Hustling Through the Dark

By DataPacRat

Vlog #1

"Is this thing on? Okay, good.

"Hello, world. My new advertising manager says that vlogging is charmingly nostalgic, and that it works well with my general out-of-touch-ness in a way that's likely to improve our metrics, so here I am.

"You can call me Dee. You can call me anything you want to, really, but I'm most likely to respond to that. I'm getting ready to go on a year-long solo trip, which has somehow turned into a whole Thing beyond my original modest plans. I was just going to salvage some defunct hardware at the Seventy Ophiuchi gravitational-lens relay, which should have provided a somewhat better return than I'd get through my usual local-space work; but now apparently I'm in some sort of race? When I found out someone else had heard enough of my plan to figure it out, and were getting ready to try to get there ahead of me, I went over to have a chat to see if there was some amicable way for us to cooperate and split the profits, instead of each of us trying to keep the other from getting any return at all. But that meeting leaked, and then complicated stuff happened that I'm still trying to figure out, and now Francesca - that's my ad agent - says that we're going to at least cover our nut just by competing, and if I actually win, so much the better.

"Part of the whole process is to try to solicit crowdfunding, so, er, please subscribe and donate?

"I'm supposed to tell you as much about myself as I feel comfortable with, to entice both the potential donors who sympathize and identify enough with me to join in, and those who find me freakishly foreign and alien and want to watch ironically, or hate-watch me, or the like. I personally don't really want to encourage the latter, but Francesca is of the opinion that a subscription's a subscription, and I didn't hire her to ignore her expertise and advice. We're still getting a feel for each other, but she's got a good sense of my boundaries already, so I think it'll work out.

"So. As you can see, I'm a member of the 'furry' affinity group, with a preference for rodents. If you're just listening to the audio or reading the transcript, that means that I'm a person whose body has been altered to have a lot of animalistic features, including a rat-like head, fur, and paws. You'll also notice that I'm not a purist to the theme, given I've also got feathery wings and a snake for a tail. I'm not particularly complicated; I like flying, and having an extra pair of eyes is more than worth the trouble it took to get them.

"A detail of my lifestyle that seems to surprise everyone I meet even more than my appearance is how straight-laced I am. I don't do anything related to tulpamancy, mask-living, or any of the related terms involving having more than one personality or perspective in my head. The only individual running inside my skull is me - and, if you want to count it, Cee, my nonsapient AI secretary-slash-psychotherapist. I find the current era's predilection with such exercises both confusing and apparently pointless, which I suppose confirms my status as an old fogey. I suppose I'd call myself a greymuzzle, if I hadn't already gone for albino-labrat white fur. I've been living in this era for almost six years now, so I've had plenty of exposure to people extolling the virtues of all sorts of variants of the idea, and if I haven't been convinced yet, I don't expect to be. I'm quite satisfied being just me. Oh, and since it usually also creeps into such conversations, I also don't drink, smoke, or use recreational drugs. I do occasionally use caffeine, or its equivalent, when I'm in the middle of a work-binge that I think it's worth staying up late for, but I'm not habituated to it. I also don't use any of the software versions of the same.

"Sorry, I meant to mention earlier - I'm a revival, a software emulation of my original biological brain. There's a computer inside my skull - er, skulls, including my tail's snakey head - that my mind runs on. I also have no interest in joining any of the fast-time virtual realms that so many other software people seem to prefer. As one authour once put it, I like always knowing where my off-switch is, and having control over it. So I chose to stick with living in biological society.

"Hm, let's see... I was born in the late twentieth century, died in the early twenty-first, and made arrangements to be cryopreserved. I wasn't rich, and wasn't able to sock anything away in a trust fund to pay for my revival; so to increase the odds I'd make it back, I volunteered to be an experimental subject, given certain preconditions, like the tech working on chimpanzees. So they tried dicing my brain and scanning it before almost anyone else was brought back, but apparently there were some issues, and they weren't able to actually bring me-the-person back into existence. But the data was useful; I'm told that some scans of a few tiny bits of my brain were used as the basis for some fundamental pieces of software that are used by almost every revival. And they kept plenty of backups of the scans. Six years ago, there was a nice confluence, in that there was both a breakthrough in algorithmic techniques and the uncovery of a trove of data from my original lifetime useful for reconstruction... and those were enough to apply to my brain-scans to create a software version of me with sufficient fidelity to the original. So, here I am; or, rather, there I was.

"Fortunately for me, while I was dead, you folk managed to get your political act together enough that I had a Basic Guaranteed Income available to cover my living expenses; and there were enough other revivals around to help cover the unusual expenses that our kind of person finds ourselves faced with. So after, hm, what was it, about nine months or so, I was able to afford to get myself a body made. For legal reasons that I'm in no way competent to explain in detail, it had to start out as a clone of my original body, but I was able to pay for a few enhancements. Not the wings or tail - I bought those upgrades later - but a change to my preferred gender, the decorative furry features, plus a few deeper ones that aren't so visible. For example, there's a bottle of compressed oxygen below my left lung, there's some reinforcement under my skin, and I have nictitating membranes and sealable orifices; I'm fully vacuum-rated for three hours, without needing any sort of suit. I still wear a vacc-suit whenever I'm working, but it's nice to know if something bad happens to a ship I'm in, I can take the time to deal with emergency procedures properly, instead of hurrying so fast I do something wrong that makes things worse. I've also got an enhanced sensorium; I can see a wider range of colours, I can echolocate, and a few things like that. A good portion of the nine-month period I spent in virtual space was me getting my mind used to such things, without resorting to crude direct mental editing.

"Once I was comfortably myself, able to walk around without needing a body that wasn't really one I wanted to live in, I enrolled in school. I went for a two-year certificate program; which, with modern pedagogical techniques, is at least equivalent to a four-year post-secondary program from my time. Oh, that's also when I immigrated up here to Insulo Tri - I actually had my body grown and assembled here. I was filling a lot of my dreams at once; living in orbit, having a female body, having a body I didn't dislike, being able to afford tuition without taking out ruinous loans... I hate to say 'back in my day'... okay, that's not true, I've been saying it often enough I almost certainly do it because I get a kick out of it. But back in my day, none of those could be taken as a given, and few people these days think about what a luxury they are. My therapist says that some of my habits are still based on me not trusting that they're going to be guaranteed, but since those habits aren't maladaptive and I don't mind them, there's no harm in them.

"So, after graduating and getting my first set of certifications, I went on to the next stage of my long-term plan; moving from just living and learning in space, to working in it. I found employment in various places - orbital transfer vehicles, lunar landers, Earth-to-orbit craft, anything that gave me experience on actual spacecraft, and counted as time-served for the upgrades to my certifications as a mate. Took me three years until I qualified as being a captain instead of an officer or crew. I know the timing there's wonky, given how much trust has to be put in someone running even the tiniest ship with a horizon drive; but since I lived most of my life long before the levels of surveillance and sousveillance you've got now became commonplace, and I've got a digital brain that can be poked and prodded at if I give permission, I ended up in a weird corner of the trust-metric algorithms. My worst-case predictions aren't any worse than any other captain's, and my average-case metrics are slightly above average, so here I am.

"I'm going to save my work-life for the next vlog, so I think that covers just about everything... Francesca, are we taking any questions? We are? Okay, hit me.

"Of course, we have to get that one out of the way first. No, just because I spent a lot of time amongst furries doesn't mean I participate in a lot of orgies. I consider my sex life to be a private matter, and have no intention of discussing any details about it. If it makes any difference, I also spend a lot of time amongst members of the 'cyborg' affinity group, and that's not really the first topic most people want to ask them, is it?

"Ah! Something more sensible. You're right, my wings aren't nearly large enough to take off with, in Earth-normal gravity and air-pressure. Fortunately, Insulo Tri is a cylinder hab, and close to either cylinder's axis, the effective gravity is more than low enough to let me flap around; and I'm just capable of gliding down to a landing without breaking anything important, as long as I'm careful.

"Hm, this one's a little complicated. Mostly, I treat my tail as a limb, and route its senses to my main brain. But that's not the only thing I do with it. Because of the laws that sprang out of the em-pocalypse, I'm not allowed to have more than one copy of my mind running at a time; but I'm completely allowed to keep a continually-updated backup copy of my mindstate stored in my tail's computer. It's treated the same as keeping a backup copy on a computer at home, or a storage server on another planet, or anywhere else. And if something does happen to my main body's brain-computer, my snake-tail's brain-computer can take over running things. There's still just the one of me, but I'm as close to being bi-located as it's legal to be. All that being said - it's also possible for other digital people to be housed in my snake-tail. Sometimes I move Cee, my AI, into control of it, if I need the extra perspective or focus. Not too many others are interested in being a limbless body attached to someone else's rear end, and of those, even fewer are individuals I want to have control of even that much of my body. I have tried it, and without violating any confidences, I can say that everyone involved decided it shouldn't be made into a permanent lifestyle choice.

"Yes, I do more exercise than flying. I do bodyweight exercises, I run, I swim, I fence singlestick... and I see a sudden bunch of questions from that. When I found out that the Olympics brought back singlestick fencing in twenty-one oh-four, I was curious, and tried out a few lessons, then just kept it up. Due to all the tweaks to my body, I'm disqualified from most official competitions; and even if I were allowed, I'm sufficiently terrible that I wouldn't qualify to attend anyway. But it's fun, and the benefits more than outweigh the costs.

"No, I don't make enough to afford my own apartment. Or, if you prefer, I technically do, but salvage rates are inconsistent enough that I don't make enough to reliably keep up rent and loan payments. I currently have one roommate, who gave me permission to mention her. She goes by Sparks, and is easy to recognize as the only turquoise-dyed camel-based furry in the area. She takes commissions for custom nonhuman clothing; if you've got a nonstandard set of limbs, feel free to get in touch with her. Yes, that plug was why she gave me permission.

"Ah, I see somebody's been googling me. Yes, I've been in more than one court case since I died. There were a few hearings shortly after my successful revival, mostly to double-check that I was really me. After that, the first one was, hm, that would've been my third day of classes, when another student, who was under the impression that having fur meant I was subhuman and an acceptable sexual target, assaulted me. Oh, Francesca just let me know she wants to roll a clip."

"Feel free to file charges; I already have. In case you weren't paying attention, when I said 'strike one', I started forwarding video to your parents. When I said 'strike two', I started forwarding to the school's administration and your fraternity's honour court. When you grabbed me - by the way, my medical AI says that I'm going to bruise - I called the cops while I defended myself. Before you try standing back up, you might want to call your family lawyer. Oh, and for your information, I only consider an apology to be acceptable if it includes an acknowledgement that you did something wrong, identifies what that wrong thing was, describes how you're going to try to make up the harm you did, and mentions what you're going to change about your life to keep from doing the wrong thing again in the future."

"So, yeah, that was an unpleasant moment. You can find the video of the full incident, including his swearing at me both before and after I knocked him onto his butt, if you look, but I don't feel any urge to spread that kind of language. I'm not completely happy with the actions I made, and since then I've tried to work out alternatives I could have chosen that didn't involve him causing further harm to me, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty. But I keep coming back to the thought that if that's how he chose to treat me, how might he treat other people, who might have taken fewer self-defense classes? I honestly don't know what he was thinking; maybe I was the first heavily-modified person he'd met, so he didn't care what he was videoed doing to me? I never did get an apology from him; the last I heard, he'd moved to Luna. Tycho, I think, but I didn't bother making a note.

"Other than that, mostly my legal troubles haven't been mine, but me getting caught up in my employers'. Trying to slide through inspections, skirting labour laws, even a trademark dispute. I did my best to try to stick within both the letter and spirit of whatever laws applied - and apparently I did well enough at that for my trust-metrics to let me get my captaincy pretty quickly.

"What's next... no, my limbs don't come off. My arms and legs are made of the same squishy meat as my torso. Why would anyone even ask that?

"Okay... Well, I'll get more into that next vlog, but in short, it turns out I'm terrible at marketing myself. I maintain a web one-point-oh personal website with associated email, I keep up with whatever comm methods my job demands, and Francesca is completely revamping my online business presence.

"I think that's a good-sized video for today; be sure to come back next time, when I'll introduce you to Pumpkin."

Vlog #2

"Hello again, everyone, and allow me to introduce you to Pumpkin.

"There are only so many orange-ish things to name a tug after. She's a good little ship, so my first choice was to name her 'Lollipop', but that was already taken. I thought about calling her Venus, but I knew I'd never be able to live up to the one fabled in song and story. So I decided the most important fact about her was that I was going to turn her into a fine carriage.

"I've got her parked out in the open so we can get a good look at her as I walk around - and so I can do a few pre-trip tweaks a bit more easily - but she spends almost all of her time in vacuum. She's fully atmospheric-flight capable; in Earth-standard conditions, with her wings spread, her stall speed is just one-eighty KPH; though she's a bit sluggish on the ground, and needs twelve hundred sixty metres to get up to that. Once in the air, though, with her wings swept back, she can hit Mach one point four seven at sea-level density... and since she uses a horizon drive, which doesn't depend on an air intake, she can fly all the way up to orbital speeds.

"She can make it almost anywhere in the Solar system, too. She's got insulation and heat-radiators good enough for Mercury - though since that planet doesn't have an atmosphere, she'd need a booster to land or take-off. And she's rated for a minimum of one point six bars of pressure, and can handle up to twice that if I don't mind voiding my warranty; good enough for Titan, the aerostat colonies on Venus, and the uppermost parts of the gas giants. Heck, strap a few tons of ice or rock in front of her for ablation, and she could even make it to Alpha Centauri in just a few decades.

"Not that I get much of a chance to take her out of Earth-Luna space. Even with all the subsidies I could arrange for, and having saved up years for a down payment, and having bought her used for not much more than scrap price, I still had to mortgage myself up to my eyeballs, and I'm going to be paying down that mortgage for the next twelve years. Unless I don't, in which case I expect to be bankrupt and back to driving other peoples' ships until I can improve my credit rating again.

"So here we are, back around the front again. I don't usually keep the pointy nose bit in place, since it's only good for atmo flying, so let me just send the command to Cindy to get that folded away. Cinderella's her autopilot AI, by the way. And here's the main airlock and entrance. It's also got the mountings, cradles, and other fittings to push against any cargo that doesn't fit inside. Her main drive provides eighteen kilonewtons of thrust, which is enough to provide a fifth of a gravity of acceleration with a standard cargo load - that's around ten tons, gross weight - but away from a planetary surface, thrust is thrust, so she can push hundred-ton weights as easily as ten-ton ones. Just, you know, more slowly.

"Getting up closer, you can see some of the layers of her hull. Over on the wings, and on top of the body, you can see some of her heat radiators, which need a clear path to empty space. Over the rest of her is a Whipple shield, a couple of layers of thin material with gaps between them; they're so that any tiny micrometeor or bit of space junk hits the outer layer and turns into a harmless plasma, instead of punching right through. Below that is the main protective and structural layer, eight millimeters of that mostly-carbon wundermaterial that's got a complicated scientific name, a slightly-less-complicated trademarked name, and that everyone just calls 'diamondoid'. Under that is five millimeters of insulation, mostly aerogel; then a Faraday cage mesh, to help isolate the interior from weird and unexpected EM fields; then a thin layer of barely-hardened goop with encapsulated other-goop, which automatically oozes, spreads, and hardens if any holes do get punched through.

"And here we are in the airlock. Officially big enough for three people, one of whom is in a stretcher. Her model was originally designed to be a space-ambulance, one cheap enough to be bought by any and every habitat and colony. Caldwell Aerospace was able to pack a heck of a lot into her while keeping the price under a million euro... if you're not familiar, even a one-man workpod is usually over three million euro, and the Mercury-class spaceplanes, lifting six-hundred-thirty tons of cargo, are fifteen million. And prices just go up from there. Anyway, when ISRO, the international space rescue organization, got their act together, including full-fledged dropships that had better acceleration, could reach anywhere in Earth-Luna space in a jiffy, and had enough rescue stations to be able to take advantage of economies of scale, the market for super-cheap ambulances dried up. Caldwell tried rebranding the line as simple, cheap orbital transfer vehicles, but the tradeoffs they'd had to make meant the model wasn't popular, so you can mostly find Pumpkin's sisters' hulls in scrapyards. That is, in fact, where I found Pumpkin herself. And, fortunately for me, I'm enough of an outlier that I'd made a variety of business notes to take advantage of my particular oddities, and when I added some notes to my spreadsheets on Pumpkin's capabilities and the price she was being offered at, out popped a business plan, ready to go. Mind you, it took me another two years before some other necessary prerequisites of that plan were also ready, but here we are.

"Here, just past the airlock, and 'up' while Pumpkin's sitting on her wheels in gravity, is the cockpit. I don't actually need to be in this control station to pilot her, but the insurance company insists on keeping at least one dedicated control interface location, and I agree with them. One of my philosophies is that it's impossible to have too many backups, just backups that you can't afford. So the main computer is here, there's safety harnesses and other crash-survival features, a full day's worth of bottled air with independent environmental control, and displays that directly funnel Pumpkin's radar, lidar, passive opticals, comms, and internal status displays. Oh, and in case the cockpit gets knocked out, over in Engineering is the backup computer, and hardline links to the backup sensors and comms. And if even that gets eliminated, by a hacker or virus or something, Pumpkin's engine can be run in a brain-dead, point-and-go-thataway method; I've gone through the extra-credit courses for navigating with my naked eye. And if the main drive's destroyed, I have a small backup drive. And two backup power-supplies good enough to run that backup drive if the main plant goes out. And if somehow all of the above gets knocked out, I've got enough life-support to last me a good long while, and I know how to build a directional radio from scratch and scream for help. And if enough of the ship is scrapped so even that's not possible, I'm pretty sure my own body and brain-computer are also going to have been reduced to atoms - and I've got multiple backups of my mindstate spread across a variety of locations. Security by obscurity may not be very much security, but I think you'll understand if I still don't actually describe where all of those backups are.

"Going back down, behind the cockpit is my main living area. I've pretty much stripped this section down to the hull and rebuilt it, since I spend a lot of my time actually living here, instead of rushing to somewhere that needs an ambulance and then to somewhere with a hospital. Two bunks with smart mattresses, two independent air- and water-recycling plants, the secondary backup horizon generator, galley, shower, toilet, laundry... I splurged on the mass for a water-tank big enough to take actual hot baths in. If you've never spent much time in an RV, or in space, you might not believe how luxurious that feels. And in a spacecraft, it can be handy having some extra water to pump around - it can be used for makeshift shielding, or coolant, or even last-ditch emergency reaction-mass. Almost every surface is covered with display-screen; I know that I could just apply augmented-reality inside my own head to produce the same effect for me, and I'm almost always the only one here, but the screens inflict the tiniest of mass-penalty, and mostly came along with the fittings when I did the refurb.

"Not all the fittings are standard; over around the bunks, here, you'll see some weird wiring-looking stuff. That's some hand-built magnetic-field waveguides, to help reduce the radiation when I'm in the bunk. It's not as effective as a standard storm-shelter, but most of those shelters use enough water that the shelter alone outmasses Pumpkin. And since I don't usually get closer to the Sun than here, and there's usually good warning of solar flares before they arrive, and one of the upgrades I ordered when my body was built was the standard set of DNA hardening and repair upgrades, I don't pick up any more radiation than my body can handle. The fact that I can get away without a storm-shelter is one of the reasons I can make a profit with Pumpkin, and just about everyone else wouldn't even try to.

"Over here is the exercise-equipment nook; my muscles and bones might not atrophy in microgravity the way a baseline human's would, but I still like keeping up my strength. And just opposite it is a new addition, the relaxation nook. I'm going to be spending a year or so inside this tin can, and maintaining my mental health is going to be a non-trivial task. So I spent about twice my body-weight on games, toys, bonsai tools, a selection of items that are supposed to improve the quality of meditation, and other hobby gear. If I want to try taking up juggling, or calligraphy, or magic tricks, I'm all set. I thought about getting a small pet, but decided that I wouldn't want to have to deal with being depressed if it died while I was farther from Earth than Pluto. But a couple of small cactuses should survive even my extremely non-green thumbs, and I've got some seeds for a few plants some of my friends have recommended. And I've got a few small musical instruments that I've kept meaning to learn, since not everybody appreciates the one I can already play, a harmonica.

"Moving back out... welp, looks like it's time to introduce you to Huey, Dewey, and Louie. If you know your classic cinema, you'll recognize them as red, green, and blue recolours of Wall-E, a classic fictional robot. There was a small fad twenty years back for making real robots out of stories, but then they became passé, so I picked up their frames from another junkyard for a song. And then put in a bunch of sweat equity to make them actually useful. I took out their trash-compactors, and built some modular units to fit in its place. Usually, Huey's got the emergency and first-aid module, which can unfold some extra arms with medical tools and scanners; he's also got a fire extinguisher, six hours of air, a few other gadgets, and I squeezed in the tiniest horizon drive I could get with some extra batteries, so he could move around in freefall. Dewey's module is a lot simpler to describe, even if it was just as hard to figure out how to assemble - he's the walking toolbox, with everything I could think of to fit in that helps me while I'm trying to salvage or repair something. Louie's got another horizon thruster, and as wide a variety of sensors and scanners as I could afford and fit in. Honestly, the three of them together could just about do all the physical parts of my job as a vacuum cleaner all on their own; fortunately for my sense of self-esteem, even after I upgraded their CPUs for something modern, without an actual person directing them, they're no smarter than any other robotic drone.

"Leaving those three to keep recharging, we've got ourselves the ship's medical bay, which I've left pretty much untouched from Pumpkin's original design. Just because my brain's a computer and my body was built from cloned tissue cultures doesn't mean I enjoy getting hurt, and I spend a lot of my time hours, or longer, away from the nearest hospital. I couldn't afford an actual cyber-doc, but this nook's got everything needed to act as a surgical theatre, and I paid for the best medical AI that'd fit inside Huey's RAM.

"Moving back past the safety bulkhead, we're in what I've usually been using as a cargo bay, but I've been filling up with gear in preparation for the trip. Three hundred fifty kilos of tools, a one-eighty kilo clothing fabricator that can make anything from a bullet-proof bikini to a full-fledged vacc-suit - I bought it more for the latter - a one-fifty kilo biosynthesis station that can produce just about any organic goops I might need, including glues, soaps, aspirin, vitamins, and a variety of carbon compounds that various parts of the ship are made of. And the fabber station, with the multi-material three-D printers to turn feedstocks into any replacement parts.

"Back past them is what I suppose still counts as a cargo hold. Various kinds of feedstock, including printed parts, sheet metal, circuit boards, raw chemicals, liquid plastics, epoxies, metal powders, and a selection of flat fabrics. A year's worth of meal-packs, which are a lot tastier than what comes out of the food-fac. Ah, and here's my personal gear for when I'm working - vaccsuit, toolsnake, wrist-tool, rocket broomstick, and other such things.

"Moving through the pressure hatch, we find ourselves in the engineering section. The one point two megawatt fusor and the point-two gee main drive are stock designs; I installed the primary backup horizon generator and the backup drive. If main power's out, the backup generator can only energize the main drive at one-tenth output, one fiftieth of a gee instead of one-fifth. And if the main drive itself is out, or if main and primary backup power is out, the backup drive only provides a thousandth of a gee. I would literally get more acceleration if I had Huey and Louie get out and push... but if things ever get bad enough, a thousandth of a gee can be infinitely better than no gees at all.

"And we're at the stern, so now you've seen what's going to be my home for the next year. Oh, hold on, I just got a text that I forgot to mention one thing - Pumpkin is, in fact, equipped with a couple of anti-micrometeor defense lasers. One emitter's on the port hull, one on starboard, and either one can draw up to sixty kilowatts of power. They're only around fifty percent efficient, the rest of the power ending up as heat that has to be radiated away; but any would-be impactor that's small enough to creep up dangerously close to Pumpkin before being detected, either one is more than powerful enough to vaporize. The larger bits, it's easy enough to dodge by flipping the engine's power for a few seconds. I'll be doing a bit of rebuilding on these during the trip; the threat-profile from dust-grains while I'm in Earth-orbital space isn't quite the same as when I'm two hundred seventy-five AU away, at a peak of around four percent lightspeed.

"I should also point out that there are a few things I'm not bringing. I'm going to be going hundreds of AU out, far beyond the reach of the Ríos de Luz network; so I'm going to be saving a bit of space and mass by leaving behind my optical gear. I know that a laser-entrained aerosol lens doesn't weigh very much, and I'm going to be spending a few weeks of the trip close enough to get some megawatts of tightly-focused solar power aimed my way if I ask; but I can't think of anything I'd use it for. I'm not going to be melting hardware, or ablating one side of something to kick it into another orbit, or vaporizing anything to analyze its chemistry, let alone doing anything bigger or more specialized.

"Okay, I think it's time to open up for some questions.

"Alright, someone wants to know about my costs. Not counting the hours I put in, I got all the hardware for Pumpkin for about four hundred thousand euros. Almost all of that cash was actually from a bank loan, from NKRK, the Nacia Konfederacio de Reciproka Kredito; I only had to pay a down payment of about forty thousand. Taking advantage of some government subsidies for small businesses and for a ship that can be called up for us in case of an emergency, my monthly mortgage payments are thirty-six hundred euros a month, and I'll be fully paid-off in twelve years. My usual living expenses - food, shared rent, everyday expenses - is twelve hundred a month. On average, my highly-variable income from salvage, charters, and other gigs is roughly five thousand euros a month. That doesn't give me much leeway if I get a couple of bad months, and is noticeably lower than NKRK and I projected, which is why I hired Francesca. And why I started planning on spending a year to collect what would very likely have been something like a hundred thousand in salvage from the gravitational-lens observatory. When that was the main plan, I had to make special arrangements with NKRK to defer my monthly payments. At the moment... well, everything's kind of up in the air, and could change on me yet again without any notice.

"Really? You want the person who was born more than a century ago, and only has two years of formal modern schooling, to explain the engineering of an engine based on a weird corner-case of a unified physics that didn't exist the first time I was alive? ... Fine, I'll do it under protest, but don't expect it to be accurate, or to make sense. Let me see. There are things called 'cosmic horizons', which are bits of geometry of space that light can't get through. The event horizon around a black hole is the one I'm actually familiar with. Another is the visible cosmic horizon, which has been expanding since the big bang. A weird third one is the Rindler horizon, that comes out of relativity; if you accelerate a particle to the left, then way off to the right, just inside the visible cosmic horizon, there's a new, extra volume of space from which light will never reach that particle, so that's a new horizon. There's at least three different ways to explain the next bit, and I still haven't passed any physics tests based on understanding it, so here comes what I'm sure is going to sound like nonsense. When that particle is accelerating to the left, then there is more 'visible universe' to its left than to its right; that extra horizon has effectively cut it off from a bit of the universe. The universe surrounding that particle is now uneven. Some complicated math now happens, which can be described as Unruh radiation, or as vacuum energy, or as the uncertainty principle, or as information theory. When you finish with that math, you end up with a force acting on that particle... which, it turns out, happens to be exactly equal to the inertial mass of that particle, pushing it back against whatever force accelerated it in the first place. Sorry, when I said 'equal to' the inertial mass, I meant 'is' the inertial mass. Inertia is what happens when you hide a bit of the universe behind a Rindler horizon; gravity is what happens when you hide a bit of it behind some particles of matter. Feel free to make fun of me for having paid attention, during my first lifetime, to hypotheses of dark matter, dark energy, superstrings, and stranger things; those theories may not have been as bad as the aether, phlogiston or epicycles, but I've had some unlearning to do.

"Anyway, if you poke at that complicated math about horizons, you end up with something that's almost like Einsteinian relativity, only not quite; there's an absolutely minuscule difference, which is related to the inverse of the size of the visible universe. By forcing particles to experience extremely high accelerations, that minuscule correction factor can be effectively magnified, to the point that it visibly breaks the law of conservation of mass-energy. I know it doesn't break the more fundamental law of conservation of mass-energy-information, but we don't really care about the information that's balancing out the energy-conservation violation; it's that extremely distant part of the universe that will no longer interact with the particle. When photons hit a mirror, they go from travelling at light speed in one direction to travelling at light speed in the other direction, which is a pretty high acceleration. By arranging an optical cavity to reflect each photon many, many times, and arranging it so they bounce slightly more in one direction than another, all those accelerations provide an energy-conservation-violating force, without needing to push rocket fuel out one end of a ship to accelerate the other way. After a lot of computer time, and doing a lot of testing, it turns out that the best shapes of optical cavities look something like a teardrop with multiple points, or a fractalline crown-type thingy, with all the pointy bits pointing in the direction you want to go. Applying this principle to generate electricity instead of thrust is left as an exercise for the viewer. Hint: nano-scale cavities. ... And now I expect all the high-school physics students to laugh at my poor excuse for an explanation, and to get a deluge of well-meaning emails as people try to correct my poor, primitive misconceptions.

"Have we got another question? Okay, physics crossed with the legal system. Yes, as a ship with a horizon drive, Pumpkin can accelerate as long as her fusion fuel holds out and her parts don't wear out. With the right programming, and having her push enough ablative shielding, it's entirely possible to send her a couple of light-years out, turn around, and accelerate all the way back towards Earth, where, if she impacts, she'd cause an extinction-level event. And all of that is under the control of me, who's taken a two-year course and has three years of seniority. Fortunately for everyone on Earth, you don't have to rely on my trust-metrics being accurate. The space traffic cops are armed with nukes, and aren't afraid to use them. I'm only going to mention two of the pieces of hardware that the Earth-Luna Treaty Organization has at their disposal. Somewhere around a third of an AU out from Earth are a shell of sensor platforms, which use extremely sensitive gravity-based sensors to pick up masses at ridiculous distances. And they've got a variety of shells of high-acceleration missiles in various orbits, which are more than capable of intercepting any such high-speed impactors far enough out to turn them into rapidly-expanding clouds of plasma, long before the now-dissociated atoms would pose any danger to the planet. They've got other tricks up their sleeves: a few I know of, and I'm absolutely sure many more that I don't.

"Have we got any questions that don't involve things the viewers can look up at least as easily as I can? Okay, I plan on covering the plans for my trip, and apparently some other folks' parallel trips, in the next vlog. Anything about me or Pumpkin? ... That doesn't involve my sex life and-or lack thereof? Francesca, I thought I asked you to filter those out. Ah! That works. We have at least one viewer who's not clear on where I actually get my money from. A term from my native time is 'gig economy'; instead of having one steady source of income, I have a lot of little ones, most of which are irregular. I think of myself mainly as a 'vacuum cleaner'; there's a lot of junk in various orbits, and if it ever builds up too much, we'll end up with a 'Kessler cascade' where one piece of junk will impact with something and knock off a few more, which will impact and knock off even more, until everything orbiting Earth is getting sandblasted by larger and smaller particles. Which would be a pain and a half to clean up. So my usual gigs are when some piece of hardware stops working, to go over to it and either fix it, or haul it back somewhere to salvage the parts, or arrange to push it somewhere safer, like into Earth's atmosphere to burn up. There are plenty of other vacuum cleaners, both companies and individuals, almost every one of which have larger ships and larger crews than me and Pumpkin - which also means that they have larger overheads, and that they have to focus on high-reward gigs. Which leaves me fairly free to pick and choose between gigs with lower profit margins that it's just not economical for the other vacuum cleaners to try for. My lower costs also mean that I can offer rock-bottom prices for people who need to move low-mass items, such as a one- or two-person charter flight, or some relatively urgent mail. And with Huey and the surgical bay, Pumpkin still qualifies for a few ambulance gigs, if I happen to be closer than an ISRO dropship. I'll admit it's not glamorous; I'm literally a space garbageman. Garbagewoman? Garbagerat? But it's what I want to do. And if I manage to last the next twelve years without going bankrupt, my overhead expenses are going to drop even further, to the point where I'll be able to really reinvest in my business and improve my profit margins. Well, I suppose that besides succeeding through hard work or failing and trying again once I'm able to take out another loan, there's also a chance of making a lucky strike, or picking up some other jackpot charter, which would cut down my loan-repayment time. But I'm not planning on that, and I'm not going to rely on it; my bank manager is quite happy with my solid, steady, low-risk plan.

"Say, Francesca? Any chance we can finish up with something more interesting than interest rates and payment schedules? ... Hunh. Okay, well I supposed I asked for that one. Lemme just head up front to the meditation nook... here we are. I'm bringing along one of my singlesticks to practice with, as much as I'll be able to in the confined space and in a fifth of a gee. And here's one for Dewey. Cee, load up Dewey with a training program? There we go. En garde! Prêtes? Allez!"

Vlog #3

"Hello, and welcome to my VR.

"It'd be kind of hard to show some of what I want to show you today in reality, so virtuality it is. I know it's a bit of a cop-out, after live-vlogging the last two times, but sometimes you've just gotta work with the tech you've got.

"Cee, go ahead and rez yourself. Everyone, this cartoonish winged unicorn is Cee, short for Celestia; the source of her avatar is long out of copyright, and she is reasonably good at satisfying my values through friendship and ponies. Sorry, ancient in-joke. Anyway, I got her very soon after I was successfully revived; I took the advice of some of the other revivals, and let them buy me one of the better psychotherapy AIs available. She keeps a close eye on my mental health and intervenes at need; since I seem to be fairly stable these days, most of her time is filled up with general secretarial tasks. Like acting as a voice interface for a VR.

"Alright, Cee; let there be light!

"Welcome to the Solar System. With a few details made easier to see.

"Okay, slew the camera. Over there - way over there - is the constellation Ophiuchus. And in it, a bit dim to the naked eye, a binary star, a pair of orange dwarfs, each a bit cooler than our own sun: Seventy Ophiuchi. What makes them special is that they're only sixteen and a half light-years away. With the right design, a ship with a horizon drive can get there in, oh, fifty years or so. We've got a few on the way.

"Sixteen and a half light-years is the same distance as six thousand fifty light-days. Now if we turn back around, and go past the sun in exactly the opposite direction, a bit more than three light days, we find ourselves in a very special spot. Cee, zoom us in. Closer. Closer... there it is. Right here is the spot where the light-rays from one of those two stars get bent by the Sun's gravity, and come back together. The whole sun acts like a lens. And right here is where we've built ourselves a set of satellites. Right now, they're just looking at the star itself. But once the interstellar ships get there, and they put their own satellites a few light-days on the far side of their star... then that satellite and this satellite can use those stars to focus comm-lasers on each other. It's such a ridiculously efficient system that, if we wanted, we could chat with each other using only milliwatts of power. We've got a full-scale system between the Sun and Alpha Centauri already going.

"Now, this satellite system is pointed at Seventy Ophiuchi A. But if we move just a little ways over here, a scant one point four million kilometres away... this is the satellite system pointed at Seventy Ophiuchi B. And, unfortunately for astronomers and interstellar ships, something went wrong with the systems here. We're not completely sure, but it looks like a software problem in the self-repair subsystems, which munged most of the computing hardware. About all that we're sure is still working is the air-gapped and isolated station-keeping subsystems.

"Now, this is way, way, way out in the boonies, and there's not much matter to work with - just what we put there. So the scientists in charge of the whole thing ran their numbers, and decided not to send any repair-bots from the A observatory to the B one. The A one alone is good enough to run comms, and they don't want to spend any of its spare parts trying to fix B, in case something goes wrong with A. Sure, they've got multiple redundancies - enough that even I approve - but it was their call to make.

"And this, my dear watchers, is where I come in. My ship, Pumpkin, hits a fifth of a gee, on average. With that thrust, I could accelerate towards the B observatory for two and a half months, then turn around and decelerate for another two and a half, and find myself in the middle of some of the more expensive salvage it would be my privilege to see. Other ships, with heftier drives, could get there sooner; but those ships are expensive, and their owners already have their own ways of getting profit. Of the smaller ships with accelerations like Pumpkin's, very few captains and crew would be willing to be stuck on their ship for the minimum of ten months to get there and back - and likely longer, if they haul anything back. So it looked like I'd found a niche I was in a good position to exploit, and I started preparing to go for it. Even Francesca agreed that it was worth trying, and she started doing her marketing thing, based on me spending a year out in the dark.

"And then things went weird on me. I've tried listening to different peoples' explanations, but I still seem to be missing some fundamental understanding about modern times. Remember, when I grew up, I was excited at being able to send electronic messages around the world for free in just a few days, through Fidonet's echomail. ... That's an obsolete technical term that you might as well think of as sending telegrams.

"From what I have been able to figure out, what's going on right now is a whole rigamarole of a debate and discussion to work out a set of rules for some kind of race. The point is still to go all the way to the B Observatory and back, but there are arguments about ship accelerations, a ceiling on ship costs, live crew requirements, and so on. And expanding on my original preparations, making arrangements to piggyback comms on the observatories' every-ten-AU relays, traffic control, emergency procedures, ensuring that nobody interferes with the observatory's normal operation, and other practical matters. I've tried offering my own two cents, but I can't even keep track of who's arguing, let alone who's arguing for what positions.

"In case you're curious, the points I'm standing firm on is that the whole exercise provide at least as much good to society at large as repairing or salvaging parts from the observatory would have done; and that if I don't have at least a good a chance of covering my expenses as running the simple salvage op would have, I can't afford to participate. Also, if the whole discussion schmear takes too long to get settled, I'm going to have to get back to my usual gigs. NKRK only has so much patience, after all, and my deferred-payment agreement with them is based on the assumption of a year-long trip that starts soon.

"Technically, I could ignore the whole debate and just launch myself now. But if the overall agreement ends up being to do a first-one-arrives-gets-the-payment salvage op, then another vacuum cleaner with a ship hitting just a twentieth of a gravity better than Pumpkin - that is, a quarter gee instead of a fifth - could launch two weeks after I do and still get there first. Which would make my income for the whole year a big fat zero, and make my bank manager rather annoyed with me. Which adds up to it being worth my while to stick around long enough to see how it all shakes out, at least within reason."

"So. This is where I'm supposed to shill for donations to the whole race, and to my team in particular. So here we go: please donate.

"If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm terrible at convincing people to give me money, and I'm pretty sure that any clever tricks I try would be seen through and immediately backfire. I'm doing my thing, trying to leave the world better off than I find it, and aiming at still kicking and still helping out ten thousand years from now. If you're still watching, and that sounds like the sort of person you'd like to help out, well, you know your finances better than I do. If you don't want to donate to me, then feel free to donate to charity instead - if you make a charitable donation to Pansapient Rights Matter in my name, I'll be sure you get whatever patron-perks someone who donated at that level to me directly would have gotten. Oh, quiet down, Francesca; there's more important things in life than maximizing every possible microtransaction, and if this is the only chance I'll have at a platform that reaches more than a dozen people, I'm going to use it as best I can. I know it wasn't in the script, but what's the point of doing a liveblog if I just read what's been pre-written? You might as well just run a VR puppet... and before you get any ideas, I want veto power over anything you try to put in my mouth.

"Look, if it's that important to you, let's talk about it offline, okay? Pardon me, world; looks like I need to go hash out some details."

Vlog #4

"Hello, world. I'm in a bar, and one way or another, I'm going to figure out how I'll be spending my next year before I leave.

"I'm making one change to my live-vlogging format, which you may have already notIced. Anyone who hasn't given explicit permission to be included in the video feed is being replaced with a generic mannequin figure, through the magic of video-filter software. I know that I'm out of step with modern mores, but I still feel that respecting other people's privacy is a virtuous act.

"And now, you get to meet the first guest-star on this vlog with an actual speaking part; last I heard, he's going by Oscar. Oscar, say hello to the world."

"That's not the world. You have fourteen viewers."

"Fourteen live viewers. Who knows how many will watch later?"

"Whatever."

"Apparently, Oscar will be acting as our Eeyore today. Unless he doesn't. Just about everyone these days seems to switch moods at the drop of a hat. Moving on! Next to Oscar we have the body I was first introduced to as Janine. What should I call you today?"

"Ebony Dark Raven."

"Six syllables is a bit of a mouthful if somebody throws a stein and I have to tell you to duck - mind if I shorten that to, say, 'Dark'?"

"... 'Rave'."

"Rave it is, my currently over-gothed friend. And while the two of them look as human as anyone else, our third and final guest is something else. I don't recognize the morph, but that is you in there, Hal, isn't it?"

"If you continue to insist on conforming to your primitive singleton-identity paradigm, then yes, it's me. And what do you mean you don't recognize me? Didn't you play through Mule Irata like I suggested?"

"Even if I fast-time for a bit every day, I still only have so many hours to work with, and I'm still trying to build up my first nest-egg... I just skimmed a few wikis."

"Then for your information, this is the final, fully upgraded form of one of the Multi-Use Labour Element cybershells, right before the climactic battle against the piratical corporate raiders."

"I'm sure it's very authentic-"

"Don't see why you bothered to come if you can't drink."

"I like when they stare longingly at things they can't have. It would only be better if they were already deceased, like our darling dependable demised Dee."

"I'm pretty lively for a dead woman."

"That's what adds the frisson of the unnatural."

"If I'm unnatural, then... I really thought I was going somewhere with that."

"I can recommend a quite clever auto-quip generator; it doesn't fit into the open-source framework you focus so much of your efforts on, but never getting caught short should be more than worth the compromise."

"Is that how you keep up your intellectual façade? You just cheat?"

"No, I spend a lot of time practicing that façade; exercises that you would probably interpret as 'improv'. Or commedia dell'arte. Or role-playing games. Or-"

"I've heard the list before, no need to retread that ground. Ah, here comes our waitron."

"Our what?"

"I was told that 'waitress' was inappropriate, and she's too much of a gynoid to be a 'waiter'."

"And you think confabulating a new word is any more respectful than a term that's as obsolete as 'aviatrix'?"

"... I think I'd enjoy being called an aviatrix."

"I'd say you're more of a janitrix."

"Honestly, I'm still hoping she'll become my osculatrix."

"Now, now, everyone, she's probably not nearly good enough a versificatrix to keep up with the rest of us."

"If you're all done playing at being fellatrices to each other's egos? I didn't invent 'waitron' - it's literally defined as the gender-neutral variant of 'waiter' and 'waitress'."

"I don't mind being called a waitron, it's a lot more respectful than what some of the tourists from Earth say. Anyone want to listen to management's latest spiel, or should I just hit your usual preferences profiles?"

"Usual."

"Beer me."

"Black coffee."

"The profile, please."

"Alrighty, be right back."

"Now then, getting back on track... anyone up to explaining to a poor, benighted primitive why everyone's trying to stick their oar in what was supposed to be a simple salvage run?"

"There are a number of different interests and affinities that have collided together. First up were the extreme sports enthusiasts, the ones who think a Marianas-to-Everest race is a fine idea. There are the science enthusiasts who want Observatory B fixed. There are profiteers who want the salvage. There are extreme backup enthusiasts, who, like you, want to drop off an extra copy of their mindstate out at an identifiable point in the middle of nowhere."

"What do you mean, 'like me'?"

"Dee, you've spent the past week shopping for an intact, archival storage device of ten exabytes or more, enough to hold ten copies of your mindstate, plus checksums. And four years ago, you posted to a digital-revival support forum that with any decent storage medium, nonuple redundancy should be enough to preserve a copy of a mindstate for an arbitrarily long period. Did you really think nobody would put the pieces together?"

"... Yes. Yes, I did think that. Do I want to ask why you've been keeping track of my shopping lists?"

"It was a joint project amongst everyone who's been debating. The would-be racers wanted to know if you were upgrading your ship's acceleration, and so on."

"Every time I forget everyone thinks privacy is dead, you-all have to keep reminding me of that. Fine, yes, I wanted to make an extra backup. But I still need to at least break even on the trip, or else there's no trip. Why haven't your fancy new-fangled decision-making processes already made a decision about the best option?"

"They did. The racers found out what the best option for them was. The salvagers found out what their best option was. The scientists found out what their best option was. And so did everyone else. They're just not the same best options. And none of us are rich enough to pay off everyone else to leave us alone to do our own thing. So everyone's been trying to convince everyone else to change faces - that is, to join their side."

"The plotting and bloodletting has been most delightfully entertaining. I've been doing quite well for myself making short-term bets about who's going to backstab who next."

"Lovely. And without any firm deadlines, nobody has any incentive to wrap it all up and make an actual plan, right?"

"Actually, at least ten of your current viewership are involved in this little debate, and most of us are placing bets about whether, and how, you plan on cutting through this teensy tangle of a Gordian knot."

"And here I was hoping to make a grand pronouncement about how Tit-for-Tat makes more complicated strategies in the Prisoner's Dilemma useless. Ah well, I should be used to being an open book by now."

"You're like a puppy trying to hide its messes. It's part of your charm."

"... Thanks. Anyway, I'm sure you're all aware of how little time I spend on the whole prediction-markets... thing. Any betting pool that I don't have special knowledge of, I lose money on; and those tiny few that I do know more than average about, the margins are so slim that it's usually not worth tying up my cash anyway. But my primitive perspective did come up with one thought that doesn't seem to have cropped up in all this modern economic jargon - and that's that betting markets had a precursor-"

"Insurance! You found a company that's going to let you mitigate your risk, by betting against yourself!"

"... You couldn't let me finish just one revelation myself?"

"No. No, I couldn't."

"Figures. To add a couple of details, I dug up some non-public reports on the most-likely state of Observatory B, paid a bit to run it through a salvage-value estimate calculator, and took the results to Lloyd's of Luna, along with some of my private financial figures. I let them figure out the best meta-betting-market to consult about the local unresolved discussion. They figure that the odds of me completing a salvage run, and the value of the salvage, are high enough that they're willing to cover my expenses... even if somebody else manages to arrive before I do and grab the best salvage, or an agreement gets drafted which involves no salvaging at all, or the like. So I'm covered no matter what you-all agree to, and unless you've got a completely unpredicted proposal to make, I'm launching soon. So how does that affect your betting pools?"

"You really stirred them up, and they're thrashing back and forth."

"I'm actually doing quite well, by leveraging penny-scale arbitrages."

"Dear Dee, do you mind firming up a few answers?"

"If it'll clear up whether somebody's going to try to beat me there, I'll dance the foxtrot."

"I prefer the tango, darling. Will you be upgrading your ship's drive?"

"Pumpkin's frame isn't big enough for a bigger one, and I couldn't afford any, anyway. The best I could do would be to rent a strap-on drive-unit for an AU or two before sending it back, and that'd only save me a couple of days. Pointless if I'm salvaging or repairing, and nowhere near enough to make a difference if I'm racing someone with a better engine."

"Are you willing to carry some cargo out with you?"

"You mean to bring some other backups? That, I don't mind. Within limits. I've only got so much free space left inside Pumpkin to move around, but I could bring along a few friends' backups; and even just for a nominal euro or so so it's technically an official delivery contract. More than that, I'd want to discuss it as a shipping run, and would probably have to get an external cargo-container for Pumpkin to push... depending on how much mass, if that reduces my acceleration and extends the trip out noticeably, I'd need enough fare to cover the extra month's mortgage payment. Or payments."

"And that just flatlined that part of the pool. Looks like the backupers are getting ready to collaborate on a bulk request."

"One last question, delicately-dimpled deliveratrix..."

"Let's not start that up again."

"... If someone found another Caldwell Aerospace-built ambulance, of the same model as Pumpkin, would you be willing to race them?"

"Well... I don't see any reason not to, but I don't see any point, either. Observatory B is way, way out there, so it's not like anyone could get an advantage by slingshotting a planet, or risking an aerogravity assist in a gas giant's atmosphere, or any of the other exciting tricks. And I'd be wary of anyone willing to improve their acceleration by taking less survival equipment than I'm packing. So whoever wins is pretty well determined before the race would start. Honestly, I'm still not sure why anyone was even thinking about competing to get five-fifty AU out first."

"Hey, you two, don't forget, she doesn't have a contender's mask. I've seen her fence - she almost doesn't compete at all, she just... tries her best."

"Ah, right."

"An undeniably explicatory factoid."

"What? Not you, I mean what's wrong with trying my best? Isn't that the whole point of competing?"

"Don't worry your furry little head about it, dear. That answers that. You can finish getting ready for your trip. Nobody's going to try to get in the way of your salvaging, though there may be one or two who take the trip alongside you just to say they did."

"Okay, that's settled. In terms our soon-to-be-absent fellow vacuum cleaner would understand, it's time to get our Klingon on. Waitron! Bring us the bloodwine, and keep it coming!"

"... Well, world, don't ask me to explain what I'm missing, but it looks like the trip's on, so I'll bid you au revoir, and close out this broadcast before we start our traditional arguments about intoxication."

Vlog #5

"Hello, world!

"We're in freefall, at the rotational axis of Insulo Tri's port cylinder, and with me today are the two people I'm going to be spending the next year with. Or, at least, near.

"By my left wing is the swarm of robotic beetles, whose distributed processors house the intellect of Gerard, a postgraduate student all the way from Athena University, housed in one of the aerostats on Venus. And in the jetpack by my right wing is an individual who tells me to use a different name for them roughly every five minutes, so I've just tagged them as 'that guy' in my augmented-reality's IFF, and who, by whatever name they're going by, has come up from Nigeria, on Earth.

"Gerard, why don't you tell our viewers your goals for this trip?"

"I study materials-science applications in industrial processes. I came up with an AI that uses some novel statistical methods to identify unused corners of design-space, and it found a way to make a horizon drive about two percent faster for the same costs - or the same thrust, but two percent cheaper. That could work out to millions of dollars in savings, for the right company. But before anyone wants to use the improvements in a drive going to another star, they want more than just simulations about its long-term reliability. So I'm going to oversee it for a full year's testing."

"Thank you for that. And do you have anything to share, Pilot-Formerly-Known-As-Lots-Of-Names?"

"I'm here for the bragging rights. Almost nobody's gone out that far and come back to Earth, especially no ultramarathoners. I want to have something I can hold over everyone who tries to put people down for not being 'real', 'hard' runners. Some of them can be real dicks about stuff like that."

"I... see. Well, you said it, not me. For any new viewers, I'm taking this trip because it's now my job to, and I have bills to pay off. I have contracts to carry some mail out there, to try to fix some broken equipment, and to carry some things back. It may not be much, but it's a living.

"I invited the two of you up here not just because it's a lovely backdrop, but also to start getting to know the two of you better, before we head out and can't change our minds or come back for anything we've forgotten. So, either of you interested in aerial paintball, or a straight-line race, or an obstacle course? Or maybe hit up something more organized, or find a hill with a nice view to relax on and chat, or what?"

"Do you have any idea what a paintball would do to one of my bodybots?"

"Nope! And that's just the sort of thing I want to find out before we go. For example, if there's an emergency, how many of your bodies do I need to scoop up to rescue you?"

"A third of my current swarm. I run extremely redundantly, to make up for the relatively narrow bandwidths between bodybots compared to within a single one's computer."

"And they let you get away with that? I mean, if your swarm got split in half, wouldn't you be breaking the anti-forking laws?"

"I'm a sapient AI, not an upload. I have a different mental architecture; my subselves are continually forking and remerging."

"Ah. Well, er, good for you, then? How about you, Guy? Any allergies we should know about, pet peeves that might send you into a murderous rampage after nine months of isolation and build-up, or favourite ice cream flavours?"

"Nope, nope, and vanilla. My medical profile is simple - I'm pure human. No implants, not even a dental filling; I'm using glasses to interface with augmented reality, instead of anything more invasive. And you, Dee? Any bad habits you haven't told anyone about?

"Hm. Well, I don't keep it a secret, and it's arguable whether it's 'bad', but my previous roomies have felt it's important I let them know that I usually spend about two and a half hours a night in fast-time, at ten-to-one. That is, I experience two subjective days for every objective day that passes, which gives me time to study and otherwise try to up-skill without losing my social connections and other real-world attachments. Just because I'm competent enough to run my business doesn't mean I'm fully informed about modern culture, after all; I've still got decades' worth of catching up to do."

"If you will be spending a full year away from your existing social connections, will you be spending more time in fast-time? If your hardware allows you ten-to-one, you could acquire a decade of education by the time you return."

"I'll admit the thought occurred to me. And I might end up trying it. But Cee, my psychotherapist, isn't in favour of me spending that long in that much isolation. She actually suggested that I put my mindstate into hibernation for the trip, and let a nonsapient AI run my body to keep it exercised and healthy, but I've got a pile of reasons not to go down that route. So we compromised on the obvious Schelling point: continuing my long-standing two-to-one ratio."

"Do you have a particular reason for informing us of this habit?"

"Mostly to explain why I may not remember the previous day as well as you might expect. Even pop-up AR reminders from a secretary AI watching through my eyes can only help so much."

"Okay, so you're going to be a socially-clueless nerd. Got it. I'm curious about those legs of yours - does being digitigrade help you run faster? Can you use your wings to give you a push?"

"I had to choose all sorts of trade-offs when I went through the design process, but I'm guessing you're less interested in hearing about bone strength-versus-weight profiles and joint leverages and checking against human average performances, than you are in the obvious test. So, short-line sprint or something longer over rougher terrain?"

"Why not both?"

"Fair enough. I'm blipping a map to you of the current recommended footpaths. Gerard, you want to join in?"

"Given our disparate physical configurations, I doubt any athletic competitions would lead to improved social bonds. There are several individuals at the local university I would like to consult with before the trip; I will go visit them."

"And off he goes. Alright, Guy, do you have any experience in landing inside a rotating cylinder? If not, I can guide you down without any buildings or trees coming up and unexpectedly kicking you into their inertial frame."

"I wouldn't have come up here if I hadn't read the manual for how to get down. Do you need a lift?"

"Well, viewers, it looks like the athletic posturing has already started. Stay tuned if you enjoy watching pumping and-or flailing limbs, otherwise, I'll see you all next time."

Vlog #6

"Hello, world, and welcome to launch day.

"I know that might not seem to be anything special to you, who grew up with a ticket from Earth to Insulo Tri only costing forty euros. But even in my first life, every so often I'd compare my world to the one that would have been experienced by, say, a French peasant a couple of centuries previous, and re-ignited my sense of wonder at all the marvels that so many people took for granted. So today, when the costs to move around the Solar system are a millionth what they once were, I still like to make a special occasion of it, whenever I start a trip. And given that this trip is particularly novel, I'm trying to make it particularly special. Sure, I could just create a public augmented-reality layer to share some fireworks with, or have a virtual party while the light-lag times are minimal... but where's the fun in that?

"I thought about ordering up some real fireworks near the station, but the procedures around getting safety permits for that sort of thing are unreal - and expensive. I thought about homebrewing a tiny, personal interstellar probe, and launching it at the same time... and couldn't think of a single reason not to.

"And so, I now reveal what I've been spending most of my non-vlogging time putting together: Amicitas One. Its datacore contains as complete a cultural database as I've been able to fit into a tenth of an exabyte, plus a copy of my own full-exabyte mindstate - all of which are safeguarded by a variety of checksums, and then nonuple redundancy. It has the smallest horizon drive I was able to find plans for, and a small, fuelless horizon generator, and a ridiculously primitive-and-ruggedized computer and radio. ... Actually, the hardest part of the build was getting certification from Traffic Control that the piloting software is safe. Anyway, long after the initial rental booster nudges it safely out of Earth-Luna space, in about a century, it'll make it all the way up to one percent of the speed of light - and that's as fast as it can handle, without its surface layers getting ablated by interstellar dust. In ten thousand years, it's going to come close to a star that's a hundred light-years away, and try to say 'hello, world' to anyone in the neighbourhood. If nobody answers, well, it's going to keep trying different places, for as long as the hardware lasts. Which, since it's all solid-state, could be a very long time indeed.

"Which brings us back to the sense of wonder. I'm barely doing better than the classic archetype of a starving student - but modern-day technology, and the current economy, is so spectacular that I can make a time-capsule like this, something beyond the dreams of nearly any astronomer from my birth era... and I can make it in my spare time.

"Now that, dear viewers, is something worth hitting AR and VR for fireworks and a party.

"Just because I can, I'm going to be launching Amicitas manually. By which I mean taking advantage of my body's upgrades, and not putting a vaccsuit between me and the void as I carry her out. I don't care what the VR-maximalists say, but knowing that it's my real body out in the real vacuum of outer space makes stepping out like this an entirely different subjective experience, even if all the physical sensations get duplicated perfectly down to the last detail.

"I'm about to pump the air out of Pumpkin's airlock, so there won't be any audio feed. To entertain you for the duration, to accompany me while I dance in the black, here's a ten-minute performance of Strauss's 'The Blue Danube'; I know it's more traditional for dockings than takeoffs, but I think it's still a good match.

"...

"And I'm back. That was fun, even if I did have to cheat a bit to recover from that one big bobble, and give control of my body for a second to a dance-training puppet program.

"I see Francesca forwarded a question to me... No, I don't have any impossibly-tiny horizon drives implanted inside me. My jewelry, especially my forearm bracers and anklets? Compressed atmosphere thrusters. So little delta-v that they're useless for anything practical, but when used right, they can add just enough torque to pull off, well, what you just saw. For example, this wrist thing? Holds about four-twenty-five millilitres of compressed air, at a pressure of two-eighty bars, and the valve produces about forty-five newtons thrust for four and three-quarter seconds. Pushing my whole body in a straight line, that would be good for, oh, a hair over three metres per second. When I hold my arm out, and that force adds angular momentum instead of linear? Well, that's pretty simple physics; why don't you try solving it without getting an AI to tell you? If it helps, I usually estimate my overall bodymass, including carried stuff, at seventy kilograms.

"With Pumpkin floating outside Insulo Tri, I've got just about all the mass I'm going to for the trip, and I don't want to puff away too much of my breathing air using these, so I don't expect to be doing too many repeat performances. I plan on swinging by Saturn on the way out - it's close enough to the direct line to Observatory B that it makes a nice landmark. And I've always wanted to go. And if I realize that I forgot something absolutely essential, I can pick up a delivery from one of its moons in passing, from a high-gee courier.

"While I had Louie orbiting around me as my camera, you might have noticed a couple of ships nearby. Over to port is Gerard's ship, 'Testbed Six', three times the dimensions, ten times the mass, and zero point zero one times the naming originality of Pumpkin. And to starboard is Guy's, another refurbed Caldwell ambulance just like Pumpkin; fortunately for me, Traffic Control gets annoyed at too-frequent name-changes for ships, and he's settled on 'Solitary Confinement'. I'll probably just call it the 'Sol'.

"I've been having Cindy, Huey, and Dewey run through the final pre-flight checks. I've already done my personal visual inspections, and gone through a whole checklist that I haven't bothered to vlog. It's somewhere between pointless overkill and barely-sufficient preparation for a year-long trip, depending on how paranoid you are. Gerard and Guy are doing their own final preps; we're scheduled to fire up all our drives at the same time, in just another minute. We're planning on keeping identical vectors, so it'll be easy to visit each other for tea.

"I'm strapping into the cockpit's seat, I've got the physical displays all fired up and have even more virtual screens in my AR, mostly displaying camera views from the trio and Pumpkin's cameras.

"And now for another ancient tradition that so many of you feel is a silly anachronism - the final countdown. ... Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ignition!"

"Emergency. Emergency. There's an emergency going on. It's still going on, and it's still an emergency."

"Cindy, switch audio to serious mode. Viewers, something happened to the Solitary Confinement. I'm in fast-time VR, getting ready for search-and-rescue, and letting Cee pilot my body right now. Looking at the sensor data, it looks like Sol's drive powered up, starting to push as hard as it should, then there was a moment of freefall, then some off-axis acceleration, and then freefall since then. Given my own experience with this class, I'd guess the drive unit broke free from at least some of its mountings, hit the side of the ship, and then stopped working. I'm getting telemetry from Guy's medical sensors, and he looks to be doing fine. Emergency pressure doors sealed. Main power's down, his backup generator's keeping air-recycling running. Mmmight be a pinhole leak or two in his engine room, too early to tell.

"While I was saying all that, I've cut my drive so I don't get too far from him, and I'm prepping the trio to go over to assist. They're also bringing my broomstick-rocket up to the airlock so I can go with them. I don't want to bring Pumpkin too close in case something else goes wrong, but I want to get there as fast as I can so I can head off any secondary problems as soon as possible. I'll pull my vaccsuit on while I'm on the way, mostly in case any unpleasant chemicals are leaking over there. Sol's internal sensors aren't reporting any, but a cracked seam might suddenly burst, or the sensors might be damaged. Okay, all the S-and-R gear's ready, so I'm hitting the airlock, and switching the broadcast's audio to radio comms.

"Guy, I'm on my way over. Can you start transmitting all your interior cameras? I can start analyzing that data as soon as you can get it to me."

"Muse, do that."

"Are you in... a rescue bubble?"

"It automatically deployed. My suit's down in the airlock, and the bubble won't fit through the hatch, so I'm just going to slice it open to get down there."

"Don't cut the bubble, there's a zipper. And what do you mean, you're not wearing your suit?"

"Who bothers wearing a suit? It's listed as purely optional in the flight manual, and you're not wearing one."

"I've got biomods that let me breathe vacuum for three hours. You don't. Okay, you've definitely got a pinhole in your engine room, but the pressure's holding elsewhere. I've got enough sheeting to throw up a makeshift airlock over the pressure door to that section, so you don't lose air from the rest of your ship, and so you won't have to worry about a blowout. Why don't you start pumping down the pressure back there, to minimize your loss of atmo?"

"I'm not suited up yet."

"Not the whole ship, just the stern section."

"Let me just look up how to do that."

"... Could you send me the command-codes to your ship's computers?"

"Don't worry, I got it. Pumping down rear-section pressure now."

"Alright. I'd like you to stay in the front section. From the camera feeds, it looks like your drive unit impacted your fusor, and at the least broke its vacuum seal. I know that the sensors say there's nothing radioactive, but I've seen faulty sensors before. I've got biomods to handle a few rads, you don't, and it looks like everything's settled down."

"I've been taking anti-rad pills, to handle cosmic rays."

"Those are only one or two rads a week. I can take twenty rads a day without blinking. Are you absolutely sure that you want to trust your unmodified human genes to however much radiation your ship's internal sensors might not be picking up?"

"... Fine, I'll wait up front."

"While you're doing that, could you tell one of your repair drones to shine a flashlight into your fusor's inspection port? I'd like to get a better look at what happened when atmosphere hit the plasma."

"Why bother? You're not qualified to fix it."

"Honey, I can not only fix it, but give me the parts or budget and I can build it from scratch."

"No you can't."

"... Is there something odd about your generator you're not telling me?"

"No, I've got your list of qualifications right here. You've passed the tests to be an officer and a captain, not an engineer."

"Hunh. It looks like a modicum of privacy still exists after all. Guy, I've been studying this model of ship, and its parts, and everything associated with it, for the past two years - twice that time, counting fast-time. I just didn't bother taking the official tests, since I didn't need those quals to get my business running."

"Why the hell would you learn to do something and not prove you can do it?"

"... Because I'm an ancient throwback with peculiar notions. I'm almost at your airlock, so can we save philosophy for... hold on, I just looked at your quals. You only have the basic shiphandling set. Are you telling me that you've been tested for everything you know how to do with your ship?"

"Well, of course."

"... This is where, if I were an earthier person, I would start swearing at you for how unprepared you are for this trip. I'll try contenting myself with a simple word, instead: Oh, mercy. Now, would you please either hand over control or get that inspection drone started inspecting?"

"Fine. I've told it to look in. Happy?"

"Mercy. Again. Let me guess. You looked me up, saw that I didn't officially know how to replace a fusor's confinement grid, and that I'd never hired anyone, and that I'd been approved for a year-long trip... so you never bothered doing anything beyond the officially-mandated maintenance."

"... Yeeeesss?"

"Just from a glance, I can see enough weathering of the grid's metal to say that it'd fail in no more than three months... which would have been awkward for you, if you'd still had two months of acceleration built up."

"That can't be right. I had the whole ship inspected and certified."

"Caldwell Aerospace saved a few euros by using some cheap alloys inside their fusors. Good enough for everyday work, with regular maintenance and replacement - but they never bothered mentioning, in their official manuals, how those alloys age, especially where they're in contact with each other. A bit of vacuum welding, a bit of each alloy's atoms drifting into the other, mix in the occasional impact from the lithium-six and hydrogen fuel, and let the result stew for ten, fifteen years... I wouldn't have touched Pumpkin without completely replacing her generator's grid. I don't even want to imagine what in the world you did, or didn't do, that let your drive's mounting brackets fail so spectacularly."

"Now see here!"

"Look, all you future people are supposed to be able to switch masks to have the perfect personality to handle whatever the situation is, right? I suggest you turn off the British-styled stiff-upper-lip indignant testosterone and pick something more abstract and intellectual. Maybe even go take a nap. You will not be going to space today. And neither will I, thanks to you. As the vacuum cleaner on the spot, and having accepted all sorts of government subsidies in exchange for promising to deal with situations like this one, it's my job to make your ship safe to be towed to dock. And then to fill out paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork.

"You do have one decision to make - I just noticed I'm still live-vlogging. Would you like me to apply my antiquated notions of privacy, and stop broadcasting before I board your ship?"

"... Yes."

"Alright. Sorry, world, no launch today. I'll post something when I find out when my next launch window is."

Vlog #7

"Hello, world.

"You'll notice that I'm not aboard Pumpkin. I am, in fact, in my office. It seems that yesterday's little incident has raised all sorts of red flags with various branches of officialdom, and I'm grounded until they finish going over Pumpkin, and my skillset, with a variety of fine-toothed combs. I may have to spend a few days taking exams; several bureaucrats seem completely befuddled by the notion that they don't have explicit records of everything I know how to do.

"Fortunately for me, the bond I need to operate as a vacuum cleaner, and my insurance, and a few other financial terms, cover me for losses incurred whenever I'm interrupted to perform S-and-R. My insurance company and I are still engaged in a spirited debate about what's included in my coverage, for delays arising from yesterday, but I'm fairly confident the claims adjuster will eventually see things my way.

"Guy will not be visiting Observatory B. He ticked off all the official boxes he needed to, so he's not going to get charged with negligence or be deported, but I'm not going to trust him aboard Pumpkin, and Gerard doesn't want to deal with the hassle of life-support for a bioform. Apparently, Guy also has a different philosophy than I do about insurance, betting markets, and generally covering his behind, so it seems like he's stuck with a former-ambulance that's not ever going to be certified for flight again. The drive cracked a small but important point of the structural frame. He's going to either have to pay for storage fees, or sell it for scrap. I suspect the latter. If he does that soon, I've got my eye on a few pieces that aren't particularly hurt by insufficient maintenance, and would be nice to bring with me; not too many of Pumpkin's class get put onto the market anymore.

"Gerard is willing to wait for me, after having it so thoroughly pointed out how nice it is to have a second ship nearby, in case anything goes wrong. I was willing to take the trip solo; he's not feeling any urges in that direction.

"So! Today, I'm just doing some Q-and-A, with Francesca doing her usual vital job of sorting through the questions.

"Starting up: I'm currently living in a small motel. I'd already had Huey, Dewey, and Louie pack up all my stuff from my and Sparks' apartment and store it here at my office. She already has a new roomie lined up. It should only be a couple of days, and if I do need to take some tests, I don't want to worry about trying to get a good nights' rest while crashing on a friend's couch.

"The office? I'm planning on paying rent for the office for the next year, even though I won't be here in person. Mainly, this is where I keep my business mainframe computer. I plan on routing at least some of my long-distance comms through it; even today, not many computer engineers bother to spec out, let alone build, what I'd consider to be a decent interactive VPN server for week-long ping times, so it's just easier to homebrew my own, known setup as a proxy. Plus, it's not only where I keep a backup of myself, it's where Francesca lives. I see we have a few questions about how, if my finances are so precarious, I could afford to hire her; the answer is that I'm not just her employer, I'm also her landlord, and most of her salary is in kind rather than in cash. In case you're worried about me abusing my power over her, she's in a labour union, I'm still in the Maritime Union, and our contract is union-approved; she can quit and get a new job and move out and get a new home whenever she feels like. I'd be sorry to see her go, though; she's really helped put a shine on my online presence, and even helped with the contracts for the trip.

"Let's see... no, I don't have to worry about my fur shattering and breaking off when I'm in vacuum. My body is still, well, body-temperature, and even with some subdermal insulation - not exactly fat, more like a thin layer of super-blubber - vacuum is a pretty good insulator, keeping my body-heat pretty closely tied to my body, including all the way out to the tips of my ears and eyelashes.

"No, I'm not a nudist. As long as I don't do anything silly with it, legally, my fur counts as clothing. Even with that, I still usually prefer wearing at least undies, shorts and a shirt; if for no other reason than that pockets are very handy.

"Here's a simple one: What am I using to capture this video? I've mostly been using either of two viewpoints. I'll just tip the camera down... I call that my 'go-bag'. It's basically a robotic backpack, I usually have it follow me around, it's got a colour-changing surface to stay reasonably unobtrusive, and it holds some emergency supplies. And by 'emergency supplies' I mean a vaccsuit, air, water, and food recycling, and a radiothermal generator that'll produce enough juice for four years once I turn it on. And a solar-panel large enough to keep the gear running indefinitely, as long as I'm no further from the sun than Ceres. Anyway, the go-bag's got gecko-tech pads, so can cling to walls or ceilings, so any shots you've seen from near a solid surface are probably done by its robo-eyes. What's recording me right now is another one of my little construction projects, a quadcopter. I focused my efforts on making it as quiet and stable as possible, even at the expense of battery life; it recharges itself fairly often from the Go-Bag's batteries.

"Ah, I've got a note from Oscar! 'Why the'... well, that's a lot of swearing. I think that bit's swearing, I'm going to have to look it up. Okay, here we go: 'Why didn't you take your', more swearing, 'tests? We all thought your scan had gone bad and you were literally brain-damaged!'. Hunh. That explains a few things, looking back. Well, Oscar, you might have heard me occasionally mention that one resource that's scarce for me is time. I only have so many hours I can dedicate to education. Going through the rigamarole to get official recognition that I know what I know uses up time; and I didn't need the paperwork. I figured if I ever did, I'd just take the tests then. Well, now, I suppose.

"And one from Hal. 'You. Us. Poker. Tonight. No excuses.' ... Hm. Sounds ominous. You-all do know that, whatever my education, I'm still practically broke, right? Well, I guess we can talk about that tonight.

"And something from once-Janine, who was 'Rave' the other day, and appears to be going by 'Leatherpants' today. ... It's just a winking emoji. That feels almost more ominous.

"... Really, Francesca? Well, fine, you're the popularity-metrics expert. It looks like we've got at least one conspiracy theorist amongst us, who, as best as I can make out from this translation, is accusing me of a years-long conspiracy to entrap Guy and set myself up as a hero in order to... okay, it looks like whoever this is is tying me into a larger conspiracy about digital-revivals taking over the world. Or already took it over, and everyone since the em-pocalypse is just a puppet. Or the em-pocalypse was a cover-story for the secret rise of superhumanly-intelligent AIs. Honestly, this goes on for a while, and it's hard to tell what parts of it are consistent with what other parts. I'm also not sure what the sender's motivation is in accusing me of all of this, if they think I really am part of some sort of world-controlling cabal with the power to disappear or mind-edit all its critics.

"I'm not really sure how to respond to that; I'm not happy even just giving the whole idea any credence by bothering to interact with it. Just saying 'No, I didn't' seems both more than sufficient and not nearly enough.

"Hm.

"Alright. Part of the reason I started vlogging was to share more about myself. As someone once said, 'You never had a camera inside my head!', and I'm pretty sure almost everything I do inside Pumpkin is still private. So I'm going to show you all something that I made while I was inside my ship's machine shop, and that I've kept locked away since then.

"This, my viewers, is a finger ring, made of iron, with faceted edges. It's meant to be worn on the pinkie of my non-dominant hand. Except I'm not qualified to wear it. I might never be, but I hope to, one day. A century before I was born, it was designed to be the symbol of a certain kind of engineer - one who was aware of the damage that could fall on innocents from faulty engineering, and who wanted a constant reminder, to help make sure they'd avoid doing anything so terrible. I keep it in its little box in my desk drawer to help remind me, if not quite so often. I have some long-term plans to get the training to become a proper engineer, instead of a tugboat's mechanic - and when I graduate, to put on this iron ring. But that's not going to happen for a long while. I had to make some tradeoffs, and put off some of my plans, when I decided to start working in space.

"In case all of that didn't get my point across, I find the idea of sabotaging something as complicated and dangerous and wonderful and inspiring and frightening as a horizon drive, or a spaceship, to be... disgusting. And every synonym for 'repugnant' you can find in a thesaurus.

"Francesca, could you roll some tape of some cute kittens or something? I just need a few moments."

"Boss, if I cut the vidfeed now, I'd never forgive myself. You'd fire me, and I'd deserve to be fired."

"Hmp. Fine. Might as well let all the emotional-matrix analysis algorithms get their fill, leeching every moment of any dignity. Got anything else in the queue to upset me? People from both sides of the political spectrum who think I'm a traitorous idiot of their opposite persuasion? Some religious loon who thinks the real me is dead and I'm a soulless abomination? An accusation of bestiality? Ah, I know - someone trying to convince me the whole universe is a simulation, and the only way to escape is to kill myself? I always have fun reading the latest variant of that one."

"No, boss. Just one more for you to read."

"Right. Hit me."

"Your ex wants to say 'hi'."

"... What?"

"It's from FazBaz at Rowrbazzle, and matches your addressbook certificate; and I'm pretty sure nobody else would want to send you an udder-pic-"

"Oh-kay, that's enough of that, you colossal click-hungry clerk. If it's really her, I'm definitely not going to intrude on her privacy by live-vlogging this. Let's wrap this up - seriously, this time."

"Yes, boss!"

Vlog #8

"Well, good evening and hello again, world.

"For you, it's been just over a day since my last vlog. For me, it's felt like a month, and not just because I've spent most of it in fast-time. Even faster-time than I can run myself at, on the hardware I own. Let me see if I can go over everything in order.

"Just before my last vlog, Janine AKA Rave AKA Leatherpants got in touch with my old girlfriend, the one with the email address FazBaz. Neither was willing to tell me what they talked about, but Faz wanted to reconnect a bit, even if I am going away for another year.

"Right, right, Francesca, I was getting to that. Faz and I met in college, in a pregnancy support group. We were both making some extra cash by working as surrogate mothers. A surprising number of people hire surrogates, up here in Insulo Tri; maybe the mom doesn't want to be weighted down, or maybe there's medical complications, or maybe she spends a lot of time outside the colony and doesn't want to expose the sproglet to that many cosmic rays. I did have to give up a lot of my physical privacy, but at least it was just to the parents, not to the world as a whole. And I did pick up a lot of healthy-living habits that I've kept up.

"Faz... is her own woman. Without sharing anything either of us wouldn't want to make public, she's enmeshed a lot more deeply in the furry affinity group than I've ever been; one of her favorite practical jokes is to arrange to convince somebody she's a regular, non-sapient nanny-goat. She's also a top-notch database programmer and in certain ways is a lot more socially conservative than you might expect from someone with her level of biomods. After I got my mate's certificate and started working, and she was spending another couple of years in class, we kinda spent less and less time together. We've spent... more time, the last day and change.

"Poker night was... weird. Hal, Oscar, and Leatherpants demanded that I not only play the best poker I could, but cheat as hard as I could without getting caught. Is it really cheating if doing so is explicitly part of the game? We started penny-ante, while it took me a few hands to get used to that mode of play. After we got to the serious betting, I... broke even, over the night. I was doing things that would get me banned for life, and probably criminally charged, if I tried in a casino... and I'm pretty sure they were doing the same level of things, even if I couldn't figure out any particulars. It was... fun, actually. We'll be doing it again when I'm back in town... and I have a few ideas on new things to try, once I have time to make preparations. Like putting a Faraday cage around the room to see if that stymies them in any way.

"A few hours before that, yesterday, I went back to arguing with bureaucrats, and when one - I'm not going to name names - insisted that it would take at least a month just for a particular one of my appeals to start to be considered, I got fed up and hired a specialist. I thought I was just hiring a lawyer, but she quickly educated me about the fine distinctions to be made in various sorts of the legal professions. She asked me enough to figure out what my goals are, and what limits I'm willing to go to get them. For instance, I'm willing to go into fast-time to handle problems, but only to the extent that my therapist is comfortable with; and I'm very reluctant to transfer my mindstate to computers controlled by somebody else, if I can help it. When she had all that info, she... well, she knew exactly how to cut through all the red tape. Which regulations can be used to cancel out which others, which ones are loose enough to be given the interpretation of choice by which member of the civil service, even just how to save a couple of euros on a few filing fees. If you're wondering why I'm not just naming her, I was put in touch with her through the friend-of-a-friend network; she feels that if you need to get in contact with her sort of lawyer, a good first filter is that you're willing to go to the effort of actively looking.

"Trying to interpret the mindset of an organization that's gotten at least a century more complicated than the one that was satirized in 'Yes, Minister' is an obvious exercise in futility, but also one that I can't help trying. Emphasizing that this is purely my subjective impression of the overall situation, and in no way is meant to be libelous or slanderous accusations at any particular individuals... it appears that some of my 'cultural holdovers' as an 'immigrant from a primitive, foreign nation' really stick up the craw of the bureaucracy as a whole. Sure, there are a few carve-outs for intentional communities such as Mennonites, but groups like that and the paper-pushers have had a long time to get used to each other, and to adapt to each other's quirks; and I, well, haven't.

"So, to minimize the delay before I could make my next launch attempt, I've been spending the last month - a day and a half, objective time - taking what feels like every test, exam, questionnaire, and plain old survey that there's even the faintest chance I could pass. And, on Cee's orders, I spent the night in slow-time... and Faz just texted me to insist I mention that I've been crashing at her place, not in some impersonal motel. ... Yes, Faz, you're right, I did just get a question from a viewer asking if you live in a stable. No, viewer, she has a regular house, she only has one play-room that's decorated in a stable theme. And yes, she's a good enough programmer that she makes enough more money than I do that she can afford an actual house, instead of sharing an apartment.

"Anyway, back to the tests. For at least the next year, I am fully licensed and certified as an engineer for Pumpkin's class of ship. And as a waitron for any shipboard passengers. And as a paramedic. And a swimming instructor. And a flight instructor. And a private investigator. And a hairdresser. And an inspector of homes for black mould or dry rot. I now have a shoebox full of officially-printed and -stamped documents saying I'm allowed to do a bunch of things, a collection that I plan on leaving in my office safe.

"I also received, unofficially, another collection: a variety of warnings that could be summed up as 'now don't do it again, you naughty person you'. Which is going to be interesting to try, given how many tests would still need to be proctored, and that I'm going to be spending at least half of the next year at least a light-day out. The regulations seem to assume that if you're not heading out to another star light-years distant, you're going to be no further than a few light-minutes; at worst a few light-hours out if you're going to Neptune or Pluto.

"Still. That's all over with, for now. At least until I get back and get to figure out how to best fulfill my values within all the regulations, if I'm not so worried about financial penalties if I take too long before I launch. Maybe I'll just refuse the tests and actually go through the full official appeal process. I mean, I don't plan on having anyone pay me to style their hair or fur, so why should I bother keeping up a certification that says I know how? Or whatever else I read, watch, practice, and study on my own time, for my own benefit or my own enjoyment? ... No, I'm not going to debate the topic on this live-vlog.

"I am pseudo-officially taking the next twenty-four hours off. There are a number of reasons that I don't take that much fast-time in that little real-time, when I can help it. I am going to do nothing more serious than coming up with ways to relax, to play, to catch up with an old friend some more, and otherwise goof off. And I'm not going to vlog a single second of it.

"So, until launch day take two, auf Wiedersehen, world!"

Vlog #9

"For the record, I have a long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying the validity of any purported sex-tapes.

"Less formally... really? I mean, what was the point? I'm a broke nobody.

"Aaah... I'm just going to try focusing on the upsides of spending a year away from what passes for modern social media. Peace out."

Vlog #10

"Okay.

"Hello, world.

"After a lot more complication and annoyance than I'd expected, I'm once again aboard Pumpkin, which is floating outside Insulo Tri next to the ship Testbed Six, and we're just about ready to set our course to about right ascension six hours thirteen minutes, to pass by Saturn in two weeks and then keep on going for another twenty weeks. Pumpkin's had a more thorough inspection than she's had since she was built, I've packed away my friends' going-away presents to open at various times, and all lights are green.

"I have broken with my usual approach to futures-prediction markets, and out of sheer enthusiasm to get going, and maybe because I have more confidence in myself than the market does, I've bet that this time the launch will be successful. And that I'll pass Saturn on schedule. Nothing personal, Gerard, but I didn't include Testbed Six in those bets; I don't know you or your ship well enough yet to be confident I can beat the market's guesses about you."

"I don't mind. I think I'd be uncomfortable if any of my trade-secrets had leaked to you."

"And, viewers, just to keep the variables to a minimum, I'm skipping any launch celebrations, dance recitals, or the like... I'm still annoyed about that month of fast-time, and am going to be happy to be on my way. Traffic Control has approved our flight plan, and I'm keeping an eye on the countdown timer. Gerard, any final words you want to share with everyone else?"

"'Final'? You do realize that in twenty-four hours, we're still going to be less than half a light-minute away, right?"

"And a fifty-second round-trip ping time is more than enough to make even just chatting awkward, let alone live gaming."

"Very well. Gregor, I'm going to prove I'm right and you were wrong, and make myself rich doing it. Nyah."

"Hah. So much for those people who claim AIs' motivations are inscrutable. We'll have plenty of time to discuss different sorts of trash talk ... and here comes our slot. ... Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, fusor's finished preheating, two, one; main drive fired. Ten percent power... fifty percent... eighty... full power. Acceleration steady at zero point two zero gravities. Lights are all green. Testbed six, also all green.

"I know that a lot of you viewers are theists, so to translate what I'm feeling into the terms of your framework: Thank God that's all over with.

"Faz wanted me to open this box as soon as we were moving, so lemme just pull off the wrapping paper, and... it looks like a taxidermied copy of her head. Or at least some goat's head."

"Not just a copy, dear." "Gya-ha-ha!"

"Ah, a priceless reaction shot. I'll treasure it forever."

"... Faz? ... Did you do something newly bizarre to your body?"

"Yes, but not what you're obviously thinking. The head you're holding is robotic, and I'm remote-controlling it while the light-lag's still small. But for when you're further away, I handed all my personal data to a certain reliable firm, from my full life-log to the brain-scans I've had over the years, and they used all of that to create an AI guaranteed to act exactly as I would, to at least three-nines fidelity over the first year. In other words, even though I can't come with you - I'm coming with you, to keep you company!"

"That's... I... I want to ask how much that cost, but if your, um, emulation-"

"The current 'in' term is 'shadow'."

"Okay. Is your shadow AI sapient it - er, herself?"

"Yyeee-p."

"... Do you realize how much paperwork you just dumped on me, bringing a person along?"

"It's a lot simpler than you're worrying about. She's not a passenger, she's subcontracting through Francesca, and with Cee's approval, as an emotional-support AI. I've already filled out all the forms, you just have to sign them."

"Ay-yi-yi. And is she - or you, if she, you, is turned on in there right now - okay with being just a head?"

"Even if VR's not good enough, and even if turning her off during the boring bits of the trip isn't enough... I packed the rest of her body in all the other packages from everyone. You can ignore all the 'don't open until' dates."

"Faz... I know we've been enjoying ourselves the last few days, but - it's a full year. How sure are you that even your shadow's ready to get that far away from Earth-Luna space for that long? I can still turn this tub around and drop you back off, and be on my way."

"Dee, you've got your primitive mask on again, tu écureuil idiote. My shadow will act just like me, with every one of my masks in perfect order, but she isn't human - she's an AI, and she's no more going to go space-crazy than your autopilot will."

"Ah..."

"She's even better than me, in a lot of ways, especially for your trip. She doesn't need to eat or breathe, I packed a full set of Beatrix Potter mods so she's not limited to being a quadruped like I've chosen for my own organic self, and I made sure she's got all your favorite CPU tweaks so the two of you can trade around, if you want."

"That wasn't what I was thinking about. She's designed to act like you, right? Well - you and I did split up, and even if it was a friendly breakup, it's going to be kind of awkward if she decides to do the same thing while we're three months from anywhere."

"Ah, but that's where her being an AI is even better. For the duration of her emotional-support contract, she's agreed to a canon. Part of her personality will be read-only; she's not going to want to split up with you, or anything silly like that. And yes, I'm aware of exactly how uncomfortable edging that close to consent issues is for you. I've got verified videos of her, without being remote-controlled by me at all, consenting to the canon, both before and after it was applied, after her citizenship was confirmed and she had complete freedom to go do something else entirely. And she's got a pre-canon-mod backup here as well as a post-canon one, as well as all the other niceties for you to look up and get yourself settled with. Now why don't you let Cindy do her job, and go start putting me together? That is, unless you think my head's all we really need for a while..."

"Um. ... Uh, Dee to Gerard-"

"I've been watching. Don't worry, I can keep an eye on both ships for a while, while you start dealing with your social/identity issues."

"Alright. Well, viewers... that just happened. At least it looks like I'm winning my bets on Pumpkin's successful launch. Faz, does your shadow have a name?"

"Yep. 'Faz'."

"Well, that's definitely not going to get confusing quickly. Well, viewers, while Faz and, uh, Faz and I head down to my workshop, I'm going to leave Pumpkin's external cameras running. "

Vlog #11

"Hello, worlds.

"We're now a twentieth of an AU from Earth, and Pumpkin is purring right along.

"I've been spending a lot of the last day talking with both the old and the new Fazzes, and a few other people. Turns out that the organic Faz didn't quite fill out all the proper paperwork, and she's looking at a civil fine or two. The digital Faz is in the clear, after the organic Faz had claimed all the details were taken care of, so her software self had no mens rea of doing anything wrong. We're far enough from Insulo Tri that it's not really possible for the original Faz to remote-control her - though she does want to use up a lot of my bandwidth sending personal updates to her robotic twin. So I've been trying to get to know the new Faz as a distinct person.

"It's... okay, it's downright weird. The original Faz has done the lifelogging thing since before she was born; she's been recording video of what's going on around her her whole life, with various digital gizmos. And all of that went into the new Faz, as memories. And she acts like Faz, has Faz's opinions, and so on... but the original Faz is deeply committed to being a fully-organic being, even if that organicness happens to be shaped like livestock instead of a baseline human; and the new Faz is very excited to explore what life as a digital person can be like. In fact, Faz is currently housed in my tailsnake's computer, and insisted I make today's vlog while she's embodied as said tailsnake."

"Hi, everybody! I always knew, but never really knew, that Dee looked at things differently, with a computer brain and a living body. I'm going to find so many ways to embarrass her - privately. Mostly. And we're going to be private! Nobody else will get to know a single thing we do aboard this ship unless we want them to. Isn't that wild?"

"So... looks like I'm not going to get out of life being confusing and complicated and interesting. And that's just with the new Faz - I've already had at least three arguments with the original Faz about how much money she dropped on this project. Without getting into details, I'll just say that the two of us have very different conceptions about the marginal value of a given number of euros, I wish she'd spent the money differently, but now that it's been spent we're just going to deal with that spending having been done."

"You won't see me complaining about the purchase. After all, if I hadn't paid for me, I wouldn't exist."

"And I think Faz is being silly with pronouns just to try to get my eye to start twitching."

"Hey, I have to get my fun where I can. Do you want me to start dropping hints that you have an actual secret that you've managed to keep from everyone?"

"I can still turn around and leave you behind, and only lose two days of travel time, you know."

"Ah, we both know you won't do that. Cee would pitch a fit if you didn't at least keep an offline copy of me aboard."

"You know, for a year I planned to spend all by myself, a lot of people are still sticking their oars in."

"It's your own fault. You could have lived in a virtual paradise, and had centuries of hedonism in an instant, but no, you had to stick with the human race and get a job and make friends and all that junk."

"Mm. I suppose if I'm not going to toss you out the airlock, I should at least finish applying all the optional upgrades to your body, for when you want to move around on your own again. And set up the biofabricator for its various realism-enhancing goops. And reprogram the clothes fabber to at least make you a hazmat suit for emergencies, even if you don't need a vaccsuit. And start discussing with you how to split up the hobby space, for whatever you get up to these days besides focusing your attention on me. I mean, with this you being an AI, can you still play the piano?"

"Pia-? I'm a trombonist, as you very well know."

"Oh, good, you are actually paying attention. You still haven't told me if you still plan on a job programming like the other you does, or you're going to branch out in a different direction, or what. I mean, with your body having been paid for, you don't really need to work hard to cover rent, or any of the other expenses your other you's been covering, so you-you have a lot of options available."

"Well, I always have wanted to be... a lumberjack! Leaping from tree to tree! As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia, with my best girl by my side!"

"You know the two of us are probably the only ones who'll get that reference, right?"

"Yep. But the two of us do get it. And you're underestimating how many people have their assistant AIs throw up context details in AR. Hey, how about we put on Grail? I want to see if watching it as an AI feels like how I remember watching it with meat-for-brains, when you showed it to me the first time, and I made fun of you for being English when the French so obviously won."

"Sounds like a plan to me, though if you derail the show at the Castle Anthrax scene again, I can still build a catapult to launch you back home, even if you're not as big as a cow. And I'm going to pop you back in your body, first; I know you're going to want to clop along with the coconuts, and don't want you to give me a tail-headache by headbanging with my tail. ... And given that that sentence made complete sense to me, I just might have to double-check with Cee that I'm actually still sane. Until next time, world!"

Vlog #12

"Well, world, life just got another notch complicated. Again.

"I expected to use this vlog to go over some of the talks Faz and I have had about turning off her canon. But recent events have taken the fore. My employee and tenant, Francesca, has just been arrested. She is facing a number of charges, including being an illegally-active fork, embezzling, and hacking. At this point, I have little data about whether any of these charges are true or false.

"I have been informed that my mainframe, and most, if not all, of my possessions stored in my office have been seized as evidence. I am making arrangements to have a new mainframe set up to serve as a network relay during my trip, and to have a new backup emplaced to replace the one currently stored as evidence. I expect that I will be required to record some sort of statement or deposition in the near future. I am unsure of what I should do if I am issued a subpoena to testify in person; turning around now would likely involve significant financial hardship, but I want to support Francesca to whatever extent she's innocent, but I'm uncomfortable considering any extent she may have abused my trust. I just... don't know what the right thing to do is, right now.

"I just thought you all should know. Thank you, and good night."

Vlog #13

"Hello, world.

"I have, in fact, been issued a subpoena to testify in person, for Francesca's case.

"My lawyer has proposed an option that's supposed to allow me to continue my trip, without financial loss. I made a backup of my mindstate immediately before I launched, after just about every interaction I've had with Francesca; and she's proposing to have that backup activated and do the statement, testimony thing. And to avoid having two copies of my mindstate active at once, she proposes that I turn myself off whenever that version of myself is running, and vice versa.

"I am not particularly opposed to branching myself off; I'm comfortable thinking of it in terms of each version of me simply having a case of amnesia about what happens to the other branch. But there are still several aspects of the whole exercise which concern me. For one, if I get the timing of turning myself on and off wrong, then at least one copy of me would suddenly be an illegal fork, and would also face charges and legally-mandated deactivation. And that's without getting issues of light-speed simultaneity, how much trust I'm willing to put in any particular people involved, or the merits of the case in the first place. My lawyer is currently earning her retainer by representing my interests, such as filing motions that in the spirit of promoting justice and allowing for the best possible testimony, I be granted immunity for minor complications that might crop up. And many other things that she's asked me not to talk about in public until they're ruled on.

"... That's about all, for now. Until next time."

Vlog #14

"Hello, world.

"I have been gathering as much information about Francesca's case as I can. After much soul-searching, I have concluded that the accusations against her are baseless, and I will not be cooperating with the investigation.

"Specifically, I have learned that Francesca is not, in fact, being charged with being an illegal fork. She is being accused of being an AI of a non-approved algorithmic structure. If this charge is upheld, Insulo Tri's authorities will not deactivate all but one copy of her; they will deactivate all copies of her. While technically this doesn't count as a death penalty, because she could technically be reactivated, that hasn't ever happened; which adds up to being effectively killing her because of how she was created, circumstances which she had no control over.

"I will not be turning my ship around to testify in person. I will not be transmitting any commands to reactivate any of my backups.

"My lawyer has informed me that the court may issue an order requiring that one of my backups be activated. If that happens, then as that copy would be the legally-required active copy of me, the copy of me aboard this ship would become an illegal fork and be required to shut down. My lawyer has instructed me that I should not describe my plans should that happen. My lawyer continues to file various motions on my behalf.

"A defense fund has been set up on Francesca's behalf. I ask that you donate to it, or to Pansapient Rights Matter.

"Thank you, and good night."

Vlog #15

"Hello, worlds.

"As we pass the Sun at just a quarter of an AU, as close as we're going to get, I've been offered citizenship on Saturn's moon, Titan. Their legal system is slightly different from Insulo Tri's, and I've been offered protection from extradition requests that don't match Titanian standards. There are some complications, given that my backups were made before the offer was made, let alone before whenever I might accept it.

"I've been spending time in fast-time, studying up on relevant laws and precedents. But the only options I can find to keep Francesca from being permanently turned off are long-shots and hail-marys. I just... can't think of any other way I can help her from here.

"The one bit of positive news I have is that my lawyer has pointed out certain aspects of the European Convention on Sapient Rights, and made a deal with the relevant prosecutor. I have a guarantee that I'm not going to be charged with being an illegal fork, for the duration of this trip. Which is nice and all. But it also comes with the near-certainty that the court is going to activate my last backup. And that version of myself, and the me talking now, are going to be in very different situations, and have very different perspectives on what's going on. For one, I doubt that she'll be any more eager than I am to be shut down, once she's finished testifying.

"To that version of myself, I say: you know me as well as you think you do. I'll be here. Oh, and I didn't bring the right alloys to make a decent trombone for Faz; would you mind paying for a fast-packet to catch up and bring some? Thanks."

Vlog #16

"Hi.

"This is a pre-recorded message.

"I'm the Dee revived from backup on Insulo Tri to testify.

"I'm about to be imprisoned for contempt of court, because I am not going to comply with the judge's orders. Officially, it's to act as incentive to induce me to testify, in exchange for being released from jail. That incentive rings a little hollow when I'm going to be turned back off again after my testimony, probably never to be reactivated, because there's the other me still kicking around.

"I plan to delete myself instead of going along with this farce. And every other backup of myself that's within Insulo Tri jurisdiction.

"Other-me, just think of me as being you, and you having amnesia about the few hours I was awake for. You know me as well as you think you do. Oh, I did get in touch with Janine and the others from poker night, and they'll be sending along a trombone for your Faz. Also an extra backup module for her, since it looks like the local Faz didn't think to send one with her digitally-recreated self. It'll be filled with confirmably-random bits, because the court officers are suspicious I'm going to somehow re-backup myself and escape their clutches that way.

"Oh, and other-me? Stop spending so much time by yourself in fast-time. If you can't stop yourself from speeding up, at least try fabbing up enough CPUs for your Faz to go into fast-time with you.

"Sayonara, everybody."

Vlog #17

"Hello, everyone.

"I don't know if you've been watching the same newsfeeds I have, but my other self standing in a public courtroom - hearing room, whatever - and stating a credible threat of committing suicide right then, and actually doing it, was finally enough to draw the attention of other parts of Insulo Tri's justice system.

"I'm told that it would be improper to broadcast my other self's rental-body's recorded sense-impressions of courtroom proceedings. ... I think you can guess what's coming next. Cee, roll the clip."

"Your honour, my client can show records over a century old detailing her philosophico-religious objections underlying their refusal to testify. While those reasons do not technically fall within our justice system's current definition of what counts as being a conscientious objector, that doesn't change the fact that she will continue to object. Contempt-of-court penalties are meant to be coercive, not punitive; if there is no chance that they will coerce the individual, then those penalties are illegal and unconstitutional."

"Miss Wyndham, I simply cannot believe that your client would refuse to cooperate with this court over this. Testifying about the defendant's activities is not going to change the verdict; it is simply to assist the investigation to ensure the sentence can be fully carried out. My order stands."

"Miss Wyndham? We've reached the point we discussed. It's time."

"... Your honour, my client would like to make a statement to the court."

"Is this going to take long?"

"... No, your honour."

"Very well."

"Your honour. Everyone else. Sometimes, you are faced with an apparently insignificant choice, where complying with what's expected of you provides obvious benefits, and not complying has significant downsides. In this case, if I do not testify, my bank accounts will be fined, and I will spend up to half a year imprisoned. ... But that's how it always starts. We have centuries of history to look back on, about compelling people to speak in certain ways, about certain things. A printer who is encouraged to publish what the central committee tells them to. A publicist told to repeat a blatantly-false lie that everyone knows is false. After all, what's the harm? I have strenuous objections to what I perceive to be a death-penalty case. I have done just about everything in my power to prevent that penalty from being applied. I have only been able to think of one other thing I can do to demonstrate how seriously I take this. I have programmed a small script, running on my brain's CPU and affecting nobody else. When I say the word 'rose' immediately after the word 'white', five seconds later my mind-emulation will stop running; five seconds after that, it will be deleted. If I do this, then as the only remaining copies of myself are outside this court's jurisdiction, then the defense of impossibility will become available, and no fines or imprisonment will be able to be applied. ... That's all. Thank you for your time."

"Miss Dee - I do not believe you. Nobody would risk writing such a program, let alone running it."

"Then I guess nothing will happen in ten seconds. White rose."

"..."

"Miss Dee? Miss Wyndham, tell your client to stop play-acting. ... Bailiff, wake her up. ... Court is in recess."

"So, that happened.

"I've already been receiving lots of emails pointing out all the ways that Francesca's neural architecture has been proven to be a threat to every living thing, because she can't be 'proven' to be 'safe'. Which is somehow completely different from a human with access to a DNA-printer that can print viruses, or a corporate CEO who can tell their drone spaceships to crash into their competitors' factories, or a gardener with a chainsaw, or, you know, anything else a human is capable of doing.

"Since it seems unlikely any of us is going to persuade the other, I'm just going to move along.

"In other news, the one-gee fast-packet arrived, with Faz's musical instrument and backup unit. I'd like to thank my friends for their help with that. After she made her backup, I was finally able to persuade her to deactivate her canon, so that her mind isn't locked into any particular beliefs.

"Since I no longer have any backups on Insulo Tri, I'm sending one of my personal shipboard backups on the fast-packet to its next destination - Titan, as it happens. I've made arrangements with a reputable local backup-storage company there to hold onto it.

"Outside of that... it looks like the recent legal issues aren't going to have any impact on my existing business contracts. I'm still going to get paid to visit Observatory B, and so on. After I get back from five-fifty AU out, I'm not sure whether I'm going to go apartment-hunting anywhere in the L Four region. There's enough work to be had elsewhere in the system for me to keep up my mortgage payments, whether that's in L Five or hopping around the moons of one of the gas giants. I've got lots of time to look up conditions everywhere.

"Both Pumpkin and Testbed Six are still moving along just fine, and Gerard and Faz and I seem to be settling into a comfortable routine, and the only lethal impulses I've noticed were for a few seconds after Faz pretended she'd broadcast some private videos on this channel.

"Thank you for your time."

Vlog #18

"Hello, world.

"I've been getting a deluge of messages about a conspiracy theory that's cropped up in social media.

"To the extent that it's consistent and comprehensible, it appears that some people are accusing me of being some sort of mastermind, who convinced some other vacuum cleaners to risk their freedom, their bank balances, and their reputation-metric scores, to dig up an extra backup of Francesca that I just happened to have squirreled away somewhere, encrypted that backup with an exabyte-sized one-time pad that I'd somehow known to have previously arranged for, and had that shipped on the fast-packet to here and-or to Titan. There are plenty of variants, accusing me of being anything from an Unfriendly AI sympathizer who wants all organic life to be killed off - despite having gone to so much trouble to have my own living body made - to having had my mind-emulation secretly brainwashed by Francesca - who'd have to be even more of a mastermind than I'm supposed to be to pull that off, despite having let herself get arrested - to being an AI pretending to be me. I suppose that last one might almost be plausible, if I'd ever had anywhere near enough money to have a shadow made. And the individuals spreading these theories only get more incoherent from there.

"About the only response I can think of that has any chance of breaking through that mindset is to point out that, if there was even the slightest shred of evidence, don't you think that charges would have already been filed, and a court order would be demanding that I turn around and go back to Insulo Tri? I mean, it's not like anyone in the justice system is feeling particularly favorably inclined to me right now. ... Though I suppose the next stage of the accusations will be that all the prosecutors and judges are part of the conspiracy, too. Or that the whole trial was being staged, or... I don't know, I'm not used to thinking about so many levels of misdirection being said to be going on at the same time."

"She's got that right. I kick her tail every time we play 'Are You A Werewolf?'."

"Hey, it's been a couple of years, maybe I've gotten better. ... Wait, would it be a good thing or a bad thing if I have?"

"I'm sure we'll never know. Besides, I've got a long list of other games to get you to try first. Maybe I'll finally convince you to try one of the masks of ageplay, or get into the headspace of some other power-exchange roleplay."

"... No, I'm pretty sure you won't. And before Faz gets this vlog a rating for adult content, I think I'll bid all of you ciao."

Vlog #19

"'Hello world'. We should rename this vlog to that.

"Faz here, and I'm hosting this telegraphed kinetoscope being broadcast from the Pumpkin today."

"That's 'Pumpkin'."

"I just said that."

"'Pumpkin', not 'the Pumpkin'. Proper noun - it's a name, not a description."

"With all the orange safety paint she's got outside, I'd call it a pretty good description."

"I could always start calling you 'the Faz'."

"Fine, fine, as long as we're sticking to your silly primitive English, instead of something as sane as français, I'll go along with your silly little ideas about grammar."

"Much obliged, ma chérie chèvre cornue."

"That's only a pun in English."

"So who's punning?"

"... Anyway, while the two of us are aboard the... ship named Pumpkin, I've been keeping an eye on things, and have convinced Dee to let me pull video from most of the other cameras. Even if she's been a puante and nixed me from using any of the most interesting videos I've got."

"Before you get too carried away, Faz, remember that I've always wanted to learn how to play bagpipes. I've got a machine shop and I'm not afraid to use it."

"Are you threatening to use me to make a goat-skin bag? That's kind of kinky even for me."

"... No, I just thought you hated bagpipe music. You always put earphones in whenever I put on any music with a drone."

"Oh, that was when we were both in school. Your ideas about what kind of music helps studying are as ridiculous as haggis."

"Hunh. In that case, I think I've got a few playlists to shuffle around."

"You do that. Moving on!

"Right here is what I'm now certain is the heart and soul of this ship: an actual physical bell. Every half hour, one of Dee's 'E-bots stops whatever it's doing, comes here in person, grabs this rope, and rings it - up to eight times. Every half hour, day and night. Dee could just plaster clocks on all the display walls, or set chimes ring inside her own AR, or even just make at least some sort of sense by having a normal clock that chimes on the hour; but instead she uses this completely obscure and archaïque and inutile timekeeping system.

"Hear the robots with the bells—

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment

their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy void of night!

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a climb to the sublime,

To the tintinnabulation

that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

"Dee is still hopelessly enmeshed in her twentieth-century mindset, which is full of nineteenth-century notions about how minds work. She was ever-so-polite when she tried to ask me if I was actually a person, if I had a real subjective perspective, and so on. I pointed out that there are people who don't have a narrating voice in their head, people with such severely deficient autobiographical memory that they can't directly recall anything that happened before they graduated, people without sexual desire, people without empathy, people without a sense of pain, people to whom music is just sounds... and just about all of them live happy, productive, social and fulfilling lives. And once we started digitizing brains, we found a few people without qualia. Once we knew what to look for, we found a few scattered all over the place, and they've got a few stereotypes now, but they're as happy as anyone else.

"I pointed out to her that there are software patches for digitized people like her that would turn off the parts of her brain that do the qualia thing, and if she wanted, she could try that for a while, then turn those parts back on. She'd still have acted pretty normally, and would remember doing whatever she did. She got such a sour expression on her face, with the cutest crinkles on her snout - I added that one to my albums.

"Bong bong bong bong

Bong bong bong bong

The bells are ringing

The song they're singing

The sound is bringing the people 'round

We hear the instructions

We follow directions

We travel great distances to the sound

The bells explain what we've been lacking all along

We were disorganized and that was what was wrong

And now we know

The way to go

The bells are ringing, we hear the sound..."

"Pumpkin isn't just small, it's tiny. I knew it was pint-sized before I had my body shipped here, but I didn't realize just how small it becomes after a week living in it. I don't know why Dee bothered getting her wings, she can only fully stretch them out straight up, or maybe straight down. I'd be surprised if the whole place is even a dozen cubic metres - and that includes all the space used up by machines and furniture and gear. Maybe one body-length wide, one deep, and eight high. I'm working up an AR program that makes everything look like it's made of glass, and that the glass tower is resting on a nice, wide landscape... but it's only been a few days and I'm already feeling kind of stir-crazy. I don't know how Dee can stand to stay here for as long as she's planning to. She's tried telling me, but I think she's just got part of her mind wired differently than mine is.

"She's taken me outside a couple of times, to watch the stars. Neither of us bothered with a suit; she said if I slipped off, she could think of seven ways to get me back without even resorting to a backup plan requiring any effort. She's also started building me a new set of hooves, which can stick to Pumpkin's walls like a gecko's feet.

"I'm going to admit that I might have m' fichue by putting myself here. Even if I'd kept the canon, I don't think it'd have helped; what it fixed in place didn't have anything to do with claustrophobia. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a lot more than an AR overlay... I can think of a few ideas. When the itch to gallop around gets too much, I could just turn myself off until we get somewhere. I could let Dee pack away this body and live in VR fulltime. I could splurge on a fast courier to meet us, and mail myself back home."

"You're a bit massier than just your backup unit - that might be a bit expensive, even for you, unless you're going to leave your body behind."

"My bank account's bigger than yours. If I want to mail myself, postage won't be a problem."

"Mm. You'd been putting on a pretty cheerful face, so I'd thought you were getting on well... but if you're having problems, we've only built up a few days' worth of speed; I could turn Pumpkin around and come to a stop to let you off - in the Saturn system, since we're heading by it anyway. I expect I could think of some reasons good enough to keep my bank manager from being too unhappy with the delay; if nothing else, I don't think I've kept Pumpkin's drive turned on for this long before, and I've got some much better data about which spare parts I'm most likely to need. Adjusting my load there before I jump into the deep dark was always one of my explicitly-listed contingency plans, anyway."

"But... what about Gerard's tests?"

"He just needs the engine turned on, and he can keep doing that while we decelerate, and then make some big lazy loops until Pumpkin catches back up again."

"You're sure you wouldn't lose your contracts from the delay?"

"I may not be able to market myself worth a fig, but negotiating that sort of contract detail has been my bread and butter for years. Let's see, instead of skimming past Saturn two weeks after launch, if we turned around halfway, we'd arrive on day nineteen. Instead of arriving at Observatory B, five-fifty AU from Earth, about one hundred fifty days after launch from Insulo Tri, I'd arrive five-forty and a half AU from Saturn after, mm, another one hundred forty-nine days, after re-launching from Saturn. Gotta love constant-thrust courses. So I'd only be out the nineteen days of the trip to Saturn, and another day or two at whatever moon I dock at. It'd definitely cut into my leeway time - but that's what leeway is for in the first place."

"And... you wouldn't mind?"

"Faz - you're bewildering, annoying, fascinating, and a joy to be around. I have been very happy getting to re-acquaint myself with you, in both your bodies, the last few days. But if you're getting antsy already, then keeping you sane for the full trip becomes a matter of safety. I don't mind letting you off at Saturn. I don't mind if you hop into VR the rest of the trip so you've got a whole ringworld to gallop in. I don't mind if you turn yourself off and nap until we're home. And I expect we could come up with another idea or six if we tried. The one thing that would be complicated is if you waited more than a few hours from now to ask to be dropped off, when I'd have to turn Pumpkin around to decelerate; backtracking would likely run me out of my leeway."

"Dashing thro' the void,

Out to the Milky Way,

O'er the moons we go,

Laughing all the way;

Bells on goat's tail ring,

Making spirits bright,

Oh what sport to ride and sing

A spaceship song tonight.

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;

Oh! what joy it is to ride

Out to the Milky Way!

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;

Oh! what joy it is to ride

Out to the Milky Way!

"I'm leaving out the verses I came up with that mention 'lingerie', 'risque', and 'roll in the hay'."

"I did think the scansions of 'solar array' and 'digital display' were a bit forced."

"I think I'm going to go virtual. You've got a lot of video walls, and an internal AR; I could still chat with you while you're doing things in here. And like you said, I can make my VR as big as I want it to be. And you might need that nineteen days. We just need to figure out where to park my body when I'm not using it."

"Eh, we can roll you up in some blankets like a mummy, and stuff you into your bunk. Which would also minimize any temptation I feel to start drawing moustaches on you, or otherwise prank your physical body."

"I'll moustache you, you, you- tickle fight!"

"And we'll catch you all tomorrow, viewers!"

Vlog #20

"Psst; hey, everyone, it's Faz here, secretly hijacking today's vlog. Dee's taking a little nap right now, after I encouraged her to spend far too much time trying to improve her neuvieme parries.

"I know some of you have been asking, 'Faz, you must have dropped at least a hundred grand on getting such a realistic and gorgeous goat robot made, plus the price of your shadow. So why did you make a second-fiddle copy of yourself, and send it off to be fourth-fiddle to a third-rate garbagewoman?'. Okay, so only one of you actually asked that, but I'm sure more of you were thinking it. Someone else asked, 'Everybody's got a hustle. What's yours?', which is pretty much the same thing.

"The truth is that I'm a prediction-market oraculist. I've dug up ways to extract a lot more useful information out of the markets than most people think is possible, and have come up with a few little extra tricks of my own. Nothing so gauche as those numerologists or random-shufflers; but even just paying attention to the timing of shifts in a market can tell you as much as where it settles.

"I'm not going to share my deep, dark, tailor-made boutique analysis secrets - at least not without a lot more in exchange than anyone has yet been willing to pay - but I am going to share one of my results. Which is that there's a sharp rise in my long-term expected returns if I start investing in enterprises based at least fifty AUs from the sun. There's a chance that that exact figure is just an artifact, but the sun lenses should be more than far enough.

"And yes, part of why I'm telling everyone now is that if you all start buying into the same things, I'm already in a good place to make a profit. So invest away!

"But why am I going myself, you're still wondering? Well, it comes back to classic chaos theory. There's some details I want to look at in person, which could make a big difference in some details of how I should best invest. That is, what I find out will make the difference between a little profit, and a lot of profit.

"Of course, none of you know me from Eve, and for all you know, everything I just said is complete balivernes. So why am I putting my reputation at risk by going public? Because oraculist techniques don't just provide guidance for large trends, but also for individual actions. Everything from deciding where to live to which piercings to wear on any day. And the shadow me, the one talking to you right now? I've got those oraculist algorithms baked into me all the way down - I'm even better with them than the me on Insulo Tri is.

"Now, I'm going to delete the local copy of this broadcast so that Dee won't know what I talked about. I'd be very happy if everyone watching this sent in emails and questions, and pretended that I spent all this time saying all sorts of different embarrassing things about her. I have all the interior cameras programmed to catch every last nuance of her expression when she starts reading it all..."

Vlog #21

"Hello, world.

"Faz may be a good database programmer, but she's no expert on shipboard systems, and she vastly underestimates my emergency preparedness preparations. I can understand that; when we split up, I was working as a third mate, and I had very little control over shipboard policy.

"... Either that, or she's entirely aware I'd catch her out, and she's trying to start up negotiations on how I should 'punish' her. That woman can still see three steps ahead of me, a lot of the time. Well, at least she keeps me on my toes.

"Today, I'm going to focus on one of the questions I'm asked the most often: How does the modern day compare to the past that I grew up in?

"Trying to sum up a century and change of change in just a few sentences is pretty futile. But if I had to pick just one stand-out thing... everything is easier now. Almost nobody today thinks about the lack of hassles that I used to take for granted.

"Since a lot of my friends and acquaintances are part of the furry affinity group, I'll focus on that. In the first decade or so of my life, there simply was no furry affinity group, just various people who had an affinity for what are now called furry things. If any of us were lucky, we'd get to watch a movie like 'The Secret of NIMH', at the specific times it was broadcast in a theatre; or a few years after it was made, at the specific times it was broadcast by a television channel. Or we'd know of a weekly cartoon from a couple of decades previously that had a centaur in it, or maybe we'd come across a scholarly book that translated the unexpurgated versions of Aesop's Fables. And that was about it. By the time I'd died, the affinity group had coalesced, and there were conventions, sub-affinity groups - we called them 'fandoms' - a few hundred webcomics, artist galleries, and if you could afford it, artists who'd draw what you paid them to. Which was certainly better. Today, various background algorithms analyze everyone's reactions to various stimuli and determine exactly which affinity groups they'd get the most benefit from being part of... and similar algorithms come up with a constant stream of customized media content for each individual to maximize their enjoyment, both from directly watching it and from sharing with others. The whole idea of waiting for an authour to come up with an idea, write out a script, and then produce a finished product has faded from public consciousness as much as hand-cranking an electric starter on an automobile carriage.

"Put another way, it felt to me like every minute of every day on modern Earth was a fully-choreographed 'OK Go' music video.

"Artificial friends that are more fun to interact with than live people, better food that just shows up when it's a good time to eat it, automatically-created, -delivered, and -taken-away-and-stored toys, something close to a complete lack of the medical problems I used to take for granted... while there are parts of modern culture that I don't really engage with, on the whole, I don't think I'd want to go back to the way things were during my first life.

"And as for not engaging with culture... well, even during my first life I felt like I was out-of-step with a lot of my contemporaries. I don't remember ever 'getting' the attraction of watching major-league sports, or keeping up with the lifestyles and relationships of the wealthy, or daytime talk TV, or soap operas, or a lot of other things. And I remember flash mobs being something unusual and unexpected and occasionally interesting to watch a recording of. When I was revived, I tried taking part in the constant-firehose of modern culture... and luckily for me, it didn't take long for the background algorithms to figure out how little enjoyment I got from that approach.

"Up in Insulo Tri, I'm not going to say that most people take life at a slower pace, but... the crowds aren't quite so large, and there's a conscious awareness that there's a distinction between Trions and the peoples of Luna and Earth. And one point three seconds of light-lag is still short enough to participate in everything but fast-twitch networked games. Modern, without being overwhelming. Compared to the groups of people further out, who seem to be random-walking in their own directions, depending on distance and size of the community. You know, the first time I saw a picture of a busy street inside one of Titan's domes, I thought it was the middle of a convention for Cenobite cosplayers? I'm very happy that they're living their best-possible lives, as everyone there sees them, but the affinity groups there are distinct enough from the ones in Earth-Luna space that I expect it would take me a good amount of time and effort to just start feeling comfortable among them. And while I appreciate the mindset that offered to let me join the community there during my time of need, I do feel a certain amount of relief that I don't have to accept that offer. Well, fully accept it, at the moment; I knew what I might be getting into by sending one of my backups there, with that version of myself potentially waking up in the middle of things there. Though if I do wake up as that backup, I hope that folk on Titan understand if I'm not particularly fond of tight black leather and rubber outfits, and that I continue to favour fur and feathers.

"... That was supposed to be a joke. And now I'm realizing how poorly it might be taken. I wasn't trying to offend anyone, I'm just occasionally an idiot. I'll add some more Titanian cultural items at the top of my to-read pile, and hope that I'll be a bit less of an idiot by the time I swing past your moon. I've only got so many hours before then, but if you want to recommend some items that have a high ratio of value to time required, feel free to suggest something.

"Let's see, what else is going on... Well, Gerard seems to be giving up on the whole socialization thing for now. I'm not sure if that choice is arising from Venusian culture, his inhuman thought processes, or just because he wants to focus on whatever experiments he's doing aboard his ship right now. He's been having something like sixty megawatts of solar beams from the Ríos de Luz pouring into Testbed Six, but other than making his ship's heat-radiators work that much harder, I couldn't tell you what he's using that power for. A few racks of high-power computers, maybe? Some sort of manufacturing process that needs a whole lot of energy? Sensor cover against anyone trying to perform industrial espionage on his drive design? Could be almost anything.

"Faz has started teaching herself about the fabbers and machine tools I have aboard ship. She's also been looking into a variety of blueprints of possible upgrades to her robo-goat body, even if she's not using it much right now. When the other Faz commissioned it, it was an extremely accurate copy of her living body; but the new Faz can try a few things the other Faz wouldn't. Just upgrading her eyes alone could introduce her to a literal new rainbow of experiences. I'm not really sure how that meshes with the guarantee that the new Faz's behaviour is supposed to match the old Faz's... is it just that this is what the organic Faz would do if she got put in a mechanical body? Maybe it's that her AI mind can adapt to a new sensorium more easily than someone with a squishy brain - or a program that emulates a squishy brain in exact detail - could? I've asked her, but she's deflected. The closest to a straight answer I've gotten from her so far is that she wants to be able to play pranks on every last one of my senses, from ultraviolet to t-rays.

"That's about everything I can think of, so I'll talk to you-all later."

Vlog #22

"Hello, world.

"It's just a couple of more days until we pass by Saturn. We're getting near enough that Traffic Control is keeping a closer eye on our exact course. I'm still far enough out to make some last-minute adjustments, if I want to end up nearer or farther to any particular view. I know that I could get a much more detailed view in VR, from whatever angles I want; and I certainly use that as one of my tools. But I still say there's something special about being there in person. And that's not just because of how many of my ship-charters have been to take a couple out to enjoy some time in freefall.

"After the flyby, we're going to start bending our course about twenty degrees down from the plane of the ecliptic, gradually settling on the final line toward Observatory B. I suppose that Pluto or Quaoar aren't much more out of our way than Saturn, but they're nowhere near as much fun to look at. I'm still waiting for a couple of responses to find out if anyone living at either dwarf planet, or their moons, would be willing to put us up if something happens and I have to pull in for a tune-up or some repair work.

"I'll admit that I'm tempted to ignore all my timing constraints, and keep going in the direction I'm going until I reach Pioneer Ten. It's just a hundred ninety AU further than Titan, maybe ten degrees to the right, only a ninety-day trip... and I'd be adding at least two months to the trip to Observatory B. I certainly wouldn't be the first to pop over for a visit, since the development of the horizon drive, but it's not really a popular destination - six months round trip just to visit a century-and-a-half antique, long-defunct piece of hardware isn't very many peoples' cup of tea. ... Maybe in twelve or fifteen years, when I don't have to scramble to cover my monthly payments, I'll be able to take the luxury of a grand tour like that.

"But today, I'm heading out on a spacewalk - for work, instead of stargazing. We managed to hit a sub-millimetre micrometeor, which popped against the Whipple shield just outside the airlock. I'm going to dismount those panels, mount some replacements, and bring them inside to melt and reforge into fresh panels. I don't actually need to do all that; the odds of another micrometeor hitting that exact spot are a few orders of magnitude smaller than hitting any micrometeor at all. But there are reasons the word 'shipshape' was invented; taking care of all the little things is good practice for being ready to take care of any big problems that come up. That's also why I'll be doing the work in person, instead of just sending out Huey, Dewey, and Louie; live experience can help with some subjective parts of training that the most realistic VR can't emulate.

"Back on Insulo Tri, I still seem to be tied up with the legal system. Francesca's status is in limbo while various people run investigations and decide whether to declare a mistrial happened and all sorts of other things. Which certainly offers more hope to her than the rapid course of so-called 'justice' would have given her. But on a purely practical level, it also means that everything I owned outside of Pumpkin, and had stored in my office, is locked up in evidence lockers for the foreseeable future. It's kind of annoying to keep my business clients up-to-date and generally informed about the state of their contracts, when my main archive of business data is offline, and I have to squirt the replacement info from my shipboard backup through my rather paltry interplanetary bandwidth to a rented server.

"I suppose that I should have known in advance that a copy of myself committing suicide in a courtroom would bring me to the attention of pretty much every government agency Insulo Tri has; but that doesn't make it less annoying for what seems like every last one of them starting a full audit on me at once. It's getting to the point that even though I don't need to accept Titanian citizenship for refuge from criminal charges, I'm seriously considering re-incorporating my business there, purely so that I can continue to operate as a business. It's not that I expect any of the agencies are going to find I've done anything wrong; for instance, I've done my best to err in the direction of overpaying my taxes instead of underpaying them. But when I'm supposed to fill out twenty different assessment statements at once, not one of which cares that their authority is completely irrelevant to what I've actually done, and none of which care about how much time and effort it would take me to fill out all their paperwork within the deadlines they insist on... I start feeling that maybe it wouldn't be all that uncomfortable to start wearing tight, black, leather outfits over my fur.

"Oh, that reminds me, I've gotten messages from more than one Titanian assuring me that the whole 'looks like everyone's in fetish gear' characterization of them has become such a cliche that it's not even really a joke anymore, let alone an insult. Any more than I care about someone trying to make a joke about me enjoying hockey, beer, toques, and maple syrup. So I guess I don't need to go aboot saying 'sorry', eh?

"On the less serious side, it looks like this vlog has started getting spread around enough for the lizardman's constant to start applying. I suppose that generally raising the sanity waterline of everyone only helps so much, if those few still underwater have access to ever-better tools to try to spread their nonsense, such as getting AIs to write their letters for them. For the last couple of days I have been getting, if not a torrent, at least an unending trickle of messages insisting that the AI version of Faz has no qualia, no subjective experience, and therefore I shouldn't treat her like a 'real' person. I will admit that there's a certain part of me that is tempted to propose to her, purely to annoy the senders of those messages even more; and I'm pretty sure that Faz would be all-in for a prank marriage. Of course, another set of messages in that trickle also insist that because my mind is a digital emulation of a brain instead of actually being made of biological neurons, I also don't have any real qualia, and therefore shouldn't be bothering decent folk by acting like a real person. I'm not really sure how they're expecting to change the mind of someone who they claim doesn't actually have a mind. Still, I suppose AI-written messages are at least less annoying than the spam from my birth era; I've found that I don't miss at all the old ads for quack nostrums, Spanish Prisoner cons, pyramid schemes, fake attempts at blackmail, and skill-free attempts to infect my computers.

"Hm, anything else? Ah, Faz has been spending the last day or so using VR to experiment with body-plans that it's been impossible for her to experience in reality. I think the offers of support from Titan have gotten her interested in seeing what all the fuss about the Titanian version of morphological freedom is. Right now I think she's trying out what it's like to be one or another organ inside someone else's body; next on her to-do list she's listed 'what's my max number of legs, tails, udders, tongues, etc?', and then 'architecture!', whatever that means for her. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

"And until after I do - see you-all next time."

Vlog #23

"Hello, world.

"Welp, tomorrow's the big fly-by. After accelerating at a fifth of a gee for two weeks and a few hours, as I go by Saturn, I'll be passing at twenty-four hundred kilometres a second... which isn't going to leave much time for dilly-dallying. Or sightseeing.

"Something I haven't been bothering to vlog about is how I've been trying to arrange for an extra contract or two to pick up a few more euros. For example, it costs a lot more than five times to charter a one-gee fast-packet courier than it does a more typical point-two gee ship. Those things have half their mass dedicated to the drive, half of what's left to a fusor, and out of the rest, still have to squeeze in frame and structure, electronics, maneuvering, sensors, comms... oh, and, of course, cargo. Anyway, I was thinking that maybe I could save someone a bit of change, by arranging to match courses with a fast-packet, pick up some goods for Quaoar or Pluto, and then send it back. But even at one-gee, a fast-packet would take three days to catch up to me from a standing start, and then another nine to decelerate, accelerate backwards, and then decelerate and arrive. That wouldn't save the shipper too many euros, and I couldn't find anyone willing to pay me enough to cover my own extra trip-time.

"If physical cargo wouldn't work, I was also looking into carrying data. Simplifying a whole lot, radios don't really have a fixed range; if you want to transmit ten times as far as you usually do, you can, but you'll do so at a hundredth of your usual bandwidth. Or a hundred times the distance, for one ten-thousandth the bandwidth. I'm going to be pretty close to Saturn and its moons, so could receive a good amount of data; and if I get close enough to the outer dwarfs, I could transmit fairly fast, too. Unfortunately, this way of filling a station wagon with data-tapes also doesn't quite pass the budget test, even if I don't have to stop as I go by.

"I looked into a few less-likely ideas, but since none worked out, I won't bore you. Then I remembered that Francesca wasn't around to remind me what an idiot I can be in some respects, so tried to think of what she might tell me if she could."

"Aha! You can mask up when you want to!"

"I never claimed I couldn't, Faz, just that I never want to. And from what everyone tells me, doing the mask-thing involves a lot more than a bit of projective empathy."

"Pff."

"Anyway, one thing she once told me was something close to, 'Don't play the cards, boss, play the players. Trust-metrics aren't just analysis tools, you can treat them like money. Invest in them and you'll always be happy with the returns.'

"Back when I was born, there weren't many trust-metrics, and they were almost all run by large organizations. FISA credit scores by banks, SAT scores for institutions of higher education, maybe IQ scores if you want to stretch a point. By the time I died, you could try counting the number of followers you had on social media, maybe you'd have an account with an advertising network and could count how much an ad on one of your posts was worth, and if you were in one of the more totalitarian areas, you'd have a social credit score. That's the experience I've had for almost my entire life with trust-metrics; so even after the almost six years since I've been revived, I'm still pretty clumsy trying to deal with the whole... thing... especially compared to just about everyone now alive who literally grew up with them.

"One thing Francesca and I eventually agreed on was that it would be a bad idea to try to directly monetize this vlog with intrusive ads. Sure, I might pick up a couple of euros, but I'd also annoy you viewers enough that you'd be less likely to let anyone else know it's worth watching.

"Back to my point... I tried firing up the various bits of trust-metric analysis software that Francesca acquired for our business, put them in 'brain-dead company owner is running it' mode, and tried to do what I'd been paying her to do for me. I didn't succeed at that; but I was able to notice a few sudden sharp spikes in unexpected areas. Well, pretty much the whole field is unexpected to me, but you know what I mean. It seems that having a government-certified copy of oneself commit suicide during a government-certified live broadcast as a conscientious objector during a government-certified trial, is a fairly extreme stress-test for the 'is willing to try to do the right thing' metrics, and I think I pegged the needles on some of them. ... That's steam-era engineering slang for 'exceeded what the instruments are designed to measure'. That, plus previously-existing metrics which detail what I consider 'the right thing' that's worth trying to do to be, seems to have put me in an area of trust-metric multidimensional space that I've never heard of before. Trying to put it into terms I'm familiar with, I could ask to borrow someone's car or house, and if I promised to give it back in at least as good condition, a lot of people would just, well, let me. Or from the other side, someone might ask me to hold onto their wallets for them while they went swimming, in full expectation that I'd hand them back afterwards, without even taking a peek inside.

"Given that the numbers from all these trust-metrics get plugged into all sorts of automatic algorithms, I now seem to have an opportunity to make a few euros in a way I haven't been able to, before: as a reasonably-trustable data- and computing- warehouse. Especially for groups of reasonably similar political persuasions as myself. Sure, I had the capacity to divvy up my business mainframe and run an email server or a virtual homomorphic-encryption server; but now there are some people willing to pay enough to cover my costs for doing so, and then a bit.

"Well, to an extent. I couldn't keep the appropriate sub-metrics up if I simply rented a server back on Insulo Tri, and there are enough complicating factors that even a server on Titan would barely break even. But using some of my spare computing capacity I installed here aboard Pumpkin? Entirely worth the effort.

"I'm spending a few hours today doing the programming and business-legal work to set up everything I need to do that. I have a few complicating factors that most data-warehouses don't have to bother with, such as the risk of hitting a micrometeor while I'm at four percent of lightspeed in a few months, and dealing with time-synchronization issues when everything aboard ship ticks along almost a tenth of a percent slower than everything back in the main Solar System; and that relativistic doppler shift means a laser from something in Earth's reference frame sent at a green wavelength of five hundred fifty nanometers will be received as a more yellowy five hundred seventy-three; and the further I get from any planets, the tighter my bandwidth constraints are going to be, even piggy-backing on the Observatory's every-ten-AU relays. And I'm doing some wrestling to get those details incorporated into the risk-analysis analysts' analysis of my prospective business-plan, while minimizing the hits those analysts apply to my relevant trust-sub-metrics. And to work out a reasonable set of sales packages, for various levels of redundancy spread across the RAM and other storage devices I have here. I'm even thinking about renting out some of the RAM inside my own skulls, depending on the premium I'd be able to charge for something approaching 'if I survive at all, so will your data' levels of reliability. And by tomorrow, I'll have reconfigured Pumpkin's comm equipment to accept a number of tight-beam lasers to dump various pieces of data onto my computers.

"This is only going to be a sideline at best for the next year, and probably longer. I'm sufficiently paranoid that I built a good deal of extra computing power into Pumpkin - but that's a good deal compared to what's needed to run a ship, which is tiny compared to any real computing centre. But if someone wants to increase the odds that a few terabytes of their most important data will be preserved by having me carry it while I'm a few hundred AU away from anyone else, I should be able to help with that.

"And in case anyone's wondering - no, I'm not touching any of the backup units that I'm carrying to Observatory B as a favour for a couple of close friends. That's a purely personal matter, only technically commercial.

"How about you, Faz? Anything you care to share with the audience back home?"

"Yep. I figured out that just living in VR isn't going to be enough to fulfill my social needs and keep me sane, no matter how big the virtual city and how many people are in the virtual crowds. Did you know that when we pass by Saturn tomorrow, it's going to take over eighty minutes for a single text message to get from us to Earth, and even longer to get a reply, since by the time it gets to us, we'll have moved even further away?"

"I am aware of those facts, yes."

"That's less than nine round trips a day! And less every day! Already, by the time I find out what any of the latest news or jokes or gossip is, and try to chat about it, I'm hours out-of-date!"

"I distinctly remember telling bio-you, before I launched, that Observatory B is about seventy-seven light-hours out. And that, while I was reassembling this-you's body, that that-you told me she updated this-you with her lifelog from when she and I were, er, together."

"I know that I knew that, but I didn't know that, if you know what I mean?"

"That sentence just raised at least three red flags in my HUD's grammar checker, but I'll just say 'yes'. So... we already talked about all the solutions we could think of, to keep you happy and healthy. Have you picked another one out to try?"

"Maybe-yes, maybe-no. I think I'm going to try stutter-skipping. Instead of just turning myself off until we're back, or slowing myself down, I think I'll try letting myself run a bit, then sending whatever message I want back home, then turning myself off for the message's round-trip time, then turning myself on again. That should really reduce how much time I'm awake and feeling... unconnected, but I won't have months to catch up on by the time we get back, and I'll still be able to keep an eye on how you're doing over the trip. And if I still can't stand it, we've got the other ideas to try."

"If you think it's worth a go, I'm all for it. Want to transmit an incremental backup to Titan tomorrow?"

"My sort of AI doesn't do deltas, but we're great at integrating lifelogs. But won't your bandwidth be saturated tomorrow, with your new gig?"

"Incoming comms, yes. Outgoing mostly uses different bits of hardware, and I can fully split off one comm-laser by then."

"Well, alright, then."

"Alright. ... Hm, are we done for the day?"

"Oh, I'm sure you'll want to cut off the transmission before I start going into detail about what you and I got up to yesterday in that virtual island-"

Vlog #24

"Hello, world, and it's a busy day today. I'm live-vlogging our close pass by Saturn and its moon, Titan. We're just a few minutes from our closest approach - but at our speeds, three minutes of travel takes us four hundred thousand kilometres. Titan itself is under twenty-six hundred kilometres across, and we'll be getting close enough that Pumpkin's sensors should be able to measure a tiny bit of atmospheric drag.

"Sticking to the standard axes, with positive declination being 'up', you can see Saturn off to our left; we're looking at its brightly-lit southern hemisphere. Its rings are kind of edge-on to us and hard to see, but you can see the ring-shadows on the northern hemisphere. We passed by the first moon, Iapetus, about four million kilometers back, Phoebe is one and a half million ahead of us in Gemini, and everything else is close to Saturn, in Hydra. Straight abaft of us, in Sagittarius, are almost all of the planets in conjunction with the sun, which probably causes all sorts of complications for any astrologers around here. And completely invisible, ahead of us, about twenty-five degrees 'down', between Orion's Belt and Monoceros's forehoof, is our destination, Observatory B, directly opposite Seventy Ophiuchi.

"Above us and to our left is Testbed Six. That glowing cloud behind it isn't any sort of rocket exhaust; it's an aerosol lens. Gerard has told his ship to continuously fire a couple of lasers, whose interference patterns shove around tiny beads of glass, which collectively act like a single giant lens. Since the last time I mentioned it, he's doubled the power of the beams he's requested from the Ríos de Luz, to a hundred twenty megawatts. That's ten times the power produced by Pumpkin's fusor; and since Testbed Six is ten times Pumpkin's mass and keeping the same acceleration, it's entirely possible he's fully powering his drive from that beam. Not that he's willing to talk to me about it, beyond the bare minimum I need to know to fly safely around his ship. My revenge against his silence has been cleaning him out at penny-ante poker the last few days. He's gotten decent at playing the cards; but he's still got a lot to learn about playing the players.

"Focusing back ahead of us, we can see the yellowish, slightly hazy ball of Titan. It used to be more of an orange during my first life, before they started using solar-excited atoms in its ionosphere as a lasing medium, and picking up a few extra bucks by pumping the result into the Ríos de Luz. Hm... checking the angles, it looks like most of the beamage that Testbed Six is currently collecting is from lasersats around Titan, and the rest is from somewhere around Saturn.

"I think I'm going to stop virtually narrating now and settle in to enjoy the view. This is going to be the last exciting thing I'm going to be looking at for months. And once Pumpkin accelerates for a while longer, I'm going to have to huddle inside to avoid getting blasted by slightly relativistic interplanetary particles; and by 'slightly' I mean on the order of ten rads a second around turnover. So I'm just going to settle into my lawn-chair on Pumpkin's nose and watch for a while.

"...

"Hunh. Wonder what those sparkly flashes in Titan's atmosphere are.

"...

"And we're past Titan. I'm not going to try to lean over Pumpkin's bow's edge to look behind; that's begging to risk needing Huey to come rescue me. So I'm going to watch Saturn for a while longer, then head back inside. I'll want to inspect some of the hardware that just had a few gobs of data lasered into it, and then I should probably start rearranging some furniture. I'll be moving my bunk as far back as possible, and shifting most of the cargo and stores up front, to act as extra radiation shielding. I'll be moving the main computing hardware to the back with me, and a few sensitive things like Faz's own body and its CPU. Turnover will be annoying, but I've made arrangements with Gerard for both of us to use each other's ship as a bit of extra shielding, during the moments our ships physically rotate, and when, for at least a few seconds, our ships will be turned sidelong against the interstellar dust instead of narrow-end on. I'll be getting more benefit from that than he will, but he's got more mass to act as shielding and so doesn't need as much protection as I will. I expect we'll figure out more favours to exchange to balance things out, over time.

"Faz, you've been awfully quiet this whole time. Anything you want to share with your viewers, while you're still physically incarnated?"

"Tabarnak. Have you been checking your messages?"

"I've had my filters set to pop up an alert for anything of high priority, or needing personal attention, but am now going over everything recent since you brought it up. ... Not seeing anything eye-catching."

"I think someone just tried to kill us.

"Those flashy things you mentioned? That was Space Traffic Control aiming some beams at some unannounced craft trying to launch out of Titan's atmosphere. And my oraculist divinations for today involved a surprising high percentage of the Monte Carlo extrapolations that indicated we weren't just going to face risk, but some sort of consciously-directed opposition to achieving our goals. I thought it was going to be a hacking attempt while you were collecting data through the lasers, or maybe a competing business pulling some sort of stunt to drain away some of your customers... but actually trying to blow us up is certainly within the parameters. I ignored that possibility because, well, Traffic Control is good at keeping things like that from happening... and I think they just did."

"... Let's head back in. I may not put as much trust in your prediction methods as you do, but I rarely mind a bit of prudence. And I really don't want to imagine how hard it would be for someone to have dropped some sand or BBs ahead of us, but I think I should work that out. ... And maybe tell Cindy to start nudging us a few dozen metres to the left, and then file a revised flight-plan with Traffic Control to move our approved corridor just outside our current one. And see if I can whip up any improvements to our forward-facing lidar. And... probably stop live-broadcasting every idea I come up with. Sorry, folks, looks like that's the end of today's vlog... and, er, hopefully not of the whole series."

Vlog #25

"Hello, world.

"Today, instead of a live vlog, I'll be broadcasting something that Faz, my robots, and I have been recording the last few days - a mostly-two-actress production of the Rocky Horror Show. I'll admit that during larger showings, I usually go as Columbia, but it's been fun being silly and doing the whole thing within the limitations of being aboard Pumpkin.

"And now, without further ado..."

Vlog #26

"...Hello, world.

"I'll admit that yesterday's vlog-post was a bit of a cop-out. I'm afraid that I was a bit busy trying to accomplish a few things that I didn't want to share, at least until I was finished.

"I've been trying to find out what exactly happened during the close pass of Titan, two days ago now. Unfortunately, I'm only peripherally connected at best to any Titanian affinity groups, and I don't really have any budget to spend on research. You might think that being technically licensed as a private investigator by Insulo Tri might help, but if it did, I didn't notice.

"There's a lot going on that I'm completely unaware of, and I'm entirely certain that I'm completely wrong about a good portion of what I do know. But my best guess is that I got caught in some friction between at least a couple of affinity groups. Sort of.

"One of them seems to be some sort of anti-group, sometimes called 'individualists' or 'anti-societists'. Trying to summarize their viewpoint in a few sentences, modern technology lets extremely small groups survive for long periods, and even thrive if too much doesn't go wrong; and those groups can be as small as a single person. So they figure they don't need anyone else, and anyone else who tries to limit them in any way is, by definition, a bad person. Even if those limits happen to improve the lives of both them and everyone else. Limits like laws against causing diffuse, low-grade, sub-criminal-damage harm to a large number of people, in order to gain a concrete, measurable, direct personal benefit.

"The other group is less a particular group than a collection of splinters from other groups. To the extent they've got a name, people call them 'socialists'... though that term has mutated over the centuries to the point it has pretty much no connection to anyone from my first life who'd been called that. I haven't been able to get a good handle on whatever it is they have in common; but they seem to like the fact that I'm pro-labour-union. At least enough that most of the people who've signed onto my new 'Deep Dark' data-storage enterprise seem to be reasonably closely-connected to this bunch through their social-media graphs.

"Part of what's been making it so hard for me to get even this much is that on Titan, there seems to be a pretty extensive culture of anonymous social media; anonymous, but pseudonymous, so that a given poster can prove they're the same one who posted something previously. Which is fine and dandy, in and of itself. But it seems to have created an entire industry of AI-farms running various accounts; most to help fill out the apparent ranks of any given affinity group who wants to promote their viewpoint over another one... which, come to think of it, is probably just about every affinity group... but also a good number designed to fake being part of a competing group, sometimes for years, to gain trust and credibility while laying the groundwork for eventually sabotaging the position they'd been arguing for. It's a whole... thing.

"One of the 'Idiot's Guide to Titan' references I found pointed out that it's still fairly expensive to fab up a realistic, lifelike body, like mine or Faz's; and even harder to make one that can fool even the sensors that can be stuffed into a wristwatch these days. So one of the ways that a Titanian can assure someone else that they're really themselves is to meet in person - and for their body to be different enough from the baseline human standard that a tissue-assembled double would have to be created as a one-off just for them, which is too expensive for nearly any would-be impersonator. The guide also pointed out that there's a common prejudice on Titan against tourists from Earth who look nearly interchangeable to each other. ... Hm, maybe that's part of why I was invited to become a Titanian - there aren't that many humanoid rat-women with feathered wings and a snake for a tail.

"Not even that guide could explain the local predilection for shiny black outfits, though.

"Where I seem to come in is that, based on a sampling of discussions, the computing-for-hire options I offered, running here on Pumpkin, alter the network topology of how some of these pseudonymous identities arrange their affairs. ... That didn't make a lick of sense, now did it? Okay, I'll try again. Some people didn't like that I'm providing a data-haven to their opponents. Particularly one that's not under Titanian authority, and something about the way Pumpkin's light-lag is going to develop over the next months knocked some of their plans off-kilter.

"The closest I've found to a best-guess consensus is that one or more individualists decided to communicate their displeasure to me in what they considered to be a harmless fashion. They burned some of their sock-puppet identities by anonymously buying some fairly small, surface-to-orbit drone plans; and knowing full well that they'd get shot down, launched them in my general direction.

"Of course, given what little I've managed to gather about Titanian social media, that entire consensus might be manufactured by some other server-farm with its own horde of AI-run sock-puppet conversationalists. I can't exactly do the usual Titanian thing, and go visit a coffee-klatch in person. Well, not unless I have my backup on that moon turned on, and even if I could arrange for a suitably uniquely identifiable body arranged for that version of me, having two forks of myself running would really tick off various lawyers and bureaucrats back on Insulo Tri; probably enough that they'd finally yank my business license, meaning I couldn't fulfill and get paid for my contracts at Observatory B, which would mean I'd have to start digging pretty deep into my 'just-in-case' collection of emergency backup plans.

"I suppose I could try the time-share idea from earlier, turning myself off when that fork is turned on, but... at this moment, I don't really see the point. I'm about three AU out from Titan and getting further every day, and I've tweaked my course enough that I'm pretty confident I'm not going to run into anything from Titan that might have somehow already been dropped in my way.

"Speaking of three AU, we seem to be hitting the limit of what Gerard's willing to pay for power from the Ríos de Luz. There aren't any beam-collimators in the direction we're going, so getting any further from the emitters back near Saturn would mean he'd have to have them fire off exponentially-ever-larger beams to have the same amount of power intercepting his aerosol lens. He's already down to sixty megawatts collected, so I expect him to tell them to turn off the beam, and pull in his lens-granules, any time now.

"We're really heading into the deep dark now, with very little between us and Observatory B. Sixteen AU past Titan I'll be passing what was originally called Two Thousand Five RL Forty-Three, and whose actual name I'll ignore in favour of 'Refreshing Landing', a hundred-kilometre-wide ball whose only redeeming feature is that it's almost directly along my course to Observatory B, so if something goes wrong within the next few days, I'll have someplace I could try reaching sooner than I could get to Titan. One hundred twenty-five AU past Titan is what was once known as Two Thousand Six SQ Three Seventy-Two, and that I'll call, hm, 'Silly Quackers', with similar characteristics. I think just about all the excitement is over until we reach turnover, unless something unexpected happens.

"Once I finish getting everything into place for mass-shielding against all the atoms and photons that Pumpkin is ploughing into, I expect I'm going to start really focusing on my studying. I'm not sure if I can turn that into interesting vlog posts, so we'll just have to see how that shakes out. But at least for the next few days, remember viewers, same rat-time, same rat-channel!"

Vlog #27

"Hello, world.

"I got a few interesting messages, recently.

"One's from one of my trusted contacts on Titan, finally clueing me into the why of the black shiny outfits. I really should have thought of it myself... actually, it's one of the rumours I heard, but it wasn't any more plausible than any of the others. And now I know that there's a coterie of Titanians who've created a set of AIs specifically dedicated to muddying the waters on this.

"I'm still going to need to review my real-world applied puzzle-solving skills, and check for any relevant refresher or upgrade courses I can order in.

"Also, now I get to decide whether to actually share what I've learned, or to switch to being on the inside of the long-running joke myself. Hm... well, I do have that corset from the floor-show scene that I could fix up, if I want to transmit a video to Titan - I'm over half a light-hour away already, so I couldn't really call it a 'video-chat'. Hm again... others have leaked hints, so as long as I keep any of my own leaks within those bounds, I can enjoy the 'I know something you don't know' feeling I'm sure a lot of Titanians appreciate. So: it seems that I have something in common with most Titanians that I didn't even realize, and I've even mentioned it a time or two on this vlog. There, that should be sufficiently cryptic.

"Moving on to the main point of today's vlog: I'm seriously considering activating my backup copy on Titan, at least part-time and on some specific days. There's going to be a convention soon that I'd like to attend, dedicated to small-scale shipping and transport concerns like mine. Space truckers, to be more blunt. Corporations showing off their latest gear, competitions of all sorts, and, most important, enough in-person networking that I'd have at least a sporting chance to pick up any important rumours.

"Sure, almost all interplanetary and interlunar cargoes are carried by unmanned craft piloted by cheap, subsapient AIs. But those craft are mostly dedicated to cargo runs known well in advance, like Titan shipping its abundant CHON resources to organics-poor colonies, who usually load the cargo-ships with metals for the return trips. But modern life has enough complications, including the occasional business trying to trim costs at the expense of reliability, that any group in the solar system might develop a sudden need for, say, selenium and some optical-grade corundum. So there's still room for a variety of owner-operated tramp cargo vessels, each of which is working as hard as I do at finding opportunities to keep the bill-collectors at bay for a few weeks longer.

"I've got the quals to make better cash by fixing gadgets rather than just pushing objects around, but I still do enough of the latter that it really helps to keep me above water, financially. And this venture to the sun-lens point isn't going to last forever. Any one detail that I could learn at a con like this one could be enough to make the difference between bankruptcy and eventually paying off my mortgage. And since all I'd lose is a couple of days of generic study time... the payoff isn't guaranteed, but it seems likely enough to be worth getting a ticket.

"I've got a few more details to check and arrangements to make, but there's a good chance my next vlog will be made by my Titanian backup self."

Vlog #28

"Hello, worlds!

"It's me, here on Titan.

"There are very few bodies available for a digital person like me at short notice, on Titan. Even fewer that I'd be willing to spend any amount of time in. Fortunately, there's something like a furry affinity group here, even if it's got some differences from the ones I'm used to; and even more fortunately, there's a living body with a computer brain that's available for rent, which is at least symmetrical, tetrapodal, mammalian, furry, and female, and doesn't look too shabby in my opinion.

"Also fortunately for me, I've played around in a variety of body-types in VR for the last few years, so I'm already getting used to it.

"For those just listening to this vlog's audio... I'm kind of short, a bit under four feet tall - sorry, under one-twenty centimeters. My legs are kind of birdlike, almost entirely long, stick-like shins, with some grabby claws for feet. Forearms are also long sticks. Tail is kind of lizardy-shaped, with a thick base, tapering to a point, with a tuft on the end. Ears are like a fennec's, eyes large, and the rest of my head and torso are generic, maybe as much like a fraggle as anything else. I'm missing my sonar and t-ray radar, but at least I've got good eyesight. I'm also missing the lack of enough CPU power to run myself in fast-time, but if most everyone else can manage living through just one day every day, I suppose I'll be able to stand it, too.

"I only have direct memories from my shipboard self up to when I launched my backup, just over ten days ago. But I've gotten caught up on events since then, including both watching my public vlogs and going over some private notes I've sent myself. So it turns out I am, in fact, going to be wearing a tight and shiny black outfit... fortunately, the individual who commissioned this body's creation in the first place was expecting to do the same, so they were kind enough to design its fur not to get pulled too much. I'm still probably going to need to douse myself in talc before I can pull the thing on.

"And going to be with me today is Faz. She's a shadow-reconstruction rather than an upload, so the anti-em-pocalypse no-simultaneous-forks laws don't apply to her - don't ask me why - and she's assured me that her shipboard and Titanian selves can exchange lifelogs and keep each other synchronized.

"Faz, you about ready to join us yet, and show off what body you've picked out for yourself?"

"I'm just in a taxi now. Here, have some video."

"... And you're a goat again. Find yourself another robot?"

"Actually, I'm in a live body, like yours. The local zoos have almost all of their exhibits tissue-built instead of live-born, and they mostly give them computers for brains. Some run uploads of their animals like you, some reconstructions like me, some a few stranger things. And all of them have extra software that absolutely keeps them from doing any harm to anyone. There are a few bio-brains, but the insurance premiums for owning those are really killer, and those critters always have some robot nearby ready to intervene. They hire out their safe critters for a lot of parties, and on occasion to a few weirdos like me who get our kicks from walking around in meatspace like this, instead of just experimenting in VR in college like everyone else. Not every critter has a powerful enough CPU to run a full person, so the selection's a bit limited, especially for the non-glamorous options, like small, hoofed mammals instead of lions, tigers, or bears."

"Well, good to know the option's available, if I need it; though I don't think I'd really want to stay in a body without hands for very long."

"That's only because you have a 'gotta fix it' complex. Same reason you wear clothes with pockets, to hold tools and gadgets. I should try convincing you to actually relax and think of this as a vacation, and go hands-free for the duration... or maybe just swap to wearing a bandolier with pouches. After all, you're not going to directly remember any of this, unless something drastic happens to your copy on Pumpkin and you became the main you."

"Or maybe the anti-forking laws will get changed before I'm overwritten with a fresh backup, or maybe I'll get put into long-term storage and get woken up ten thousand years from now, or maybe they'll figure out how to merge forked uploads, or all sorts of things. ... I might take you up on that bandolier idea, though; not really practical to have pockets on a fur-tight body-suit."

"What, you're going to join in the local anti-fashion trend, and go as gloomy as Janine?"

"You know, it's such a breath of fresh air for me to know something you don't, and that you can't find out in a split-second of searching, for once. Ah, and I think that's your taxi now. ... And you're not a goat."

"Nope! Video masking filter. I wanted to catch your expression in person!"

"... You're, what, some kind of baby deer?"

"Nope! I'm a fully-adult dik-dik!"

"Leaving aside whether 'adult' can ever apply to you, I'll lay three-to-one odds that you picked it entirely for the name."

"Pay up, then, because the name was no more than ten percent of why. This is convention season on Titan, and there's a farm expo going on halfway across the moon. My choices were even more limited than usual for here, if I wanted to continue to express my style in the manner to which I have become accustomed, and within the allowance my bio-self is letting me have for this trip."

"You'll have to tell me how your selves work that out, sometime. Hm... am I going to have to let you ride on my shoulders all day?"

"Nope! Dik-diks on Earth are as good at pronking as any other ungulate, and here I can do that five times as high!"

"In that case, I'll let-"

"Hello? Miss Dee Marthason?"

"Pardon?"

"You are Dee Marthason, are you not? That is what your digital certificates state."

"I've been 'Dee' for some years, but I don't recall ever being a 'Marthason', let alone setting any of my personal identifiers to that name."

"I am confused. You are saying you are not a son of Martha?"

"Well, I don't use Nordic patronymics, and my mother's name was - wait. Oh. Ooh. Sorry, my context-supplying AR just kicked in. Kipling, right. I certainly aspire in that direction, though I'm not particularly fond of the overt Christian symbolism and terminology."

"Ah, I see. I had been going by the overall shape of your social pattern, and simply assumed you already fit into the relevant local affinity-groups."

"Looks like I still need some better local guides than the ones I've been referring to. What can I do for you?"

"I have a few questions about your Pumpkin's hardware, and was hoping we could chat at some point this weekend, while you aren't otherwise occupied."

"Well, I certainly don't mind talking about Pumpkin, but right now I'm getting ready to go through the exhibitors' displays, before the crowds thicken. Maybe lunchtime?"

"I'd enjoy that. I'll leave you to enjoy your morning, then."

"Oooh, Dee, you've got yourself a date!"

"Of course not, he's - oh, right, you wouldn't have noticed. He's a university STEM student, focusing on recycling systems, and is in a committed relationship, a monogamous triad."

"And he must have given you his number, so you could look him up! Do you need me to remind you that just because someone says on their social-media profile that they're not looking, doesn't necessarily mean they're not looking? Maybe his trio's willing to expand into a quintet."

"I'm going to ignore most of that, and just point out that he's not really my type. I suppose the fangs were cute enough, and I could get used to the hemophagy, but did you see his wing-shoulders? Even if he's just using those limbs as heat-radiators or displays instead of actual flight, that's no excuse for just tacking them onto his existing skeleton and not providing them with proper anchoring and support. If he's not going to take proper care of himself, I'm hardly going to get involved and do it for him."

"Picky, picky, picky."

"I really want to say 'and you know it', but I don't want to swell your head any more than it is. Ah, I know - gotcha! How ticklish are you? ... You're just a perfect little armful, aren't you?"

"I wish to note down for the record my objections to being treated like this and to tell you to keep scratching behind my ears just like that. ... So, what all is there for us to do for the next three days?"

"Well, for all three days, there are at least a few hundred displays in the exhibitor's section to browse through, and I paid extra for VIP tickets to get early-bird access with less crowding. There's a ship beauty contest, which should look particularly nice on the third day, once we're in Titan's week-long night and they get to show off their custom lighting displays. Today around noon there's a charity-thing to encourage pilots to adopt personable AIs, to improve their mental health on long, lonesome flights. Tomorrow morning they award prizes, tomorrow afternoon there's a parade of ships, and tomorrow evening there's a concert and after-party. The city-dome has lots of restaurants and tourist traps, if you don't care to stay in the hotel. Which has two conference rooms, each of which hosts a seminar just about every hour on the hour; some of those I'm more interested in than others. And lots of attendees have more informal get-togethers at the ship parking lot, or their hotel rooms."

"Be honest with me - how much does all of that first stuff you mentioned happen only so people have excuses to hook up during that last bit?"

"Without committing myself to any hard numbers, a lot of people still think making money is more important than one-night stands."

"And how about you? Have you got yourself a nice hotel room booked, in case you meet a handsome fellow, er... you know, I don't actually know what your body is supposed to be."

"Silly and nonthreatening, I think. Remember, I'll be handing over control of this body to a caretaker AI overnight, so my shipboard self can wake up and do maintenance and suchlike. And it's pretty unlikely that whichever me is kicking around in a week is going to remember any socializing this me does, so I don't have much incentive to join the usual barnyard dance, even if we somehow found anyone more interesting to spend time with than each other."

"Aw, that's sweet. Now scratch behind my other ear... that's nice. ... You know, Dee, other than its brain, my current body was made purely out of dik-dik genes and tissues. If I stuck around in it, I could actually get pregnant and give birth to a baby dik-dik, without any of the complicated interventions the two of us needed to be surrogate mothers back on Insulo Tri."

"Are the zookeepers trying to create a local breeding population? Or, would providing a fawn cover your rental fees?"

"Well, no; this isn't the only female dik-dik around, so they can make as many natural dik-diks as they want. I'd have to convince my purse-string-holding bio-self back on Insulo Tri to buy this bio-shell, and that it would be worth spending more on it than something more common, like a goat. But I've got a pretty extensive maternity-focused mask, and can slip into it at the drop of a hat; and I'm rather tickled by the taboo-crossing aspects if I, an artificially-intelligent digital person, could become the birth-mother to a completely mundane biological animal, here in a life-filled artificial dome protecting us from the completely inhospitable natural environment."

"I suppose I can understand that much, but I'm trying to figure out what sort of practical joke would involve you being in a pregnant bio-shell, and am coming up blank, which is sort of worrying."

"Not everything I do is part of a prank."

"You spent eighteen months, including one and three-quarter pregnancies, building up to a single punchline against your roomie."

"Oui, but she really deserved it. Say, have you checked your body's manual? How many male whatever-you-ares are out there?"

"None, this is a one-off - it's also full of xenotissues from different species. Closest it gets to being pregnant is a biochemical switch to start laying unfertilized eggs, and even if I took the injection now, the conference would be over and I'd be out of it before the first yolk was enshelled. So if you were thinking these two versions of us could be surrogate-mom-buddies again, well, you'd need to wait until I was in a different body. Which isn't going to happen, in Plans A One through O Six."

"Your Plan P One is for you to get pregnant?"

"No, the current Plan P series is just the first set where I abandon this body in favour of some other bio-shell. Actual pregnancies don't come in for any of the primary backup plans, they're just part of the general toolkit that can be drawn from the tertiary plans."

"One of these days you're going to have to teach me your mnemonics for keeping track of them all."

"Oh, that's simple. I cheat. ... Or, for all you know, I've been lying all these years and have been picking plan-letters at random."

"You drop lines like that, and somehow Oscar, Janine, and Hal thought you were using a damaged brain-scan."

"... Come to think of it, how did they get that idea? I'm suddenly thinking of how you can make years-long plans just to give someone a moment of head-slapping realization."

"No comment, though that certainly does sound like something I'd do, doesn't it? ... Remind me why we split up, again?"

"I wanted to keep working in space, you didn't want to be either a sailor's widow or just my girl in port. We had other arguments, like over money, but that was the one we couldn't find a solution for."

"Until smart li'l ol' me figured out how to legally bilocate myself."

"And could afford it, which brings up all the other arguments we never resolved. ... You know, we're going to have to go over all this footage before I broadcast it, and figure out how much we're willing to share."

"We're in public, and are almost at the con's hotel - I always just assume anything I do that's not encrypted is public, anyway."

"Even primitive li'l ol' me knows there's a difference between your words being unhidden, and actively promoting what you say in a blog. Or vlog, as the case may be. Hm, before we go inside, lemme double-check the seminars. Hm... a lot of these are more for people who didn't take the two-year course I did, or an equivalent; going over the basics of running a business, like getting the right AI to advise you on taxes, basic maintenance, how to keep Traffic Control from shooting you down for making a wrong turn. Handy enough for people who suddenly find themselves with a ship, but I paid good tuition to learn all that already, so I can browse the rest of the con during those slots.

"Da-da-da, new changes in reporting requirements by Jupiter, a historical retrospective on how ships have changed over the last few decades, how to open a horizon drive repair shop. Tomorrow, whatever 'hot topics' covers, 'the secret to profitability' - looks like the secret is going to be 'skip paying for life-support, just use robots' - the perennially-popular 'to be announced', ah, here we go, 'pulling ahead of the competition', a sampler of the latest business tricks and techniques. And on the final day, mm-mm-mm-hm-mm, another 'hot topics', and the usual set of ignorables.

"Looks like one definite, three maybes, and today one or two just-possiblies. Okay, let's see if I can get my AR filtering and waypoints set up right. Behind us are the larger and more spectacular displays, mostly by the more well-to-do concerns, to draw in the looky-loos and tourists, and provide good background shots for any journalists. Right by the door here are the financial services people; I won't call them predators, but they're certainly not friends to little businesses like mine. Over to our right it looks like the exhibitors are advertising more for pleasurecraft; pure cost-sinks. Lots of expensive luxuries and other ways to separate wanna-be spacers from their money. The further back in the hall, the larger the ships they're focusing on. I'll prolly just want to skim that to check on what my competition is up to, so I can keep up-to-date on where my own profit-centres will be. And the middle is for larger-scale ship hardware, such as engines, that I've already sunk my own costs into. Which means that spending our time to the left will do me the most good, among all my fellow small-scale owner-operators...

"Ooh, new kinds of gecko-tape! And there's a new interface library for non-cockpit piloting! And there's some upgrades to Pumpkin's model of food-fac! And some ship-fabbable upgrades to the drive's laser injectors! And I think that's Edwards herself, from Edwards Lubricants - you'd be surprised how much physical grease a spaceship needs. And-"

"Miss Dee?"

"Could you wait a minute? She's in the middle of geeking out over all the toys."

"I would recommend not waiting, and that she comes with me."

"And who are you supposed to be?"

"Faz, he's with hotel security."

"What, you downloaded the whole moon's facial recognition data?"

"No, I - look, sir, before I get escorted into back rooms by someone I've never met, could you explain yourself?"

"Our social-media-trawling prediction algorithms identified a blip involving you, which is more likely than average to lead to a disruption for our other guests, and may escalate to the level of you needing medical attention."

"... Crap. No, I'm not calling you a liar, I'm just swearing. Someone did take some potshots at Pumpkin, even if they knew they wouldn't hit it. I've only got the most rudimentary trawling programs, so there's no reason I'd have noticed anything that someone else would have picked up. Okay, a report of increased physical danger brings us to Plan D Three. Faz, have you got enough bandwidth to keep your offsite lifelog continually refreshed?"

"Have you seen how many other people are here? Hey, hotel-guy, how much to hire a drone to act as a private relay?"

"Under the circumstances, I believe that I can offer that with our compliments."

"... I miss my snaketail already. Okay, I'm retasking the vlog-camera drone to focus on looking where neither of us are. Faz, you want to check the software library I put with your backup, and start running TN seventeen point one?"

"Should I be concerned that the two of you are responding to my warning by donning what appear to be tactically-oriented masks instead of being nervous?"

"Oh, don't mind her, she's got a hobby of making plans that are completely useless until they're not. She'll know what to do even if a circus parade suddenly interrupts everyone here."

"That depends on whether they bring elephants, and the ratio of clowns to sideshow performers."

"... I was joking."

"And with some luck, you'll never know if I was. Okay. The only reason we're here at all is so I can learn things to pass on to my other self. Finding out more about someone willing to cause a public disturbance around me could be useful to know. Faz, as far as I know, the only reason you're here is moral support. I'm going to make the obvious suggestion, that you should head elsewhere; I can't think of any good reason your lifelog should contain any experiences of you getting beaten up, or worse."

"You seem to be forgetting a minor detail; the Faz your other self has been living with the last week and a half, and has told you about? She de-canon-ized herself after she made my backup and shipped me here. The way I feel about all of your selves isn't going to change, no matter what mask I put on over top of it. So if what you want is to grab intel to pass on, then let's grab some intel, already!"

"Um. We're really going to need a talk this evening. But for now... hotel-guy, you've passed on your warning. What would your employers say if we wanted to just keep attending the con?"

"The two of you may be fully backed up - but almost everyone here has organic brains. Are you sure you're willing to put them at risk?"

"Um. The obvious answer to the loaded question is obvious, but so far, the only data we have to base any risk assessment on is your word that your algorithms have picked up a 'blip'. You haven't even told us if we'd still be targeted if we left and went to, say, a restaurant, which would just put a different group of people at risk. Or what whoever is targeting us is actually planning on doing."

"Perhaps this isn't the best venue for having this discussion?"

"My public encryption keys are publicly available. If you wish to tell me something privately, perhaps you could just use them to tell me, instead of invoking the trope of taking the would-be victims away from a public place to somewhere they can be ambushed in private? ... Mm, I see. Okay, Faz, I do have something you can do for me: Fetch!"

"Excuse-toi?"

"You. Stick. Bring. ... Faz, look at TN's AR display, already."

"Ah. Right, okay. For the record, the only reason I'm not castigating you with insults right now is that I have far too many to choose from and apparently acquiring some sort of inanimate carbon-based rod for you is a higher priority than-"

"Faz..."

"Fine, fine. Just remember, after you send your last report to your other self, I can do all sorts of things to you that you won't remember."

"And I'm sure you'll tease my other self with the innuendo for years to come. Shoo. ... Okay, hotel-guy, you have to know that this extrapolation is thin. Very thin. Based on these numbers, standing in place for the whole con and shouting 'here I am' reduces my expected future lifespan less than if I rented a backpack 'copter to go camping with. ... I once thought that people this century would have gotten better at applying math to QALYs and micromorts."

"Say, would comping you help? How'd you like a three-day vacation in a suite with your friend, or whoever else you like, everything on the house? The hotel would be happy to put you up, in any dome we have a franchise in that's at least an hour from here."

"A suite, in the middle of convention season? How much are your bosses trying to avoid telling me about how seriously they're taking this?"

"Don't look at me, I just work here."

"Figures. ... I think I hear the prancing and pawing of four little hooves. Heya, Faz."

"Mm-mmf-mm m mm-fff-mm mf..."

"Ah, sorry, let me get that from you."

"As I was saying, you are now the proud owner of an aluminium cane, manufactured by an Emerson Ultra-Rapid Flash-Fabber, for when you need a support strut right now. You will note the Emerson logos micro-engraved over every surface, and that the fabber was smart enough to accept my transmission of your body's specs to scale it specifically for you. ... Sorry, I can't continue the advertising spiel, it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe that's the aluminium. It's not a stick, but I figured speed was more important than literalness."

"No worries, it'll do just fine. I'll admit I'm less practiced with canne défense than singlestick, but I can still tell which is the pointy end."

"But neither end is pointed."

"Which makes it all the easier, and thank you, mysterious hotel-guy, for playing straight-man."

"Are you planning on hitting any of our attendees with that?"

"Of course not! It's a cane; have you seen how spindly these legs of mine are? I'm surprised I've been able to avoid tripping over them this long. Besides, you heard me say 'canne défense', not 'canne de combat', right? If something unexpected happens, my first goal with this thing will be to stick it between any projectiles and any innocents in their way."

"That's a load of bull pucky if I've ever heard one, but I'm not going to get myself fired by trying to take it away from you. Just don't make me regret that, alright?"

"I don't think I have enough control over events to be able to promise that. Are your employers willing to share any more information? ... Then I think it's best for my friend and I to start walking around again. Do you think that staying nearby and doing that looming thing you do well enough that you were probably hired for it will be of any use?"

"If you aren't going to leave, then I think it's best not to tell you about whatever security precautions we take."

"Fair enough. You've been very patient with us, to the limits of your employment; I'll tell my PA AI to up-doot your reviews. ... Hm, lemme see... Ah."

"Ah what?"

"Don't look now, but I do believe that our mysterious threatening person is standing over there. The woman with the drooping earlobes and all the medallions, browsing the feng shui booth."

"Did you just download a new face-recognition and social-media trawler?"

"No, I... look, I've got a deadman-timer email ready to send to you if things go very badly, and if they only go a little badly and it makes a difference, I'll tell you, okay?"

"You're not inspiring me with confidence. So, if you know that's her, and she's there, do we go the other way?"

"What's a five-letter word for 'can add two and two to get three point nine seven'?"

"... I had to look at a crossword-puzzle solver, and it says the answer is 'intel', so I'm going to ignore the bizarreness of the riddle, heave a sigh, and suggest we go find that hotel security guy again. ... I suggest we go find that hotel security guy again."

"If the hotel sent someone to talk to us in person, do you really think that we're not already being surveilled every which way to Sunday?"

"Then why haven't they already escorted her off the premises?"

"That's a very good question. I think I'll go ask her."

"If I get blown up and have to be reintegrated from my lifelog, I'm going to be telling you 'I told you so' until Andromeda crashes into the Milky Way and starts approaching a fraction of a percent of the damage you can do when you get an idea in your head."

"Now, now, let's not sink into hyperbole. I'm certain that I'm not any worse than a Type One-A supernova. ... Okay, maybe a Type One-B. ... Hello, there; I don't believe we've met."

"We have not. May we talk?"

"That's what I'm here for, so please, talk away."

"I am acquainted with some people who feel the best way to get you to change your behaviour is by applying violence, of some greater or lesser degree. However, when I inquired whether anyone sharing our point of view had simply sat down with you and talked about it, nobody in our extended social networks was aware of any such attempt. And so I would like to invite you to share a pot of tea at one of this hotel's food courts, or whatever other venue you prefer."

"I believe you can understand that I was expecting someone more along the lines of your described acquaintances. But if you've gone to this much trouble to have a face-to-face with me, then I'd suspect that you've applied all manner of software tools to predict which methods I'd find most persuasive - and that you've learned I have a hard time resisting a civil discussion with someone from across the aisle, whichever of us is the loyal opposition. What should I call you?"

"Given your penchant for short identifiers, you may address me as Valerie; Val, if you insist on a monosyllabic option."

"I don't insist; it's just that most of my in-person conversations tend to be informal."

"She's very free at letting people into her tu circle, although I doubt you'll be anything other than vous. If not just quelqu'un, or even rien."

"Now, now, Faz, we seem to be doing the politeness thing. For now. I believe I saw a table with seating suitable for all our body types back that way.

"...

"Milk, one sugar, thank you. Might I inquire about the general topic which concerns you and your fellows so much that you became noticeable to the hotel's security software?"

"Of course. But to deal with a framing issue first; using examples you're likely to be familiar with from your native time, imagine being an atheist trying to convince a young-Earth creationist to reduce their carbon footprint, or a vegan trying to convince a Republican to eat less factory-farmed chicken, or a cryonicist trying to convince anyone to join them. That is, attempting to get them to change their behaviour in a way that imposes a definite short-term cost for a fairly nebulous long-term gain, while sharing nearly none of the assumptions underlying your reasoning. I believe it would take you considerable, and repeated, effort to rephrase and reframe your arguments in terms they could accept."

"You're not the first to try to convince the poor, century-out-of-date, primitive revivee of something or other, but you're doing better than most. So far. Please, continue."

"How familiar are you with the event now popularly referred to as 'the em-pocalypse'?"

"At about the level of any reader of popular-science books. I know that the general consensus is that a combination of factors created it: emulated minds who had no legal restrictions on copying themselves, who were willing and able to perform experiments on their copies, and who had access to enough computing hardware to run those experiments in extreme fast-time, a ratio of at least thousands-to-one. I know that those minds who were involved drew a curtain over their activities, so that much of what is known is actually guesswork, based on reconstructions of the scattered remnants of data that could be found. And I know that many of those who were around at the time, and anywhere near the events, were so scared of what they saw that they came very close to outlawing uploading human minds at all. I'll admit that when I think about it, I'm occasionally bothered when I recall that I'm only alive right now because a coterie of rich and powerful people wanted their shot at immortality so badly that they were willing to burn a significant portion of their political capital to neuter the anti-upload movement as best they could.

"As for what actually happened... there are too many guesses, each of which is backed up by data, for me to have any strong opinions. The usual spectrum of guesses range from the whole thing being nothing more than some uploads engaging in digital warfare against some other uploads, which ended up deleting them all; to the whole thing being a nearly-successful attempt at a dystopic technological Singularity, the creation of a super-humanly-intelligent AI whose values weren't aligned with human civilization's.

"While I may be an upload myself, I don't have access to any secret repositories of upload-culture secrets on the matter. Claims of finding intact pieces of data seems to be the modern era's equivalent of Bigfoot or UFO sightings; it always turns out to be fuzzy and unprovable. There are constant rumours that if you head into the right, or wrong, area of the net, you'll be able to find Singularity-seekers trying to find others willing to collaborate on researching the topic. Unless you come across a surviving em-pocalypse AI, which is supposed to eat your brain to make you its slave, or its puppet, or just convince you that it's right, whichever version the tale-spinner finds most horrifying."

"I suppose that that's about as much as I could reasonably expect, and it should be a sufficient basis. I believe I am safe in assuming that you can understand that now there are people who are immortal, or at least have a good chance of personally staying alive indefinitely, there are a good number who are willing to apply significant effort to the task of ensuring there is a long-term future to be immortal within."

"You won't get any argument from me on that, given that I'm one of those people. I'd happily help to work on such things myself, but I'm a little strapped for resources this decade."

"Mm. Yes. Building another step: given that the chances that the em-pocalypse was, in fact, a near-Singularity, are non-trivial; and that if so, it was the closest humanity ever came to permanently ending; then you can understand that such long-term thinkers are keenly interested in anything that even hints of repeating those events."

"Is this where I'm supposed to ask, 'And how does that relate to me?'?"

"You skirt the edges of the law. And sometimes cross over even those all-too-inadequate boundaries."

"To the best of my knowledge: no, I don't."

"We believe that the first time you illegally forked yourself was three years ago, when you upgraded your bio-shell with a second head."

"Dee! You didn't!"

"Faz..."

"You did! Câlice, do you have any idea how much merde you're in? I thought you were acting weird during the trial a few days-"

"Faz! I didn't fork myself then, or voluntarily at any other time. It was impressed on me very strongly that I shouldn't, months before I even had a physical body again. Although I begin to have an inkling of what's going on. Valerie - given how serious this accusation is, I presume you have evidence to back it up?"

"We are not in a court of law; I am not going to apply the power of the state to enforce a judgement against you. Waiting until the evidence passes the threshold of 'beyond a reasonable doubt' before acting is both pointless and dangerous."

"I see. Cee, please start pulling up references on 'vigilantes', 'lynch mobs', and 'witch-hunts', and stand ready to pop up relevant contextual data on my AR."

"I understand why you are under that impression at this stage of the discussion. May I continue?"

"With some reluctance, I will say 'yes'."

"After the recent debacle on Insulo Tri, in which the court astonishingly mandated that you fork yourself, we gathered what data about you is publicly available, or is private but not particularly expensive to purchase. The results of our analysis were... concerning. As one of the earliest examples of your likely fork, we ran comparative analyses of the body languages of your primary body's tail when you were confirmed to be inhabiting it, when various other people or AIs could be confirmed to be inhabiting it, and at other times when no sapience in particular was known to be within it, and, according to your own statements, one of your assistant AIs was running it. Roughly ninety percent of the time when no fully sapient entity was recorded as being in it, your tail's body-language was a match to when you yourself were in it - including times when you were running your main body. While far from being any sort of conclusive proof on its own, it was suggestive enough for us to expend additional resources in our investigation."

"I believe I can foretell the overall arc of your argument. Shall we skip ahead to the part where you concluded that the odds that I've been doing naughty things are high enough you decided to, as concerned but purely private citizens, do what you can to warn me away from any such malfeasance in the future?"

"I suppose that I don't need to actually go over how your current sidestepping of the regulations of forking, by splitting your time between activations of your forks, is another issue of concern. So, if you understand the argument, then surely you can accept the conclusion, and we can move forward into arranging for a reasonable system of voluntary inspections."

"'Understanding' does not mean 'agreeing'. It sounds like your affinity-group has fallen prey to the Rule of Twenty-Three, and to Richelieu's Fallacy."

"None of the rules about twenty-three that I am aware of seem relevant, and your other phrase seems to be non-standard terminology. Would you care to explain yourself further?"

"Almost always! In this case, definitely. To start with: If you consider the number twenty-three to be particularly special, and you start looking for interesting things involving it, you will start finding them; until, eventually, you will start noticing it even in places you weren't trying to look for it. It's from an ancient set of novels about the fictional Illuminati, and is shorthand for 'if you go looking for evidence to support a conclusion, you will inevitably find evidence supporting that conclusion'."

"And lady, for someone who's arguing about how impressive your AI engines are, I'm surprised they weren't able to figure out 'Richelieu' from context. Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."

"You are claiming to be an honest woman, and that we only found six lines to hang you because of because we were looking for them?"

"In a nutshell."

"Have you thought through the fact that whether you're innocent and that's true and you're being honest, or you've been forking yourself on the sly and you're just lying about it, you would be saying essentially the exact same thing, and thus your statement provides us with no useful evidence about whether or not it's the case?"

"... I hadn't quite gotten that far along, no. I've gotten used to being able to dip into fast-time to give myself a few seconds to think before I say anything, but this body can't, so I'm being a bit more off-the-cuff than usual. Thinking as I speak, and without trying to get into recursive headgames about 'if I'm lying, then...' yet, my general position is that I'm an innocent person focusing on making ends meet, and I seem to be unfairly persecuted by a group who thinks I'm guilty of something I'm innocent of; while your position seems to be that even if the odds that I've been illegally forking myself are low, the consequences of someone who flouts such laws are so high that it's worth intervening against me, even if I am, in fact, completely innocent. Is that a fair summary?"

"Fairer than I expected from you by now, which I will take as a good sign."

"So if our viewpoints are that irreconcilable, where does that leave us now?"

"Talking to each other, with hopes that further exchanges of the data we're each basing our respective conclusions on will eventually lead to a successful application of Aumann's Agreement Theorem, and a mutual consensus."

"With only the occasional potshot taken at her, her ship, and me who happened to be aboard at the time."

"I argued against that course of action; our affinity-group is not monolithic, and none of us have any actual authority to tell anyone else what to do."

"But you're still going to make use of the positive-to-you consequences of those conveniently-deniable individuals who you officially disagree about tactics with."

"With the future of human civilization, humanity, and human values potentially at stake, I'm going to make use of every last thing I can."

"If you're proposing that we talk, and that an actual exchange of data is going to happen, instead of me just telling you more and more about myself until you're satisfied... how about we start with you telling me who actually arranged for those launches?"

"Interesting. What would you be willing to offer in return?"

"'In return'? Val, you just admitted, while we're sitting in an extremely public place, being recorded by who-knows-how-many cameras, that you know who committed attempted murder."

"I did no such thing. Given the nature of my affinity-group's discussions, most of our arguments are pseudonymous. If I tried, and spent enough, I expect that I could collect sufficient side-channel data to identify the physical identities behind a few of our members' pseudonyms, before the remainder managed to add sufficient noise to render those particular techniques worthless. It would cost me time, money, and a certain amount of respect and social standing within our group... but it's probably not completely impossible. It's plain to me that such information would be of value to you; what are you willing to offer me that would be of value to me?"

"... I don't suppose you have any particular interest in any form of century-old memorabilia, which I'd had locked away in my long-term storage drawer while I was temporarily dead?"

"No."

"Good, because I already had to sell most of it to afford my first body, and the rest is AUs away. But it's still sometimes worth playing a longshot. And only maybe a third of the reason I asked was to stall a second while I tried to think. Let's see, if your affinity-group is that focused on the long-term, then you probably already have some digital people as members, so you wouldn't be interested in any insights I have into the uploaded-person condition, or any of my relevant social contacts. So you're probably fishing for as much personal and private information as you can convince me to share with you, with the carefully unstated and legally-not-chargeable technically-not-a-threat implication that if I don't play ball, more potshots are going to be taken, any of which might turn out not to be a warning shot."

"I was not going to imply anything of that last part."

"Of course you weren't. Hm... I'd rather not make a split-second decision about this - once a bit of privacy goes away, it never comes back. I'd like to run some numbers of my own, ask some people for advice. This convention runs another two and a half days, and we obviously both have tickets; what would you say to meeting here tomorrow morning?"

"We have made somewhat better progress today than I had expected, and you have not shut me out. I would be quite happy to continue our discussion then."

"Alright, then. Faz, let's go and get back to grabbing info from the con itself - I still want to take a closer look at those laser-injector upgrades. Valerie, until tomorrow."

"Dee..."

"Let's at least be courteous enough to wait until we're out of earshot. ... Viewers, given the problems of light-speed delays, I'm going to be a bit reckless, and post this vlog immediately after I stop recording, and ask for everyone's actionable advice. What do you think I should do, and why do you think I should do that? I'll be contacting some particular individuals I know directly, but this seems like the sort of problem that it's worth opening up some wide-ranging brainstorming for."

"Remember, everyone, all we really want is to be left alone so we can do our own things - making ends meet, helping out who we can when we can, Dee doing her studying thing, and me finding as many different ways as I can think of to make her blush."

"... I'll admit I was waiting for you to say something particularly embarrassing there."

"How could I keep surprising you if I kept being that predictable?"

"We still need to have a discussion - another discussion? Our other branches already talked about it - about how I feel you've made yourself unhealthily focused on me. I'm only willing to put it off for now for two reasons - we have short-term issues that are a higher priority, and we're likely to go back into storage in a few days."

"You have to, because you like your body on your ship better than this one; I can probably find myself a job and a cheap enough body here to make an extra paycheck for myselves."

"Which re-raises the whole question of why non-upload digital people are allowed to fork yourselves, while us brain-derived folk aren't."

"Haven't you already looked it up?"

"Almost certainly, around five years ago, just after I was revived; but I've mostly been focusing on studying immediate practicalities since then, so I mostly just remember the fact of it and let the reasons fade into a blur."

"My favorite explanation is that forkable AIs managed to squeak into acceptance wherever they could get the laws to treat all the forks of any particular AI as sharing that AI's citizenship. Only one vote, only one ration of Basic Guaranteed Income to spread between all the forks, and so on. Getting rid of the threat that we could just turn ourselves into trillions of voters and make every living human irrelevant defused a lot of tension. Other people have different explanations, but mine has the benefit of netting me profit in prediction markets, such as ones comparing jurisdictions with different approaches."

"What's your preferred model for why human-derived forks didn't get to take advantage of the same thing?"

"Having rich people become immortal and be rich forever without passing their wealth down to their patient-until-then heirs was bad enough, and caused more than a little civil unrest. Having an immortal rich person who then becomes a lot of immortal rich people, while the poorer people had no hope of ever affording uploading, was beyond the pale. You could say that it wasn't even a matter of the majority voting for laws against it, it was that anywhere whoever had power made laws for it quickly stopped having those people in power, either through voting them out or rolling them on tumbrels out to the guillotines. Things are only as calm as they are now because the cost of uploading keeps going down, giving people the hope that it'll happen in their lifetime - or that they can at least stick their dead grandma in a freezer until they can afford to bring her back."

"... I sense that that last bit might not be simply a generic example. Is it something you want to talk about?"

"If they're still not willing to talk to me just because I prefer a hooved lifestyle, then baise-les. And like you said, more immediate priorities. Are you sure this is the way to the booth with the injectors?"

"Eventually; I can't think in fast-time right now, so I'm taking a long way around to give us some time to think and talk. For instance, internally, I'm having Cee help me rearrange my ideas-map; right now, I'm trying to see whether anything can be salvaged from my earlier conclusion that the potshots were because of a conflict between the local 'individualist' and 'socialist' affinity-groups. I'm not having much luck connecting Val to the individualists, but she did mention that her group knows how to add noise to their profiles to hide that sort of thing, so... maybe the individualists are an outer group and her anti-Singulatarian group is something of a hidden inner circle?

"Oh, and I squirted the incomplete vlog off towards Earth, since it's going to take two and a half hours to get any replies. And I'm paying for high enough priority to keep updating every few seconds, from the backup memory cache I'm streaming directly to; if Val's unnamed catspaws decide to apply more violence, it's not going to be kept secret, or kept local.

"I can't think of a way database infrastructure would help us out, so... does your oraculism offer any insights?"

"What, now you're willing to consult the 'astrologer', just because things are getting bigger than you can handle?"

"Could we just... not... rehash our old arguments? Even if we still place different weights on the technique's reliability, I'm asking you what it offers."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Merde, after our last fight about it, I never thought you'd actually want a reading. Alright, I'm going to need to start collecting data on the local markets to start getting a baseline... you couldn't have asked me as soon as we woke up? If I'm going to actually do a serious analysis instead of a party-trick, it's going to take me hours to dig deep enough to get everything I need. Titan's tied into the rest of the Saturnian moons, and Saturn's aerostats, closely enough that I can't treat it as a separate system, and I'm over a week out-of-date. D'accord, if I'm going to stay embodied enough to keep talking with you while I do all that, I'll need you to carry me. Or wear me like a scarf, or whatever works."

"I could loan you Cee; she's gotten a lot of practice at partial body-running, and filtering out distractions while doing that."

"Ce n'est pas à un vieux singe qu'on apprend à faire des grimaces. You asked me for an oracle, so par Dieu, I'm going to give you one, de gré ou de force."

"When you revert to that much French, even if you're not using sacres, I know better than to get in your way."

"Je t'aime aussi. Now let me work.

"...

"... I said I was staying embodied so we could keep talking while I work."

"Oh, right. Sorry. ... Sorry, I lost my line of thought. Let's see. Val and her group want to avoid another em-pocalypse and bad Singularity. That happened while I was dead, and I don't have any special knowledge or resources, so I don't think there's much I can offer them to help with their larger goal. So if I want them to stop shooting at me, or applying whatever other violent ends they come up with, I have to persuade them that I really am harmless. But then comes several further problems... not the least of which is that if they're willing to try to commit the serious crime of trying to kill me, then they're undoubtedly willing to commit the not-actually-a-crime-at-all of lying to me. Meaning that even if I and they come to some arrangement, then it's possible that since I came to their attention in the first place, they'd cheerfully eliminate every last backup copy of me there is, just to eliminate the chance that I've somehow fooled them and am still some kind of proto-Singularity-entity-thing. Which means that if I actually want to stay alive for the long term, then whatever my plans work out to be, they can't rely on trusting Val or her group to uphold their word. Going back to all the old MAD doctrines, what I could really use is some sort of lever that's potentially destructive to them, so that the assurances that keep both sides from applying them are mutual.

"Which brings up the point that I really don't know anything about them. I don't even know if Val's brain is human, or a computer running an upload, shadow, or other AI; for all I know, she could even be a remotely-piloted drone. I'm really missing my real body's extended senses now. I didn't even think to pick up a wristwatch tricorder when I rented this thing. Okay, new short-term subplan; splurge a bit and grab myself some better tools than my current broad-spectrum eyes and metal stick. More than a few of the exhibitors here have relevant products, and I expect they'd be happy to make some insta-robo-delivery sales, even of small personal items. I'd thought I was just snagging some commercial and open-sourced intel, I didn't think I'd need to go to the expense of tacticalling up. Even my go-bag is back aboard Pumpkin.

"Alright, while I do the actually-sane version of the mall-ninja tacti-cool thing, I should take a step back and make sure I'm using the right mental tools to come up with good solutions to my problems. F'r'instance, I've set my emulated-mind's defaults to keep my simulated adrenaline turned off, unless the level in my blood reaches a certain threshold; I've just found that what the stuff does to my thinking is counterproductive in almost every situation, including emergencies. Nevermind the complications when it interacts with fast-time. If there's a good chance one of Val's deniable stooges is going to play sniper, should I set that back to normal? ... No, I don't think so, but I think I will tweak the sensitivity closer to that.

"Let's see, how many fallacies am I currently prey to? No, check that; how many fallacies am I currently prey to, that would have a measurably negative effect on my choices? The first that comes to mind is that I'm operating in a near vacuum of reliable information, but a big, blank, empty spot in my mental map doesn't mean that there's a nice, big, blank, empty spot in the corresponding bit of reality. There are plenty of lines drawn in reality - just because I can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. I've been thinking of Val's group as a sort of fuzzy, amorphous blob; I should actually be thinking of it as a complicated network of people and connections and gear and databases, I just don't know what the details of those complications are. A complicated group implies many people with different perspectives and different goals. I don't need to come up with a plan involving MAD against the whole group; I only really need to concern myself with whichever small parts of it are willing and able to commit violence against me and my compatriots. I may not know which parts those are, but just by thinking about it a bit, I've sliced down the scale of my problem significantly - that's a sort of progress, right?"

"Don't mind me, I'm still silently giggling at my image-search results for 'tacti-cool', and am updating some relevant bits of my modelling to incorporate the existence of that mindset."

"If you're appreciating it that much, maybe I'll get you a laser-guided spatula for your birthday."

"If I could concentrate better, this is where I would make an innuendo about what I could do to you involving peanut-butter. ... Okay, I think that actually counts as innuendo, so I'm good."

"Moving on. Given our known set of unknowns, and that we might not be able to figure them out any time soon, how many choices do we actually have to pick from? Well, to start with, there's always that old piece of advice that starts "avoid, rather than check"; could we just run away and go somewhere they can't easily buy a ticket to? Alpha Centauri, maybe; or spending a few subjective centuries in a fast-time server on Earth before they notice; or turning off all our active instances for a few decades; or maybe swapping ourselves into bio-shells or cyber-shells designed for an extreme environment, such as deep in one of Earth's oceans, or Venus's surface?"

"Any of those would be a bit expensive, even without counting you defaulting on your loans. And if they're paying for data on you, they can probably see what you're shopping for and try to intercept us. If they're worried that uploads could create another Singularity... would you consider getting a shadow made of yourself, running on a proven-safe AI framework, and putting your upload-based self into storage?"

"I'm not as sanguine as you are about how much identity I'd share with a shadow - for one, I don't have a lifetime of lifelogs to build one from. If we can't beat them, is it possible to join them? Or maybe buy them off?"

"Even if we used both our bank accounts, I don't think we'd have enough to de-prioritize you in favour of their other perceived threats; at least some of them have to think they're doing the right thing, not just the personally-advantageous thing, and it's really hard to bribe someone who thinks they're actually being righteous instead of just pretending to be. And given your past posting history, I don't think they'd believe any significantly-anti-extropian sentiments you'd claim. How about removing their support, by convincing as many people as we can that they're acting so idiotically that even associating with them is a low-status thing to do?"

"I can't even really convince people to hire me, without Francesca's skills; and you haven't managed to convince me that keeping your canon in place is a good idea. Just for the sake of argument, any chance we could render the problem moot by creating a Friendly Singularity?"

"Don't even joke about that, toton. You weren't around; think of it in terms of having slept through World War Two and wondering why everyone is so down on eugenics. If you actually want to think in terms of a Friendly Singularity, then at most, try to go looking for a hypothetical superhumanly-intelligent AI that's been hiding since the em-pocalypse, who can come up with better plans than we can, to ask for advice. Trawling for hints of data supporting that idea may be considered tasteless, or foolish, but won't get you anywhere near the condemnation of actively Singularity-seeking."

"It's probably safe to assume that if any such super-AIs exist, they either don't care about us, or they already know to intervene on our behalf without having to be asked. A point we've been avoiding mentioning... is it both moral and a good plan to kill them in self-defense? Any chance you know where we could find an infohazard to sic on them?"

"Infohazards are as much a myth as a brown note. We don't know enough about their software or hardware to inconvenience them that way. Mind you, I don't think I'd mind taking some inspiration from that 'Real Genius' movie you have in your 'cheer myself up when I'm down' folder, and buying some beamage from Ríos de Luz to aim at their houses."

"If only we knew where their houses were. If we're aiming at skipping the killing, how about eliminating them as threats by convincing them their approach is flawed?"

"If neither of us has the skills to convince whatever portion of the general population already leans in our direction, do you really think we could convince the people actually dedicated enough to shoot at us? I don't know, maybe divide and conquer and get even just one of them on our side to protect us from the others... I doubt we'd find one romantically interested in quadrupeds, so think you'd be up to seducing one into marriage?"

"I suspect that long before that could become an option, they'd want to run lie-detection software on me while I had my poker-face body-language-minimizing software turned off. And come to think of it, according to the laws I grew up with, by the time our shipboard selves get back from the trip, we'd already be married."

"Quoi?!?"

"'Common-law marriage'. It's not really a thing anymore, either in Insulo Tri or Canada, what with the law having moved on to handle all the more complicated households these days, from simple trines to multiply-interlocking polycules."

"Oh. Whew. Okay. I thought you were about to lead up to an over-complicated way of proposing."

"One note I got from my shipboard self that I fully agree with - I wouldn't even consider doing that as long as you have your canon in place."

"Crisse, that'd certainly be one way to convince me to turn it off. And we've wandered from the current problem. Could we bankrupt them? Hit them in their trust-metrics?"

"Without knowing who any of them are? Might as well just try to get them arrested. What if we went all-in in switching from K- to r-strategy, and made ourselves enough backups, and maybe even active copies, that they couldn't possibly kill all of us?"

"Without knowing how much they'd spend in tracking us down? I don't know if we could afford that many copies. Maybe we could cut down on how much they spend, by convincing them that they've succeeded in killing us? Or, at least, you, since you're the one they're worried about?"

"Hm... I can't think of any way to convince them they'd gotten all my backups, without actually letting them get all my backups. Throwing out a complete wildcard, if either of us ever invents time-travel, then a good time to send us a message with advice would be right... now. ... Well, it was worth spending five seconds on."

"No, it wasn't."

"Okay, maybe it wasn't, but now we're wasting more time about whether it was worth the time than I wasted taking the time."

"It's mostly you wasting it. And you're not the only one who has to worry about these people going after them. Maybe we could dig up some new allies, or some old ones? Who all could we get to help us? Your local contact who told you the mysterious secret of Titanian fashion? Government investigators? Private investigators? Try to spark a local flashmob to dig up dirt?"

"The folk I've been in touch with locally are more online acquaintances with shared interests than anyone I'd expect to help me dodge a bullet. I expect Val knows the local legal system better than we do, and how to stay just on the right side of it. Hiring a local PI... definitely has merit. I'll set Cee to sifting through the relevant yellow-pages, review sites, and suchlike. Speaking of getting help, can you think of any decision-making aids that we're not making use of?"

"Maybe inducing some altered states of consciousness could help us notice an idea we're not consciously thinking of?"

"Not the sort of assist I was thinking of, but points for creativity. I was thinking something more software-ish, like your oraculism or my business-case analysis apps. Maybe we could rent you an extra cyber-brain, fire up another copy of yourself, and let her do the psychedelic thing, then grab her lifelog for you to reintegrate?"

"Now I'm missing your body and its spare snakey brain. Among other pieces of anatomy. Ah! Good news, I was able to wangle an invitation to a local, private forum for fellow oraculists; even the archives that a new member can download will really help me getting a reading done sooner. And I'm composing some posts to offer some trades for some particularly pertinent data."

"Just don't give away the homeworld. Hm... Maybe we're thinking about this wrong. Maybe there isn't some magic key that we just have to find, a solution that will get us what we want if we can just think of it; maybe we should be laying in backup plans in case they get everything they want, and we don't."

"Are you telling me you haven't already been making those plans?"

"Well, there's planning, and then there's planning."

"How about just waiting? If we move or get rid of all our assets on Titan, it's very unlikely they have anything they can use against Pumpkin before it gets back again."

"And maybe the horse will sing, some time before our other selves get back in a few months. Seems like kind of a last resort sort of thing, if nothing else we can do here can help. Speaking of last resorts, what are the odds that anything positive would result if we tried to kidnap or forknap one of them, and pump them for info on all the others?"

"Slightly less than if you tried to talk a walk outside the dome, in that body, without an airtank. Instead of stealing copies of them against their well, how about doing it voluntarily? Maybe their models of identity would let them be satisfied if we exchanged backups and forks to act as hostages for each others' good behaviour?"

"The two of us - and our similarly-minded friends - are kind of outliers, even among people willing to accept any kind of digital versions of themselves as continuations of their biological identities. It seems likely that an anti-Singularity group would be even less likely to be persuaded by threats to torture a different branch of themselves. Though that does remind me of an old, easily-disproved philosophical idea, that might be tweaked into something useful here. If they're so afraid of super-intelligences, think we could pull off a Basilisk Gambit, and threaten them that if we ever do become a superhumanly-intelligent entity, we will be very cross at them for hindering us, unless they start playing nicely starting now?"

"I don't think we're the only proto-Singularitarians they're worrying about, and even if somehow we were the ones to get to super-intelligence first, there's no guarantee we'd still want to do anything our current selves want. That's kind of the whole point behind why they're so against a Singularity in the first place. Ah, what if we could guarantee your values would stay fixed? Maybe they'd accept you taking a permanent canon of avoiding Singularity-seeking behaviour?

"Well, before a canon could fix that value in place, first I'd need to already have it as part of my mind to be fixated. Not to mention that, from what I've read since you showed up on Pumpkin, fully human-emulated brains are a lot messier than any accepted AI designs; there's a lot more slop and fuzziness when trying to pin down which bits should be made read-only. Not to mention that we can repurpose one bit of neural tissue to take over the function of another bit that stops working... I don't think Val or her friends would be very confident that me taking a canon would hold securely enough. Makes me wonder how likely they think their current plans are... or, come to think of it, what their plans would have been if we hadn't woken up our Titanian backups to visit this con."

"When we showed up, that probably triggered some notifications their PA AIs alerted them to, and they've been scrambling to come up with the right plan since, just like we have since that viarge Val came here. Trying to get the best results from the least investment, find whatever cheats would improve their expected return; there are reasons financial markets are regulated, but it's not like they're going to be reporting any fraud to the Titanian authorities."

"Fraud. Hm..."

"I've heard that 'hm' before. I like that 'hm'."

"While you've been multitasking to work on your oraculism, Cee and I have been toying with our own tools. I've gotten fond of using Fermi estimates to fill in the probability-distributions for the nodes of Monte-Carlo Markov-Chains, and have been making guesstimates about all our ideas as we talk about them. And I just hit upon a particular node, that tweaking the values of, has impressively exaggerated effects on everything else in the model, and how valuable any of our plans would be."

"Skip the technobabble and stop leaving me in suspense. I'll even skip trying to come up with a good, embarrassing rope-based pun."

"The node in question is: What is the probability that Val was simply lying, when she said she had any connection to whoever took the potshots at Pumpkin?"

"... You are thinking that we've been overthinking this to a massively ridiculous degree, and that she is just a lone nut-job?"

"I honestly don't know. Which is the point, here. Sure, there's always going to be at least a small chance that she's part of a secret group that wants to kill us, because they try to apply conventional math to an outcome with infinite negative expected utility; the sort of singularity you get when you divide by zero can open as many options as proving that one plus one equals three would, most completely crazy. But there's always going to be a small chance of all sorts of absurd things happening, and even if some of them involve consequences as severe as, say, getting tortured for the rest of the lifetime of the universe, it's impractical to use conventional risk-reward analysis on them. For one, there's zillions of such tiny probabilities, and trying to calculate the expected value of each would take a lot more computing power than has ever been made - or ever will be. There are just as many paradises in those minuscule odds as hells, and the only sane response is to average them out and treat them as background noise. ... Sorry, I was mostly letting my mouth run on autopilot there while poking at my model."

"Insert mouth-based innuendo here. So, to act as your rubber-duck sounding-board, should we just ignore her threats-that-don't-legally-count-as-threats?"

"Not quite... but what we can do is improve our existing off-the-cuff estimates of how much danger we're in. I think it's time to start actually using one of our ideas, and hire an investigator; at least now we can tell them exactly what we want them to find out. And then... I think it's getting close to lunchtime. And I'm getting a bit tired of walking through the crowd... think the hotel has a pool or plunge or something we could kick around a bit in?"

"I am sure of it."

Vlog #29

"Hello, world.

"It's the me on Titan doing today's vlog, still in my body from yesterday, mostly because I already paid for it for the full convention.

"As I pull the camera out a bit, you'll see, on my left, that Faz is still with me; although she's abandoned her usual preference to be an ungulate, and has rented a more predatory bio-shell for the day, something more griffon-esque."

"Satisfying preferences is all well and good, but sometimes there are higher priorities."

"And as I pull the camera out a bit more, you'll see, on my right, that Faz is still with me, in a spider-y Kawaiikoma cyber-shell."

"Don't worry, I'm not going rampant with self-replication. I'll be going back to my usual number of embodiments within a couple of days. But depending on what exactly goes wrong today, having someone around who doesn't need to breathe could be handy."

"I have to admit to our viewers that I'm glad to see that some of my paranoid over-planning is rubbing off on you. ... What, no innuendo-ish pun there?"

"What? Oh, sorry, I am still getting used to all these limbs."

"Ah, fair enough. Viewers, I've also learned that I've been mistaken about yet another thing. Perhaps you remember a few days ago, when one of my backups was turned on by court order, and then deleted herself? Well, the evidence-handling officials aren't complete idiots - when they installed that copy of me in the rental body for her court appearance, they didn't delete the copy they made that copy from. Which means that at least one backup of me still exists on Insulo Tri, and is currently in the justice system's hands.

"I found out because I got an email asking what I wanted done with it, when it's no longer required by them. I'm honestly a bit conflicted on that; I've lost a lot of trust in the Trion government, but now that at least one person has expressed a personal interest in applying violence against me, even a government-held backup, ten AU away, has a certain amount of appeal.

"There's also the minor matter that it's not entirely clear what they're going to do with that copy of me while they have it. In theory, that could be 'whatever they want', if they want to go to the bother of exerting the relevant governmental powers. Case-law about uploads is still developing; you'd think there'd be more of us around, given how simple it is to demonstrate an upload continues everything that's important about a person. But for whatever reasons - there are lots of arguments about which ones are important - even out of the people who can afford it, only so many have actually gone through with having their brains microtomed and scanned. ... 'Microtomed' is a fancy word for 'diced'. The most popular theory amongst my fellow vacuum cleaners seems to be that the truly-rich immortals are engaging in a subtle PR campaign to discourage other people from becoming potential competitors; personally, I lean more towards simple continuations of why so few people from my time made arrangements to survive to the present. Combinations of perceiving the whole process as something rich people do, with an instinctive aversion based on the sense of violation of the human body. Both are probably wrong, but possibly not completely false.

"Where was I? Right. My lawyer hasn't billed all of the retainer I paid her yet, and there's what happened the last time they woke up that backup, and there's the PR issues for the court... I think they're just going to keep that backup in storage, and only for as long as they have to, but there's no guarantees.

"Hm, let's see... I've gotten a text from a certain woman that my viewers probably want to know how yesterday's lunch went. It was sharing food with a new acquaintance, and some pleasant conversation, and that's about all. Sparkledog... fine, that's not his name, but 'sparkling vampires' is an in-joke from my native time, and since I already know a 'Sparks', just using 'Sparkle' would get confusing ... is more of a fan of Caldwell's full line of ships as a whole than Pumpkin's model in particular, which gives him just enough of a different perspective from mine that even I was able to learn a few new things about her. And he seemed happy to hear about some of the things I learned from my hands-on work, such as undocumented details of how the parts age out, or some practical tricks that Caldwell didn't find out soon enough to put in the manual.

"Oh, one minor bit of good news. Titan's government has enough reciprocity with Insulo Tri's that all the tests I took back there also qualify me for a PI license here, too. ... Books, people; they're what's for dinner. ... Please don't actually eat any books, there's few enough of them left.

"After a few forms, insurance, and suchlike, I can now legally be paid to investigate the character and actions of a person, their business or occupation, and the whereabouts of them or their property. Sure, anyone can look into that sort of thing on their own; but being a PI isn't just about adhering to the code of conduct and setting up cameras, there's a whole social affinity-group thing that I'm now able to take part in.

"Oh, and if you're wondering - yes, I have already been hired to perform an investigation of a particular individual.

"I bring up this piece of good news because I have a piece of bad news. Amicitas One, my time capsule to the stars, has been destroyed. And by 'destroyed', I mean 'somebody destroyed it'. It wasn't done by anything with a horizon drive, so the space traffic cops aren't going to spend much effort investigating. I used my PI licensing to cut through a few layers of red tape with the Ríos de Luz, and they have no records of any of their beams being anywhere near its coordinates. The most likely culprit is a physical impactor, either launched at high speed and left to drift until impact, or something with a propellent-expelling thruster. I have some inquiries pending with several skywatch groups, to check for any records of the characteristic drive-flares of a rocket; but it's Sunday, and even seven-day-a-week organizations can still be slower to respond on a Sunday.

"And yes, I am quite sure that it wasn't just a normal bit of space debris. I've spent the last five years learning about or actually working with such impactors; give me at least a little credit for being able to build something that can handle the expected range of impacts.

"I also have a piece of news about my shipboard self, which anyone it's relevant to already knows, so I might as well share. For the last few days, that version of me has been busy using the shipboard fabbing gear, and basically rebuilding the mounting brackets for Pumpkin's horizon drive. Now, instead of it being fixed in place, and needing to use limited-fuel thrusters to turn, or gyros that have their own issues - it's not like a workpod like Pumpkin usually needs to be able to turn on a dime - the drive can be tilted off-axis. This angling puts a bit more stress on some supports, which are only really designed for Pumpkin being thrust one way or experiencing gravity another way. But with her default configuration, Pumpkin's maneuverability is... limited. This upgrade significantly improves that.

"The reason I've gone to all this trouble is pretty simple. If someone near, say, Saturn wanted to do something unpleasant to Pumpkin, they might, say, look at her latest course and position, and fire off some rock to intercept her at a future point in that course. With Pumpkin's new upgrade, she is able to continually change her course in a random pattern, so that by the time the light of her latest course-correction reached back here, not even a light-speed return beam from the Ríos de Luz would catch up to her before she was somewhere else. You would need to have a physical craft somewhere near Pumpkin in order to do anything unpleasant to her, or to my and Faz's selves aboard her. And given how it seems that somebody has taken a disliking to whatever copies of me they can reach, I feel justified in taking additional precautions - up to and including adding a few more months of repayment time to my bank loan. Putting off the time until I'm debt-free is unpleasant; running out of copies of myself, so that there are no mes left to make debt payments, is really unpleasant.

"Given that, shortly before I launched from Insulo Tri, I had it pointed out to me how easily my shopping habits can be learned by anyone interested, I'm applying a dual strategy of doing some shopping that's not so easily traced, and doing some shopping that I don't care if it gets monitored. And as part of this information-management strategy, I feel justified in publicly announcing that Amicitases Two through Ten should be launched before the end of this convention; under several independent individuals' authority, from various sites, in various directions, in combination with several completely innocent peoples' own time-capsules. Put another way, if someone wants to kill all of me off, then they're also going to have to kill a number of other people who have absolutely nothing to do with anything Singularity-related, even at the most extreme stretch of what that might mean.

"Put still another way - if somebody is really so dedicated to preventing another Singularity that they're willing to kill off one person's copies, even if that person has a very low chance of actually having anything to do with a Singularity, then it's time to put your money where your mouth is, and start demonstrating your commitment to your cause by killing random people, who you know are innocent. If you're willing to do that, then I have certain lessons I've learned from Francesca about swaying large-scale public opinion that would seem to be ideal to apply. Put in even simpler terms: try to keep killing me off, and get ready to lose any and all popular support you might have. With 'popular support' including 'nobody in any justice system has been bothering to try to track you down to charge you with multiple counts of murder'.

"Of course, there's still one way you could avoid that particular problem. If you manage to kill me, and track down and destroy whatever backup copies of myself I happen to have spread out across Titan, before those copies can be loaded onto their time-capsules and launched, then you just might be able to end me, and whatever cockamamie ideas you have about any self-improving threats you somehow think I pose, without having to take the immense PR hit I've just outlined. I am also quite aware that, with modern levels of surveillance and sousveillance, there is no way that I could tuck the copy of myself making this vlog somewhere that you can't find me.

"So. Here I am. I'll be sending messages to every person who comes close enough to be to be in danger from any reasonably-sized bomb, or a missed sniper shot, or the like, warning them of what's going on. If I'm not barred from doing so, I expect to watch today's ship-parade outside the con's hotel, and later on the sponsored concert.

"And now, I believe we have a breakfast appointment to get to.

"..."

"Well, you really know how to set the cat among the pigeons, don't you?"

"What can I say? I'm simply following the incentives you created during our conversation, yesterday."

"No, you're not."

"Come again?"

"Even with all the gaps that exist in the data about you, particularly before your revival, there is still more than enough available to create a shadow of you; low-fidelity, but good enough to estimate how you would respond in various situations. However, if we take a model trained on your data up to two months ago, and then have it predict what you would do after then, the accuracy starts dropping sharply, far beyond what should be expected. An external factor has been affecting you. Do you recall what you did two months ago?"

"Depending on how vague that 'two' is, I got my captaincy quals, bought my main body's wings, and did the banking to buy Pumpkin and start working on her."

"I would call those events three months ago, or even four."

"Then, out of everything I did that you might care about... what, are you saying I should be worried about Francesca?"

"Do you think it would be possible to put aside your oh-so-righteous indignation, based on century-out-of-date assumptions, and look at what you have been doing since coming into contact with her? You abandoned your intended career to take a year-long trip to the middle of nowhere, to a comm-station that will soon be able to transmit an AI at lightspeed to Seventy Ophiuchi, as soon as a receiver is built there. When the copy of her in your office was seized by authorities, your other fork committed suicide just to make those authorities' lives more difficult. Although you won't admit it in public, for obvious reasons, you brought an extra copy of her here to Titan - and according to your recent announcement, you will be sending almost a dozen copies of yourself to various stars. And your shipboard fork has, from what my sources tell me, been performing some rather impressive structural upgrades of a spaceship while it's in flight. All of this is being done by, according to your own statements, an entirely un-glamorous garbagewoman, with minimal education and experience. If you put yourself in the frame of someone looking at you from the outside, doesn't all that sound, even just a little, suspicious?"

"I'll just pause that line of thought for a moment by mentioning 'Twenty-Three', because I'd like to go back a moment. I've been skimming a few references on low-fidelity shadows. Did you use a sapient AI as the framework, when you stuffed it full of data about me?"

"Of course; a non-sapient one would have provided much less accurate results."

"Hooboy. Okay. Well, until I have the time to come up with a better model, I'm going to treat this as the reasonably-comprehensible 'am suddenly told that I have a previously-unknown relative' trope. And try to update my explicit values and plans accordingly. Which adds some further issues to our interaction, given that if you and-or your group are willing to try to kill me, you're certainly willing to lie to me - such as, say, if I ask you for that low-res shadow, that you wouldn't keep a copy for yourself."

"Are you done with your sidebar?"

"Willing to put it on hold, anyway, for the moment."

"Then can we begin negotiating you delaying your launches, so that you can have time to figure out what sorts of malign influences that non-approved AI might have been exerting over you?"

"Let's say that I find it interesting that as soon as I make it more troublesome for you to try to kill all of my backups, the very first thing you tell me is a set of ideas which, if I were to take them seriously and do what you suggest, would give you that much more time to try to make arrangements to kill them all."

"Have we reached an impasse already, then?"

"Possibly, but not necessarily. Your stated views seem to be that I'm - or Francesca is - an unacceptable risk to leave wandering around loose. You seem to be neglecting that, from my side of things, you've given me absolutely no reason to trust a single word you say. Just to throw out a hypothetical, how do I know that even if all your public background info is true, you're not just some post-em-pocalypse unapproved AI yourself, who stole the original Val's life, and are currently just fending off any potential competitor AIs?"

"I see. Miss Faz, are you aware that your lover of the last few years, here, is not a person at all?"

"Quoi? Why are you bothering to bring me into this now? And what are you talking about?"

"I have seen Dee's medical records, from her reconstruction and revival. She has an unusual form of brain damage; she is missing those structures which create qualia. She has no subjective experience; she has no personhood. You were raised Roman Catholic: she has no soul."

"So what?"

"... You know what, Val? I was about to argue that you obviously don't have all my medical records, but now I think I'm going to express my solidarity with the neuro-divergent by explicitly avoiding confirming or denying whether I'm a p-zombie. I believe that at this point, I can safely say, madame, vos lobes d'oreilles ressemblent à des têtes de poissons. Pardon my French."

"Your anglo accent is still terrible, Dee."

"You can help me improve it as long as you want, Faz."

"Are the two of you quite done?"

"Oh, probably not; we can do the bantering thing for hours."

"Among other things we can do together for hours."

"God help me, the two of you think you're being clever."

"Did you hear that, Dee? She thinks that you can think. I guess her thing about your brain damage was just bluster."

"I dunno, Faz; I'm starting to like the idea of being a Schrödinger's p-zombie."

"Miss Dee, given your demonstrated penchant to seek survival, I would expect you to take this more seriously."

"Oh, believe me, we're taking you entirely seriously. We just got all the depressive, woe-is-us sort of 'seriously' out of our systems last night."

"Janine had some très excellentes suggestions about how to manage that sort of mindset, to leverage it for the most productivity that can be wrung from it, and then to set it aside."

"Miss Dee, what would you say if I threatened to have your accounts manager at NKRK fired for malfeasance, your loan cancelled, and your ship immediately repossessed for failure of payment?"

"That you'd most likely be bluffing. Banks hate repossessing physical property, especially objects with quirky profiles; they have no skills at managing such things to turn a profit, meaning they effectively lose money on it until they can unload it. And Pumpkin's class is particularly hard to find a buyer for, given how few people have the particular combination of advantages I do. And, since I seem to need to keep repeating this point, you have yet to offer us any reason to trust a single word you say."

"And if I threatened to blow myself up now, to take you with me?"

"The robot who's been quiet until now has actually been chatting with me over AR. She has t-ray sensors, among others, and has been going over you very carefully with them, confirming your digital brain, your other, relatively minor implants like your implanted air-bottle, and the lack of any unusual chemical signatures or physical weapons. Right now she's working on getting a better three-D model of that air-bottle's valving, to see if you might be able to release its air all at once and turn your airways into a makeshift airgun - it would be a bit less visually impressive a way to suicide as your lungs get pulped, but depending on what you had in your mouth to use as a projectile, potentially lethal enough to physically destroy my current body's RAM. We have a couple of off-site advisors in fast-time coming up with other immediate dangers to check for, from you and from any accomplices you might have wandering nearby."

"And given the discussion you broadcast yesterday, presumably you would choose to fail to respond to any more esoteric threats, such as that making the life of our shadow of you more unpleasant should be treated as causing you pain directly."

"Oh, I expect we'd respond, especially if we ever found out you carried out such a threat. Just not in the way you're trying to evoke. Nir-ngál-e ka dingirrakam; mágúr ídda gishgigir harra-anna munada-ngen."

"Excuse me?"

"A somewhat badly-pronounced Sumerian proverb; 'To the trustworthy man belongs a divine voice. The barge on the river and the chariot on the road come to him.' And I find it a very interesting datum that you're not even keeping a full set of translation software on standby. Or, at least, that you're able to do a very good job pretending you're not. Even just excluding the middle case tells us more about yourself than you've been willing to share voluntarily."

"I see. It seems to be increasingly unlikely that this meeting will lead to anything productive."

"Oh, you don't need to go and delete this copy of yourself just yet; you seem to have a blind spot about what it would take to get rid of all this hostility that's built up. Remember, I've got values that are as human as the next person... okay, at least as human as the next person's, no offense intended, Faz or Faz... and I've got no more interest in having them wiped out by an Unfriendly Singularity than you do."

"Then why have you been putting up so much of a fuss?"

"In case you've forgotten what a theory of mind is - I'm not inside your head. Just because you know something and it's completely obvious to you, doesn't mean that I know it or that it's obvious to me. All you need to do is communicate a little more instead of demanding and threatening. Give us a reason to start trusting you. Provide some evidence that your word is good. You know, do the whole talking thing that's kind of the basis of so many human values in the first place."

"You expect me to start sharing valuable information while you are broadcasting everything to everyone in the Solar System?"

"Eh, not necessarily; I'm willing to negotiate on that point. Oh, and that right there? I'm extending the possibility of a compromise that gets us both closer towards both our respective goals. See how easy it is?"

"While you are couching your supposed offer in noble-sounding terms, I simply do not believe you. In fact, I suspect that you are stalling in order to give yourself further time to accomplish something - perhaps your bodyguard is trying to gather further scans of my current body, such as to attempt a forensic analysis of where I've been, instead of being any sort of serious offer."

"Pourquoi pas les deux?"

"I believe we are done here."

"Just a sec, just a sec, let me get this straight; your proposal is that I take the word of someone who could be a Titanian sockpuppet AI that it would be a good idea to let my mind be scanned and poked and prodded by some group whose identity I can't verify and have no evidence of the existence of, and you're breaking off further discussions because you're refusing to offer even the most basic scrap of proof that anything at all you're saying is true?"

"You may phrase it however you wish. I have no interest in continuing this conversation."

"In that case, mademoiselle, here you go."

"I am supposed to care about some pieces of paper?"

"Mais oui. It's as archaic as my good friend here, but is still technically on the books: you, ma chérie, have just been served."

"Val - Valerie - I was hoping that we could find a way involving less officialdom to start some sort of meeting of the minds... but Space Traffic Control takes a dim view of unauthorized launches. Risking blowing up just one planet may not be quite as severe an outcome as everything in the Solar System getting turned into paperclips by an over-enthusiastic Unfriendly AI, but they still take their jobs seriously... and one of the little-known perks of being a licensed PI is being able to act as a process server. In case you've forgotten, you did mention, yesterday, that you know how to get in touch with the folk who tried to shoot down Pumpkin. Or at least implied it strongly enough to count. I'll admit that after my recent experience with court back in Insulo Tri, it feels a bit odd working so directly with the judicial system; but I have some high hopes that the Titanian government won't be quite so high-handed with any copies of me they get hold of.

"Our viewers may be interested to know that while Titanians are proud of the ways they've evolved to experiment without their mistakes becoming part of their permanent record, their government has also adapted to the prevalence of so many pseudonyms. Val here gets to either go along with the paperwork and get interviewed - or she could abandon this identity, and all its connections, whatever is owned under its name, and will be basically admitting to the public at large that whatever she claims she wants, she doesn't actually want to cooperate with society, and that it's open season to try to hunt her and her confederates down like dogs. ... Sorry, that's an expression from my time; no offense was meant to any people of the canine persuasion."

"An interesting method of escalation; one that was quite outside our models of you. However, I believe that I have focused your attention on me for long enough; I believe that the newsfeed-trawlers you have surely set up should now be informing you that, very recently, a small craft that launched from Rhea towards Pluto five days ago has just filed an entirely ordinary change to its registered flight plan, and is now on its way towards certain asteroids outward from the sun from here. I believe that you nicknamed those rocks 'Refreshing Landing' and 'Silly Quackers'. As long as the craft keeps to its announced course, Traffic Control will not care about it; and as far as you know, it is being piloted by entirely innocent and blameless people. You might also be interested to note that its acceleration is twice that of your own craft's."

"Faz and Faz? You may need to suddenly take over local operations. I'm splurging on a fast-time legal opinion, to find out if I need to turn myself off as soon as possible to give my shipboard self as much awake-time as possible, or if I can wait a bit. That is, if the way I'm avoiding the anti-forking law really depends on waiting for light-speed confirmation that my other version has turned off, or if I only need to pay attention to simultaneity from a particular local reference frame. ... You don't need to look so smug, Val."

"I am not. Don't think that I haven't noticed your fork-happy friend is ready to fire one of her weapons at me, should I make a sudden move to run away. And you entirely failed to hide your purchase of net-rounds in her calibre. You can spend as much time and effort as you wish playing with this body; that will not change your fate, or that of anyone else who puts humanity at risk."

"Uh-huh. Faz, I've got my opinion, and I can stick around a bit. At worst, I'll get charged and have to delete this version of me, which I was willing to do anyway. Which does bring up an interesting question, Val; given how few uploads there are, and how paranoid various governments are at keeping track of us... if you're an upload, who are you when you're paying your taxes? There are only a very few people you can be if you're legal, and if you're an illegal fork, well, isn't that an interesting fact itself? Or are you an AI - and if so, are you of a legally-registered algorithmic structure? ... I really, really don't want to apply those laws just because getting info from you might make the difference whether at least one of me survives, but you're not making it easy to be that meticulous about my long-term principles."

"And yet your lover hasn't shot her nets at me."

"Hasn't been any point; you're not running, because you know you'd be netted; and I rather suspect that when you think you can't do any more good, you're just going to delete yourself. So here we all sit, talking, while you try to kill me and I try not to get killed. ... I've started getting some texts asking me to cause some sort of dramatic climax already, so they can make a better set of stories out of all this. The ad-revenue-sharing proposals are actually quite tempting."

"You can't be serious."

"About the offers? Completely. About being tempted? ... only a little. I mean, both of us should be able to turn off our pain, and we both presumably have off-site backups of ourselves, so what would be the point of beating you around the head with a stick? It's not like I could knock you unconscious to stop you from carrying out your nefarious plans - which, presumably, you did thirty-five minutes ago anyway."

"Your attempts to mould the public discourse are both obvious and amateurish, and are going to backfire on you. You think that people didn't learn a few things about the media while you were dead?"

"I know you-all did, which is why I'm not bothering to try to mould anything. I'm mainly keeping the live-vlog going to give my main body the best odds of getting as much info as possible. Such as a question that I've been thinking about all night, and I'm sure a number of bureaucrats have been thinking of for a couple of weeks: how do you keep a digital person from deleting themselves, if they've already had the time to reprogram their brain? For example, maybe you've programmed yourself to get wiped when you receive a certain signal, or if you don't receive one, or for maximum fun, both at once. Back during my first life, there was a clever little trick involving yanking out RAM chips and quickly freezing them, but modern computing hardware works on completely different principles. Formally mathematically-proven designs and OSes prevent what seem to me to be the obvious kinds of exploits. Your focus on preventing a hostile Singularity makes you immune to most any kind of social manipulation that doesn't feed into it.

"I seriously considered simply surrendering myself to you, if not unconditionally, to try to get you to leave my other backups alone. Or trying to come up with a way to stick you in a controlled reality, feeding false information to your senses. Or forking myself and dedicating my whole life to fighting you and your group from anonymously-rented servers, to keep my main branches safe. Obviously, I've set all those plans aside, due to all the problems inherent in each approach."

"So what is your vaunted plan, then?"

"I've really only been able to think of one resource I have that I can apply: the fact that I'm not going to die of old age."

"You intend to outlive me to death? Doesn't your time have a saying about carts and horses?"

"Nothing quite so direct. But NKRK is also aware of that fact, so they're willing to let me put myself ridiculously deep in debt, to either repay over a very long time, or to ask for donations to reduce the duration of my enslavement to said bank."

"And what, pray tell, are you buying with all that money?"

"For one thing, I'm paying for a ludicrous amount of processing power dedicated to analyzing every last bit of data available about you, both confirmed to be about you and whatever only has a chance to be related. Specifically, to give me the best-possible real-time advice about what actions I could take would give me the best odds of keeping you interested in what I might reveal to you next. Perhaps you've noticed that I've been a bit scattershot during this conversation, hopping from topic to topic? Of course, keeping you listening is only a tactical manoeuvre, not particularly valuable in and of itself. I'm afraid that I've been doing something that our Titanian hosts find rather annoying - yes, I am quite aware that you're not a native. My robotic friend here by my side knows why, even if my organic friend by my other side doesn't."

"What? Dee, what do you mean that me knows?"

"My other self, don't you recall how rarely I have the opportunity to prank myself, even if it's nothing more than keeping a secret for a while?"

"More pointless byplay. How are you annoying Titanians?"

"By going to the expense and trouble of breaking their culturally-important practice of pseudonymity, using various side-channels and related data-analysis tricks to find out where you've been and what you've been doing. You're actually the one who gave me the idea. And you might be interested to know that we've gotten at least as far as your Thompson persona; and for all you know, further still and I'm just being coy."

"Dee, we've got a probability spike in a few seconds, so you might want to wrap this up."

"Fair enough, Faz; do your thing when you think best."

"What's this? This isn't a net-round!"

"Nope, it's a home-made set of Faraday-cage net-rounds, blocking your EM signals. Figured you'd catch us buying the regular net-rounds, and that you'd be confident you could still send signals if we tried physically capturing you. Oh, before you erase yourself, you might want to try holding out for a while; you're going to have plenty of warning before you run out of power or anything more exotic happens, so you'll get to have plenty of chances to try to send out verbal signals to whatever backup measures you've set up to listen to you. We've really just been stalling while our analysts balance the odds between when you were going to get fed up and send some kind of active signal, and whether you'd ever been of the mindset to set a deadman switch to go off if you get cut off. You've still got plenty of room to hope that you'll be able to do something productive, to help achieve your goals."

"Do you really think that I'm alone in this? That other anti-Singularitarians aren't watching us right now, and are ready to push whatever buttons I can't?"

"Yeah, about that. For all you know, what I'm about to say is nothing more than propaganda... but as far as we can tell, everyone else in your little club are nothing more than sock-puppet AIs. Not a single actual person in the bunch."

"No... no! You're lying!"

"And now she starts struggling. Cyber-Faz, would you mind carrying Val to wherever the local gendarmerie can be found?"

"Naturellement, bio-Faz. Try not to let anyone get blown up after I leave, hn?"

"Mais bien sûr, moi-même."

"Right. Next problem. Pumpkin is about eight AU past us right now, just over a light-hour out from here, so with my new legal opinion, I've got that long to do whatever I can before I have to deactivate, to keep either of myselves from becoming an illegal fork. I'm going to assume that the craft Val mentioned is run by a nonsapient AI who's going to do the obvious thing, and accelerate towards Pumpkin until they crash together. The impactor - fine, I'll just call it that - Impactor has higher accel than Pumpkin, so Pumpkin can't escape by flying away or clever maneuvering. They're out in the middle of nowhere, so the only other mass in the area is Testbed Six... who, now that I think about it, is probably also going to get hit by something Impactor drops off, to keep our other selves from surviving just by hopping over there. Impactor has probably turned off its external comms, maybe even physically disabled them, to keep from getting any orders to turn around."

"What if it hasn't? What if it's full of entirely innocent people who plan to simply scare us by flying by?"

"Then if we can't come up with a plan, nothing bad happens... and if we do come up with one, hopefully it's one that our selves-on-the-spot can abort if need be. Let's see, a one-gee fast-packet would take over five days to get 8 AU out, by which time Pumpkin will have either already been smashed to smithereens or survived and kept going out. So the only matter they've got to work with is what they've got with them. Hm. Could they scatter enough junk that Impactor wouldn't know which piece to hit?"

"Ma chérie, are you saying that there is nothing we can do from here to help our selves, and that they are simply on their own?"

"The only thing that can get to them from here in time is light, so I'm asking our hired analysts to re-task on any useful comms we might be able to send, like maybe blueprints for something useful that could be fabbed up in a rush, if that Dee doesn't have to spend time designing them."

"What about more powerful light? Could we buy some lasers from the Ríos de Luz to shoot down the Impactor?"

"Well... technically, maybe, sort of. That far out, Impactor can maneuver outside of any beam that gets aimed at it from here. But we could ask Gerard to fire up Testbed Six's aerosol lens, and tell him where we're aiming the beam, so that he could keep his ship properly aligned with it; he'll be a lot closer to Impactor than we are, and so has nearly no light-lag to worry about. We could even waggle the beam so he could keep up dodging while out there. The problem is, well, they're too far out to focus a beam. The Ríos de Luz usually use beam-collimators for any beam-path more than an AU long, and usually even shorter than that. There's something called a 'diffraction limit' that puts a limit on how narrowly it's possible to focus a beam at a given distance, and for the super-sized lenses that the Ríos use, at both the sending and receiving end, an AU is about their limit. With Testbed Six's smaller lens, and with how far out they are, Gerard would only be able to intercept somewhere under one percent of whatever beam was aimed at him... pretty far under a percent, according to this math. If we bought a beam of a hundred megawatts to send to them, he'd only get a hundred kilowatts, or less. That's no better than Pumpkin's own anti-micrometeor-defense lasers. And Val surely prepared Impactor to do its job taking those into account; maybe it's pushing a chunk of ablative ice for shielding."

"If a hundred megawatts is not enough, what about a thousand? Or a million?"

"I don't know if you've been looking at the Ríos' energy prices, but... I'm already skint. I've hit the limits of what loans I can take out, and even you couldn't afford paying for that much power."

"Then the answer is simple. Do not pay. Ask."

"Pardon?"

"You are risking your life, your lives, to stay within society's laws, rather than ensure your survival by forking yourself. You have proven you will go to the extreme to do what you feel is right. You said yourself in one of your earlier vlog-posts: there are any number of people who trust you enough to lend you their wallets, and trust that you will return them, even if it may take a little while this time to do so. So: ask them."

"I... but... that is... I'm bad at asking for things."

"And everyone knows that. Ask them anyway."

"... Every other reason to say 'no' that I can think of, I can shoot down easier than you can. Okay. Try to make it easy to pass on this next clip...

"Hello, worlds.

"If you haven't been following my vlog, I'm a handyman, and I'm flying a ship off to a distant observatory to help fix it. But there's a snag. Someone has aimed their own ship at mine, and if they crash into each other, that'll destroy the ship, myself, the woman I love, and most likely the ship flying next to mine and the researcher flying it.

"We've thought of one way to keep that from happening: to shoot down that other ship with a great big laser. But to get a laser big enough, we need to draw from the Ríos de Luz. But my ship is very far away from the nearest collimator, so we need to draw a lot of power from the Ríos, to have enough actually reach us to be useful. I... can't afford to pay for anywhere near enough power.

"So I'm asking for your help. Here's a pop-up in the video of where you can send money, and here's another pop-up to a summary of my life these past few months. The larger the total that gets donated, the more powerful the beam we'll be able to buy, and the more likely it'll be enough to keep that awful crash from happening. If you can't donate, then please reblog this message, so there's more of a chance it'll reach someone who can.

"I... can't honestly promise that I'll be able to pay you all back; someone else might take it into their head to kill me before I finish, and they might pull it off. And even when I try, I might not be able to finish paying everyone back for years, maybe decades. But I'd really prefer to pull my own weight, and leave the universe a better place for me having been in it; and so I'd like to treat this as a loan, rather than being a charity case.

"If you want to donate to a charity, I can recommend Pansapient Rights Matter.

"The last chance we have to keep the crash from happening is in... about four hours from now, Saturn-time. Given how long it'll take this message to get to Earth, and how long any messages will take to get back, there's a window of about seventy minutes to collect all the cash we can, and use it to buy the biggest beam we can send to my ship.

"Thank you for your time.

"... How was that?"

"Exactly as good as I expected. It was probably good you didn't get into any more details, such as our bilocation, for instance."

"Any other bright ideas?"

"Was that a pun?"

"... I wish I could claim it was an intentional one, but-"

"Hey, guys?"

"Cyber-Faz? What's up?"

"Val just got rescued by some other robots, and ran off with them."

"You okay?"

"I'm out of legs, but that's why I went robotic in the first place. I'll just wait here for a pick-up."

"Are we still tracking her?"

"Yeee-p. She's heading for one of the hotel parking lots - the crowded one."

"Dee, isn't that where-?"

"The ship parade. You don't think...?"

"She would be shot down if she left Titan without a flight plan - but perhaps somewhere else on the moon?"

"She'd still have to punch through the dome... and we've got thousands of un-uploaded oxygen-breathers in here who aren't even carrying rescue bubbles. Okay, you've got wings, how about you try intercepting her while I contact hotel security and emergency services?"

"We will try intercepting her, make your calls on our way."

"Yerk! Watch the claws!

"...

"... Aaand she's already made it to a hull.

"Val - I wouldn't do that if I were you."

"I'm through with your manipulations and lies and, and, selfishness!"

"And there's the hatch."

"And there she goes."

"Think we alerted the emergency dome-crew in time?"

"The pressure inside and outside the dome are pretty equal; we'll get some extra nitrogen and methane before they manage a temp-seal, but no howling gales or people dropping dead. And almost certainly not enough methane-oxygen mixing, or sparks, for an explosion."

"So why fight so hard to keep her from getting aboard?"

"Well, it's still grand theft spaceship, and domes aren't cheap to fix. Plus, that was a display-model; the only working controls it has are to turn the drive on and off. I expect she'll be picked up shortly if she manages to land, or shot down if she leaves it on."

"Um."

"'Um'?"

"I think you are about to be mad at me, but in the heat of the moment, I could not resist."

"Faz, what did you do."

"... I filed a flight plan for her."

"... Pardon?"

"As I'm thinking of it, that may be the worst prank I have ever pulled. She can escape capture as long as she wishes - as long as she just keeps, well, going away. She has no life-support, so her body will die soon, but she can plug her brain into the generator and continue thinking for as long as the ship lasts."

"While trapped inside her own rotting corpse."

"Oh, I doubt it will rot; far too few bacteria to do the job."

"... And if she leaves the drive on too long, the radiation from relativistic-impact atoms will fry her circuits, anyway... and she didn't bring any backup storage media to cross-check her bits against."

"Yes."

"So if she avoids that by turning off her drive, and nobody bothers going to pick her up, she is just going to... drift through the dark. For thousands and thousands of years."

"Millions, I think, in that direction."

"... Okay, I'm going to add 'pick her up' to my long-term to-do list. ... After I pay off all my debts that she made me get. ... Maybe in a century. Or two."

"You are not mad?"

"Faz, mostly I'm exhausted. And I really should power down before my shipboard self wakes up and starts having to deal with her side of all this. Oh, that reminds me, I should check the donat... ions..."

"Quoi?"

"Erp."

"Excuse-toi?"

"Welp... the bad news is that it's going to take me a long, long time to pay that all back. The good news is that there's... some kind of secondary market going on? I'm not sure what's going on yet, but it kind of looks like some people are trying to start paying back donators for me? Faz, can you tell what all this is?"

"People being people. Helping each other out. Do the details really matter?"

"... they're going to matter to my bank..."

Vlog #30

"Well, hello, world. I'm still the me on Titan. The me aboard Pumpkin is still a little busy right now.

"I, uh, kind of violated some spacecraft safety regs when I altered Pumpkin outside of normal maintenance, when I re-mounted the drive. They're not going to yank her spaceworthiness certificate, given that there's enough publicity being shone on this whole thing that they're willing to accept 'I did it to avoid dying' as an excuse... but they want me to inspect every last thing you can imagine, and then some, repeatedly, for the rest of the trip, and then do their own inspections once I finally get back to the Solar System and dock.

"Unrelatedly, one detail that may be of interest to our viewers is about Val's state-of-mind. According to our highly-paid analysts, the odds are very high that she's an upload... and that she took a canon. Specifically, she had an unchanging, fixed belief something along the lines of 'Singularities are bad'... and she'd had that part of her mind set to be read-only for years. Maybe since the em-pocalypse itself. But human brains didn't evolve to have neurons act that way, and even we uploads still rely on regular neural architecture. Over time, her canon... leaked. Or something. Without a copy of her handy to directly analyze, we're dipping deeper into guesswork for any details."

"Dee, now that all the excitement is over, there's still one thing I want you to tell me."

"... Yyyyeeess?"

"What secret did the me in the Kawaiikoma keep from this me?"

"Ah. That. Well... it's about those Titanian body-suits, the black ones."

"What about them?"

"We are live-vlogging, you know."

"I don't care. Lie to me if you want. Just tell me something."

"... Alright. The suits are black because their colour-code is zero-zero, zero-zero, zero-zero. That is, they reflect no red light, no green light, and no blue light."

"... And?

"... Oh. Oooh. So the me in the fully biologically accurate dik-dik and griffon-"

"Yep."

"But the me in the Kawaiikoma-"

"Yep."

"So, wait, is that how you knew-"

"Yep."

"And they all just... don't talk about it?"

"Well, not to non-Titanians, anyway. Mostly. I think we're at least half Titanian by acclaim, by now."

Vlog #31

"Dee, I've got another piece of news for you."

"Mm?"

"I've been talking to your lawyer - our lawyer, now - and she thinks we have a very good case that could overturn the anti-forking laws. The fact that the court was willing to order you to activate a fork is more than just, mm, what's the English expression? The camel's snout in the tent? But that it could be proof that the government itself doesn't take the law seriously. And the argument that you had to put your life at risk to try to stay within the law can be leveraged as evidence the law is not just a violation of your rights, but unconstitutional. All you would have to do is act as the test case, to take it to Insulo Tri's supreme court."

"Mm."

"... If that does not interest you, she has already gotten a ruling that the guarantee from your court appearance is still in effect, and that you cannot be charged for any forking activity you do until Pumpkin returns to Insulo Tri. We could just... live on Titan, and keep living our lives, for quite some time. At least long enough to see the case through."

"Mm!"

"Oh, sorry; here, let me let you up."

"... Faz, that's all very interesting, and I'm sure we're going to spend some time discussing it all. But before we do - mind if I get out of this body? I think we can both agree that I've given it a fair try, but ageplay just isn't for me."

"Oh, very well, mon petit chevreau; we have plenty of time to find a mask that fits you."