Beggar's Sky by Wil McCarthy

Author:Wil McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Hard Science Fiction, Alien Contact, General
ISBN: 9781982193188
Google: PsMC0AEACAAJ
Amazon: 1982193182
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2024-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

Despite his plan to practice his English, he ended up mostly daydreaming the hours away, thinking about how he, a fifteen-year-old boy, could attract the attention of people on Earth. Technically, Thalia already had a charitable foundation—the nonprofit Aphrodite Group, which had organized the missions that had brought the equipment and people. When asked, Tohias had eagerly told him all about it, as it seemed to be one of his proudest accomplishments. And yet, the foundation was presently in a coma, just a holding vessel for the investments of five people who couldn’t actually come here unless another forty-five could be recruited. Assuming those five would even go through with it.

Could Frédéric, from 150 million kilometers away, start his own foundation? Children of Venus, something like that? If it were possible at all, it would be difficult. What he really needed was a lawyer willing to handle the details for him. TV had taught him that much! And a publicist, and an accountant, and some cash donors to get things rolling. Which sounded extremely difficult, but perhaps not completely impossible. Not for a marooned kid with way too much time on his hands.

That night, he stayed up late searching for social media sites he could access, and finally—after more than four hours—found his way to something called Weightless. It was aimed specifically at people who wanted to travel to space someday, and allowed them to communicate with people presently living on Mars, Transit Point Station, and ESL1. The landing page boasted that their servers used not only the SpaceNet protocol, but also the Deep Space Network through which governments and Horsemen communicated with hardware scattered throughout the Solar System! Well, der.

With painful slowness, Frédéric made an account for himself, snapped a quick profile picture with the camera on his tablet, and looked at the names and locations of people he could “join.” Right away, he could see that the outer space angle was a mostly fraudulent gimmick, because the list included exactly two Martians, exactly one ESL1 colonist, exactly zero people on Transit Point Station, and approximately half a million people from scattered locations on Earth.

He had listed his own location as “Thalia Buoyant Island, Venus,” and honestly, he was still figuring out the user interface when he saw that one of the Earth-based members had already joined him.

With a sort of exhausted excitement he typed a quick biography for himself: “My name is Frédéric Ortega. I am fifteen years old, and I have spent the last five years living on an island in the upper atmosphere of Venus. I am interested in Earth culture, and look forward to many interesting conversations here.”

He’d written it in Spanish, but the interface included automatic translation from the source language into whatever language the reader was using. And he was too tired to worry about it; he would take another look tomorrow, and see if he needed to edit anything.

He thought he might be too excited to sleep, but sleep found him anyway, almost as soon as he turned out his light.

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