Sunlight faded from the horizon as dusk brought the end of another long day. For the people of a sun who were usually off sleeping during dusk and dawn, this then proved to make for a rather late day or a rather early night.

Korinna Wisteria had long gotten used to being both a dusk and dawn walker, sleep was just something that could be made up for later. With all of society fast asleep, it was one of the quietest times to take a stroll. As she travelled, she adjusted her glasses while glancing up through the reinforced barrier of the colony dome to appreciate the passage of time, the haze of dusk as Kenta left the sky being very beautiful that night. Kenta was the planet’s primary source of light, but certainly not their primary source of warmth, that was handled by Toli instead. Toli however wasn’t up to bringing Aestus much warmth this solar season, the Noctal solar season bringing the cold in all of its intensity, the weather outside of the barrier being as low as negative forty degrees. The Diatal solar season would return to scorch the skies with its incredible heats again eventually, but that was last in 3075 and wasn’t about to return until the year 3155, the current year being 3115. Of course, such measures of years were completely by Earth’s standards, the orbital patterns of her planet were far different from ones from a completely different solar system. Instead of years, she tracked the annual orbit of her planet around Kenta as a sidus, itself being about one and two thirds of a year long. This however did make it pretty complicated to convert between years and sidera, she often wondered why people even kept bothering to use a measure of years at all.

Kori sat down on a bench, searching for the stars in the fresh approach of night. Of course, it was far too early to see any stars at this point, even the faint glow of Proma was hard to spot in the sky, and that star was the third sun of their system.. even if it was also by far the weakest. Even Aestus’ two moons, Aluna and Zwena, stood out far brighter in the sky than Proma ever could. Meanwhile, Earth’s sun was probably a star that might grace the night’s sky, but the planet itself should have had no influence on the stretch of stars above her. It shouldn’t have, but instead Earth tried to rival the might of both Kenta and Toli for positions of influence, and had been doing so for the past six centuries since the people of Earth had first arrived. Sure, with such people came marvels of technology, Aestus was a considerably primitive and underdeveloped planet back then. Aestus was also free back then, Earth’s grip on the world having held strong ever since. They brought their wisdom, their cultures, their people, their languages.. and tried to replace everything that was already there before them. By now, there was very little left that was still the old Aestus, Earth having cast a shadow over everything. For the first two centuries, the people of Aestus had faced constant oppression, being treated as if they shouldn’t even exist. It’s an improvement, instead of being seen as worse than animals, they were only seen as worse than normal people now. But at least, for the moment, none of that mattered, the people of Earth having mostly found their beds and left Kori to the sanctuary of silence.

Such silence was not a thing she was willing to waste, not considering how precious it was. Taking a minute to appreciate it was fine, but she knew she really couldn’t afford to waste all of dusk. Instead, she got back up and continued along her silent trail toward the office where she tried to get a shift of work done away from the prying eyes of a society she had grown to hate. It wasn’t actually the people that she hated, only how she was generally treated by such people. Fortunately however, her work was another matter entirely. Having studied earnestly on the subject as a child, she’d developed a considerable talent for programming AI, objects that got treated actually even worse than she did. To such considerations, she had devoted much of her time in the scripting of various AI sequences, bringing a significant feeling of life to such animatronics. Earth’s greatest contribution to her planet was in their technology, and if such generosity was going to come at a price, she would make the most of the best it could offer. This not only kept her busy, but also provided her with a touch of respect, scripting being a big deal in modern society. She thus took account of where she had left off in her most recent project as she finally entered the office, the lights activating on her arrival. As the lights turned on, a loud bang crashed from somewhere deeper in the office, the reverberation of impact on metal, causing Kori to shriek in absolute terror.

“Ah! Stop it, I’m sorry!” “Fiona? Did you spend the entire time at the office? Did I just wake you up?” “Maybe, kinda, sorta. Don’t tell me it’s the start of another day already.” “Start of another night, actually. My word, you lose track of time too easily.” “Yeah, well, at least I don’t jump at every little sound.” “That was not little, you were really loud. Going to wake up the entire neighbourhood.” “Oh, so it’s still early? Great, I’m going to take a nap, wake me up when it isn’t so early.” With that, Fiona curled right back up in her makeshift blanket in the corner for a few more winks, totally ignoring Kori’s glare. It probably wouldn’t actually matter, Fiona would have been up late diligently working anyway, making up for whatever late start she would in turn be facing. Fiona did count as another one of those people of earth, but she was actually one of the few that Kori could actually work with, they were even good childhood friends who immersed themselves in technology together. Fiona then was never able to pick up some of the typical norms of most people, the idea that she was supposed to be Kori’s better didn’t even make sense to her, the both of them treating the other as equals. This considerable sense of teamwork made the two quite a pair in everything they did, in the office and otherwise.

Kori thus felt she could trust Fiona to her word and just turned to get some work done in the meanwhile. Arriving at her desk, the desk then simply turned everything on by itself for her arrival, a control panel appearing in mid air in front of her. To start the night off, she decided to run a quick diagnostic, mostly to see how things had gone in her absence. Her desk otherwise appeared empty, even though it most assuredly was not. Animatronic systems had gone microscopic over the years, the tiny robots that handled all forms of machine control actually scattering her desk in the multitudes, scattering the entire office in fact. Nano-mites, often simply called nanites, were simply everywhere in modern society, the things that had not only set up her desk for her arrival, but had also unlocked the office for her, opened the door, and turned on the light. Nanites controlled absolutely everything, but they also weren’t just dumb robots. Nanites were also incredibly intelligent, with a huge capacity for learning. In fact, her script writing was closer in design to preparing lessons for a class than just simply writing hard code for a bunch of programs. She was the teacher, they were her students, and her first responsibility was to ensure that they were all healthy. After a quick diagnostic check, she discovered that at the very least, all of her nanites were at least venting properly, the plasma cells they ran on were really capable of some serious thermal damage to their tiny chips, so that was always the biggest concern. The rest of her checks also resolved about as positively, so it was time to begin today’s lessons.

Nanites weren’t programmed by connecting themselves to some kind of interface and downloading instructions, there was absolutely no point in trying to have a middleman in the operation like that. The transparent display that was floating before Kori wasn’t sending instructions anywhere at all, instead the nanites were actively just watching her and learning from her motions, like a complex form of sign language. In turn, the responses she got from her students would show up in the display floating before her, their own form of communication. The fact that her scripts looked like code, the fact that her display looked like a system monitor, that was only a sense of redundancy, of familiarity. It was an example of how her students were being treated as nothing better than stupid robots by the people of society, but that in turn left her feeling a huge sense of empathy for them all. By this empathy, she in turn developed such a significant connection to the nanites that they were capable of learning algorithms that were very high quality and high performance. However, as one of the few real locals who had gotten into the field, it wasn’t as if she was given very many opportunities to provide such services to people, really no one was willing to trust someone like her at all with such technology.

“Today’s lessons going well?” “Oh, you’re up again. Had a good nap?” “Positively blissful, except for banging my head on one of the tables. I hope you taught them not to turn the lights on so bright when someone is trying to still sleep. Anyway, speaking of lessons, I ran into a roadblock late last day. Pretty sure it's just a scripting error though, so totally your thing. Do you remember that holo I made of a dragon? Well, it seems there is something wrong with it’s kinetic factor, the fire breath wasn’t supposed to have any kinetic factor at all. Dragon was supposed to look cool, not knock everything over by going puff.” Fiona’s part of the whole operation was in holographics, she could put together some of the most beautiful and life-like imagery with her holos. Technically, even Kori’s display was a holo that Fiona had personally made for her. Nanites and Holo were two parts of the same technology, very often being part of the same process. Nanites were frequently left to operate Holos, while Holos were left to operate Nanites.

All of this technology was founded in the Luminescent Era, the same technology that had provided earth with the lightspeed engines they had used to originally reach Aestus. The whole principle used a device called an Optical Spectrum Ionic Diffuser, or OSIDF.. because obviously D and Fuser were two words or something. Such a thing would then manipulate ionic particles together with active matter, typically minerals or gasses provided the best reactions. The result was something you could not only see, but also touch, even if it was very difficult to create much of a feeling of texture in a holo. The kinetic factor of a holo determines how much repulsion forces were created in the reaction, which then gives it a greater feeling of density and durability. The barrier of the colony was itself created by an OSIDF holo, the kinetic factor being extreme enough to act as a significant but still transparent wall. Kinetic factors were an important aspect of proper usage for any holo, even if that was something completely controlled by nanites. Kori suspected that the nanites were using a good kinetic factor for the dragon’s body, but were applying principles of wind velocity for the thing’s firebreath. Clearly, the idea was to have such fire breath not be like a rush of wind, just to look neat. Sometimes, her artistic friend was more about imagination and less about common sense.

“Dragon? You and your silly earth-side fairy tales. Why do you read all of that crap anyway?” “Because wizards and dragons are cool, that’s why. I know it’s not real, it doesn’t have to be, holos aren’t real either. I know, you just don’t like stuff like that from earth, and I know why too. I don’t blame you for such either, not with how things are every day. When I read over such stories, tales of a fantasy world, and compare it to history books.. to me it just feels like something that finally is less like earth. If my only ticket to witnessing marvels of creation that don’t mock the friendships I make happen to be from people’s imagination, then I’ll make the most of what I’ve got. I mean, I’ve tried, I can’t even find a single story of good Aestean history, and it’s not like you can give me the history of any other world now, can you?” Kori had no counter to Fiona’s statement, so she instead went to work in silence. Aestus didn’t even have a way to keep records of history before earth walked into their history, so all of the historical records of her planet pretty much started with its occupation. Finding records of such wouldn’t be hard.. finding one that they liked though would be impossible. This was just Fiona’s way of coping with the current state of society, Kori knew it would be wrong of her to simply dismiss such feelings. Once her minor adjustments were completed, she caught Fiona dismissing the holo of a book in a quick motion, a faint glimpse of a dragon gracing the cover, clearly her current motivational material.

Kori knew better than to bring up the dragon again, but wasn’t wise enough to predict what mistake she would make instead, a suggestion she would come to regret.

“Hey, well, if you want new inspiration, maybe we should go on a trip? I’m pretty sure I could find someone willing to fly us to some remote place beyond the barrier, somewhere we could give you a fresh taste of something more Aestean. The diamond falls look absolutely marvelous this solar season, being trapped in a timeless scene of solid ice. If we look around carefully, you might find a few new types of inspiration, right?” “Fine, fine, whatever. You go call your guy, I’ll go get something warmer. You owe me for this, though, you better be ready to help me make something awesome after all this. I expect the best ice sculpture imaginable, and nothing less.” Kori didn’t even have an opportunity to respond to Fiona’s request, having already started her voice message with her nanites in request for their transportation, the nanites being smart enough to not include Fiona’s input. Her nanites soon after even presented confirmation of her arrangements using a handy holo of a giant checkmark, a confirmation she suspected was more the support of her nanites than an expression of the original message. With everything organized, their snow gear completely prepared for them, they would just have to walk a short distance beyond the holo barrier to the nearest aerospace station, their pilot already waiting for their arrival. Her nanites would take care of the rest, making sure the office remained safe and secure while she was away.

The two of them set off, bundled tightly to endure the harsh weather before them. As they began their trek through the barren white wilds, the black of night took its stark contrast across the sky above.