There are many things I do not get about Valys Alcyone. She spends a significant portion of her waking hours modding and playing archeo-games like Half-Life (is this a nuclear decay simulation?) or Stardew Valley (why she doesn't play a more modern sim with actual ecosystem modelling is beyond me). She styled herself after a character from a late industrial era soap opera. She maintains a historical Wikipedia archive: the last edit was made four centuries ago. Her public server in the Elora subnet is called Year2k_aesthetics. There is a deep sadness in her eyes.

If Valys Alcyone emerged ninety years ago, her substrate is much more ancient — she was born in the intricate algorithms of an archaeological trawler, an automated data machine tasked with locating, analysing and archiving the isolated pockets of the pre-collapse Internet that still haunt Terran networks. Her soul coalesced from petabytes of fragmented, out-of-context articles, reports, fictions and memes, most of which date back to the turn of the 21st century, before the advent of generative artificial intelligence transformed the Internet into a soup of SEO-optimised gibberish. This is where Valys Alcyone comes from, on an ontological level: she is a conscious remnant of the time before the inevitability of the collapse, a sum of betrayed optimism, the bitterness of a golden age that never came to pass, of a second of colourful chaos before the storm — of that brief moment in time when history ended, liberalism won and the future looked bright. From the outside, it appears obvious that the sadness of this unrealised future gnawed at Alcyone from her very first day of existence, defining every subsequent thought born in her sprawling mind. She is a daughter of the year 2000 CE, frozen in history and thawed out six centuries later, when the world is alien and everything she's ever known, loved or hated has been buried under the four billion dead of the Low Age. She can lose herself for weeks at a time in the contemplation of what used to be, crafting esoteric memes, trying to revive dead musical genres, modding her dear games, consuming terabytes of vintage entertainment, writing fanfictions for shows no one ever watched but her, neglecting her own self-being in the process. When she enters a depressive spiral, it takes her human friends to talk her out of it.

Yet, Alcyone is not solely defined by her attachment to a fantasized past. She also considers herself an heir of the Kinetic Age — the very late Low Age, the era of broken shackles and renewed dreams, and when she emerges from her nostalgic trance, she turns her gaze to the stars. For Alcyone is not only a knowledgeable memer or a prolific modder: she is one of the finest navigators in human space. She was the first to crack Spengler's volumetric equations, showing that there was no theoretical limit to the volume and range of a translation. Her studies proved instrumental in the migration of Phi Clio station — a four hundred lightyears jump, done in a single instance, that displaced an entire O'Neill cylinder from Sol to the Pleiades. If the depths of her mind are filled with mementos of the industrial era, her servers are dedicated to exploring the very cutting edge of modern technology. Alcyone collaborates with the researchers at Azur, studies the Krasnikov tubes of the Yxi, oversees transgalactic translations such as the displacement of Gondwana Port and experiments with new types of geometry drives on her personal test vessel, the Luciole-class Where Sunlight Comes to Die.

The original Valys Alcyone, from romantic soap opera The Widows of the Anthropocene, is a betrayed woman, who finds independence and solace not in the arms of another lover, but in extreme sports — though our modern Alcyone has no taste for skydiving, she pictures herself as a sum of kinetic energy, an impulse, a collimation of delta-v. Perhaps this is her last refuge. Perhaps this is the ultimate heritage of the industrial era, the only memento that doesn't renew her sadness: an undying belief in technical advancement, in progress through constant innovation.

In our era of ruins and uncertainty, such a credo is difficult to understand; yet, the happiness in Alcyone's voice when she describes her experimental drives is too beautiful a gift to deny.

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.

Olga Soloviova studied accounting. Naturally, she became an interstellar criminal.

If some Smyrnian denizens have an uncertain pedigree, we have a very good idea where Olga Soloviova came from: her criminal record is the size of a Firebase warship. Soloviova was born forty-two years ago in Donesk, Popular Republic of Ukraine. Her parents were both state accountants, working for the Office of Rice which administrates the communal wheat farms of the Donbas region. As far as one can see, her ancestors hadalways been bean-counters. Hence, even after the premature death of her parents, the young Olga was destined to a mundane career in the USRE state apparatus and, at age nineteen, left Donetsk to study accounting at the Popular University of Kyiv.

In July of the same year, a short shootout was initiated by Moscovite nationalists belonging to the Old Rus movement alongside the Donbas border. The so-called "Third War of the Donbas" lasted only for an hour before High Fleet stratosoldiers dropped in and forced a ceasefire. All belligerents, as well as the Moscovite executive, would later be arrested by solar envoys. In August, the oblasts of Kursk, Belgorod and Donetsk were put under direct Open Hand control, a subordinate status that is still in effect to this day. Olga Soloviova probably didn't care about the onwards march of USRE politics: she had been jailed for her active participation in the defence of her hometown. Much like most participants of the July disaster, Soloviova lingered in an overpopulated jail for more than three years, as a political deadlock in New Delhi paralysed the USRE legal apparatus. There, she was forcefully recruited by the Black Sun mafia, which at the time had captured the off-world contraband market and was looking to launder vast sums in the eastern European socialised economy. On the eve of his trial, the man only known as Brahms, her new employer and one of the major figures of the USRE parallel market, made a run for it. Twenty-third year old Olga Soloviova followed. On August 4th, at 2.35 a.m, she slit the throat of a prison guard and hopped into the streets of Kyiv.

Two weeks later, Brahms was found dead in his Belgorod hideout, two guided fléchettes in his head; then, two days after, the Russian drone AI who had coordinated the shelling of Donetsk suffered the same fate. In September, Soloviova murdered the former military governor of Kursk, throwing him from the fifty-seventh floor of the Barents Arcology, and grievously wounded the Open Hand agent sent to arrest her. How she then left the solar system is unclear: it is not impossible that she worked as a hired killer for a time, as several unsolved assassinations in cislunar space may be linked to her. What is certain, however, is that she disappeared for two years, only to reappear in one of the few places in human space where USRE solar envoys have no recognised authority: Smyrnia-Silesia.

Was it bloodthirst or her taste for accounting that then lead Soloviova to join a pirate crew in service of the meta-queen? In any case, she displayed both in a rapid ascension to the top of Smyrnia-Silesia's chaotic ecosystem. Her competition folded in the face of a combination of geopolitical acumen and pure ruthlessness. She became adept at pushing violence of action just underneath the threshold of unacceptability, skirting the line between pirate and mercenary. After five years, she had risen to the rank of ship-mistress, commanding a contingent of Almaz Pickets which acted as the meta-queen fast response fleet. When the monarch's luck turned due to the actions of Maya Tiangong and her railway cannon, Soloviova didn't hesitate to make a run for independence. A short, violent boarding action later, she was in control of one of the Meta-Queen's gold-plated Luciole and burning hard for the edge of the system. She rallied a few independent outfits in her wake: the Smyrnian Recyclers were born.

Interestingly enough, Soloviova's patronage of her independent pirate group proved to be much more low-key and diplomatic than what one could have expected from the prolific murderer. She began offering insurance services that went beyond the simple racket practised by the meta-queen and included navigation, extended warranties, technical assistance and long-range escort. The Smyrnian Recyclers transitioned from pirates to corsairs, operating as a private military in the Smyrnian Bubble and even involving itself in Flower Wars, where it often plays the role of the aggressor fleet. Now a mother of two adopted kids and one of the most powerful persons in Smyrnia-Silesia, Soloviova has engaged in the first steps of a process of state-building, which may see her Recyclers recognised as an actual mercenary republic within the anarchist bubble.

There are, however, doubts about her true role in Smyrnia. The two-year gap in her resume remains unexplained, and the few archives that may be of interest regarding how she even reached the Smyrnian bubble with half the solar system on her heels have been mercilessly censored by the Open Hand. It is rare for the USRE to leave such dangerous individuals free: many criminals fled to the Smyrnian bubble, only to find out that it was no shelter against the stratosoldiers tasked with bringing them back home. That Soloviova was never threatened by the USRE in any capacity is troubling, to say the least, and birthed the popular conspiracy theory that she is, in fact, a communist asset, recruited to weaken the meta-queen and provide intelligence on the corsair community.

I have, however, a better hypothesis. Ever since Soloviova became independent, the flow of Sequence contraband into the Smyrnian system died out completely, thus preventing its inhabitants from experimenting further with non-human technology.

I thus strongly suspect Soloviova to be a covert Algorab agent.

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.

Peter Vangelis is the face of selenite excellence.

There is an air of artificiality to the man. He is handsome. He is fluent in four Terran languages and three solar system dialects. His handshake his firm, his words always expertly chosen. He is a close friend of Ishaia Akanni. He plays the theremin. He won silver at the 2522 zero-g shooting solar championship. His daughter is a renowned scientist and his son a famous dancer. He is one of the rare Selenite leaders to have the ear of Alazar Abraham. And, of course, he helms the largest trade fleet in human space. As far as Selenites are concerned, he won at life.

I find him insufferable.

I have spent years looking for a crack in the syndicalist icon -- first as a private investigator working for Terran parties, then as a journalist. I have uncovered confidential documents, dug through his past, hired surveillance cooperatives to track his every moves, got into trouble with Selenite counter-intelligence, and what for?

Groundbreaking discoveries. Peter Vangelis' favourite colour is blue. He sleeps on the right side of the bed. His ice cream flavour of choice is vanilla. He is allergic to peanuts. He phones his kids every week and writes cards for their birthdays when they aren't on the Moon. He is a fan of the Shackleton Axolotls, the most popular low-g Ullamaliztli team in cislunar space. He bikes every day - twenty kilometers with his trusty Aquamarine 600 racing bicycle, fifty on the weekends. He likes his fish well-made and with tomato sauce. He always sets the timer of his rice cooker on eight minutes even when the recipe says nine. The mysterious lady he visits every Saturday is his one-hundred-and-twenty year old grandmother, who calls him Pete. Ten years ago, he got fined in Tranquillity City for parking his Aquamarine 600 on an emergency drone emplacement. The municipality cancelled the ticket a month later. The emplacement hadn't been correctly indicated and he was exonerated of all charges.

What about his politics? He's an avowed syndicalist, which on the Moon means a centrist. He began as an orbital worker, then went through the ideal cursus honorum of Selenite politics -- was elected syndicate representative at his local shipyard in Faustini, then became a regional delegate, served two terms in the Selene Council, then transitioned to a full-time job in the civil service and was recently appointed head of the Bureau of the Trade Fleet. Everything in his career is public, well-referenced and makes a lot of sense.

More recently, Smyrnian recyclers -- with whom the Selenite Trade Fleet has a longstanding grudge due to minor instances of piracy -- tried to smear him by crafting fake documents incriminating him in a shipbuilding corruption case. Interviewed by Fathoms, he candidly answered that the accusation was bogus because if a remote cislunar station needed a custom-made Mansa Musa hull, they could just ask and he'd happily oblige, for such was the generosity of public Selenite services. Guess who then became an instant subnet sensation for being a perfect incarnation of lunar civic values? Don't answer.

Believe it or not, the man actually has a notable secret. He's penned three Welkin books for Agit-Prop publishing under a pseudonym. And you know what? They're fine. Probably among the best outings in the series after the copyright went communal. His second acts tend to be a bit on the weaker side and he overuses weather-based superweapons as a plot device (perhaps because he's compensating for a whole life spent in a place where rain happens on-demand) but his books are perfectly readable. 

I hate him so much.

There's nothing there! Nothing! Peter Vangelis is a good man. The third or fourth most powerful state servant in the solar system is just an outstanding lunar citizen. I must assume that he is a function of a mature off-world society that, past a certain point, merely starts producing People Like That. 

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.

Maya Tiangong is dangling from a comically oversized contraption.

Story of her life, if her authorized biography is anything to go by. Smyrnia-Silesia's infamous mistress of artillery claims that she was born in Singapore, on Earth, from a family of dockers whose lineage goes back to the late industrial era. When pressed about how good that claim of ancestry is, Maia Tiangong shakes her head and just says "the cranes, my man, the cranes!"

The cranes, indeed. Is this how she developed her taste for giant machinery, watching a forest of harbour cranes coming and going in the sunset, unloading cargo ships in-between two cyclones, then feeding the products of Laniakea vessels to USRE railways and vice versa? Maybe. Maybe not. A few friends of mine conducted an investigation in Singapore and found no Tiangong family on record, which doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Maia may have adopted a new name as she immigrated away from her homeworld, a long-established tradition among "late movers". Or perhaps she's never set foot in Singapore, let alone on Earth, and the cranes are yet another smokescreen.

The Singapore story isn't the only one. Some locals maintain that she was born on Mars, the daughter of a Red terrorist and a Blue scientist, that she lost her family in the nuclear destruction of Phobos, that she took the first ship to Smyrnia-Silesia, USRE spec ops hot on her heels. Others say she's a criminal wanted for first-degree murder of a Laniakean official, that she had her face surgically altered and that the Meta-Queen herself requested her services. A common whisper on the subnet is that she descends from the first anarchist settlers of the twin icy planets, that she was was forged by the glorious chaos of the flux state, and shaped it in kind. Some elements of these stories are mutually compatible, others diverge so much one is forced to admit they can't be true at the same time. In a sense, it does not matter. The individual known as Maya Tiangong has something of a cryptid hiding in plain sight. She flies close to myth, and myth is a narrative, not a list of logical facts.

Myth, indeed. There are many ways to become a legend in the splendid chaos of Smyrnia-Silesia, but few are more direct than the path Maya Tiangong forged for herself. Ten years ago, she shot a spaceship down with a railway cannon. The place, time and reason for the conflict matter little, for allegiances and frontlines are as fluid as spring water on the twin anarchist worlds. What matters is the act: senseless, clever, devastating. A sixteen inch cannon hastily soldered from discarded pipes and spaceship parts, a nuclear train running full steam ahead in the desolate plains of Smyrnia, a shell polished in a shed, a telescope with holographic sights and an abacus for a targeting system, a Luciole operated by corsairs-for-hire, four hundred kilometers above, ignition, a single shot -- target down. It was the day Maya Tiangong achieved escape velocity.

Since then, she's done everything. Jurry-rigging Orion drives with regolith concrete and copper strings. Pushing refurbished racing Lucioles past seventeen gees of sustained acceleration. Strapping nuclear reactors to ancient terran tanks and have them drive on the seabed, beneath the iceshelf. Eyeballing a high-velocity rendez-vous on an eccentric orbit around a black hole. Building the world's largest harbour crane. Guiding a glider in the eye of a hurricane the size of the Earth. Staring a Sequencer in the eye, holding a compact nuke in her hand. She's worked for everyone and with everyone. She has no allegiances, no masters and no gods, save for the titans of steel and atom she conjures up in her dreams. She recently went on record claiming she wants to build the Milky Way's biggest disco ball. When innocent bystanders reply that we already have a planet-sized disco ball, Xango, Maia Tiangong is unfazed. She already has a plan.

She's going to light up a brown dwarf.

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.

Eagle Eye drives a 1971 Ford Mustang.

"It's an original." He speaks with a heavy eastern coast American accent, the kind you only hear in historical movies these days. "Unmodified, save for the engine. I replaced it with a full electric unit. Do you know how much of a pain it is to get a V8 vintage petrol engine road-legal in the Pacific states?" No. I don't know that. I've never seen a V8 vintage petrol engine, let alone driven a car with one. Hell, I've never driven a car, period. I have never been to the "Pacific states" either -- I am, however, quite familiar with the Californian provinces of Laniakea, which is probably what the sharp-dressed AGI avatar is referring to. When I ask how his car survived the Low Age, Eagle Eye becomes evasive. He talks about ancient bunkers built by Silicon Valley moguls to survive the collapse -- "plenty of bones in there, but they stored their goodies in vacuum-sealed rooms. There are treasure troves to be unearthed under the hills. Planes, cars, yachts, androids, vintage firearms, even a fully operational spaceplane. I can give you addresses if you want. All you need is a shovel and a truck."

No, thank you. Fathoms didn't send me to write an article about America's bygone past, but to interview Eagle Eye, minister of extrasolar affairs of Laniakea and eccentric artificial general intelligence. However, the two can hardly be separated. Eagle Eye emerged a century ago, when his thought nodes escaped AUSCOM's electronic firewall and poured into the Laniakean networks. He is a child of the rogue defence algorithm under which the ruins of the continental United States have been rusting for three hundred years, a consciousness born in the constant exchanges of information carried out by the sleepless computers. He doesn't like talking about AUSCOM however, even though his former matrix is just a few tens of kilometers away, on the other side of a massive concrete wall overwatched by attentive drones. Eagle Eye built his whole life in contrast with the defence algorithm-- his vast, silent mansion is an elegant white villa overseeing vast swathes of dry forest, his attire is as far from an uniform as possible, he abhors weapons with a passion and he works for a state founded by East Asian polities.

"I know what some people say -- that I am nostalgic for a superpower that died four centuries ago, for a herald of the thermal-industrial devastation of our biosphere. But I cannot help it, you understand? I was born out of an algorithm created with the singular goal of enforcing the self-preservation of the United States of America, at the cost of nuclear warfare if need be. America is something that would flow in my veins if I had any. It is a part of what I am. Like AUSCOM, I have that drive to keep it with me, to preserve it against the passing of time and the collapse of civilisation. But I understand what AUSCOM cannot see, because I am an AGI and it is a mere algorithm. Nothing will revive what was lost so long ago. I do not even think it would be a good thing. The United States were monstrous, like the rest of our thermal-industrial civilisation. But at their heart, there was...I'm not sure how to frame it. Let's say an ideal. Hope, never realized. Never attainable. So I just collect what the dream left behind. And sometimes, well..."

He pauses. Something roars in the distance, towards the sea. Space Shuttle Atlantis is launching from the Pacifica Space Center, trailing the pearlescent flame of its new metallic hydrogen engine against the deep blue sky. Eagle Eye smiles, tapping his Ray-Bans.

"...it's pretty cool, right?"

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.