I happened to be on the bridge being chewed out by the Captain when we stopped to replenish our hydrogen.  He hated the idea of having a bleeding heart social worker on board as much as I hated counselling a bunch of grunts, but my career wasn’t exactly skyrocketing.  A job was a job.  He’d been shouting at me for nine minutes and forty-two seconds when First Officer N’Kawo announced, “ETA Thodes system, fifty-eight minutes, Captain.”

Every social scientist on Earth had studied Thodes, a remote, self-contained research colony housing a handful of scientists.  Working in isolation, they’d been trying to prove that AIs with adaptive learning modules could evolve self-awareness and develop feelings.  Contact with the station had been lost in ’74.  The scientific community had demanded that the government launch a rescue mission, but the Depression had changed everyone’s priorities.  Almost thirty years later, the fate of the station was still a mystery.

Thodes!  The opportunity of a lifetime, and I had less than an hour to convince Captain Blockett that stopping to investigate was worth being late for his rendezvous with the admiral. I was surprised he even listened to me.  Maybe the fact that I was willing to risk one extra minute in his presence told him how important Thodes was.