Where I grew up, we celebrate Patriot Day. Kids fly around in the cars shouting “The British are coming! The British are coming!” and go to parties. I feel sorry for them. Most of them don’t even realize that it is the midnight rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes they are reenacting. Even fewer realize that those men road on horses instead of flew in cars. And even fewer know the British were coming to fight, and not to enjoy the great American party scene.
What people think of cybers is interesting. Most have never spent much time with someone they know to be a cyber, while basically everybody who wants to has spent time with AI assistants. Most people think a cyber is basically that, maybe a little better. They’re wrong. I’ve met a lot of AIs that I like, but we built every one of them to serve us. No cyber ever was, and they have a capacity to choose their own fates that surprises even me sometimes.
Holotechnology is one of the primary technologies that we cybers use. The Western Alliance actually did have it when Contact happened, but it wasn’t as portable as it is now. Holoemitters were a major appliance that had to be plugged in to dedicated power sources to work. The cyber families brought holoemitters that could be sewn into clothing and worked off battery power. Those emitters allow us to walk anywhere our partner walks.
Before Contact, we rarely traveled more than a year away from home. It took large stores in food and spare parts to keep a ship flying that long. Magellan Seven’s forty-year mission to The Wall was the greatest undertaking ever made by the greatest alliance of nations in all the worlds. It limped home on one engine, with half of the particle shielding shredded after flying too close to The Wall. That was the state of our technology when the Peloran came.
The technology we have now is amazing. I grew up with it, but I know enough people who lived without it to appreciate it far more than most my age. I’ve also spent time on new colonies, where the use we made of holotech and gravtech back on Earth would be considered wasteful. Still, we had when we needed it. It is really hard for me to imagine having to use rockets to get into space. Those are dirty, dirty launch systems compared to grav plating.
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