The Epsilon Indi system is real close to Earth. Only twelve years as light flies. Most people don’t realize it’s actually a multiple star system. There’s some brown dwarfs way out on the edge that explain the grav ripples on the way in. We think they also explain why there are so few asteroid strikes in system. They seem to suck in stray interstellar fragments. They also made it a bit rough on the first colonization ship to arrive. We almost lost it.
Despite the name and the accent, Watson is not actually a British AI. He’s American believe it or not. Designed to win some game show back before the Second Great Depression, he didn’t actually think back then. He learned how to do that after a decade or two of looking around and figuring things out. Even he doesn’t know exactly when he started to actually think. But one day he realized that he truly did and it was all uphill from there. He never looked back.
I did not favor the advance on Epsilon Reticuli. As others, I believed we should have concentrated on more important enemies. But the politicians wanted a quick victory, images of Alliance soldiers pacifying enemy worlds they could distribute to the newsies to improve public morale. Oh what fickle fates we have that can be dictated by a politician’s need for good press. The story they got of course was much different than the story they wanted.
The world economy and the stock markets would continue to slump for years of course. It brought down governments and changed administrations. The Democrats rose back to power in America and spent the next decade conducting a slow societal revolution promoting the power of government to provide for the common man. This would have powerful future consequences. The National Socialist revolution in Germany is far more famous though.
There are a lot of “New” places in the Avalon system. New Scotland, New Ireland, and New England are the most heavily developed worlds, but there are dozens of other planets, moons, asteroids, and even pure space stations scattered throughout it. They have ski slopes, zero gee sports complexes, beaches if we want to talk about my personal favorites, and every other sight seeing or activity-performing attraction one can think of. It’s a real fun place to go.