"Hello, and welcome to my VR.

"It'd be kind of hard to show some of what I want to show you today in reality, so virtuality it is. I know it's a bit of a cop-out, after live-vlogging the last two times, but sometimes you've just gotta work with the tech you've got.

"Cee, go ahead and rez yourself. Everyone, this cartoonish winged unicorn is Cee, short for Celestia; the source of her avatar is long out of copyright, and she is reasonably good at satisfying my values through friendship and ponies. Sorry, ancient in-joke. Anyway, I got her very soon after I was successfully revived; I took the advice of some of the other revivals, and let them buy me one of the better psychotherapy AIs available. She keeps a close eye on my mental health and intervenes at need; since I seem to be fairly stable these days, most of her time is filled up with general secretarial tasks. Like acting as a voice interface for a VR.

"Alright, Cee; let there be light!

"Welcome to the Solar System. With a few details made easier to see.

"Okay, slew the camera. Over there - way over there - is the constellation Ophiuchus. And in it, a bit dim to the naked eye, a binary star, a pair of orange dwarfs, each a bit cooler than our own sun: Seventy Ophiuchi. What makes them special is that they're only sixteen and a half light-years away. With the right design, a ship with a horizon drive can get there in, oh, fifty years or so. We've got a few on the way.

"Sixteen and a half light-years is the same distance as six thousand fifty light-days. Now if we turn back around, and go past the sun in exactly the opposite direction, a bit more than three light days, we find ourselves in a very special spot. Cee, zoom us in. Closer. Closer... there it is. Right here is the spot where the light-rays from one of those two stars get bent by the Sun's gravity, and come back together. The whole sun acts like a lens. And right here is where we've built ourselves a set of satellites. Right now, they're just looking at the star itself. But once the interstellar ships get there, and they put their own satellites a few light-days on the far side of their star... then that satellite and this satellite can use those stars to focus comm-lasers on each other. It's such a ridiculously efficient system that, if we wanted, we could chat with each other using only milliwatts of power. We've got a full-scale system between the Sun and Alpha Centauri already going.

"Now, this satellite system is pointed at Seventy Ophiuchi A. But if we move just a little ways over here, a scant one point four million kilometres away... this is the satellite system pointed at Seventy Ophiuchi B. And, unfortunately for astronomers and interstellar ships, something went wrong with the systems here. We're not completely sure, but it looks like a software problem in the self-repair subsystems, which munged most of the computing hardware. About all that we're sure is still working is the air-gapped and isolated station-keeping subsystems.

"Now, this is way, way, way out in the boonies, and there's not much matter to work with - just what we put there. So the scientists in charge of the whole thing ran their numbers, and decided not to send any repair-bots from the A observatory to the B one. The A one alone is good enough to run comms, and they don't want to spend any of its spare parts trying to fix B, in case something goes wrong with A. Sure, they've got multiple redundancies - enough that even I approve - but it was their call to make.

"And this, my dear watchers, is where I come in. My ship, Pumpkin, hits a fifth of a gee, on average. With that thrust, I could accelerate towards the B observatory for two and a half months, then turn around and decelerate for another two and a half, and find myself in the middle of some of the more expensive salvage it would be my privilege to see. Other ships, with heftier drives, could get there sooner; but those ships are expensive, and their owners already have their own ways of getting profit. Of the smaller ships with accelerations like Pumpkin's, very few captains and crew would be willing to be stuck on their ship for the minimum of ten months to get there and back - and likely longer, if they haul anything back. So it looked like I'd found a niche I was in a good position to exploit, and I started preparing to go for it. Even Francesca agreed that it was worth trying, and she started doing her marketing thing, based on me spending a year out in the dark.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"And then things went weird on me. I've tried listening to different peoples' explanations, but I still seem to be missing some fundamental understanding about modern times. Remember, when I grew up, I was excited at being able to send electronic messages around the world for free in just a few days, through Fidonet's echomail. ... That's an obsolete technical term that you might as well think of as sending telegrams.

"From what I have been able to figure out, what's going on right now is a whole rigamarole of a debate and discussion to work out a set of rules for some kind of race. The point is still to go all the way to the B Observatory and back, but there are arguments about ship accelerations, a ceiling on ship costs, live crew requirements, and so on. And expanding on my original preparations, making arrangements to piggyback comms on the observatories' every-ten-AU relays, traffic control, emergency procedures, ensuring that nobody interferes with the observatory's normal operation, and other practical matters. I've tried offering my own two cents, but I can't even keep track of who's arguing, let alone who's arguing for what positions.

"In case you're curious, the points I'm standing firm on is that the whole exercise provide at least as much good to society at large as repairing or salvaging parts from the observatory would have done; and that if I don't have at least a good a chance of covering my expenses as running the simple salvage op would have, I can't afford to participate. Also, if the whole discussion schmear takes too long to get settled, I'm going to have to get back to my usual gigs. NKRK only has so much patience, after all, and my deferred-payment agreement with them is based on the assumption of a year-long trip that starts soon.

"Technically, I could ignore the whole debate and just launch myself now. But if the overall agreement ends up being to do a first-one-arrives-gets-the-payment salvage op, then another vacuum cleaner with a ship hitting just a twentieth of a gravity better than Pumpkin - that is, a quarter gee instead of a fifth - could launch two weeks after I do and still get there first. Which would make my income for the whole year a big fat zero, and make my bank manager rather annoyed with me. Which adds up to it being worth my while to stick around long enough to see how it all shakes out, at least within reason."

"So. This is where I'm supposed to shill for donations to the whole race, and to my team in particular. So here we go: please donate.

"If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm terrible at convincing people to give me money, and I'm pretty sure that any clever tricks I try would be seen through and immediately backfire. I'm doing my thing, trying to leave the world better off than I find it, and aiming at still kicking and still helping out ten thousand years from now. If you're still watching, and that sounds like the sort of person you'd like to help out, well, you know your finances better than I do. If you don't want to donate to me, then feel free to donate to charity instead - if you make a charitable donation to Pansapient Rights Matter in my name, I'll be sure you get whatever patron-perks someone who donated at that level to me directly would have gotten. Oh, quiet down, Francesca; there's more important things in life than maximizing every possible microtransaction, and if this is the only chance I'll have at a platform that reaches more than a dozen people, I'm going to use it as best I can. I know it wasn't in the script, but what's the point of doing a liveblog if I just read what's been pre-written? You might as well just run a VR puppet... and before you get any ideas, I want veto power over anything you try to put in my mouth.

"Look, if it's that important to you, let's talk about it offline, okay? Pardon me, world; looks like I need to go hash out some details."