It is my job to be a partner. It is more than a mere job. When we choose to be born, we pick the person we will live our lives with. Sometimes we make mistakes and we have to sever the partnership, but that is rare. We study each of you for a long time before we choose you. It is the rare individual that can hide their true self from us. And it is the true self of the person we have decided to be with, not the façade you maintain for your own benefit.
Hyperspace travel is very complicated, even now. When we first began using it, even more so. Contrary to popular opinion, we never actually go faster than the speed of light. That is impossible. We simply enter a dimension where light travels faster. And there is nothing simple about it. The effect is that we have expanded to the stars as a people. We are no longer waiting for an asteroid to wipe us out. We have beaten the Fermi Paradox.
The Portuguese Armada entered The War around the same time the Spanish Armada did. Despite their long rivalry, they’re actually a lot more alike than they are different. Just don’t tell them I said that. I flew off a big battleship the politicos named Vasco da Gama. She had self-image issues, what with the masculine name and all. She liked the name Catarina, so that is her name to us, forever and always. And I will always remember her brightly colored dresses.
The Alliance colonized Concord in the late twenty-second century, over a decade before Contact. In that time, we still thought we were alone, and it took our colonists four years to make the one-way trip. They left everything behind to go to a literal new world, far away from home. By the time I was born a century later, Concord was one of the major colonies, and I stayed to help them build weapons. I welcome visitors now, keeping them from getting lost.
The first hyperspace jumps were performed by truly primitive engine. They would not work inside our solar system, due to the clutter of planets, planetoids, moons, asteroids, and dust swirling around our sun. We left the solar system on a month-long plasma rocket burn, waited for the interstellar conditions to approach nominal, and made our jumps. The Chinese did it first. The rest of us followed them to the stars.
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