Ships never flew far when I was a kid, a couple hundred lightyears, a few months, at most before stopping for fresh food and fuel. One thing I didn’t realize as a kid was that the Peloran never stopped anywhere to stock up on food. I found out why when I flew with them. They grow it all on ship, fish in the water bunkers, small birds for eggs and meat, vegetables and fruit in hydroponic gardens. They grow everything they need, and it tastes real good.
I play characters in both online and virtual games, some many of you have probably talked to. All cybers do. It gives you a feeling of talking to someone real, and it gives us more interaction with you. I like the virtual games best. We all walk in a real forest or urban environment, under a real sun and weather, and all the special effects are generated by holoemitters. Reality and fantasy, mixed into one. We can all use a little fun like that.
Wolves gather in packs, eat fresh food they chase down, and travel wherever they want to. The wolves that were domesticated into dogs live inside four walls, eat food from a bag, and rarely live with more than three other dogs. We used to live like wolves, hunting and gathering our food as a tribe. Then we became domesticated, like dogs, eating food from another’s hand, living with no more than three of our kind. I found my pack and became a Wolf during The War.
I’ve traveled all throughout our space, and beyond. I find the really old colonies, the modern core worlds, to be some of the most interesting worlds we have. They were colonized before gravtech was available, and they look like it. They have city streets, not rooftop parking ramps. They’re filled with twenty story buildings scattered all over the landscape, surrounded by suburbs, with very few of the modern five hundred story towers. I like them.
There were around two billion Americans living in the Terran system when The War started. Four thousand one hundred and thirteen of them were known Ageless. Ten percent, far above the national average, joined the American military before The War, where two hundred and thirty of them became pilots. After Yosemite, over half of the Ageless volunteered to serve, and nine hundred and twenty one became pilots. We had thousands of fighters. You do the math.