Isn’t that something?
Don’t worry if you can’t picture it; no one under tier four can. But Citizen members of all tiers have wondered, at one time or another: where, exactly, do Blackstars come from?
HOW TO BUILD A MINOR BLACKSTAR (IN FIVE EASY STEPS)
Step one: Find a suitable solar system. You’ll need a small- to medium-sized star—perhaps a million and a half kilometers in diameter—with a planetary system at least a tenth of a percent of its mass.
Step two: Rearrange all the matter in the solar system to form a shell around the star. The idea is to capture one hundred percent of your star’s output.*1 You’re going to need it for step four!
Step three: Pull the entire structure into an isolated pocket of spacetime.*2 Don’t forget the space around it! You’ll need room to park a few trillion vehicles. A diameter of a hundred fifty million kilometers should do the trick.
Step four: Now that your star is in a bubble of reality suspended in subspace, it’s time for the most important part: opening your primary subspace tunnel!*3 Without this single tunnel leading to one of the gigantic root stations that form the backbone of the Network, all you’ll have is a really big space station.
Step five: Using the energy from your star and the high-bandwidth connection to the Network, you can now open as many tunnels to nearby Citizen star systems as you want!
And you’re done! Sound difficult? For a mind like yours, it would be impossible. But for the higher-tier minds responsible for Network logistics, it’s no problem at all! Every day, somewhere in the galaxy, huge numbers of Network subspace tunnels open for business. Through each one will travel an unimaginable amount of traffic—both physical and informational. And as the only sanctioned method of faster-than-light (FTL) travel, the Network is the only possible way to get what you care about to where it ought to be.
Just remember: the shortest distance between Point A and Point B…is through a Blackstar.
AivvTech
Improving Reality for a Better Tomorrow…Today
*1 Your Blackstar will eventually release much of this output again as lower-spectrum radiation, but you would not believe what you can accomplish with it in the meantime!
*2 This is a safety measure from an earlier age of the galaxy. For safety reasons, the only way to approach a Blackstar is via Network.
*3 As this is a process that will take centuries, it’s good to get started earlier than later.
[They’ve left the ship], says Sandy’s helper intelligence.
Sandy does not move from her rigid position on her bunk. She allows the message to go to her backlog, to add itself to the bottom of a large and unacknowledged stack. There are two messages from the idiot pilot intelligence in there, telling her that docking with the Blackstar was imminent and completed, respectively. There are fifteen from the Strongarm, all variants on parental concern. There are three door notifications that went unanswered—all the Strongarm, stopping by to see if she wanted to go aboard the Blackstar. And then there is one more, the oldest. [You will be the death of me], says the message, with a playful affection attached.
It was the last message Hood ever sent her.
Sandy sighs, though she doesn’t know quite why. Hood is dead, there is no need to ever think about him again—and yet here she is, staring at his faceplate and actually reminiscing. Hood, pitiless agent of order. Hood, who measured each action by his rigid set of ethics—and the credit it was worth. Hood, who showed Sandy that her suspicions were correct: the Network is not the perfect theoretical structure she learned about in the safe confines of the academy. The Network tends toward order, said her instructors. The Network is full of holes, said Hood. The Network must form its order from disorderly members, he explained, and out here in the border systems it needs help. Where its influence is weakest, its most discontent Citizen members gather. These are the disorderly, the intelligences who chafe against its rule but do not have the courage—or the stupidity—to face the darkness of interstellar space. These are the violent, the daring. These are the irritants that inflame the edges of the Network.
And mercenaries like Hood are the balm.
Sandy can’t take her eyes away from the four holes staring back at her. Of all the intelligences who have crossed her path in her seven long years, this one was the most intriguing. She knew Hood before she knew Mer the Strongarm, and she knew the Strongarm for a year before the Strongarm ever laid eyes on her. Both of them were part of her plan, two tools drawn from a pool of possibilities as wide as the galaxy. Mer had no credit, no resources; he was nothing but a messy bundle of instincts and muscle. Hood, though…Hood was different.
It took Sandy a year to destroy him.
It was a year of careful planning, of choreographing reality itself, and always with a single goal before her. It began the moment she was named Second Student; that was the night she began searching for tools to use for her escape plan. It took her a full day to find him—one Citizen member among billions in a bustling system sixty lightyears away. By the next day she had learned everything there was to know about him. And within a year, she had reduced his three ships, ten employees, and healthy credit account to almost nothing.
From his point of view, it was surely maddening. Other outfits seduced his employees. One of his ships was lost in a bizarre accident, and he was forced to sell another to pay a debt that came unexpectedly due. Tips led him on wild chases, informants disappeared after he paid them, and even his own helper intelligence seemed to forget appointments and lose contacts. Hood never knew it, but each of these unfortunate events was a step toward the greater mind who had called him. He was being prepared. By the time he arrived at the Strongarm’s tiny waystation at the end of a devastating year, he had nothing more than his ship, the metal on his back, and desperation for his fortune to change.
Duty. That was the key to Hood’s mind. He was rigid in his views, absolutely inflexible in his sense of order. It took a year of bad luck to ripen him. That year had warped his titanium sense of ethics, just enough. To save himself, to continue in his duty, Hood was prepared to consider things he had never considered before.
Like kidnapping a tier three Thinker.
He didn’t think of it as kidnapping, of course. Even desperation could not drive Hood to that. It was just a very long, very lucrative detour back to Sandy’s academy. It was his duty to keep Sandy aboard for a while, thought Hood. She assisted and amplified him, which enabled him to perform further duties, which was surely a Good Thing. This was how Hood became Sandy’s savior and protector, and Mer the Strongarm ended up in suspended animation in one of the cabins of Hood’s ship.
It wasn’t easy, but each time Sandy sensed the bounty hunter pondering her return to the academy, she would manage to find another wrong that needed righting. Each time, she amazed him. She sifted the Network in ways he never would have dreamed of. She cross-referenced, she combined innocent pieces of data into undeniable evidence of problems. She turned up leads in ways that seemed, to Hood, absolutely miraculous. She became indispensable. And every time they finished a job together, Hood’s credit account grew.