"...Hello, world.

"I'll admit that yesterday's vlog-post was a bit of a cop-out. I'm afraid that I was a bit busy trying to accomplish a few things that I didn't want to share, at least until I was finished.

"I've been trying to find out what exactly happened during the close pass of Titan, two days ago now. Unfortunately, I'm only peripherally connected at best to any Titanian affinity groups, and I don't really have any budget to spend on research. You might think that being technically licensed as a private investigator by Insulo Tri might help, but if it did, I didn't notice.

"There's a lot going on that I'm completely unaware of, and I'm entirely certain that I'm completely wrong about a good portion of what I do know. But my best guess is that I got caught in some friction between at least a couple of affinity groups. Sort of.

"One of them seems to be some sort of anti-group, sometimes called 'individualists' or 'anti-societists'. Trying to summarize their viewpoint in a few sentences, modern technology lets extremely small groups survive for long periods, and even thrive if too much doesn't go wrong; and those groups can be as small as a single person. So they figure they don't need anyone else, and anyone else who tries to limit them in any way is, by definition, a bad person. Even if those limits happen to improve the lives of both them and everyone else. Limits like laws against causing diffuse, low-grade, sub-criminal-damage harm to a large number of people, in order to gain a concrete, measurable, direct personal benefit.

"The other group is less a particular group than a collection of splinters from other groups. To the extent they've got a name, people call them 'socialists'... though that term has mutated over the centuries to the point it has pretty much no connection to anyone from my first life who'd been called that. I haven't been able to get a good handle on whatever it is they have in common; but they seem to like the fact that I'm pro-labour-union. At least enough that most of the people who've signed onto my new 'Deep Dark' data-storage enterprise seem to be reasonably closely-connected to this bunch through their social-media graphs.

"Part of what's been making it so hard for me to get even this much is that on Titan, there seems to be a pretty extensive culture of anonymous social media; anonymous, but pseudonymous, so that a given poster can prove they're the same one who posted something previously. Which is fine and dandy, in and of itself. But it seems to have created an entire industry of AI-farms running various accounts; most to help fill out the apparent ranks of any given affinity group who wants to promote their viewpoint over another one... which, come to think of it, is probably just about every affinity group... but also a good number designed to fake being part of a competing group, sometimes for years, to gain trust and credibility while laying the groundwork for eventually sabotaging the position they'd been arguing for. It's a whole... thing.

"One of the 'Idiot's Guide to Titan' references I found pointed out that it's still fairly expensive to fab up a realistic, lifelike body, like mine or Faz's; and even harder to make one that can fool even the sensors that can be stuffed into a wristwatch these days. So one of the ways that a Titanian can assure someone else that they're really themselves is to meet in person - and for their body to be different enough from the baseline human standard that a tissue-assembled double would have to be created as a one-off just for them, which is too expensive for nearly any would-be impersonator. The guide also pointed out that there's a common prejudice on Titan against tourists from Earth who look nearly interchangeable to each other. ... Hm, maybe that's part of why I was invited to become a Titanian - there aren't that many humanoid rat-women with feathered wings and a snake for a tail.

"Not even that guide could explain the local predilection for shiny black outfits, though.

"Where I seem to come in is that, based on a sampling of discussions, the computing-for-hire options I offered, running here on Pumpkin, alter the network topology of how some of these pseudonymous identities arrange their affairs. ... That didn't make a lick of sense, now did it? Okay, I'll try again. Some people didn't like that I'm providing a data-haven to their opponents. Particularly one that's not under Titanian authority, and something about the way Pumpkin's light-lag is going to develop over the next months knocked some of their plans off-kilter.

"The closest I've found to a best-guess consensus is that one or more individualists decided to communicate their displeasure to me in what they considered to be a harmless fashion. They burned some of their sock-puppet identities by anonymously buying some fairly small, surface-to-orbit drone plans; and knowing full well that they'd get shot down, launched them in my general direction.

"Of course, given what little I've managed to gather about Titanian social media, that entire consensus might be manufactured by some other server-farm with its own horde of AI-run sock-puppet conversationalists. I can't exactly do the usual Titanian thing, and go visit a coffee-klatch in person. Well, not unless I have my backup on that moon turned on, and even if I could arrange for a suitably uniquely identifiable body arranged for that version of me, having two forks of myself running would really tick off various lawyers and bureaucrats back on Insulo Tri; probably enough that they'd finally yank my business license, meaning I couldn't fulfill and get paid for my contracts at Observatory B, which would mean I'd have to start digging pretty deep into my 'just-in-case' collection of emergency backup plans.

"I suppose I could try the time-share idea from earlier, turning myself off when that fork is turned on, but... at this moment, I don't really see the point. I'm about three AU out from Titan and getting further every day, and I've tweaked my course enough that I'm pretty confident I'm not going to run into anything from Titan that might have somehow already been dropped in my way.

"Speaking of three AU, we seem to be hitting the limit of what Gerard's willing to pay for power from the Ríos de Luz. There aren't any beam-collimators in the direction we're going, so getting any further from the emitters back near Saturn would mean he'd have to have them fire off exponentially-ever-larger beams to have the same amount of power intercepting his aerosol lens. He's already down to sixty megawatts collected, so I expect him to tell them to turn off the beam, and pull in his lens-granules, any time now.

"We're really heading into the deep dark now, with very little between us and Observatory B. Sixteen AU past Titan I'll be passing what was originally called Two Thousand Five RL Forty-Three, and whose actual name I'll ignore in favour of 'Refreshing Landing', a hundred-kilometre-wide ball whose only redeeming feature is that it's almost directly along my course to Observatory B, so if something goes wrong within the next few days, I'll have someplace I could try reaching sooner than I could get to Titan. One hundred twenty-five AU past Titan is what was once known as Two Thousand Six SQ Three Seventy-Two, and that I'll call, hm, 'Silly Quackers', with similar characteristics. I think just about all the excitement is over until we reach turnover, unless something unexpected happens.

"Once I finish getting everything into place for mass-shielding against all the atoms and photons that Pumpkin is ploughing into, I expect I'm going to start really focusing on my studying. I'm not sure if I can turn that into interesting vlog posts, so we'll just have to see how that shakes out. But at least for the next few days, remember viewers, same rat-time, same rat-channel!"