"Hello, world.

"It's just a couple of more days until we pass by Saturn. We're getting near enough that Traffic Control is keeping a closer eye on our exact course. I'm still far enough out to make some last-minute adjustments, if I want to end up nearer or farther to any particular view. I know that I could get a much more detailed view in VR, from whatever angles I want; and I certainly use that as one of my tools. But I still say there's something special about being there in person. And that's not just because of how many of my ship-charters have been to take a couple out to enjoy some time in freefall.

"After the flyby, we're going to start bending our course about twenty degrees down from the plane of the ecliptic, gradually settling on the final line toward Observatory B. I suppose that Pluto or Quaoar aren't much more out of our way than Saturn, but they're nowhere near as much fun to look at. I'm still waiting for a couple of responses to find out if anyone living at either dwarf planet, or their moons, would be willing to put us up if something happens and I have to pull in for a tune-up or some repair work.

"I'll admit that I'm tempted to ignore all my timing constraints, and keep going in the direction I'm going until I reach Pioneer Ten. It's just a hundred ninety AU further than Titan, maybe ten degrees to the right, only a ninety-day trip... and I'd be adding at least two months to the trip to Observatory B. I certainly wouldn't be the first to pop over for a visit, since the development of the horizon drive, but it's not really a popular destination - six months round trip just to visit a century-and-a-half antique, long-defunct piece of hardware isn't very many peoples' cup of tea. ... Maybe in twelve or fifteen years, when I don't have to scramble to cover my monthly payments, I'll be able to take the luxury of a grand tour like that.

"But today, I'm heading out on a spacewalk - for work, instead of stargazing. We managed to hit a sub-millimetre micrometeor, which popped against the Whipple shield just outside the airlock. I'm going to dismount those panels, mount some replacements, and bring them inside to melt and reforge into fresh panels. I don't actually need to do all that; the odds of another micrometeor hitting that exact spot are a few orders of magnitude smaller than hitting any micrometeor at all. But there are reasons the word 'shipshape' was invented; taking care of all the little things is good practice for being ready to take care of any big problems that come up. That's also why I'll be doing the work in person, instead of just sending out Huey, Dewey, and Louie; live experience can help with some subjective parts of training that the most realistic VR can't emulate.

"Back on Insulo Tri, I still seem to be tied up with the legal system. Francesca's status is in limbo while various people run investigations and decide whether to declare a mistrial happened and all sorts of other things. Which certainly offers more hope to her than the rapid course of so-called 'justice' would have given her. But on a purely practical level, it also means that everything I owned outside of Pumpkin, and had stored in my office, is locked up in evidence lockers for the foreseeable future. It's kind of annoying to keep my business clients up-to-date and generally informed about the state of their contracts, when my main archive of business data is offline, and I have to squirt the replacement info from my shipboard backup through my rather paltry interplanetary bandwidth to a rented server.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"I suppose that I should have known in advance that a copy of myself committing suicide in a courtroom would bring me to the attention of pretty much every government agency Insulo Tri has; but that doesn't make it less annoying for what seems like every last one of them starting a full audit on me at once. It's getting to the point that even though I don't need to accept Titanian citizenship for refuge from criminal charges, I'm seriously considering re-incorporating my business there, purely so that I can continue to operate as a business. It's not that I expect any of the agencies are going to find I've done anything wrong; for instance, I've done my best to err in the direction of overpaying my taxes instead of underpaying them. But when I'm supposed to fill out twenty different assessment statements at once, not one of which cares that their authority is completely irrelevant to what I've actually done, and none of which care about how much time and effort it would take me to fill out all their paperwork within the deadlines they insist on... I start feeling that maybe it wouldn't be all that uncomfortable to start wearing tight, black, leather outfits over my fur.

"Oh, that reminds me, I've gotten messages from more than one Titanian assuring me that the whole 'looks like everyone's in fetish gear' characterization of them has become such a cliche that it's not even really a joke anymore, let alone an insult. Any more than I care about someone trying to make a joke about me enjoying hockey, beer, toques, and maple syrup. So I guess I don't need to go aboot saying 'sorry', eh?

"On the less serious side, it looks like this vlog has started getting spread around enough for the lizardman's constant to start applying. I suppose that generally raising the sanity waterline of everyone only helps so much, if those few still underwater have access to ever-better tools to try to spread their nonsense, such as getting AIs to write their letters for them. For the last couple of days I have been getting, if not a torrent, at least an unending trickle of messages insisting that the AI version of Faz has no qualia, no subjective experience, and therefore I shouldn't treat her like a 'real' person. I will admit that there's a certain part of me that is tempted to propose to her, purely to annoy the senders of those messages even more; and I'm pretty sure that Faz would be all-in for a prank marriage. Of course, another set of messages in that trickle also insist that because my mind is a digital emulation of a brain instead of actually being made of biological neurons, I also don't have any real qualia, and therefore shouldn't be bothering decent folk by acting like a real person. I'm not really sure how they're expecting to change the mind of someone who they claim doesn't actually have a mind. Still, I suppose AI-written messages are at least less annoying than the spam from my birth era; I've found that I don't miss at all the old ads for quack nostrums, Spanish Prisoner cons, pyramid schemes, fake attempts at blackmail, and skill-free attempts to infect my computers.

"Hm, anything else? Ah, Faz has been spending the last day or so using VR to experiment with body-plans that it's been impossible for her to experience in reality. I think the offers of support from Titan have gotten her interested in seeing what all the fuss about the Titanian version of morphological freedom is. Right now I think she's trying out what it's like to be one or another organ inside someone else's body; next on her to-do list she's listed 'what's my max number of legs, tails, udders, tongues, etc?', and then 'architecture!', whatever that means for her. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

"And until after I do - see you-all next time."