"Hello, world.

"Welp, tomorrow's the big fly-by. After accelerating at a fifth of a gee for two weeks and a few hours, as I go by Saturn, I'll be passing at twenty-four hundred kilometres a second... which isn't going to leave much time for dilly-dallying. Or sightseeing.

"Something I haven't been bothering to vlog about is how I've been trying to arrange for an extra contract or two to pick up a few more euros. For example, it costs a lot more than five times to charter a one-gee fast-packet courier than it does a more typical point-two gee ship. Those things have half their mass dedicated to the drive, half of what's left to a fusor, and out of the rest, still have to squeeze in frame and structure, electronics, maneuvering, sensors, comms... oh, and, of course, cargo. Anyway, I was thinking that maybe I could save someone a bit of change, by arranging to match courses with a fast-packet, pick up some goods for Quaoar or Pluto, and then send it back. But even at one-gee, a fast-packet would take three days to catch up to me from a standing start, and then another nine to decelerate, accelerate backwards, and then decelerate and arrive. That wouldn't save the shipper too many euros, and I couldn't find anyone willing to pay me enough to cover my own extra trip-time.

"If physical cargo wouldn't work, I was also looking into carrying data. Simplifying a whole lot, radios don't really have a fixed range; if you want to transmit ten times as far as you usually do, you can, but you'll do so at a hundredth of your usual bandwidth. Or a hundred times the distance, for one ten-thousandth the bandwidth. I'm going to be pretty close to Saturn and its moons, so could receive a good amount of data; and if I get close enough to the outer dwarfs, I could transmit fairly fast, too. Unfortunately, this way of filling a station wagon with data-tapes also doesn't quite pass the budget test, even if I don't have to stop as I go by.

"I looked into a few less-likely ideas, but since none worked out, I won't bore you. Then I remembered that Francesca wasn't around to remind me what an idiot I can be in some respects, so tried to think of what she might tell me if she could."

"Aha! You can mask up when you want to!"

"I never claimed I couldn't, Faz, just that I never want to. And from what everyone tells me, doing the mask-thing involves a lot more than a bit of projective empathy."

"Pff."

"Anyway, one thing she once told me was something close to, 'Don't play the cards, boss, play the players. Trust-metrics aren't just analysis tools, you can treat them like money. Invest in them and you'll always be happy with the returns.'

"Back when I was born, there weren't many trust-metrics, and they were almost all run by large organizations. FISA credit scores by banks, SAT scores for institutions of higher education, maybe IQ scores if you want to stretch a point. By the time I died, you could try counting the number of followers you had on social media, maybe you'd have an account with an advertising network and could count how much an ad on one of your posts was worth, and if you were in one of the more totalitarian areas, you'd have a social credit score. That's the experience I've had for almost my entire life with trust-metrics; so even after the almost six years since I've been revived, I'm still pretty clumsy trying to deal with the whole... thing... especially compared to just about everyone now alive who literally grew up with them.

"One thing Francesca and I eventually agreed on was that it would be a bad idea to try to directly monetize this vlog with intrusive ads. Sure, I might pick up a couple of euros, but I'd also annoy you viewers enough that you'd be less likely to let anyone else know it's worth watching.

"Back to my point... I tried firing up the various bits of trust-metric analysis software that Francesca acquired for our business, put them in 'brain-dead company owner is running it' mode, and tried to do what I'd been paying her to do for me. I didn't succeed at that; but I was able to notice a few sudden sharp spikes in unexpected areas. Well, pretty much the whole field is unexpected to me, but you know what I mean. It seems that having a government-certified copy of oneself commit suicide during a government-certified live broadcast as a conscientious objector during a government-certified trial, is a fairly extreme stress-test for the 'is willing to try to do the right thing' metrics, and I think I pegged the needles on some of them. ... That's steam-era engineering slang for 'exceeded what the instruments are designed to measure'. That, plus previously-existing metrics which detail what I consider 'the right thing' that's worth trying to do to be, seems to have put me in an area of trust-metric multidimensional space that I've never heard of before. Trying to put it into terms I'm familiar with, I could ask to borrow someone's car or house, and if I promised to give it back in at least as good condition, a lot of people would just, well, let me. Or from the other side, someone might ask me to hold onto their wallets for them while they went swimming, in full expectation that I'd hand them back afterwards, without even taking a peek inside.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Given that the numbers from all these trust-metrics get plugged into all sorts of automatic algorithms, I now seem to have an opportunity to make a few euros in a way I haven't been able to, before: as a reasonably-trustable data- and computing- warehouse. Especially for groups of reasonably similar political persuasions as myself. Sure, I had the capacity to divvy up my business mainframe and run an email server or a virtual homomorphic-encryption server; but now there are some people willing to pay enough to cover my costs for doing so, and then a bit.

"Well, to an extent. I couldn't keep the appropriate sub-metrics up if I simply rented a server back on Insulo Tri, and there are enough complicating factors that even a server on Titan would barely break even. But using some of my spare computing capacity I installed here aboard Pumpkin? Entirely worth the effort.

"I'm spending a few hours today doing the programming and business-legal work to set up everything I need to do that. I have a few complicating factors that most data-warehouses don't have to bother with, such as the risk of hitting a micrometeor while I'm at four percent of lightspeed in a few months, and dealing with time-synchronization issues when everything aboard ship ticks along almost a tenth of a percent slower than everything back in the main Solar System; and that relativistic doppler shift means a laser from something in Earth's reference frame sent at a green wavelength of five hundred fifty nanometers will be received as a more yellowy five hundred seventy-three; and the further I get from any planets, the tighter my bandwidth constraints are going to be, even piggy-backing on the Observatory's every-ten-AU relays. And I'm doing some wrestling to get those details incorporated into the risk-analysis analysts' analysis of my prospective business-plan, while minimizing the hits those analysts apply to my relevant trust-sub-metrics. And to work out a reasonable set of sales packages, for various levels of redundancy spread across the RAM and other storage devices I have here. I'm even thinking about renting out some of the RAM inside my own skulls, depending on the premium I'd be able to charge for something approaching 'if I survive at all, so will your data' levels of reliability. And by tomorrow, I'll have reconfigured Pumpkin's comm equipment to accept a number of tight-beam lasers to dump various pieces of data onto my computers.

"This is only going to be a sideline at best for the next year, and probably longer. I'm sufficiently paranoid that I built a good deal of extra computing power into Pumpkin - but that's a good deal compared to what's needed to run a ship, which is tiny compared to any real computing centre. But if someone wants to increase the odds that a few terabytes of their most important data will be preserved by having me carry it while I'm a few hundred AU away from anyone else, I should be able to help with that.

"And in case anyone's wondering - no, I'm not touching any of the backup units that I'm carrying to Observatory B as a favour for a couple of close friends. That's a purely personal matter, only technically commercial.

"How about you, Faz? Anything you care to share with the audience back home?"

"Yep. I figured out that just living in VR isn't going to be enough to fulfill my social needs and keep me sane, no matter how big the virtual city and how many people are in the virtual crowds. Did you know that when we pass by Saturn tomorrow, it's going to take over eighty minutes for a single text message to get from us to Earth, and even longer to get a reply, since by the time it gets to us, we'll have moved even further away?"

"I am aware of those facts, yes."

"That's less than nine round trips a day! And less every day! Already, by the time I find out what any of the latest news or jokes or gossip is, and try to chat about it, I'm hours out-of-date!"

"I distinctly remember telling bio-you, before I launched, that Observatory B is about seventy-seven light-hours out. And that, while I was reassembling this-you's body, that that-you told me she updated this-you with her lifelog from when she and I were, er, together."

"I know that I knew that, but I didn't know that, if you know what I mean?"

"That sentence just raised at least three red flags in my HUD's grammar checker, but I'll just say 'yes'. So... we already talked about all the solutions we could think of, to keep you happy and healthy. Have you picked another one out to try?"

"Maybe-yes, maybe-no. I think I'm going to try stutter-skipping. Instead of just turning myself off until we're back, or slowing myself down, I think I'll try letting myself run a bit, then sending whatever message I want back home, then turning myself off for the message's round-trip time, then turning myself on again. That should really reduce how much time I'm awake and feeling... unconnected, but I won't have months to catch up on by the time we get back, and I'll still be able to keep an eye on how you're doing over the trip. And if I still can't stand it, we've got the other ideas to try."

"If you think it's worth a go, I'm all for it. Want to transmit an incremental backup to Titan tomorrow?"

"My sort of AI doesn't do deltas, but we're great at integrating lifelogs. But won't your bandwidth be saturated tomorrow, with your new gig?"

"Incoming comms, yes. Outgoing mostly uses different bits of hardware, and I can fully split off one comm-laser by then."

"Well, alright, then."

"Alright. ... Hm, are we done for the day?"

"Oh, I'm sure you'll want to cut off the transmission before I start going into detail about what you and I got up to yesterday in that virtual island-"