I was born American. A lot of us don’t realize how lucky that makes us. But we’re happy to be it and happy to say it. We’re real proud of being it. Most of us. We love telling government where it can stick things. We love shooting guns. We love a good grill off. And we love blowing stuff up in celebration of everything that being American is. It’s Fourth of July. Go blow something up. Make sure you ain’t it.
While America saw soup lines and rampant unemployment not seen again for almost a century, Germany’s economy fell even harder. Bereft of any gold or silver reserves, the government printed fiat paper money and ruinous inflation rates made it worthless. The government fell out of favor and the outlaw of a previous decade stood up to speak hope to the German people. His National Socialist party soon won the seats of power and Germany began to rise again.
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.