We are nothing if not the change we bring to the world; our memory, our legacy, our dent upon the universe. So it goes. Our greatest dreams demand the greatest upheaval. As to forge the future, we must break the past.

All in pursuit of perfection.

Every once in a while, an entire generation is thrown into the fire to grasp it. Some of our dreams, the worst ones and the most powerful, demand a new beginning. We hurl our ever greater resources at the hideous task: be it scorched earth or the final solution. (Aren’t they always meant to be so?) The previous century will be remembered, as long as there are people to know, for its decades long adventure into hell on earth. It was the worst of us. What different worlds could we have seen if the fire was not lit, ninety-nine summers ago. If indeed you or I would have ever been born at all.

History is written by the winner. But push it hard enough, and you’ll leave your mark in either case. Just don’t count on liking it.

Fortunately for the lot of us, beyond two cities in Japan, everything changed in 1945. Our newfound nuclear prowess put the kibosh on the once very appealing notion of a winnable war between great powers. As unfashionable as it is to say, I really do think that our remaining ability to demolish one another in a furtive hour or so is what remains our principal peacemaker to this day. The nations of the world are led by no brighter minds or more enlightened souls than before. As if. And our interconnectedness, though ever stronger, is not the sort of thing the past could never know. Rather, we went our way safe in the knowledge that future tyrants had better think small. So far, they have.

But what about when we must no longer share the same lonely little world?

In my story, Aria is the first to stir this fate. A confrontation between our first and second Earth results in something so atrocious that it is still, in Alpha’s time centuries later, known as just the “Aria incident.” It is the nightmare of shining apocalypse that I imagined everyone must have had during the Cold War; whose end alone I saw. It is an orgy of space borne violence, triggered in confusion but executed meticulously. And I have a song set aside for it, to be explored in time.

This memory of a lost world is the setting for the people of Earth come the story proper. As above them threatens not Aria’s forgotten army, but a single man. The one who could, and would, end it all for us. That we might finally repay our debt, and meet Elysium as one.

A neon genesis, as it were. Many minds think alike for good reason. Before and after discovering the fact.

Ode to Joy is the poem and the song for this set piece. What else could suffice? Schiller’s appeal to our gloried future when put to Beethoven’s most enduring symphony’s very climax is perfection in itself. The ultimate soundtrack to the battle at the end of the world. All quarter of an hour of it!

I have an orchestra in mind, playing a concert while it happens quite beyond them and old Europe’s evening horizon. The Ode is the centrepiece of their performance, played to mark the centennial of the world government whose leaders are attending. It is, of course, still the anthem. Though seldom quite as long as this.

As great an indulgence as this all surely is, I’ll note that I’ve worked out what events come when, in the music. One highpoint is when Yolanda, the president, is finally handed a screen onto the live events above. She went in to the hall knowing that a standoff was now likely, but her underlings acted alone to unleash all this. Echoes of Aria, which foreshadows everything.

But not quite.

I can’t really say what it is that makes me want to write. As if it’s any single thing. But one theme that makes me tick is an interest in putting diverse knowledge to use. I like my fiction laced with insight.

Among the better reads on the internet is Horace Dediu’s Asymco. The name’s shorthand for asymmetric competition: a crucial pattern if ever there was one. He’s a protégé of Clay Christensen, rightly well known for The Innovator’s Dilemma. But he amounts to more than his influences. He’s a storyteller as much as an analyst. If there’s someone who can spin a yarn about history, its ebb and its flow, it’s Horace.

The latest episode of his podcast, The Critical Path, is titled rather ominously The Best Single Invention of Life. It’s always worth a listen. The part I’m pointing to, however, starts at the full hour mark. I think it’s a classic bit of big picture thinking, on the fly.

Business is business. Cut-throat, dynamic, possessed. Companies thrive and starve by the strength of their ideas and execution. That turbulence is what sets aside our free market capitalism from other failed ideas. Pity they were designed to be so much better. Innovation is fire. Without it we freeze, but never pretend that no one gets burned.

Cities are built by the commerce within them. Horace notes that London is still, at its core, Victorian splendour writ in stone, while Tokyo is the corporate towers of its own boom, post war. No doubt the same will be said of now when Shanghai and Beijing reflect on their future pasts. You build in the good times. And, as long as war or other monumental catastrophe doesn’t tear your city down, so the urban landscape remains.

But why do golden ages end? For cities, for companies, for cultures and for men?

The key may well be that we must learn how to destroy as well as to build. As in to topple those achievements we made our very selves. We’ve got to disrupt ourselves, before someone else inevitably does. We’ve got to keep breathing, instead of fighting off the future from our precious past. We, the individual, have got to get to grips with the disturbing truth that nothing is eternal. History rolls on, wherever innovation takes it.

Being European, I can see his point. I live in a Victorian city of sandstone terraces and villas, with scarcely a sixth storey let alone a tower in sight. The twentieth century left Edinburgh almost alone. A resident of a century ago wouldn’t have much trouble finding their way around. The eyes of the world were elsewhere. What work did go on in recent years came to a sudden end, thanks to a certain bank and crisis.

Horace is quite right of course. Renewal the like he describes is no less than rebirth. An ancient archetype of culture the world over. Yet one we much prefer for our heroes than ourselves.

As for my writing, the idea of the truly eternal city fascinates me just as it does in real life. Make no mistake: to be any such thing is a struggle. A fight, between the drives to create and destroy, and between the instincts to invent and preserve. A metaphor suited perfectly, I think, to Aria and Gaia. The thriving city of billions, and its sanctuary of a moon.

Rebirth here is more than figurative, as Aria was not spared the discontinuity of apocalypse. It takes more than the memory of a metropolis to build it again from scratch. It takes an infectious ideal.

For whatever reason, I’m unsatisfied with dreaming of cities under alien skies for their own sake. The aesthetic is one thing, but why else are they there? What makes them viable? What draws people to them in the fist place? From where we are back here, so early on in history, we haven’t the faintest idea what could truly drive us to the myriad of worlds in those countless stars. Curiosity won’t pay the bills. That’s the place for economics.

But there’s something to be said for the artful guess; when you know the pattern, if not the ultimate answer or the underlying cause. And while we might not know much as yet, wherever we go in the fullness of time, we can’t help from being ourselves when we’re there.

Remember Gaia? According to Marie:

The two might have started out as twins, but Gaia is a whole other world now. Where there are streets like mountainsides on Aria, Gaia has stark ravines of bare rock. Through them fly either wild birds or urban traffic. For every garden in the city, here there was a forest. And a mountain, plain and lake. But the most striking difference of all was simply: where were all the people? On Aria, in the all but unending city at least, you’re never by yourself. Not really. Solitude was a luxury most folk could only fake, jammed together in history’s biggest construction site. But Gaia truly was a place of peace.

And Mina loved it.

Little Gaia is Aria’s moon. The two orbit around one star of the doublet that is our next door neighbour: Alpha Centauri. A likely place indeed, both α Cen A and B – or Toliman and Kentaurus as they are named by then – are stable, middle aged stars of promise and integrity quite like our Sun. The larger one is even just as golden. Around each other they dance, in a loop of eighty years, never too close to disturb the other’s potential planets, and never too far to shine quite glorious in said worlds nighttime skies.

No wonder they turn up time and time again in our space stories. Or indeed that I picked Toliman for Aria, my tale’s second Earth.

But Aria was not always to be there. And nor was Gaia born its moon.

Once upon a time, and for quite a long one too, Andala wasn’t in the Pleiades. I imagined it as a planet of a blue star in Sagittarius, on the way to the centre of our galaxy; albeit less than a hundred light years so. Longer years than ours, instead, and neither shining Merope and her sisters, nor great Kai forever overhead? It would have been a different Andala. Alone.

Aria was already baked into the story, in either case. I couldn’t pass up a whole New World when I had the chance. Aria is where human achievement and excess is raised to a whole other power. Its sheer nerve threatens us like nothing else. Inevitably, both of mankind’s home worlds do clash. The event is such a nightmare that it is still known, euphemistically, as “the Aria incident”. I haven’t as yet as described the conflict any further than the mention of its name. But, given that we have the power to make worlds for ourselves by then, you can well imagine.

I don’t want to strew populations here and there across the stellar everywhere. It’s a lot of needless work, for a start, and I don’t think adds as much as it costs in confusion. Mine and yours! Yet even so, I wasn’t done with Andala and Aria in addition to Earth. I had one last world in mind.

Gaia was born from the question: what of a global nature reserve for our dying habitats? We may be slowly coming to the realisation of our full impact on this planet, but I do wonder how much of it we can save, whatever our intent. We’re surely never going to dismantle our cities and our farms, to head back to the forest, mountain and the open plain. Not even in the absurd case we should all want to. There’s just too many of us, too much of us, and our artificial realms. You could well say the fundamental problem posed by climate change is just another layer on top of the engine of extinction which is our drive to feed ourselves and build our homes. Nature is nothing if not dynamic. And so it changes as we change.

Come the point when we can breathe life on barren worlds, needless to say, we’re in a whole new game. I liked the idea of one globe set aside for saving nature, while another sees the very opposite. So Gaia became Aria’s counterbalance, Pollux to Castor, the one that can survive.

Then I thought about who’d pay for it.

The best idea, I reckoned, was that Gaia was never meant as charity. Such an expense! The fabrication of worlds could only be as a venture, expected to pay back handsomely, like our empires of old. Gaia’s fate as a sanctuary was an accident. I figured that Aria and Gaia could have been in a race for supremacy, each one the product perhaps of vying powers on the Earth. Interstellar imperialism, indeed. As I got around to getting a feel for the actual distances between the stars, and started putting numbers to our progress, I was struck by how narrow our horizons would still be by the time I needed them made. Alpha Centauri loomed ever larger, and so I moved them there, from the as yet undefined afar. But even so they weren’t yet planet and moon. Indeed, they didn’t even share the same one star.

This whole place doesn’t really want to stick together. The gravity is fake. The atmosphere is fake. The tides, the wind, the sea. Might all look nice and natural on the surface, but it’s not.

What finally made Gaia into Aria’s moon was the thought of its latter day tribesmen looking up toward the awful glow coming from the city in the sky. The incident needs its witness. And something about the artifice of their small world and reassembled tribes said it all for me.

We’re getting to the stage now that we know there are worlds aplenty, out there beyond our Sun. The hunt for exoplanets is booming, in something of a modern day goldrush if only we could get there. Writing a story set out among those very stars, you can likely guess my sentiment. I’ve already a song set aside for the growing starmap of man’s ongoing travels, for a choice moment of exposition somewhere in my book. The coincidence of science fact meeting up with my fiction is a merry one.

But wouldn’t you know they’ve now found the first one at Alpha Centauri?

I’ve a particular interest in that binary star, as our closest neighbour is the inevitable place to build our second Earth. In my tale, it’s called Aria. Let Marie fill in the details.

Nothing can prepare you for Aria. We set a record flying there in just twenty days, quite an achievement back then. Yet before our eyes, there was no doubt who had won the prize.

“Different every time.” Said Kingston from his prime view up in front.

That world shines blue like Earth, with a clear sky you can see through to the storms and clouds, and glimmers of the sea. But our homeworld has no city a tenth the size of Aria. We saw it rise before us as we arrived. Circles, like rings in a tree the size of Britain or Japan. At its core the old town, where they built the dome which used to be the only human part of this planet. And around it, ever larger, ever farther to the curve of the world, the layers of a metropolis beyond anything built any time, anywhere.

“So they say.” Mina waved me to her side. “Aria is growing so fast you can see more branches of the city from here in orbit.”

Aria is at Alpha Centauri because of my future history’s needs. I required a well established outpost by the time that Proteus visits. And I’ve later reasons for this to be an independent world, I shan’t go into soon. With my preferred principle of the ever increasing speed of interstellar travel, I found that the available space was indeed a smaller place, considering what was available “back then”. A nearby neighbour so it was. And Alpha Centauri, for all its binary omens (regards the n-body problem), looks much more Sun-like than the competition.

For now, we cannot see these planets that we discover. It’s all less direct than that. We infer that they are there by their effects on their mother stars. As such, it’s easier for astronomers to find larger planets, or ones close in to the star in question, or indeed both. Our lists are dominated by such examples, unlike any in our family, unless you still hold out hope for Vulcan. I bet this is observation bias, an understandable and quite perennial feature of a technology-limited field like astronomy. So I mean to say I expect a great diversity of extra-solar systems out there, not all of them the spitting image of ours, but not the unrelenting cosmic zoo we’re first finding either.

The fact that Alpha Centauri B holds a planet is grist for my wishful mill. And the fact that we cannot simply see whatever system lies there, at once, is all the better for dream-weavers like me. There’s still a chance I might be right! Oh brother.

We live in interesting times. But dream of so much better.

My model calls.

Gravity rules the universe. Of all the invisible forces of physics, it is the one we see out at large; in its actions. Our gentle course around the Sun is its doing, as is the Moon’s silent hurtle above our heads. Our mutual speed is our saving grace. Gravity would have our worlds collide in ultimate destruction, once again, if it were not for the orbits’ dance. And this is the subject that’s been keeping me in code of late.

My long fascination with astronomy and physics strikes again!

I’m quite chuffed with my recent experiments in simulating gravity. Not the physics, which is pure Newton, but the fact I could get them built and run at all. I can’t pretend to be a great programmer, yet the fact I’m drawn to one of the oldest languages of them all does at least lend a fair bit of speed to the calculation. Brute force, courtesy of Euler, until I get to grips with a better way. Or another yet? Yes, all this would be easier if I didn’t insist on reinventing my every and very own wheel in the process. But this is just how I work, on so many levels.

Technically, all I’ve done is cobble up a simple integrator, pre-loaded with the solar system, as it is now. The fact I could just query a second forward and get acceptable velocities for the bodies involved was music to my ears. Indeed, so far, I’m impressed with the fair accuracy of my rudimentary sim. Made possible thanks to a public wealth of open astronomical code.

Suffice to say, what draws me to simulations of planets, stars and moons, is neither mathematics nor programming, but the chance to play god. Once you have the gears in place, the machine is yours.

Back when I was laying out the physical groundwork for Kai and Andala in the one hand, and Aria and Gaia in the other, I was playing the classical way in bare guesswork. With a little luck, my number machine might confirm what I have arranged already, and, better yet, let me extend it. My desire for scientific credibility is a fine old piece of busywork, when I occasionally remember to indulge it. And when, inevitably, it does come back to bite me, I’ll get another round of practice in the art of the evasive maneuver.

Yes, it’s all been Proteus, lately. Goodness, if that little ploy hasn’t grown to almost fifty chapters already, of a thousand words apiece. Not quite what I had in mind. But I shan’t repeat myself. It’s all good practice.

Instead, some inside details.

First up is quite what I meant in the latest opening:

Our welcome in Ayanakert was good and warm. Tani, our steadfast advocate then and since, caught Akanai’s agile fancy with her grandstand tales and infectious keen. The pair of them shared an instinctive curiosity, in fact, unable to leave a stone unturned once spotted. Not all Andalans, or Ana, are like this; as I’d seen for myself with Tani’s parents. So they have a name for it. Essin. Despite her rural accent and antiquated ways, the king’s household recognised Tani as Essaieen the moment she got him started. I could see it in their cringing eyes. Each spurred on the other.

This is Marie’s first mention of an idea I conjured up a while ago in Dimensions of Identity. I can’t think of a pithy introduction beyond what I wrote then and since. The concept of Essin and its identity as Essaieen is as big a deal to the Ana as good and evil is to us, or indeed possibly even gender. My intuition’s antennae are a-tingle with the possibilities, even if what I’m writing here this moment sounds too nebulous to be of much note. Let’s just say I’m working on this. And that such experiments may very well be what Proteus is for.

Then there are the statues:

“This is Anatai-kalikaleh. Akanai’s aka.” Said Tani of a statue, the first of a crescent in the hall. They were lifesized and really quite exquisitely detailed.
“His mother.” I explained. “She ruled Andala too?”
“Mm.” Said Tani, who began to name all of them. “Ankelika-kalikaleh. Anaster-kalikaleh. Kanekina-kalikaleh. And…” She paused to look back at Akanai, who waved her on. “Ayana-kalikaleh.” Said Tani, in hushed reverence at the smallest statue of the line. Little Tani almost towered over it in comparison. “They’re all women.” Observed Kingston.
“Aye, and they’ve all got the same fashion sense too.” Robin naturally dwelled on the figures lack of clothes.
“Is Akanai the first male to rule Andala?” Mina asked Tani. “The first man?”
“Mm.” She nodded. “Do not hold it up against him.”

They are of course Andala’s rulers, in reverse order back to the first. Kingston raises a good, if obvious, point. Akanai is none other than the first king of the unified tribes. Every chief before him was a queen. Not that we should hold this against him. These are modern times.

As for the statues themselves, I do have something like cult images in mind. What’s good for Sumer is often good for Andala. I’m not sure as yet quite how Akanai fits into his people’s religion, and whether his ancestors are considered godesses as such, or not. But I’m thinking about it, and so a hook left here and there is welcome enough to me.

What’s the deal with those funny numbers?

“Nai-nai-nai-nai?” Asked Akanai. Then his automated translation in our ears. “65,535?” It said, quixotically.
“Marie know number-speak yet?” Asked Tani, who I had not taught our own system.
“Bigger.” I grinned.
“Kaia!” She told him. More.
“Anka-ko-nai!?” Asked Akanai, with a raised brow. “4,294,967,295!?”
“That’s pretty damn specific.” Grumbled Kingston.
“That’s some power ae two. Near enough.” Noted Robin.

Near enough. But the base is 16. Namely hex. Nai-nai-nai-nai is the Anatara equivalent of 0xffff, or 65,535 to those of us who don’t think in bits. Take a guess at what anka-ko might then mean, given Akanai’s second stab amounts to 0xffffffff. Evidently, they have their own kind of scientific notation. Another convenient, if not too egregious, shortcut.

My notes say the actual answer to his question is 14 billion humans on Earth by 2169. And another 2 billion between Aria and Gaia, apparently, which sounds a bit high. Let’s just say Marie was right. Consistency being what matters when you are, of course, making it all up as you go along.

And finally the finale:

I showed Tani my ten digits plus three from my friend, knowing she had no idea what our numbers meant. My translator whispered its guess to me when Mina said, but I wanted to make a point.

“That many ahreni. That’s how long we took to get here from our home.”

She and Akanai looked at us, and eachother, understanding what I’d said but finding it a little hard to believe. Then Akanai muttered something and Tani laughed.

“You are old!” She giggled.
“Tell me aboot it.” Sighed Robin.
“Yes. I suppose we are.” I said. “But don’t hold it against us.”

Mina’s answer is correct. Proteus took six years, or the better part of thirteen ahreni to discover and reach Andala. But I like my tricks, and Tani’s reaction might not be to quite what Marie had in mind.

Why haven’t we kept up in space?

Few must have expected back in 1969 that Apollo was to be our high water mark for the next forty years and counting. Famously, the sixties was a time full of high and mighty ambitions for what was next to come. Looking back, you could well forgive them, the amazing pace the space race kept for that while. But once Kennedy’s finishing line was crossed, the funding dried up on both sides of the Cold War’s divide, and that was the end of that.

This is what happens when the only real money in manned spaceflight comes from governments out to prove a point. They get bored and the whole show winds down to a stop.

Realism challenges me everywhere. I’m writing fiction and can wave the age old magic wand whenever I like, so why should I be bothered about space’s present malaise? Because that is just what I am, that’s all. I want the setting to feel right. Back to Hemingway once again:

When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.

Space will only truly open up when there’s money to be made out there. But based on what?

The age old examples from our previous experiences with new frontiers down on Earth are mining, farming, and building cities. The first thing we tend to do with virgin land is plunder its resources. Minerals are the first to go, and timber, furs and suchlike have built nations in the past. Not to even mention the old tradition of treating native humans in just the same way: potential slaves aplenty. The idea is that first we snatch and grab.

That’s the obvious model for our next steps out in space. Plans to devour the metal cores of asteroids are on the whiteboards where spinning space stations used to be. And I would hardly rule them out, as rare earths and the like are only getting more that way. Eventually. Just like the oil industry is expanding to previously too-exotic sources thanks to rising prices, mining could well move beyond our globe. Though it is but a lonely future landscape it creates, as barely manned as possible.

Next up is farming. Beyond the Earth, this is vastly more involved than merely mining. It essentially assumes terraforming; quite a giant leap again from here. Granted, I already do assume the same in my story: Aria and Gaia are both terraformed by the second half of next century by my timeline. (Beyond “optimistic”, I know.) So I suppose the same could have been going on at a smaller scale for quite some time in my setting. What with domes as the starting point, and ships carrying their gardens. There’s nothing especially novel about it, but that is not what I seek. Rather the other thing.

And, according to my happenstance list, the next stage is building whole societies away from Earth. Those start off, of course, not complete but somewhere on the outer edge. The ideal of space as the final frontier, and being every bit the Western with lawless independence has been around longer than our ability to go. Aria is the prime Earth-away-from-Earth in my book, and its history is not as clean as its latter day rulers would like. But I’m not delving into it right now, or in Alpha proper. That’s a setting I’d like to leave for myself a similar liberty as its settlers, no doubt, aspired to themselves.

By the time of the Proteus mission, let alone Alpha’s start, deep space is well peopled. There’s no doubt that by the time we have made another New World, we will have advanced indeed. Just think for a moment of the effect on all of us the world over if Columbus had got his way and all there was on the other side of the Atlantic was a quicker way to China! Building up new nations, which in turn grow to challenge the old world’s dreams and spur its progress: that’s the good stuff. Marie’s breathless words about Aria as she finds it are but my own in trying to imagine something on the scale of this in my work.

So, by then, we have space aced? In choice locations, at least. There’s still every bit an ocean without a soul to be found the moment you go beyond the places we’ve made our home. Space in my story is not a merry sea in which you’ll bump into other ships every now and then, and pass by ports, friend or foe. The naval idiom has certainly been done its due, and that’s not my handle at all. Void is void, as far as I’m concerned. And its exploration, then, a serious matter with no less a sense of the unknown; but a harsher one.

There’s also tourism as a fourth level, I suppose. Again, dependent on the ease of transit and the existence of enough people to make it worthwhile. Somehow, I don’t think space tourism as we know it now will advance us far. Oh, and before we go anywhere as such, there are also potential kluges for fixing the mess we’ve made in global warming, should push come to shove. Not that this has much relevance for the worlds I’m building here.

Anyway, suffice it to say I’m no wiser than most when it comes to the great question of space exploration: who pays? We’re waiting for a real turnaround for space to draw us back in earnest. Our economy needs to surpass the Earth for us to make it an honest habit. When we do, boy, you can reckon things will be different. Disruption in a word. Just the kind of thing to prove that futurism is indeed a mug’s game, as I too know. Key to all of this is making spaceflight quicker. Space must become a smaller place; to borrow someone’s motto. Moving our scope beyond the solar system is the kind of thing only fiction can think of doing yet. And so I shall. But with a persistent sense that I’m missing something, everywhere I go.

Marie Chen’s final day at Aria. Departure already in progress.

“What do you mean ‘someone has been here’?” Snarled Mina as the captain told us what had happened. “How could they get inside?”

“Same way you did.” Kingston shrugged. “Straight through the hatch.”

“How did they do that?” She pushed me aside to get a close look at the airlock doorway we’d just walked through. It did not look forced.

“We don’t know who they were, what they did or how they did it. Only that they did.” He sighed. ”This here thing just ain’t right.”

I was still wheeling my luggage aboard Proteus as this went on. Mina dropped more bags atop the trolley. Well, half of them were mine as well.

“How did you find out? If you never saw them?”

“We shouldn’t have. But they left a trace on the computer.”

Mina looked alarmed. I didn’t like the sound of this, and kept my mouth shut.

“How much do they know?”

Kingston propped his arms across the console, and his head sank. He whispered something I couldn’t catch.

“See, here’s the thing.” Robin strode in, poking at a pad, almost colliding with me. “They could ‘a hid this.” He glanced up, too close, and smiled. “Sorry, love.”

“They could?”

“Aye, Mina. They done a sloppy job. Or left a calling card in there on purpose.”

“They wanted us to find out?”

I slipped off to my quarters, weary after keeping up with Mina the last few hectic days. None of what was going on made any sense. Standing before my cabin door, my hand hesitated in midair beside the lock. This was still home, wasn’t it? I took a breath and opened up. Carefully, I looked inside.

“But who would it be!?”

“Take a guess, woman!”

I switched through my usual mild lights to the harsh ones. Ouch. No good if I couldn’t see. I bumped them back to usual.

“Guesses will not help us.”

“An’ neither will closing our eyes, will it?”

Nothing looked out of place, from what I could make out at the doorway. To be honest, I left my apartment pretty messy anyway, so it was hard to tell if it had been touched. My stuff was always being rifled through in a hurry, by me.

“What did they get from the system?”

“All’s I know is they left a telltale. They had full access when they were in.”

“Everything!”

“Everything.”

I sneaked about, trying not to make a sound, even though the yelling going on outside made it feel a little dubious. My desk was in an alcove around a corner, and if there was anything disturbed I should spot it there.

“Don’t panic.”

“Aargh!” Kingston really made me jump. I almost flew at him, until I saw his smile.

“Oops. My bad.” He chuckled.

“Good grief. Are we all going crazy?”

“Maybe! Anyway, Chen, there’s no sign they searched through any of our personal stuff.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yeah, I got a few tricks, you see.”

“Tricks?”

Kingston walked me back to the door and ran his finger around the edge.

“Put a little something in the gap when you leave. Then you can tell.”

“You do that?”

“Yeah.” He shuffled nervously. “Old habit, given where I’ve been.”

“Huh.” I was both impressed and a little creeped out.

“If there was a quarters they would raid first, it’d be the captain’s, right?”

“But who were they, Kingston?”

“Someone keen to see how Proteus ticks.”

“Right!”

“And maybe even slow us down a while.”

“Sabotage!?” I leapt again.

“Whoah, Marie. I got Robin looking into it. We ain’t moving till he’s done diagnostics.”

“Wow. I really didn’t sign up for this.”

“Hey, neither did I. But when you got a fast ship, you catch some jealous eyes.”

If there were just one single thing about Kingston, it was his deep resolve. As I looked at him, shaky in the broken comfort of my own apartment, I wondered why he was so calm. He was pretty tightly wound, often times, and it seemed like he should have flown into a rage given what was going on. But no. I envied his composure.

We stayed another day in orbit over Aria, running deep diagnostics and limiting our losses. Nothing physical was stolen. But we could be sure someone had every one of our files. Command would not be pleased, and, anticipating that, the captain put us back on our way before there was time for a reply.

Robin was satisfied our systems did check out and gave the green light a full minute before we were off again. In the back of our minds, though, was the alarming thought that we couldn’t know for certain what went on inside of Proteus while we were away. Anyone sophisticated enough to cut clean through our security could surely wreak untold havoc if they really wanted. The first moment we engaged and safely entered superlight, all four of us heaved a sigh.

“Next time, someone stays here.” Vowed the captain, scowling at Robin only half in jest.

“It’ll no be me!”

“At lifeless planets?” I asked.

Kingston smiled. “Only when we’re sure.”

Again with the foreshadowing. Hopefully I’m not overdoing it, if such a thing is possible, but in this case it’s Marie and she can have her own quota anyway.

So ends the Aria chapter of the flight of Proteus. From here on in: it’s about Andala. (Phew. At last, etc.) The break in does have a background rôle to play a little later, and makes a thematic break from all the recent sightseeing at least. Plus there’s even more foreshadowing with Marie’s cautious searching of the ship. Their arrival at Andala is just as awkward as today’s departure. But I’ll figure out the details when we get there.

See if you can spot the lyric. The events are not related, but I do like the sound of the line and, indeed, the entirety of that earnest and urgent song.

Proteus returns. Marie Chen continues her account of the journey to Andala. Currently at Aria:

We didn’t have long on Aria, and we knew it. Time was still ticking on our race to the Pleiades. Fast as speedy Proteus surely was, we would be aboard her for the most part of several years, with nowhere else to go when between the distant stars. So we had to make the best of our fleeting stay at Aria, as this was the last chance for many things we had.

I’m not sure I could tell you what Aria is all about. “It’s like Earth, only more so”, I’ve heard people say. And I guess it’s true. Certainly, on Aria everything is faster and louder than I’m used to. Even growing up in London, which says something. The heart of town, in the ravines between mountains of buildings, as tall as the sky, is just unbelievable.

“What do you reckon that is?” Mina asked me over coffee in the largest café I’d been to in my life. An artery of traffic pulsed over us in the fishbowl ceiling crowning the amphitheatre.

“Romanian?” We were counting the languages we could hear just from our table in that maniacal space.

“No! You English speakers have not the ear.”

I listened closer to the conversation just along from us. You could see much further than you could hear. “Turkish?” Just another guess.

“Closer.” She turned her pad around to me. “I already know this one. Azeri. Friends of mine spoke it in Iran.”

The screen confirmed her as she said it.

“How many’s that now?”

“Twenty one.”

“Well, no more than you would have heard if we tried this experiment in Tottenham.”

“After a single coffee?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged and put on my Cockney voice: “Easy, if you counted dialects.”

“Australian?” She laughed.

“No! You Persians haven’t the ear.”

Mina and I had already become fast friends, and we were one another’s anchor in our hectic time on Aria, immersed in a world of strangers. Reluctantly, she caved to my excitement for trying out the city’s famous fashion district. For a careful, scientific mind, Mina’s sharp instinct for style was a welcome surprise and better honed than mine. She kept me from my routine mistakes of instant infatuation, and humoured my suggestions for her in return. I was sure she could pull off some extravagance I could not myself. But either her modesty really was so deep, or my plans were as misguided as her wise grin voicelessly described.

Once the Aria Corporation managed to agree who we were, we had no difficulty crossing items from our to-do list. Concerts, comedies, plays and a front row show by the completely preposterous Galla Acrobats kept us busy every evening. By day, we simply wandered about, through that city’s endless serendipity. Sometimes the captain would join the pair of us, but we scarcely saw Robin at all. The boys seemed to relish their freedom from the ship and the rest of the group. We knew where they were, but fortunately, Mina never did pick up any alerts during our time there.

“You know, you’ve only been to half this place if you haven’t been to Gaia.”

I watched as she struggled to stay still as our beautician fussed over her facial at the spa. Mina wasn’t used to this. She was a practical, proudly self sufficient sort who seemed not entirely cosy with comfort. But she was prepared to endure me, and I had to admire her patience. She was to become my guide, that way.

“What should we do there, exactly?”

“Study the people, the ecosystem, the environment. You know: get back into practice.”

“The people? You mean the tribes out there?” I wondered what she was on about.

“There’s always something to be learned from other cultures. Trust me.” She laughed. “Even Britain!”

“Fair enough. But that’s not what we’re up to in the Pleiades.”

“No.” She instinctively replied, just as unaware as I was. “Indulge my interest, though. Besides, you could get a few good pictures.”

Leafing through my photo library now, these years later, I’m glad I was as busy shooting pictures as I was. Not just of Aria’s grandeur, itself now a relic from a misty past like every fleeting yesterday in that place, but of what we would find on Andala. It was my job to make the record, and it was my pleasure long before we knew how significant it would become. Strangely enough, you often find you were preparing for something before you ever knew it would happen. That’s my story, anyway.

So it transpires that I avoided the awkwardness of Aria’s demonym, instead of take it head on. For now at least. I’ve tribesfolk to reach on Gaia, in preparation, just as Marie says, for what’s to come.