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.
The Wolfenheim Project had many goals. First among them was of course to colonize a new world far from Earth, a clarion call of “here we are” for the betterment of mankind. But it was also always meant to act as a base of operations for Charles. A base his family had no influence or control over. This he also considered to be for the betterment of all mankind. Later events would prove Charles very right indeed.
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