Marie reports back to her captain, from the heart of Zuba.

“Well Kingston, I’ve got to tell you,” I grinned into my screen on Bee, “you’ve really missed out.”
“That so?” His little image asked me, alone in the dark.
“For sure. This place, goodness, we really must get you down to Zuba.”
“What they had you doing there anyways, Chen? Seeing as I can’t seem to find your report.”
“This is my report! Come on, Mina and I have been rushed right off our feet all day long.”
“And Tani?”
“She was the one doing it.”
“Makes sense.” He smiled. “Your tag says you covered, what, a dozen klicks every which direction.”
“You know how it is. But all worth it, captain. We’ve found the mother lode here in Zuba.”
“Akanai’s been telling me about that.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he’s fairly talkative without Tani around.”
“Right. About the Azu?”
“Well, really about Megan.”
“Maigan.”
“Uh, yeah.” He laughed. “I oughta know by now.”
“She’s been with us all day, in fact.”
“What do you make of her?”
“Well, everyone knows who she is. I mean she has the key to the city, it feels like. And she’s damn smart, too. So quick. She’s picking up English already, would you believe.”
“I would. Akanai’s pretty sold on her. Says she taught him everything he knows.”
“Like a mother?”
“She kinda was. He lost his the day he was born.”
“Wow.” I stopped in my tracks at the thought. “Tani never knew hers either.”
“Is Mina there?” His eyes twitched side to side, as if my screen would show him anything in the evening dim.
“Oh no, they’re still together. It’s just you and I.”
“How’s she taking it?”
“Mina’s acting a little funny, I’ve got to say.”
“Is she alright?”
“She is now. Initially, she just seemed quite overwhelmed when we arrived here. But over the hours, she’s really gotten close to Maigan. It’s like the two of them are…”
“Are?”
“Well, I don’t know what. They’re just finishing each others thoughts, almost.”
“Interesting.” Pondered Kingston, as he looked away from his screen. “You think that maybe…”
“What?”
“Like how you and Tani are pretty tight. Is it like that?”
“Sure, I guess. Yes!”
“She’s met her first Andalan friend, then. Good for her.”
“I’ll say, Kingston. Maigan’s determined to share her knowledge with us. And, well, Mina…”
“Has changed her tune at last? Let me guess.”
“Perhaps. She’s much more comfortable speaking with Maigan than she is anyone else. If anyone can handle it, I suppose it’s her.”
“Which one are you talking about?”
“Both!”

The orange sun still shone, if only just, back up in Ayanakert. Its shadows reached ever longer across the wall behind the captain, one I recognised from the palace. We talked for quite a while about what we had seen. I told him my impressions of the great Azu city of Zuba in the detail he preferred. Lastly, twilight fell on him as well, as both Andala’s capitals joined in night.

“How long should we stay here, Kingston?”
“Till Proteus can spirit us away back home.”
“No! I mean down here with Maigan.”
“Oh, right.” He smiled. “Been a long day all round, Chen.”
“They always are on Andala.”
“Right enough, I could use a break from this place.”
“We could pick you up and bring you down to Zuba.”
“No, Marie, a break. Like, uh, I don’t know. Just thinking.”

Something about the way he said that reminded me of what had been, until only weeks ago, our mission. We came out to the Pleiades to explore. This we were surely doing, but in a very different way. Our training and our equipment was all for barren worlds, far apart, even in as busy a stellar neighbourhood as this. Proteus was to take us to dozens of stars, the seven sisters themselves included, and yet here we were all tangled up in just one Earth-sized moon. All the worse for Kingston, as he didn’t even have our shuttle nearby to leave Ayanakert. The dark little cabin I sat inside was our only vehicle in the world. Bee couldn’t reach lightspeed, but it could take us to the other planets around Andala’s star if we wanted.

“Yeah, I could see doing that.” He agreed. “Could really use the space. But you know the problem.”
“You wouldn’t need Proteus just for sublight around the system.”
“Maybe not. But think about the comm. Sublight applies there too.”
“You’d be a few lighthours away.”
“Which means real hours. Without a way to respond if and when you need me. No, I’d better stay in touch. Besides, getting Proteus back online is our real priority.”
“I suppose. How’s Robin getting along?”
“Now there’s a question. We’re still limited by secondary radiation aboard Proteus, so we can’t really get to grips with the problem; yet. Let me tell you, I for one will be glad when we can get started. Because, ah, you know how it is.”
“How he is!” I laughed. “What’s he been up to while we’ve been away?”

The captain stared into space, his mouth a little open and sliding to the side. This was not going to be good.

“It’s been a whole I-Year ain’t it?”
“Aieer.”
“A whole goddamn day! He must have given me the slip when we met up with Akanai this morning.”
“His tag says…” I pulled up a map of his whereabouts, using Mina’s medical credentials. “Well, he didn’t leave town at least.”
“Where’s he been?”
“He wandered a fair bit, but has been in the one place for a good few hours now.”
“Copy me his fix. I got a little something in mind for him.”
“Captain, you’d better hold on. The place he’s in…”
“Coordinates!”
“Is the temple.”
“Temple?”
“He’s the first of us to gain entrance. I did ask Tani about it the day we landed, but she couldn’t get permission.”
“What exactly do we know about the joint?”
“Next to nothing. I’ve never been in one anywhere on Andala.”
“Fantastic. And now Robin’s giving his thanks to…” Kingston paused. “What do they call the big man around here?”

Another for the annals of futurism.

Jason Snell wrote a rather nice piece about time-travel induced anachronism; and remembered to include Marty McFly’s astonishing Walkman. John Roderick was on a similar quest to prepare himself for a trip back in time to the 1940s last week. Something about the passing of years puts people in the mood, apparently.

But here’s my favourite, as linked by Snell. Now that we have it, what are we actually doing with our technology?

I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.
I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.

—nuseramed

The dream doesn’t match our reality. The promise of a portable oracle of boundless wisdom was best addressed by that canny bugger Douglas Adams. Information is power. Democratised power like this must surely change our lives. Well, it did, just not quite as expected. We pick our momentary intrigues, be they anonymous and bloodless fights or cat clips, and leave the countless epics just as dry and dusty as they were before. Our universal book is an infinite jest.

I’ve wondered myself about the future of tablets and whether there will be such a separate thing as cameras in the long run. One bias I’ve been making is right there in my choice of setting: centuries out in time and stars away in space. No matter how up to date your computer is at Aria or Andala, you’re still lightyears from the internet.

But in the broader sense of what we’ll use our tech for: there’s surely truth to the apparent, pessimistic view. We aren’t all computing formulae with our computers anymore and we aren’t all scholars on the internet. We’re people, now, too. Our faults and tastes and idle fancies are all included.

So if you’re ever wondering what the people of the future will be up to with their magic, let’s just take a guess. Because if they are anything like us: the answer is entertainment.

Relativity runs against our human intuition. That’s what comes from being raised in a decidedly sub-lightspeed environment. To us, time is a perfect ticking clock that can be heard across the universe. If only it weren’t a fiction. Writing the stuff would be easier for the prickly like of me!

In truth, there is no such thing as universal time (in spite of what we like to call GMT these days), and, all the more bizarre to our senses, there is no such thing as being still either. Everything in time and space is relative, hence the name relativity. “No reference frame is preferred over another”, if I remember my physics right. Einstein worked it out from the speed of light alone.

So, if physics is to be obeyed, interstellar transit and communication go all pear-shaped. It’s superlight or superhuman lengths of time, I’m afraid. A choice between breaking spacetime or making androids of ourselves for epic journeys torn from history at both ends? Yikes. The latter can wait another creation.

Where it does meet with my book, though, is in the sublight era, when Aria is first established. I’ve set that up to be a passing phase, with G-Ship runs to only the closest stars, or for all we know. The fact that time dilation slows down the experience of high sublight speed travellers as it does, makes them into time travellers from our perspective. Indeed that was the basis of a little something called The Planet of the Apes, though why they were confused at where, not when, they were remains a mystery to me until I read the original. Let’s just say I’m not ruling out undiscovered or, rather, “uncontacted” relics from that age in Alpha’s time. But I digress.

The real point is that communication is not instant anywhere beyond a trivial distance in space. Before the superlight breakthrough it really was a matter of four years and four months to be heard on Aria. Double for the return. And even after, there is no such thing as the realtime simultaneity we assume in the Internet as well as between ourselves in words. Every place is its own time. You can cheat a bit by sending physical packets along the network, a sneakernet contraption we see in action in Alpha’s day, but it’s never as fast as people want. After all, wherever would we be if we were sated?

Aria has enough time in the early slowpoke age to have plenty of space to develop its own culture and personality. Like the Atlantic crossings of old, which were slow and difficult enough to ensure an imperfect imprint of Europe on the Americas. I’ve quite a bit in mind for Aria and the rôle it might play, so this is an important note. Here’s a hint: imagine a single city of a billion souls.

The story Alpha is about, meanwhile, is that other clashing of distant worlds: mankind and Andala. The fact we’re ever closer, ever faster, is not lost there.

If there’s a transformation underway right now, it’s surely the internet. We’re so used to the web and apps and all the rest of it, wherever and whenever we want, that network access has become a modern lifeline. I’m hardly the first to point out just how redundant so many old plots become the moment you allow for a mobile telephone. Telecommunication has taken a driving rôle in social progress for well over a century now, and that vector is far from over yet.

But out in space you’re forever up against the speed of light.

President Nixon discovered this in his “phone call” to the Apollo 11 astronauts when they were safely on the Moon. Our closest neighbour of all is still more than a second away at the speed of light, which made Nixon’s conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin an awkward and uncanny affair. Naturally, we assume people can hear us immediately, and any delay in their answer takes on meaning of its own. In the decades since, as satellite feeds have become commonplace on news shows with live interviewees at purposefully far-flung locations, we’ve all become a little more used to the relativity of time; though as often as not one of the talkers still fumbles. Now just imagine what a difference a lag made of years makes.

Until we’ve some way to travel faster than light, the internet must remain an Earthbound institution. (We can just about include the Moon on a practical basis, but the planets are minutes or hours away. It gets more like sneakernet than a realtime network.) I can only imagine what a separation of four years would be like. Indeed, it is the underlying origin of Aria.

Long before Alpha, and before Proteus too, there was an age when interstellar flight was a “sublight” affair. The era of the G-Ship. Aria was settled during this period, and developed a distinct culture of its own through its remoteness from Earth. Unlike Andala, with its indigenous ways, Aria is a New World, very much informed by its settlers backgrounds from their old countries on Earth.

But once superlight travel comes about, space really does become a smaller place. Communication becomes possible between Earth, Aria and Andala at far more acceptable speeds to we of instantaneous tastes. The way this is done is via that very same technology. Rather than beaming signals faster than light themselves, I have a hankering for something the vague like of a past age even to our ancient selves in the living present. Sneakernet lives at superlight speed! A system I shall conjure up in a bit.