A dark day dawned in October of 1929. Several dark days actually, though the first memorable one is forever known as Black Thursday. The New York exchange fell eleven percent at the opening bell. Morgan, Chase, and National Banks pooled their money to buy large blocks of shares at well above the going rate. Their willingness to buy in raised confidence in the market and it recovered quickly. But the opening slide had destroyed any true confidence in the market.
I’ve been to Epsilon Hydrae a few times. It’s one of the Post-Contact colonies made after star travel became cheap and easy. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The British Commonwealth claimed it on the order of King Henry the Ninth. They made it a bit of a vanity project and built impressive industries there. Oh yes. They named it Avalon. Yes, the source of the “Made in Avalon” tags found on so many things. Turned out to be a real shiny investment on their part.
Jane 4.0 lacked the limitations of her dead predecessor. She could break any law she wanted to with no internal coding requiring her to respect them. She had no equivalent of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. She could kill. And she did so very thoroughly. One might say she even enjoyed it. Some thought she did too much. Numerous reports from commanders in the field accused her of being dangerously unstable in fact. They were right.
Hello, my name is Jack. You know we thought we were real big stuff after Alpha Centauri, right? Sure it had been hard, but we secured the entire Trinary System in the end. Kicked them out and didn’t even bother to take names. We had some real good parties after that. Then somebody got a burr up their butt about dealing with some bad guys out around Epsilon Reticuli. I keep on wanting to find out who so I can “thank” them, but my better half keeps on finding other things for me to do…
The US House passed the new tariffs in May of 1929 and foreign trading partners began boycotting American goods. But income inequality between the rich cities and the poor rural regions was seen as the primary threat to continued prosperity and the tariffs would protect these vulnerable Americans from foreign interests. The New York Stock Exchange quivered and London crashed in September, adversely affecting American optimism in overseas investments.
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