Marla had been a gifted child. She graduated at age 13, got her master's degree at 15 and wrote an already groundbreaking piece as her PhD Thesis when she was 20. That was in the year 2089. ...
Later on, Marla became more famous than Einstein, but not only because of her groundbreaking papers that changed physics. After that, she organized the think tank "Enclave" and gathered the most brilliant minds for years to deepen her theories. ...
Fifty years later, the solar system was split between huge corporations with more financial power than any state on earth. The Dublin drive, invented by Zodiac, was the dominant spaceship technology. So the company became number two, so huge that it could buy number three, Sagittarius. But the possibilities to grow didn't end there. ...
Marie approached Zodiac Station inside the most comfortable space vessel possible. The station circled Titan, which circled Saturn, which in turn circled our Sun, she thought sitting among 50 other suits. Representatives of wealthy corporations of the solar system. This was the most exclusive funding event she ever attended. And before she could finish her thought, the station appeared on Titan's Horizon. ...
The endeavour with the first twins was a fifty per cent success. Probe number one brought amazing results from our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri. But the probe to Barnards Star had a series of failures in its transmission module and didn't deliver results. ...
"She's gone. They have her. What should I do? This is so fucked up. What's going on?" B055 had a complete breakdown. He had called Hana into their office space in the mesh and didn't stop talking nonsense since she had arrived. She still couldn't understand a word. He needed a slap in his digital face. ...
"Glad you have found our message", a distorted voice said with a noticeable ironic undertone. "We have your girlfriend. You know that. Hugo Niemann, you will do something for us. You will raid the crypto vault of Credit Cayman. We know what you're capable of." ...
B055 once showed her the place in the 3D map of Prague. "I'd go there", he said pointing at the ugliest piece of brutalism architecture that her otherwise beautiful home city had to offer. It was the abandoned, rotten TV tower. Now she came here to think from time to time. And there was a lot to process now. ...
The day of the heist. B055 and R00t prepared themselves. They chose flies as their Avatars. R00t once came up with that mod. Actually, avatars have to be at least 1 unit in height. For today's purpose, a little piece of nothing that could defy virtual gravity was a perfect fit. ...
The safe was a different beast. It couldn't be cracked with programming skills. That was the task of B055, the Operator. Hugo did not only know most of the security systems by heart, he also had an intuition for the situation and he had a bespoke toolkit from R00t. So he went to work. ...
B055 moved like a robot. This was his world, the crunch time. Twenty seconds left on the clock. The time was counting down in his heads-up display. For some of the data artefacts, he used ejectors to transfer the raw data. But some of them had to be extracted as a whole, the complete virtual objects. The problem: This would be discovered within minutes by the securities at Credit Cayman. ...
B055 and R00t needed over three hours in their virtual lab to sort out and prepare the loot from the heist. Some of the data packets contained encrypted inclusions they had to crack first. Some others were still covered in their virtual objects. Paranoid shit. ...
Three weeks had passed since the heist. Although the first call with Hugo and Adele was heartwarming and tears were flowing, Hana felt a change. They barely worked together and they met in their real Avatars. At the same time, they were closer and more distant to each other. Hana decided that it was time to do something. She took the train to Hamburg. ...
During the 22 missions before one of the probes targeted the Rana Starsystem, the Gemini project already had found two planets with lifeforms. One infected with funghi and another one with an almost breathable atmosphere and grass-like plants. ...
Martin, the chief diplomat in the crew of the Rana Mission, stood in line with the others as Captain Persson gave her speech. It was the departure speech. Martin was a little nervous and proud. He would most likely be the Armstrong of his era, the person who was supposed to make first contact with an alien. ...
Arriving in the Rana system was less spectacular than Martin thought. The blackness of the space there followed the blackness between the systems. The only difference was a star that shone a bit brighter than usual. They still had two days until they were supposed to reach the orbit. ...
The following weeks brought inflation of knowledge. The probes on the surface of Rana 3 worked perfectly. The translator AI learned the new languages within a week. In the same week, the crew gathered geographical and sociological data. After that, the working teams augmented their observations with statements from the aliens. ...
For Martin, the first contact was a life-changing moment, but the weeks, months and years after that were the most work-intensive. He became the first ambassador representing Earth as a whole while over there on his old home planet they still thought in dimensions of states and corporations. ...
Martin and the other leads of the first contact crew regularly spent their evenings together with dinner and discussions since the launch of the mission. One day, about four months after the first contact, Amanda, the chief biologist, came out of nowhere with a topic. "These are no aliens", she said and got the attention of everyone in the room. ...
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