Chapter 1
Dressed in boots, blue jeans and a red flannel shirt, a Stetson turned upside down at her feet. Gold and silver coins glittering from its interior, The fiddler played a lively tune while standing in an open area on the space station's Grand Concourse. .
It took a noticeable measure of time for my onboard AI to correlate the sound with its memory banks and relay its correct identification to my brain. , I could hear the sounds of metal on metal as appreciative passers-by silently swiped their fingers across her debit machine.
"Quaint touch," I thought.
All of this was designed to give the visitors to Hypatia the illusion of stepping back in time to an Earth which never existed in history. I marveled that an American western frontier icon could coexist with the Egyptian-themed space station and planet side resort. Oh well. Humans did not augment themselves with AI's. They were not as apt to fret about esthetic inconsistencies.
Humans. Yes, I was one of them now despite my Pantheran DNA and appearance. I took a deep breath and started across the Grand Concourse, uneasy with my new status as rich tourist bound for an alien world. I would have been more comfortable docking at the cargo port and coming aboard through narrow unadorned corridors rather than this elaborate and ostentatious display of open and unused space.
