Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Mouth throat lips lungs tongue

sentence syllables silent

Paws scrawl laser words

_____

Once, a long time ago, I had a plan. And in my opinion, it was a pretty damn good plan, too. Didnt work, but that was only partially my fault. Most of my plans are like that.

To explain this plan, were going to need to go on a tangent. Wait, you say, no longer so foolish that you think you can talk to me, but still reflexively talking to yourself, Lily, you just started. Is it really time for a tangent?

You fool. You lack *vision*. It is *always* time for tangents.

The history of the Sol System, and Earth specifically, is kind of spotty. I can tell you, with reasonable accuracy, what years things happened in, up until about the mid 1900s. Or at least, I can tell you what year historians decided things happened, and kept writing down. After that, things get iffy, and its mostly because humans suck, but also partially for other, worse reasons. And what I can tell you about even recent history right before my birth is more or less a guessing game.

I can tell you that around the year 2130, there was either a religious or social movement to reject the concept of truth, which took off, and led to the purposeful obfuscation of a lot of records. I can tell you that in the mid 50s, a mutating strain of loose code deleted several online libraries, causing further problems. I can also tell you that by the turn of the century, at least one nation was actively trying to suppress knowledge of what year it was, either for political reasons, or because it was a prank that went way too far.

I was born in, if I remember properly, year twenty eight, of circumstance four. I do not know how long after stable history this momentous event happened, and I dont remember where my home was. Or rather, I dont think I was ever told. Different cultures, cities, even households, use different ways of tracking the number of the year.

Add to that the fact that at least one emergence event brought in an invasive species that instinctually zeros in on high concentrations of organized information and then explodes, and the picture of the chaos starts to come into scale.

And if you think this is confusing now, bear in mind Im telling you this after Ive spent centuries trying to recreate a timeline of events.

I cannot. I just fucking cant. I can tell you that the Worshiper Wars happened, but I dont know if they occurred before, or after, my own home station was launched. I know at one point humans were building spaceships, but I dont know the ebb and flow of development, or when it stopped. And I can tell you the population of Earth is at about a billion and a half sophonts, but I have no idea if that is a historic high or a dangerous low.

Now. The surface of the planet is hospitable for humanity and the few other sophont races they share the ball of dirt with. But depending on what region youre in, your lifestyle is going to shift dramatically, and a large part of that is the lack of any kind of central information repository like the internet or the overlink used to be. They just dont exist anymore.

But a lot of technology was built to *last*. And last it has, especially when communities have sprung up around still functional factories or hospitals, turning golden age miracles into modern centers of commerce and culture. This is how you end up with farming village where only one person knows how to make nails, but everyone has a holophone.

Now. This station comes from one of those golden ages, and I suspect part of the reason so many different polities occupied it over the years was because they were hoping it had complete copies of old archives. No such luck, sadly, but the station does have some pretty massive databanks that are largely empty. And the added pieces accumulated over the last half milinnium have only made that capacity greater. So while it doesnt have the easy answers, it *does* have the scanner power, and *occasional* acceptance of automating systems, to let me start to rebuild that archive. Either by making records of oral histories as they are spoken, digitizing books when theyre read slowly, outside, and at the right angle, or just tracking statistics and trying to extrapolate backward.

Then its up to me to filter out the lies, inaccuracies, half-truths, and bedtime stories from whats real. And let me tell you, that is harder than you might think. Im not omnipresent, and the bedtime story part alone is a massive headache. What if there *is* some eight legged black furred child eating cow thing nearby? Im *positive* Ive bombed an emergence that spawned those once; its not impossible that one survived, made it halfway across the planet, and set up outside this village!

Took me three weeks of stationary orbit to find it, turn it into charcoal, and mark that bedtime story as inaccurate.

You know, I could almost smell it cooking when I hit it with the void beam? After all the fur got torched off, I bet it would have been *so* delicious for a half second before it burned.

Im getting off track. Even farther, somehow.

Earth. I wanted to talk about how people live.

I dont know how we got here, exactly, but I do know that most people dont live in cities. There *are* cities, but aside from the one sleeping automaton in the rainforest, and Melbourne, there arent a lot of high tech cities with things like integrated utilities.

Anyway. The kid had gotten this old good luck charm. I had already written in my head an expansive fanfic of this interaction. And then, hed done what the merchant had said; held it close and told it his problems.

His main problem was that there was a monster that lived outside the town. His main good luck was that his home was at the very top of an old residential skyscraper, higher up than the merchant had ever taken his little charm. And the random chance that set off todays bombardment was that the charm itself was an Oceanic Anarchy emergency call beacon.

Hell, maybe the height didnt matter. Maybe it was just that I happened to be overhead when he hit the button. But the young bird *had* hit the button, and I *had* heard about this beast that was tormenting their town.

And, naturally, I had scanned the area, found it, confirmed what it was, and blew it up.

The next two calls were from adults. The good luck charm was now a little more than a childs good luck. Two more problems were identified, and handled. The kid was now a hero, the one whod found the magical device that had saved more people than hed ever met.

But my orbit wasnt going to keep me here. I wouldnt always be around. Which was why Id told the station to hold us here as long as was safe from the mess of debris around us, and taken the time to load into my armored suit.

It made it a lot easier to draw with the laser cannons.

Before I floated on, I put to use a lot of that knowledge of societies, mythologies, and languages that Id picked up all those years ago. I had a hard time forgetting anything, but I might have been out of practice. So, what they got was a cliff face near them, etched with a four panel comic, written in high intensity light.

I wont always be here. Was the meaning I put into it. But Ill listen if I can.

The whole village had, in the last hours before I shifted position, turned out to see what Id made for them. And through the emergency broadcast link, a few hundred avian voices had in unison thanked me, whatever kind of god I might be.

Even if I had to get the translator to help me understand their language, it still almost made me cry.

*Wait*. Did they say god?

I double checked the translation. Then checked to see when Id next be in range to doodle a correction to their new religion on a different available rock. Three weeks, with my current off-kilter orbit, assuming no distractions. That would be fine, right? There wasnt too much trouble that could happen in

Mmh. Not gonna finish that thought.

I disengaged the laser batteries and mewed a sigh into my suits helmet. I was still armored, and I needed to get out of this and get back to my chores. I had a dozen maintenance bots to activate within the next three hours, before we passed by an old UCRS war cruiser that still showed signs of having live point defense weapons. And I was sure I was going to either shoot it, or grab it and weld the guns to the outside of my home. If I was very lucky, the power source would be live, and long term usable too. And then, later, Haze management. And then a check in with something weird going on on the primary moon. And then another local scan for any operational satellites. And then. ugh, so much to do. Id wasted too much time. There was barely any moment scheduled for sun naps.

But as long as I was headed for the drone bay, and had better paw control

Maybe a short divergence to send a letter to Glitter. Tell them how my day was going. I had an amused suspicion that theyd have some choice words to say about my newfound divinity.

The quiet days were gone.

Maybe I missed them.

But the quiet days had never had *friends*.

So maybe I didnt miss them too much.

Armored drone servos whined to life as I kicked off a bulkhead, and rocketed at normally lethal speeds down a service corridor, trusting the suits reflexes to safely turn me down the corner at the end. And when the absolutely unsurprising station proximity alarm blared to life, this time, I sung along with it.

The quiet days were boring anyway.