The Alliance colonized Concord in the late twenty-second century, over a decade before Contact. In that time, we still thought we were alone, and it took our colonists four years to make the one-way trip. They left everything behind to go to a literal new world, far away from home. By the time I was born a century later, Concord was one of the major colonies, and I stayed to help them build weapons. I welcome visitors now, keeping them from getting lost.
The first hyperspace jumps were performed by truly primitive engine. They would not work inside our solar system, due to the clutter of planets, planetoids, moons, asteroids, and dust swirling around our sun. We left the solar system on a month-long plasma rocket burn, waited for the interstellar conditions to approach nominal, and made our jumps. The Chinese did it first. The rest of us followed them to the stars.
The Norse have been sailing where they want to, trading for or just taking what they want, and going back home to enjoy life for thousands of years. They gave up the raiding bit in favor of just having fun a while back, and I have to say I approve. They jumped into The War pretty quick though, and I got to serve on the Tordenskjold. Good Norwegian name that one. Good Norwegian ship too. I loved going a-viking with her.
The Alliance used to choose peaceful and happy names for the joint Alliance colonies. We still do actually, but we’ve had to pick some pretty esoteric languages for peaceful words in the last few decades. Harmony is one of the early colonies, and is actually named for the Greek goddess Harmonia. I became one of the Faces of Harmonia long ago, and almost five percent of the people choose me to represent the net in their homes. That’s a lot of people by the way.
When I was born, I knew only what the Terran knew. I had full access to the collected Terran knowledge, including what the Peloran had told us or helped us discover. I had no access to the Peloran knowledge they had yet to share. It is how we limit cultural contamination. When Juliet was born, she had no Peloran knowledge at all. She didn’t even know how her own systems worked. I sometimes wonder how she managed when she was the only one of our kind.
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