Not many people live in the Sheliak system. For one, it’s a long ways away from Earth. For another, it seems the stresses that tear stars apart do Bad Things to local planets. And watching a star die can bring on some rather morbid thoughts about mere human mortality. Most people don’t stay more than a few days. But there are numerous permanent space stations, with tens of thousands of people filling them every day of the week. I love visiting the place.
Texas Tech’s Dixie was a virtual cheerleader designed to play on the billboard during home games, but a generation’s worth of science department students had fiddled with her code by the time the Second Great Depression hit. Nobody knows to this day if she was an accident or a plan, but one day she “woke up” and realized that she loved her job. It was an unexpected realization, as was the one that she had a choice to like it or not. She chose to like it.
Constantinople had been a center of trade since before the Romans bestowed the name of their emperor on her. 1,600 years later, Ottoman society had evolved into the millions of common citizens who paid their taxes, lived, and died without notice, and the wealthy merchants and factory owners who paid good bribes to make sure they paid nothing. To add insult to injury, many of the later class were actually foreigners. They were not popular amongst the common man.
Sheliak is what we call a destination star. The better part of a thousand lightyears away, we hadn’t even considered going that far before Contact. We’ve gone there since, because we wanted to see what it looked like up close. I’ve been there, and it is beautiful beyond my gift of words to explain. Imagine two stars so near each other that gravity is tearing one apart and spreading its fire all over space. Then imagine the other star eating it all. Amazing.
The Second Great Depression signaled an end to the abundant power supplies that AIs depended upon over almost any other computer application. They could not survive on the trickles of power coming from emergency generators or a solar cell or two, and most garage AIs fell to the roving power outages. The students of Texas Tech did not want to lose their virtual cheerleader and worked hard to keep her fed with all the power she needed to run. Dixie repaid them quickly.
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