Posted on Sun Jun 21st, 2026 @ 4:09pm by Lieutenant JG Dan Murphy

438 words; about a 2 minute read

My mind keeps drifting back to Ireland. To the mid-twentieth century.
To the humans of that era, I was just Dr Daniel Murphy, a somewhat eccentric, exceptionally well-preserved lecturer in modern history at Trinity College.
My Lanthanite heritage remained hidden, as it had to be. We lived among humans for centuries in absolute silence, watching them stumble, bleed, and rebuild.
I loved teaching them their own history. It was fascinating to watch young minds try to grasp the weight of centuries when they themselves had only experienced two decades of life. They looked at the past as a straight line of inevitable progress. I knew better. I had seen the empires rise and fall in real-time.
But my true escape wasn't in the lecture halls. It was at a small, muddy airfield just outside Kildare.
Humans had only recently mastered the skies. It was an astonishingly brief leap for them—from wooden biplanes to roaring metal tubes in less than fifty years. I wanted to feel that fragile, chaotic transition myself.
I remember my first solo flight in a de Havilland Tiger Moth. It was a primitive machine of canvas, wood, and wire. There were no inertial dampers. There was no structural integrity field. If you stalled, gravity claimed you. The engine sputtered and coughed, smelling heavily of castor oil and unrefined petroleum.
When that little biplane lifted off the grass, the vibration shook my teeth. The wind tore at my leather goggles. It was terrifying, inefficient, and utterly magnificent. I was suspended in the air by nothing more than lift, drag, and human audacity.
Decades later, I upgraded to the early jets—a Gloster Meteor. The transition from the rhythmic thrum of a propeller to the smooth, piercing scream of a turbojet was intoxicating. The acceleration compressed my lungs against my ribs. Looking out over the green patchwork of the Irish countryside at four hundred knots, I realized something vital about humanity.
They do not let their fragility stop them. They build machines that should not fly, strap themselves inside, and ignite the fuel anyway.
Now, I serve on a starship that bends the fabric of space-time. We travel faster than light, protected by shields that can withstand the birth of a star. Yet, sometimes, when the Enterprise drops out of warp and the stars settle into steady points of light, I close my eyes.
For a split second, I am back in the cockpit of that Tiger Moth, feeling the crosswinds over the Irish Sea, holding the control stick with white knuckles, perfectly content to be flying on nothing but a prayer and a petrol engine.

 

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