"Why offer your spaceship to me, though, instead of a government?"

Ayjinon (as he'd identified himself) sprawled across the couch of my suburban townhouse, looking at me upside-down with all three of his eyes, and letting a hologram drone illustrate his words. "Committees bore me. More interesting to see what an individual does. Why you in particular? You're an educated commoner from the leading spacefaring civilization. Simple research showed you have some knowledge and interest in space and won't merrily hand the prize over to your masters."

I wondered about the research. Had the alien's civilization been monitoring global communications? Maybe he'd found my arguments about the design of the Super Heavy rocket booster versus SLS, or the terrible Trek fanfiction I'd written in high school, or my current job with a minor aerospace subcontractor. In any case, the iridescent-scaled stranger had already showed off a few sufficiently advanced tricks to convince me he wasn't a human prankster in a costume. So I said, "Let's see this supposed ship. How do we --"

The alien snapped his fingers, and in a swirl of light and wind, we were there. We'd gone from my living room to a yacht's lounge, wood-paneled and featuring holographic screens. No rocking of waves, only an electronic hum and the feel of dry, ozone-charged air.

"Real hardwood floors from what you call the Trappist-1 system," Ayjinon said, stamping one hoof. "Forty-one light years out. You could visit in a week."

I hardly heard. I ran my hands along the railing and walked into a cockpit with a huge viewscreen and three command chairs. "It really goes faster than light?"

"Of course. You'll find the AI more than adequate for navigation. Don't worry about orbital mechanics training, though it'll be happy to teach you. And time dilation effectively doesn't apply to you."

I whistled. "Life support?"

"Enough for ten indefinitely, twenty for a week in an emergency. Let it snack on an asteroid once a year, and you should be good for five years. We'll send a team for five- and ten-year maintenance, included."

"I could do a lot with a starship in fifteen years. But the price you told me..."

The salesman tried to copy a human shrug, looking boneless. "As I said, it's practically free."

"Two-thirds of all humanity's income for a thousand years."

"Right; nothing on the cosmic scale. Build a few automated bases on other planets and you won't notice. Your people will still be richer than they are now. You personally will have most of your time to yourself."

"And you want to watch what I do with the thing."

"Just flight paths, cargo manifests, and monitoring of the shared rooms. It entertains my people to see how it goes."

He'd answered basic questions for me just by showing up to make the offer. Did aliens exist, and was FTL travel possible? Yes, and as he boasted at length, FTL came with hardwood floors, leather seats, and a one-year, hundred-light-year satisfaction guarantee. That last clause in the contract drew my thoughts in particular. In the end, I was sure I'd enjoy the experience. Even if it meant shackling humanity to a payment plan that, according to the fine print, would really take more like two thousand years.

I signed and provided a voiceprint and blood sample.

"Excellent!" said Ayjinon. "I'll get out of your way now, and let you get on with your space adventure! Computer, recognize Roland here as the owner and captain."

"Acknowledged," said a soft electronic voice. I looked toward the screens that displayed trumpets and confetti. When I turned again, the salesman was gone.

The ship had what he'd called a cloaking device, though he'd snickered while saying it. More like, enough stealth to hide from present-day Earth technology so long as the ship didn't use its engines much. It was as good as hiding under a blanket for his people, but for my purposes it'd do.

I was in a geostationary orbit with a view of the Atlantic Ocean. I repeated my tour of the ship. Cockpit, lounge, little kitchen, hydroponics bay, captain's cabin with gratuitous levels of silk and the pelt of some exotic bear-like thing. Small but pleasant cabins for nine more people, a cargo bay like a two-car garage, an airlock/entryway, and a medical bay. This was a luxury yacht, but with some rugged automated functions meant for clumsy monkeys. It sounded like I wouldn't be commanding the ship to build me a Dyson sphere, but the narrow function of melting space ice for water and oxygen was easy for it. Other machinery would, with human supervision, build basic mining and solar equipment. I worried about lacking the knowledge to make repairs, but was going to have to take that risk.

The medbay shined sterile and sleek. At the ship AI's suggestion, I lay down on a bed of whirling machinery and got a baseline scan. Which revealed I had a problem that would kill me in a year.

The machinery fixed it in an hour. I got up sore, bandaged, and shaken. I'd had no idea I needed that. "Well," I said. "Thank you, Ship. I suppose you'll report that to the aliens."

In a pleasant echoing bass it said, "No, Captain. The medbay is considered private space."

I nodded. "Then we're going to bring some friends aboard."

I had access to a teleport system. So over the next few days, I beamed aboard dozens of family and friends and their friends. I got to show off and blow some minds. The point was to usher them into the medbay, though. Out of the forty-two people my ship handled, several got major injuries and illnesses fixed, most including me got an effective age reset to twenty-one or so, and my cousin's wife walked out with cat ears and a tail. I'd have to look into that function later.

But somebody talked; it was inevitable. Rumors spread that "aliens" were abducting people for medical experiments and healing them. The trouble with having a wish-granting system was that without infinite time and resources I had to pick which wishes to grant, and I had other things to work on. Even though that meant not saving countless more lives, and feeling like a chump for knowing that. Yes, I tried having the ship divulge exactly how the medical systems and other technology worked, but major secrets were locked down and my attempts to pry got me a warning about voiding the warranty. So humanity would have to settle for getting clues passively.

Next, I flew to the moon. It took hours as I entered lunar orbit and admired the view. I was nervous about landing and getting out, of course, feeling like I should pray and have some pithy words to say. I settled for a moment of silence before entering the airlock to try on the advanced, adaptable spacesuits.

The moon really is an eerie place, "magnificent desolation" as one Apollo man called it. I went still and silent, then walked in a place very few boots had ever marked. But once the initial awe wore off along with the terror that my life support gear would break, it started to bore me. Nobody here, no ruins, very little history -- only rocks. I took aboard pounds of grey regolith, wrapping the stuff up for safety and scientific preservation.

The next step was to do something with the moon. I hopped over to the Shackleton Crater area at the south pole, found the ice-rich rocks that NASA and India had been so excited about, and tried having the ship munch on that. In a day of experiments I'd set up a solar panel and a proof-of-concept aluminum panel made from the rocks. Took video of the results... and with that work done, I returned to Earth and broadcast what I'd done.

There was a glorious confusion down there on Earth! Understandably, people declared my footage a clumsy fake. But I managed to get in contact with Scott Macho, space commentator, and beam him down a beacon to his porch. Which let me kidnap him to orbit. I gave him a tour of the ship, then sent him home with a bag of moon rocks, a full head of hair, and a look of bewilderment in his next public video.

I actually got more publicity when I contacted a guy going by "Mister Werewolf" than I did from the space enthusiast. But I'd take what serious believers I could get.

By now I was getting mainstream interview requests and a mention in a ludicrous White House press conference, commanding me to report to the government if I wasn't a hoaxer. And somehow calling me racist. I dropped the cloaking system and knowingly got spotted by amateur astronomers, flashily changing my orbit in ways no known craft could do. Scooped up some space junk while I was at it.

I told NASA to line a few guys up at a designated spot to pick up a beacon, tomorrow, and to bring any space tools they wanted to experiment with. "Time's wasting."

The day came. I turned on the teleporter, and four men in combat gear appeared on my ship. I greeted them while wearing a spacesuit. They greeted me with drawn pistols.

"Gentlemen? You don't look like astronauts."

One of the four said, "You're under arrest."

"For anything in particular, or is this one of those make-it-up-later offenses?" I was shaking quietly, faced with those guns, but tried to sound bold.

"Put your hands on your head, and identify yourself."

"Computer? Go."

The AI took my cue and sent the soldiers back -- but one shot at me. The bullet struck my suit and bruised me, but it didn't pierce. I was glad they'd thought to gamble that maybe they really would be on a spaceship, and had used small calibers.

I wasn't invincible on this ship. Intruders could make me give commands to the AI and find creative ways to get around any safeguards I put up. I got myself checked out in the medbay, and fumed. I had less than a year to be useful with this ship before committing humanity to pay for it!

So I uploaded video of the attack, repeated that I had no plan to conquer the Earth, and suggested that NASA try again to find someone with the right stuff.

In the meantime, I got to take Elon and a couple of his guys to the moon and that was awesome.

"Why not Mars?" they asked.

"It'll take a bit more time to reach and I need a crew ready to build stuff. Here; I'll give you the specs on the construction equipment I have access to. Study it and we can meet in 24 hours, including any legitimate NASA astronauts who want to show up. No more than nine total, and I want you to have everybody frisked for weapons."

One engineer said, "So you have this miraculous ship somehow, and you won't tell us how you got it --"

"Short answer: Aliens. I can explain more later. We have work to do first."

"Okay, aliens. I want to hear more about that, but right now I mostly care why you're not using this ship more."

Another of the space guys said, "He's trying! He just can't get the world to cooperate right away."

"Exactly," I said.

But I did get a willing crew. Nine people came, with a set of tools and books that combined decades-old wish lists with scribblings that had obviously been put together over coffee in the last day. They wanted a moon base, yes, but they immediately asked, "Can we capture an asteroid? Please?"

I'd thought of that. So we did. Oh, it freaked out the governments! The engineers had deliberately avoided asking me until now, for that reason. What we did was gingerly approach a near-Earth asteroid about twenty meters wide, nudge it into a stable orbit around Earth, and spend days babysitting it to make course corrections and make sure it'd park as expected. That was a very simplified process compared to how NASA would've done it, considering this ship's capabilities for motion and maneuvering.

By having our ship even slightly towing-capable, we were in a position to bombard the planet and hold the Earth ransom -- but all of us had more lucrative things to do. (Though it was very tempting to erase certain national capitals.) With the rock on its way to becoming a tiny new moon, just big enough to be a useful new space station and mining opportunity, we'd given Earth a reason to get up there and play with the thing. The US and China and Japan were already shifting their rhetoric from "the madman must be stopped" to "the madman's failed plot to destroy the world is an opportunity to take over orbital space".

By now, two whole weeks had passed. My borrowed crew flew to the moon and began using the ship's equipment to build a clear landing pad and an excavated site with radiation proofing, insulation, solar panels, and piping. In the process we carried tons of water from Earth and built a cistern, installed radio beacons, and set up an experiment in making concrete-like bricks. Stuff that the space agencies had been itching to do but couldn't for lack of funding and the ability to lift many tons of startup equipment. Was this new base up to the aliens' standards? Not in the slightest. It was a rickety hole in the ground, a cave dwelling. But it was a major step toward what we'd all been hoping to accomplish generations ago.

And then we did the same thing on Mars. I got to set foot there first, saying, "We're on our way." The crew this time was less spur-of-the-moment. By now I had everybody's attention. I was facing demands to make my crew more diverse, or I would be sued.

I had a lawyer set up a little corporation just so there was something to sue, with ten bucks in assets. Meanwhile I had my pick of volunteers, mostly the corporate guys I'd been working with and a few rotating slots for qualified people who incidentally needed the medbay.

But we weren't constantly in Earth orbit. Back and forth to Mars and the Moon we went, shoring up the basic habitats.

"So how about another star system?" asked Johann, an experienced astronaut I'd come to trust as a science expert.

"We could do Centauri and set up a fuel depot and telescope. Barnard's Star is close, too."

"What about Trappist though? And all the other exoplanet systems? I thought this boat could go anywhere."

In private, I told him about the warranty situation, and the price. He went pale. I half expected him to pull a gun and damn me for selling out humanity, but I was able to calm him down.

We continued working within our own solar system, hauling a thrown-together probe into Europa orbit and debating a ground mission. NASA people were begging to send cargo but had been thrown utterly for a loop: they had a thousand ideas but any one of them would take years to build even if they had the funding. They ended up defying Congressional mandates, in order to build basically Cubesat-style craft of which three-quarters would probably fail in a month. (So what?) We sent them here and there, and none took more than days to arrive and start scanning.

I hadn't set foot on Earth in months. I'd been walking on other planets instead, learning quickly about space construction. Air, water, power, dust control: all of the technical work needed to keep a crew alive for the job of even more building to come. We had the ship fabricate extra spacesuits with raw materials we brought from Earth.

But there was the problem of ownership. Currently we had people from America, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Japan signed up to walk on the moon -- and all five governments claimed ownership of the new base. Multiple fights had broken out on Earth about crew selection, with attempts to trick me into beaming a bomb aboard or to ambush me with guns or to have me beam down and get arrested. So I couldn't go home, I couldn't fully trust anyone, and millions of people called me a fascist terrorist for not "surrendering".

And then there were the people who had guessed some inkling of the deal I'd signed!

When I beamed the next crew up, three of them drew guns. It was disappointing but expected. When I complied with their order to say nothing at all, the ship's default "send armed people back" command triggered, and they were gone. Easy enough -- but could I trust the others?

With an overloaded crew of seventeen, we hurried to Mars to drop most of them off. They'd need to fend for themselves with reduced manpower. Then it was back to Earth to grab the moon-bound crew one at a time, tackle them, and search every one of them thoroughly. With this group we had no obvious traitors among us.

While headed to the moon, we sat around glumly in the lounge. "Who does own these new bases?" asked Johann. "We've been so busy building them and focusing on the science."

I told them, "I could say I'm dictator of outer space, or give you each shares in some colony corpoation. But who's going to listen, either way? The only reason we've been able to get materials is the teleporter, I think; otherwise we'd have been arrested on the ground and barred from picking up so much as a spare ingot."

The crewmen said, "It's a parallel economy. They can't do much to stop you. But so far you haven't brought much back but moon rocks you gave away." Glass-coated moon chips now adorned many coffee tables and there were many fake listings on auction sites.

So, we shifted from pure science to business. We flew out to the asteroid Psyche, dug out an anchor point and potentially inhabitable cave for later use, and kept valuable ore. We stopped by two more asteroids, did much the same, then returned to Earth and got ourselves a Swiss bank account owned by a company with shares for everybody. Also, we announced an auction for access codes needed to use the Psyche base safely.

That was a golden apple for the world. No government could place a bid without acknowledging our venture as legitimate. Nor could they let anyone else do it for fear of losing out. What emerged over the next week was a very unofficial consortium, condemned by everyone, promising to make every one of my crewmen so far a millionaire. And to keep providing supplies and -- unofficially, they kept insisting -- paid interns.

We rolled with that, and only had to stop one more piracy attempt over the next month.

Eleven months had passed. My starship had restored hundreds of rich old people and various friends and family and engineers and astronauts to prime health. We'd also fixed up a bunch of astronaut candidates who'd been rejected for some medical problem. With our ever-expanding talent pool we had begun colonizing. There were greenhouses on Mars, a fuel station on the moon, and several outposts in the asteroid belt. We'd even taken jaunts to the nearest stars, mostly for science but identifying a few good pit-stop asteroids mankind might use. We had a trove of data about how the ship's many advanced systems worked, through passive observation. We couldn't copy the technology yet but could give Earth's scientists a head start... once we mentioned we had the files and publicly demanded amnesty for our horrid ways.

At a party in the lounge, I got asked, "What's on for year two of being space emperor?"

I sighed. "Ship? Contact Ayjinon."

A hologram flickered to life above our table of food. The crew had never seen him before, and they recoiled both at his boneless three-eyed look and at how nearly human he still managed to be. The alien said, "It's been entertaining to see your progress, Roland! Has the ship been treating you well?"

"It has," I said, "But I'm not quite satisfied. I'd like that refund as of year's end."

The ship went quiet. Then everyone exploded. The crew said, "What the hell are you thinking?"

Ayjinon was more polite: "Is the performance not to your liking? I don't think you understand how much more advanced this vessel is than any of the, ah, clever vehicles your species has invented."

"Our oar-powered monkey barrels? I do. But getting from Earth to orbit is the hard part! I've gotten us orbital gas stations and the scaffolds of planet and asteroid bases -- including the legal structure. And the ship's cost... Go ahead, tell my crew about the price."

They listened, stunned in many cases but some suspecting all along that I'd signed some devil's bargain. "But it's not really that bad a deal," said one woman. "We really will make more money with the ship than without."

An argument broke out. The alien who'd been startled at my refund request looked amused now, if I could read that expression. "You'd give up quite a lot. I don't expect you'd be able to build a ship like this for centuries."

I suspected otherwise, but shrugged. "We can do things our own way, and not be in hock to anybody. It was..." I'd been about to say it was never my right to commit humanity to the contract, but that might count as an admission of fraud. "It was a fun preview."

"Well then," said the alien, ignoring some of the crew's protests. "Captain Roland has spoken. I'll be taking the ship back, in a month. We'll be interested to see what you do with it for now."

He vanished, twitching in alien laughter. Some of my crewmen looked ready to mutiny, but they were divided on whether it was because I'd canceled the deal or because I'd signed it at all.

I clapped once, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, I understand you're upset. But can we agree that we should have a very busy next month? It should be a question only of how to use it."

The time limit snapped them out of their argument. Suddenly we were a team again, with the mightiest spaceship man had ever seen. With vast wealth to earn for ourselves, and plans for a jumpstart on exploring the universe. With our borrowed cheat gone we'd be far better off than before, and all of humanity depended on us to see exactly how much better.

So, we wondered. What should we do with one month's use of an FTL luxury yacht?