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.