meaningful discussion

Basically you need a quick and dirty, cheap plot device to enable a character/object to travel beyond the speed of light in your lil story?

Well, as far as I am aware, it's quite impossible to exceed the speed of light. But if you insist on doing so anyway, you could try looking around at what other science fiction does.

Star Wars has some sort of 'hyper drive' which afaik is hardly elaborated upon other than that it goes REALLY fast ;-) and lets them travel from one star to another without aging too much along the way.

Star Trek has the so-called warpdrive, which basically creates a field around the ship. This field stretches out space in a way that is supposed to make the actual distance it has to travel to get from A to B shorter. Im not sure how this would be possible as I believe you could still pick an observer judging you to be exceeding the speed of light, but it is certainly better thought out than the 'hyperdrive'. Only real problem is that for creating the warp field, you need some sort of faery dust. Im also unsure whether matter-antimatter reactions could provide the necessary energy for such a field (huge as the energy resulting form this may be)

Another thing you might like to try is the old wormhole. This basically means that you can take shortcuts between places in space. If you forget the third dimension of space for a second and think of it as a flat piece of paper. Now ruffle it some and fold it. Now to travel form A to B through space, in the straight line/shortest path which light would follow is prolly like the geodesic route along the surface of the paper. However with a wormhole, you'd like puncture through the surface of the paper and puncture it elsewhere again leaving the surface and thus not being bound to travel all across the curvy surface (which as you might imagine lets you travel large distance if the fold you are evading is particularly large.) Ofcourse, this is all just an analogy, but for short stories, devices like this should do. You're not writing a book of actual physics after all.

Finally, if your plot only needs to allow for a person or people to go from place A to place B, realize that I am 19 now, and given the needed vessel with enough energy, I could like travel 500 light years away from earth before I reach age 20. That is because of (from Earth point of view) time dilation (or from my point of view: length contraction) when travelling at speeds near the speed of light. Mind you that I might be 500 lightyears away from earth and ot only took a few months for me, for earth it will have taken me over 500 years So the use of this in a story is very limited by the plot you intend to have It is however, actual physics.

PS. I may have been unclear at places, or even incorrect, if so please do say so and feel free to ask anything else.

The thing about Star Wars that made it so great was that George Lucas realized he didn't NEED To explain everything.  Instead of focusing on mechanics, he focused on the lore.  That's why the Star Wars Universe is so broad and expansive.  It doesn't really matter HOW the hyperdrive works.

For the same reason, "The Force" was much better off before the advent of midichlorians in Episode 1.  In the original trilogy, it was just the mystical force, there was no need to explain it.  Trying to give a scientific explanation for it just took all of the mystique out of it and made it boring.