The names of the brave astronauts aboard the first manned FTL spacecraft will forever be recorded in the annals of human history as a triumph of human ingenuity, determination, and international cooperation.
However, what came immediately after would be far more remembered.
"Hello, people of Earth! Humans! Welcome to the galactic community."
A shocked planet watched on their screens as an utterly alien character that looked like it was lifted out of a bad sci-fi show spoke. The alien mouth movements of what could only be described as a frog creature did not match the very human words that came out of the robotic translator.
The aliens did not pirate TV networks, nor did they hack into important government websites. They simply broadcast this openly on satellite TV for anyone with an antenna to hear. And for anyone who did not, there were CNN and social media.
"First, we would like to congratulate you on your first successful use of the blink drive. That itself is a feat of enlightenment most species we monitor do not achieve. Indeed, the physics of it all is not only extremely complex, it requires the cooperation and sacrifice of many beings, over many generations."
The young people at Mission Control in Johnson Space Center patted each other on the back tepidly as they watched the green headed frog-like alien addressing their hard work on the main screen.
"We come in peace. We are representatives of the Galactic Trader Guild."
Some humans let out a sigh of relief. Others, skeptical, watched intensely on.
"We are not here to take your resources or your people. The thousands of planets and species in the galaxy live in total peace and harmony with each other. Regional conflicts on planets are inevitable, but one thing we as a Guild pride ourselves on is our ability to ensure that none has ever reached the sacred frontiers of space."
That's a little odd, most people thought, and probably at least a little propagandized. After all, war is such a big part of human history and the human condition that it was hard to imagine an entire galactic community of thousands of FTL-capable species that never fought in space.
"Our spaceships represent millions of years of hard work, and these incredible investments must never be put into jeopardy. Therefore, weapons designed for use in space are banned. This ban will be enforced by regular ship inspections from your local Guild representatives, who are exceptions to this rule."
Most of the peace-loving people of Earth thought this was great news. After all, many nations had banned the usage of weapons in space. The only exceptions were, of course, the nations that actually had the capability to make use of space weapons. Government lawyers in the world were already starting their first drafts on their inevitable memos on how these rules obviously wouldn't or shouldn't apply to their country.
"As our name implies, we are a trade organization. We have rules for proper trade conduct that ensure a free and fair exchange of goods. All offworld traders from your planet must abide by them. Any breach of our bylaws and all fraudulent transactions can be reported to your local Guild representative. All our Guild documents will be transmitted to your people, translated to your dominant language."
A quick string of bytes followed on the digital transmission. Amateurs on the Internet quickly decoded the document. The content was a goldmine of information about the galaxy. Coordinates for alien planets on the blink drive, some engineering documents, and standardized units of measurements.
These are the temperatures and pressures at which pure water boils.
This is the standard strength of iron.
This is the distance light can travel in a vacuum while certain atoms decay. And so on.
Indeed, the big frog alien continued, "inside, you will find the specifications for an FTL beacon and the requirements for a standard trading spaceport. Once you have built them, traders around the galaxy will make the journey to make fair exchange with your people. Commonly traded items are food, manufactured goods, and workers. We are certain that your planet has many items of value for trade."
"We hope that you have a good cycle, and we eagerly await the arrival of you and your descendants in our spaceports!"
With that message transmitted, they and their ship disappeared. There were no negotiations. No exchange of handshakes.
As their ship blinked away, humanity pondered the colossal implications.
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"Which planet is next on the list?" asked the big green frog as he parched his throat with water after the broadcast.
"That was it, representative. The railgun upgrade betting pool has Planet-3822 and Planet-8901 as the most likely next contenders for enlightenment. Would you like to place a wager?"
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Some governments decided to suppress the news. North Korean state television cut to an orchestra playing classical music. Others made laws prohibiting the distribution of the material transmitted by the aliens until further study could be made.
In most of the connected world, the Internet rendered these measures pointless. By the end of the day, everyone had seen the aliens and that's not a genie that you could put back into the bottle. Most governments used this as an opportunity to justify dramatic increases in funding for space programs and defense.
There were very few incidents of the often exaggerated threat of civil unrest. Most people went on with their lives. They went to school, to work, and to ball games.
The arrival of the aliens had profound implications on the future of human philosophy. Most major religions had a dogma-compatible explanation by the end of the hour. Some sects even proclaimed this as evidence that their worldviews were correct.
In the stock market, this news was a massive upheaval in expectations. Thousands of alien worlds. This meant new markets with potentially trillions of customers. It also meant that potential alien technology could put entire industries out of business. Stock prices swung wildly as uncertain traders rapidly changed their positions.
Several development companies immediately announced their intentions to start construction on the spaceports mentioned in the Guild documents. As it turned out, building a place for spaceships to land wasn't that complex. You just needed something hard, durable, and flat that could withstand a bit of heat and wear. Using the formulas provided by the documents, experts agreed that the asphalt concrete normally used for airport tarmac would do just fine.
Normally, environmental reviews would need to be done, the sound pollution would need to be contained. Hundreds of tests needed to be conducted on site, but from what the frogheads said, if you built it, the traders were going to come.
Nobody wanted to be left out of what was going to be the new gold rush. So, money changed hands to grease the gears that ensured these new projects went through. Some lobbyists in Washington DC made a lot of money ensuring that no new regulations on "spaceport construction and operation" were added.
Even in California, the capital of NIMBYs and tree huggers, people could smell an opportunity if it boomed down from orbit and bonked them in the nose with it. Which it did in this case.
Thus, Livermore Spaceport.
What used to be a bunch of warehouses and parking lots just a short five-minute drive from Lawrence Livermore National Labs became a rapidly growing construction site. It was close enough to the San Francisco Bay Area metro that people could commute to it and see the first of the new generation FTL spacecraft take off and land, but far enough that they didn't have to hear about it when they slept.
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BREAKING: LIVERMORE SPACEPORT OPERATIONAL
Looking up from her morning coffee, that's what the muted TV screen was trumpeting in big words on the CNN ticker. The mayor was talking, judging by the scrolling captions, something about how this will bring new jobs and money to the city.
Sarah snorted. Everything is always breaking news. She absent-mindedly watched as the TV played stock footage of the construction workers installing the antenna last month and humanity's first interstellar ships took off and landed on the concrete lot as she sipped her coffee.
Sarah Miller would not call herself a hard worker. She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Communications, not exactly a field high in demand. When she got offered a job as a "marketing person" at a tech startup in SF, she grabbed it, more like you'd grab a life raft and less like it was an opportunity of a lifetime or anything.
Then, two years later, the startup failed. Funding dried up, and now she was out of a job in a metro with some of the highest cost of living in the world, with not exactly the hottest resume.
So now she was sitting at a breakfast shop just outside her rented apartment in Livermore, checking her emails to see whether she got any replies on her job applications (she had not) and contemplating how long she'd last before she'd have to go home to live with her parents in Seattle.
It was not exactly a fun thought.
"You going to the spaceport opening too, Sarah?" Rudely interrupted from her self-pity, she looked to see the woman across from her. She racked her memory to match the face to a name, but nothing came immediately. Mid to late 20s, Asian American, hipster glasses, t-shirt and jeans.
The writing on the coffee cup in her hand said her name was "Jan". Ah, yes, they met a few times on the BART commute into the city. Was her name Jan or…
"Hey Jen, naw I was just staring at the news. How's it going?"
"Great! What about you? Haven't seen you on the BART for a few. You still working at that place downtown?"
Sarah sighed internally, here it is again. "Not anymore, we just got shut down. So, I'm pretty much just lounging around."
"Aww that's terrible!" Then Jen thought for a second. "Listen, I've got a business idea about the spaceport stuff, but no one to share them with. You should come with me to the opening."
"Oh yeah? Why's that?" Sarah asked, leaning forward. Normally, this would sound like the start of some kind of MLM scam or something, but she'd been unemployed long enough but that the word "business" piqued her interest. She knew that Jen was some kind of fancy engineer who made enough to still have savings despite living in one of the most expensive places in the world, so she probably wasn't asking for money.
Jen almost whispered, "my cousin's one of the construction workers at the spaceport, and he said he could get me in. They have a lot of big companies bidding to get on the ground floor of the alien trade with truckloads of all kinds of goods, but he's got an employee pass that'll get us in on day one."
"Wait, what?" Sarah said, confused. "I thought we were just going to see the opening."
"We are," Jen replied, "but I'm thinking we rent a truck, load it up with food, and see what the aliens will give us!"
"What do you need me for?"
"Well," Jen hesitated, "I have money for the truck and the food, but I don't know much about selling stuff…"
Neither did Sarah. She was in marketing, not a saleswoman. But she wasn't going to mention that.
"Sure, I sell a ton of stuff on Craigslist," she said instead, "but I'm sure nobody has experience selling to aliens!"
Jen looked relieved. Really, she just wanted some kind of backup instead of going alone. "Ok, since I'm putting up the money, and you're going to do the selling, I think we split profits fifty-fifty after I recoup the cost of the U-Haul rental and the food. How's that sound?"
Sarah thought for a while, but not too long. It probably wouldn't make them that much money, she thought. Then again, she wasn't putting anything on the line. And she needed money, if there were any to be earned here. She reached her arm out for a handshake.
"Deal!"
It's not like she had anything else to do on Saturday.
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Costco, Livermore
The froghead had said that aliens traded food, and food was relatively cheap, so it was probably a safer bet to stick to than manufactured goods. Who even knew if the aliens could ride a bicycle or were interested in a PlayStation? The part he mentioned about trading workers sounded an awful lot like slavery, so that was an obvious non-starter.
"Do you think the aliens eat meat?" Sarah asked, holding up a massive bag of hamburgers.
Jen considered that for a second. Some vegetarians and vegans would probably postulate that a morally superior species would not partake in the consumption of animal flesh. Then again, she didn't have to guess. She pulled out her phone, and looked up the Guild documents summary someone had helpfully compiled into Wikipedia.
"Hmm it says that many of the other alien species are omnivores because that's how they get a wider variety of calories," Jen said after browsing a while.
They loaded one bag of each of meat onto their carts, and made sure to buy ice boxes to keep them frozen. It took several trips to their rental truck, but they finally loaded it with enough fruits, vegetables, and frozen meats to make a dent in Jen's sizable bank account.
They hoped that these aliens liked apples and pears. Those were on sale.
Stolen story; please report.
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Livermore Spaceport, Earth
It looked like the entire Bay Area showed up and were lining up to get in. Tourists were bussing in from out of town. They saw several groups of international tourist groups that were corralling their customers around with loudspeakers.
As they drove past the long line towards the vehicle entrance, they waved at the excited crowds and got a few whoops and cheers in return.
The security guards at the gate checked their pass and let them through to the security checkpoint. Several men that looked like they meant business opened up their truck and scanned it carefully with metal detectors and x-ray scanners to ensure that no one got any funny ideas.
There was a short delay while the customs officer tried to figure out whether they needed to fill out an elaborate looking form for the fresh food in the back of their truck. A few calls to his supervisor later, amid angry glares from the truck drivers waiting behind them, he let them go.
Sarah and Jen drove into a parking lot closer to the landing pads. The pads were large concrete surfaces with white and yellow painted targets. Off in the distance, they could see hangars and a tower that looked like an airport traffic control tower. There were also a few buildings under construction, including one that looked like the start of an upscale luxury dining establishment.
From behind, they saw some of the crowd were filing into a waiting area from where they could observe the aliens from afar.
Jen felt lucky. If the food in the back was the price of admission for seeing the visitors from outer space up close and personal, to her, it would have been well worth it. Sarah was checking the battery on her phone to make sure that there would be enough left to take pictures or video, if the opportunity arises.
Most of the other trucks in the parking lot with them had logos of recognizable companies on them. Several tech companies in the Bay Area that sponsored the construction of the spaceport won bids to get in on the action. Others were some local companies that had connections to the spaceport like Jen did.
Sarah saw them first before she heard it.
First one, then several more, spaceships descended from the sky, accompanied by sonic booms as the excited crowd looked up into the sky with hands on their brows shielding from the sun.
The alien spaceships couldn't be mistaken for human rockets, but there was a certain familiarity. Long, pointy, utilitarian hull shapes with rocket flames coming out the bottom. Like modern cars that all look like they're designed in a wind tunnel, it seems like there's one efficient way to build spaceships, and everyone stuck to it.
It's nice to know that at least we were on the right track, Sarah thought to herself as the ships touched down gently on the target landing pads. Human ships can't maneuver as sharply, nor are they anywhere near the same scale and size, but at least we got the shapes right.
The cargo-plane-sized spaceships settled on the concrete landing pads without so much as a crunch. Small hatches opened at the bottom of each, and walkway ramps rolled down.
At some hidden signal, the security guard gestured to the parking lot that they were free to approach, and the dazed merchants sprang into action.
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The alien they've just greeted through a translator calls himself "Zarko". He was apparently part of a species of rock planet humanoids called the Zeepil that came from a system about 200 light years from Earth, and his skin had a charred appearance that made him look like a heavily sunburned sloth on two legs.
"Let me guess, what you've brought is your native foods," Zarko's translator said in a monotone Stephen Hawking voice that did not match the movement of what looked like his lips.
"Yes! How did you guess? Can you guys eat the fruits and vegetables that we have?" Sarah asked. She stopped herself from mentioning the steaks and chicken in their ice boxes. She figured there's no knowing whether these aliens thought about carnivores, so she started with the safe stuff first.
"We consume silicon and uranium for sustenance," Zarko made a strange face and then burped, "I am joking. Every newcomer species asks the same question. Most species share the same diet. Some species eat meat from other animals. Sapient meat is of course illegal on most planets."
Relieved that Jen didn't just waste thousands of dollars on the meat, they showed Zarko their wares. And with their permission, he sampled some of each goods they had, including a bit of the raw meat.
"Good, good," Zarko was pleased. "I detect a high amount of sugar and starch in a lot of your wares. I would take it all." The Gaks would be impressed the next time he stopped at their planet.
"Can we see what you have?" Jen asked excitedly. She pushed a funny image of the aliens grabbing all their stuff and just taking off out of her mind. They wouldn't go through all the trouble of coming here just to steal some food… would they?
"Yes, yes," Zarko pulled out a tray of gadgets and started describing his goods to them.
"This is a spaceship rated fire extinguisher," he described several slightly oversized aerosol cans, "good for even reactor fires!"
"First aid kits for basic bandaging and wound cleaning, compatible with human physiology." They were several plastic looking boxes with an alien looking skull marked on all six sides. It looks like the red cross symbol wasn't so universal anymore.
"Civilian hunting rifle," Zarko set it on the table. "Powered by laser. Holds twelve shots."
It was a familiar looking weapon. Jen and Sarah looked nervously around at the security guards, but they didn't seem to notice. This was very illegal in the state of California.
They shook their heads at that one and asked to see something else. Whoever was dumb enough to buy that one would probably get it confiscated on their way out of the spaceport.
"Advanced mathematics calculator, base-24," he said. This one looked like a regular calculator but with more buttons. Interesting, but probably not that useful to humans.
"Stasis box. Keeps food safe to eat for years. Operates on solar power." Ah, a space fridge, basically. Finally, something that would probably cover their expenses.
Zarko also claimed to have tons of raw materials in his ship, including what he called "better concrete" and "better steel". The translator had some problems with these; it seems like they just hadn't been invented on Earth yet. But Zarko had customers for those on other planets already, so he didn't bother to put them out for display.
After a little haggling, Sarah and Jen settled on four of the first aid kits, six of the fire extinguishers, and one of the stasis boxes. Sarah reasoned that the stasis box could probably fetch a much higher price if they resold it as "alien technology" online, and Jen deferred to Sarah's experience in selling her old stuff online.
Zarko printed out instructions for each of the items in English, even if they did all look fairly intuitive to use by themselves. The aliens may look different from them, but by the way the fire extinguisher buttons seem to activate, the way they made their stuff did not seem that different.
The most significant difference they saw between the alien goods and what their human counterparts would be is the amount of care that clearly went into making each item. Each of the first aid kit boxes, Sarah observed, looked just a little different from each other. The adornments and decorations on the side were painted or carved on with details that weren't exactly the same, and one even had a bright gold finish.
She wondered why.
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As she got home around midnight, Sarah immediately got onto Craigslist and thought about where to list "alien first aid kits". Technically, it could be under "household items", or "tools", but "collectibles" would probably get them the most-
That's when she found the "alien" section. Of hecking course. For a website that looks like it was made in the 90s, they'd already adjusted to the latest fad with remarkable speed. She found dozens of listings of alien items that she saw that Zarko was parading around, and quite a few that he didn't have.
There were no other first aid kits listed on the market. Which was strange because she definitely saw dozens of those being sold by the other traders. Hm… without a starting price, it was hard to gauge how much she should be selling it for.
She refreshed the page out of habit and watched the new items scroll in.
Her first reaction was: Ah, someone just posted a first aid kit.
Her second reaction was: Wait, for how much?
There was a listing of a first aid kit for $20,000. Which was ridiculous. It's a collectible, but a box of bandages was not worth the price of a brand-new car.
Something nagging at her instinct, Sarah opened one of them up. It was just a bunch of bandages, syringes, and basic medical stuff. Some of it had the wrong shapes, or had a different color than they'd normally be, but there's only so many ways to bandage an open wound, and everything looked familiar-ish.
She read the English manual that Zarko had printed for her. It said:
"Rated for human use. Includes:
Bandage 4 rolls,
Skin adhesive 16 pieces,
Pain relief cream 2 ounces,
Radiation exposure injection 2 doses,
Cold relief medicine 24-"
Wait, what? Radiation exposure injection? Like in case the spaceship hull leaks or something?
Sarah skimmed through the list and looked at usage instructions for:
"Radiation exposure injection: use in case of emergency hull exposure. Rapidly repairs cell and bone marrow damage for patients with acute radiation exposure and kills all cancer cell growth in body. Dose takes effect within 30 seconds. Side effects may include nausea, dehydration, drowsiness…"
Her blood chilled. She read it again.
And again to be certain.
Then she wiped away the sweat around her eyebrows to make sure she wasn't dreaming.
"Kills all cancer cell growth in body."
She looked at her laptop and refreshed the page. The previous first aid kit listing she saw had been taken down, presumably sold for $20,000. If this kit did what it said it would…
Excited, she refreshed the online listing page again. She saw two listings for the alien first aid kit, both up to well over $100,000 now.
Refresh.
A million. Some guy was selling a darn first aid kit for a million dollars.
This was incredible. Some corner of her brain whined something about putting a price on health, but she cast that out of her mind to refresh again and see more listings in the millions of dollars. And she was holding four of them in her lap.
Half an hour later, it seemed that the prices had stabilized around $4 million, the price of a small closet in downtown San Fran.
This was evidently the market price for the life of a cancer patient.
Horrific.
She put up a listing for $15 million for her four boxes.
Instantly, her email inbox started getting notifications, a number of apparently wealthy individuals with sick relatives desperate to buy a miracle cure that hadn't even been tested or proven on humans yet, introducing themselves and sharing their life stories.
There was a guy who owned a large database company but had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. He knew he should have stopped smoking years ago, but he needed something to manage the stress.
Another, a business executive, who had a heartbreaking story of her dad dying of liver cancer.
Then, a short and simple "Willing to offer twenty million in cash today for all 8 doses of anti-radiation medicine in alien aid kit, J&J VP of Research and Innovation, Alexi G."
She looked him up online.
He was legit, from a big pharma R&D.
She reasoned that maybe selling to someone who could do research on it would help more people. And he was offering more…
She replied.
He wanted to meet at their company office downtown first thing in the morning.
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Downtown San Francisco
Alexi had made good on his offer. He hadn’t tried to haggle the price, as she’d know some Craigslist buyers would try to do once you met them in person. It was generally considered a jerk move.
It was Saturday, so the offices were mostly empty, except for one conference room with several employees as well as Alexi. She handed over her duffel bag with the four kits, he opened and checked each to make sure their contents were all there, and handed over a cashier’s check for the agreed amount.
And that was it.
It had taken her bank an hour to process the check, and several additional hours to clear it. The money appeared in her account around midnight, at which point Sarah let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding for a day.
Sarah was rich.
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Sarah got out her phone to text Jen the news.
Huh, there was an email notification "Hey Sarah, thank you for your interest in applying to be our marketing assistant. If you can send us your resume and a co-"
Delete.
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Twenty million dollars was a lot of money.
Neither Sarah nor Jen had ever seen that much money, but they knew enough to leave something like this to a professional.
An accountant at a Big Four company helped them divide up the assets and ballparked how much they’d eventually need to render unto Uncle Sam the things that were his come April 15th.
Sarah paid all her bills on time, a first in months.
Jen quit her job the next day. After all, what was the point of being a web developer for a measly six-figure salary when there was a gold rush next door?
Figuratively speaking.
They both vaguely knew the history of the gold seekers during the California Gold Rush.
Some of them struck it rich, but some found nothing in the river beds of the Sacramento. The people who had made the most money in 1849 were actually not the flood of gold prospectors who came into the area.
The people who had gotten the richest out of the gold boom were the merchants who sold them the prospecting equipment they used, the services they needed, the food they ate, and the clothes they wore. The masses of pioneers who came for a new life in the American West: they were the real gold rush.
Most people today do not know the name of a single gold seeker.
Most people today have heard of some of the merchants who got rich off the gold seekers’ businesses. Levi Strauss, John Studebaker, Sam Brannan.
And of course, Henry Wells and William Fargo.
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This was the fourth time they've been back to the spaceport, Sarah thought, and they'd gotten something new each time. They'd dealt with different traders each time, though they did see Zarko at least one other time as he was leaving with a full hold of fresh fruit.
After the first couple days, the alien traders had noticed that there seemed to be shortage of first aid kits on Earth, and the inevitable flood of anti-cancer syringes put online dramatically lowered its listing price.
Several large pharmaceutical companies had also issued press releases that they were within months of the development of generic anti-cancer medicine. The lawyers were working overdrive over the IP implications of adapted alien technology, but there didn't seem to be any laws preventing companies from doing it…
This brought its price down to the tens or hundreds of thousands. Nothing to sneeze at for most people, of course, but it was a literal cure for cancer and well within range of some other items the aliens were bringing.
Today, Zarko was trying to sell her and Jen on some kind of liquid medical adhesive in industrial quantities. Some hardy tree-like species use it to glue deep wounds together or something, but Sarah saw a few listings for it on Craigslist a couple of days ago that had no takers, even for cheap. Medical companies must have thought it not really worth pursuing as Earth already had similar products.
Unfortunately for Zarko, he'd already filled his cargo hold with tons of the liquid after hearing how well medical supplies were selling on Earth. His reward for his entrepreneurial spirit was an empty paw. It was beginning to look like he'd need to dump his cargo for a few boxes of worthless Vton trinkets on his way home.
Sarah and Jen had driven all the way out here with a U-Haul truck worth of pears, and most of the other traders were ready to leave for the next cycle of traders to come in anyway. They could dump their goods on Zikzik, the trader next door, but all he had left are a bunch of "better steel". Apparently some construction companies were learning to work with it, but from what she heard, it was annoying to sell those because the government was still looking at the regulations around these new building materials.
And they looked soooo heavy to have to carry home.
Sarah had learned to read a little more of the humanoid sloth's facial expressions, and he was clearly not happy about having made a trip for nothing. "Tell you what, Zarko. I'll give you the fruit, and you can bring me my goods the next time you come back," she said.
Zarko's snout perked up as he thought. Fundamentally, Zarko considered himself an honest trader. He didn't cheat or skimp on quality of materials, and he didn't lie about what he sells. Sure, he embellished a little sometimes, as all traders do, but who doesn't?
Zarko had never taken on debt to a customer. He's heard of other traders doing this, but the far more common use of debt across the galaxy was to trap people into a lifetime of hard work in unpleasant conditions.
But Sarah and Jen didn't seem like the kind of people who would be capable of doing that.
For a second, Zarko thought about cheating them. Just take their fruits, and never come back to Earth, but immediately he put the thought out of his mind. That was not the right thing to do.
Zarko agreed. He would just have to remember to bring more first aid kits next time right?
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"Did you see the way Zarko reacted to the IOU?" Sarah asked Jen on the way home.
"Yeah, do you think he'll just abscond with the fruit?"
"Nah, apparently the pears are selling out like hotcakes. He can't just leave Earth and never come back. I heard Zikzik say he got a brand-new reactor upgrade just from one trip of pears alone," Sarah sounded confident, and hoped that she was right. Something else was bothering her about the alien traders.
"Good. Maybe he's worried we're naive or something and someone else will take advantage of us," Jen brainstormed.
Naive? For what? Getting cheated out of a truck full of ugly pears Safeway was going to throw out at the end of the day? Then, it dawned on her.
"I think there's something missing," Sarah said slowly, thinking about their past interactions with the alien traders, "they don't think about selling things the way we do."
"You mean they don't have money?" Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes in her head, of course Jen was thinking about money.
"Yeah. Come to think of it, they clearly don't live in some kind of Star Trek galaxy where everything is free," Sarah continues her train of thought, gears turning in her head, "they just barter and haggle for all our stuff."
"They don't have money, they don't have debt, they don't have Craigslist!" Jen blurted, the implication of this was beginning to excite the inner businesswoman in her that she's been discovering the past week.
"Coming to the spaceport is their Craigslist, but without money or debt, they must also not have a lot of the other stuff we take for granted," Sarah was already making a list in her head, "that explains why the small variety of consumer goods they have are all related space travel and cargo storage, and why most of their big trade is in industrial goods. They can't have banks! What about loans and mortgages! What about paying fines! How do they even buy stuff normally?"
"Ah, must be such a simple and happy existence without having to think about money," Jen said wistfully.
"Yup," Sarah grinned, "let's go ruin it!"