We Americans have a saying. “From many, one.” Some people even say it in Latin. The point is that we all have our differences, the things that make us unique. Even us Cowboys. Especially Cowboys. It’s really hard to say that all Cowboys are one way because we aren’t. There are no generalized traits that match all of us. No ways of acting or being. We don’t think the same way. And that makes us stronger as a group than if we parroted the same ideas.
In the end it was The War that truly changed us all. We could not use the same tactics we used to save the Peloran two thousand years ago. The Shang were not the Ennead and the Terran were not the Albion. The War was different. So we adopted Terran tactics, rescinded many of our most cherished rules, and hoped that that lifetimes of tradition would keep our shared society from collapsing. It did not. We changed. We became more human. And that nearly killed us all.
There are many names for us. Some call us immortal. I try to stay away from that name. We die like anybody after all. Some call us Methuselahs, though I step back there too. Too religious. Cowboy I am happy with. Those of us who served earned that name well. But not every one of us served. And every year there are more of us who never had the opportunity. So we settled on the name Ageless. While a logical fallacy, it has poetry in it.
Someone asked me the other day if all Cowboys are Ageless. Well no. Many of the Cowboys were normal people. There were never enough Ageless back then to go everywhere we needed to go. Even now we aren’t really enough. But many more people have the right genes to make good pilots than merely those of us who don’t age. It took us a while to find the right ones, and how to use them right. But we got there. And so we’re still here.
Contact brought great change to those who lived on Earth. It changed us too though. It took longer. We had two thousand years of inertia to get past. We knew how to do things right. The Terran AIs didn’t have any of the rules we had. And they weren’t quick to adopt them either. They never really did in fact. That made it difficult for me. I come from a Peloran cybernetic family but was born Terran. It took me a long time to work through those opposing positions.
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