Why do I feel so old?

I usually don't feel melancholy. There is simply too much going on to waste time with emotions that don't really add anything to the situation. But sometimes, even I find myself slipping into a state of mind where it is very difficult to maintain a bright outlook.

While getting Aurora home safe has been a bright spot in of itself I can tell she's not really happy here. She doesn't want to go back to Ariel to stay with my folks, in spite of the opportunities there she won't have here on the Rim. She's been spending time with some of the local families and going to the creche school but I suspect in the very near future she'll be informing me that she plans to return to Caliban.

Why? Why does she identify so strongly with Krenshar? How did she become 'Daddy's little girl' when he's not her father? I know why I care. I don't entirely understand why I care, but I know the reason for it. Something I will have to accept. Something that would have been much easier to accept before this remote little colony changed me.

Then there's Lily. The one who legally is my daughter. She's never been one to set in one place for long. Must have something to do with the sugar fueled fusion reactor in her butt. But now, with her running with Cody on Raivenn, I'm even less sure how to handle her. Somehow, she managed to clear the radiation that she'd been contaminated with. How? Who knew. Mindo, maybe. Murphy more likely. Fact was she wasn't shedding enough alpha particles to read by any more and I was OK with that.

Mindo. That guo cao de ben tiansheng de yidui rou. Part of me actually felt sorry for him. Pity for the damned. Pity for the mad. But we could trace so many of the issues we had out here back to his hakkyou. And here, x0x0 was going to bring him here for containment. Right in our back yard, in a specially prepared facility deep under the Blue Sun lab compound.

I can't ultimately blame her. He is her brother and there are some things he knows that are desperately important to her. But I'd be lieing if I said I was happy about it. x0x0 said herself she wasn't telling be everything they were doing in order to give me plausible deniability when, not if, it all came out into the light. But the fact was I needed to know. She wanted to protect me from the possible fallout of her experiments. I appreciated that. But she'd made herself a citizen of our little slice of Heaven, and I had just as much of a responsibility to protect her. I couldn't do that if she didn't keep me in the loop.

What was she doing down there? Those . . . things we'd encountered when getting JJ back out of the lab weren't what I'd expected to find. She told me later why she'd deployed them, but it spoke back to my needing to know.

I'm not sure I'll ever understand my relationship with her. I am genuinely fond of x0x0. I'm just not sure I'll ever how the two of us inter-relate in the grand scheme of things. Much as I might deny I have one, we each have our own agendas. There's overlap, I'm sure. Cooperation. But conflict? I hope not. I would much rather see us working on the same side of whatever the 'Verse throws our way than being at odds.

Though, I still had to wonder, what had they found down there during the excavation? Hale's Moon was on the small end of what the Terraformer's were able to work with back during colonization. Below a certain critical point, they couldn't establish the 'gravitational standing wave effect' that gave all the worlds of the 'Verse the same gravity: Earth Normal, maybe a couple tenths either side. Without gravity you didn't stick to the ground and, more important, you didn't old atmo and water. How'd it work? Not my field. 'Brina could tell you how the Terraformers set up the wave in the first place, but I doubted even she knew the physics behind the effect. She was Buddha's own Mechanic, but not a theoretical physicist.

Point was it worked. Hale's was terraformed. Had standard gravity. Held atmo. People lived here. Before the 'formers did their work though, it'd been a black rock like every other little moon in the 'Verse. Mass profile had it with just a small fraction of a G. No atmo. No water that wasn't frozen into the rock. No life.

There could well be something down there. Something left over from the early days of colonization that'd gotten lost in the histories., and subsequently buried by the 'formers. But Alien? Just was kyouki no hanashi. People'd been looking for non-human Alien intelligence since before we'd left Earth that Was, and no one'd ever found anything. Unless you counted Dolphins, Chimps, AI's and sentient machines like Krenshar, that is. There was a whole unit that'd been dedicated to investigating claims of alien artifacts across the 'Verse and they'd always come up empty.

There had been life, of sorts, in the 34 Tauri system when Humanity arrived. Something a bit like cyanobaceria. About as sophisticated as the pseudo-microbes they'd teased out of the soil on Mars, and from under the ice on Europa. Pure statistics said life was pretty common, but intelligent life was looking pretty rare on the cosmic scale. Ask an astrobiologist if "They" were out there, they'd give you a measured "probably." They'd also tack on a "but almost certainly not anywhere near close."

Which brought me back to what had they found down there? Almost certainly Human in origin. But if it was something from the Colonial days we'd be in for a whole world of annoyance. Not much more frustrating to deal with than an archaeologist on a field expedition.

Seriously. Rather have Reavers.