Gordan McDowell opened his eyes. The last thing he remembered was entering the cryonics facility and putting on the hospital outfit so that he could be frozen and sent to the waiting ship in orbit. It would carry another twenty thousand people, all of them investors or members of the project who had been left behind. The ship they would be loaded on would be small, barely a hundred kilotons not including fuel, and would travel just a bit faster than the Trappist Traveler at 11.5% of the speed of light. The Trappist Traveler had left the system forty years and eight months ago. The timing had been chosen due to that being the length of time it took light to reach the Solar System from Trappist One. Due to their slightly higher speed they would arrive only ten years after the other ship, giving the colonists enough time to make good on their promises to the investors.

The colony’s investments in the solar system had been used to purchase the ship they were on, the rest being left behind in case the colony needed anything from Earth. Those that still remained behind were able to get anything they needed for them, including people if the cost of sending a person was cheap enough. They had considered downloading all of the technology they could to take with them, and indeed had filled up the ship’s computer with such files, but it was unlikely that it would be necessary. The solar system could broadcast all of the technology it had to the system whenever it wanted to, and by the time they arrived the technology would be four hundred years more advance than what they had instead of forty. Still, Earth might choose to wait to transmit until they received a signal from Trappist One, which would add an eighty one year, three month delay to the data, and in that case an extra forty years of technology would be useful.

In the recent years Earth’s policy seemed to be to expand its influence any way it could. It has even had some border skirmishes with the Jovian Mining Consortium, now a mega-corporation government in its own right, and some experts believed it would only be a matter of time before Solar War I began. So now was the perfect time to leave.

“Mister McDowell?” asked a woman’s voice and he opened his eyes to look at her. He must have closed his eyes while remembering the past.

“Yes.” he said. “Are you my nurse? Are you here to put me under for cryo freeze?”

“Actually, I’m here to bring you out of cryofreeze. You have been frozen for three hundred and seventy five years.”

Gordan felt dizzy and closed his eyes. “So, I’m in Trappist?”

“Yes, sir.” the woman said. “You are at Hermes station. It’s where the interstellar relay is located. Once you have recovered, we’ll figure out where to send you.”

“My investments.” he said, trying to remember. He knew he was an investor, but couldn’t remember how much. Millions? That sounded about right. Why couldn’t he remember how much?

“You are listed as an investor, and as such were woken up before the colonists, but I don’t have any other information. Once you have recovered you can talk with the Colony agent here and work out the details. We still use the Credit system here, where an entry level full time job earns you one thousand credits per year, so you should have been given an account with five times your investment in it. I just don’t know the details.”

Gordan tried to remember how much he had invested. After all, that determined his future in this system. Or was it about the money? Had he always been this greedy? “Why don’t I remember.”

“Oh, we had to flash your brain twice to get all of the memories to stick, but you should fully recover. Apparently, staying in cryo that long does a lot more damage to your memories than we knew when we left Sol.” Gordan nodded. He was tired and wanted to sleep. “I’ll let you rest now. Maybe when you wake up you’ll have remembered most of the things you forgot.”

Gordan’s dreams were full of memories. Past lovers, children he had, his businesses and the advances they made in various technologies. That time he ran for office in the Canadian government. They all came flooding back to him, jumbled together like one big twisted ball of string. Upon waking he spent a few minutes sorting the memories out. Now he remembered who he was. His memories were in order now, and he could name all of his children and most of his lovers. The others would come back to him in time.

He remembered all of his businesses and how they had worked. He was certain that he could build a business here as well. Now that he remembered the twenty million credits he had given the colony before its launch, he knew that he was entitled to one hundred million to rebuild here. What exactly that could buy, he wasn’t sure. Even with the Credit system dictating how much people needed to be paid there were still variations in the standard of living. The one thousand credits a basic employee might earn in one city might earn him a shack and only the most basic food, while in another he could eat at decent restaurants a few times a week and had some creature comforts in his moderately sized apartment. He would need to learn the details of the economy in order to earn money by making what was in demand.

He spent an extra twelve hours resting in his room, then got up and signed out. He was given a basic jumpsuit, communication device, and a pressure suit and told to go to the Colonization center to collect the details of his bank account so that he could have money. Most of the people that came here would be members of the group that launched the colony, and therefore donated the contents of their bank accounts to the colony group before being frozen. After all, they couldn’t take it with them. The records of how much they donated was sent along with them and when they arrived here they were given a bank account with five times that amount in it, the funds coming from the colony’s sales to civilians.

Gordan, on the other hand, had given his company to one of his children along with splitting all of his possessions between them. He knew that the transfer might not work, so he didn’t try to take more than his initial investment with him. If he could do it over, though, given what he knows now, that it would work, he would donate more to them. His children didn’t need all of the shares of his company to still have a controlling interest, after all, and with enough starting capital he could build the largest company in the entire system.

He stood in line for an hour before his name was called. It had been a while since he had to do that, as his assistant made sure that he didn’t have to, so it was an interesting experience.

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“Name?” asked the banking woman in front of him.

“Gordan McDowell. I’m an investor.”

She nodded and looked him up. “Ah yes, Mr. McDowell. Here you are. If you wouldn’t mind placing the cap on your head.” she pointed to a helmet-like device on a stand on the counter. “It will verify your brain pattern and give you access to your account.”

He put it on and after a few seconds the helmet beeped.

“Good.” she said as he took it off and put it back on the stand. “You certainly were an investor. One of the largest ones, I’d wager.” She handed him a bracelet. “This bracelet is tied to your account. For purchases of up to one hundred credits, it only requires scanning. For purchases of up to one thousand you will need to enter your security code. Anything over that requires biometric verification, but all of your data is already tied to the account so you can begin making purchases as soon as you have set a security code.”

She held out a number pad and he typed in the six digit code he had used on earth.

“Thank you for investing in the colony, Mr. McDowell.” she said. “You are now ready to go.” She called the next person and he stepped out of line.

He scanned his bracelet with his phone and when the banking app on it asked for biometric identification he scanned his iris. The number “100,000,000Cr” appeared on screen. Exactly five times the twenty million Credits he had donated on Earth to become an investor. Now that his finances were in order, he needed to do some shopping then find a new home.

The first thing he did was go shopping. He purchased several new suits and placed them in a suitcase along with the free pressure suit and jumpsuit he had been given. He then sought to do something about his technology situation. While he was being measured for his suit the salesman mention a type of implant that could let you carry your phone inside of you, making it impossible to steal without extreme crime and violence. The fact that it could contact the security on any ship or settled world meant that it would be difficult to seize you and do that, even if the people were inclined to commit such a crime. The crime rate in this system was quite low by Solar System standards, likely because everyone lived in recorded areas at all times, but also helped by the fact that your body’s sensors could be recorded using these implants, making every person a possible security camera.

The implant in question had been invented on Hephaestus, the coldest world in the system but the one that was most concerned about inventing new technology. The implant used the interface technology from prosthetics, called a Neuro-comp, as it was a computer that interfaced with the brain. They had expanded its function so that it could do anything a cellular phone could do while directly interfacing with your brain rather than interfacing through a helmet using magnetic fields.

The technology had actually been developed on Earth around a decade after they left the system, but was never more than a fad due to strong anti-transhumanist sentiments. By the time Gordan had boarded the ship, the only people who still had them were people who had bought them during the fad and never had them removed.

In this System, however, the people had no prejudice against body modification through technology, so the fad had grown until there were many brands of MindPhones, as the advertisements called them, constantly competing for market share. He had purchased one of the better models that didn’t seem too cutting-edge, as that might stand out and was likely overpriced, and had it installed at a nearby clinic. He didn’t actually need the best one, and once the technology they had brought with them had been distributed he knew that the technology would be updated. By this time next year, a new model will have come out with triple the performance of last year’s model, if not more.

The one thing the Trappist version did better was include a small nuclear battery in the device, in his case a 500 mW betavoltaic one based off of Bismuth 207, thus having a half life of 32.9 years. This guaranteed that you never needed to charge the device for the next several decades. The material decayed into Lead 207, so while it could cause heavy metal poisoning if it got into the blood the ceramic casing of the battery could prevent that outside of catastrophic impact, at which point you would have greater problems than being slowly poisoned.

He transferred his banking over to his new MindPhone and threw the other one in his luggage. Now he needed to find a place to go. The local tourist agency told him the basics of the system, including cultural data. Euporie seemed the best place to buy an estate, but he was unsure if it would make a good factory world. The system didn’t really have the equivalent of an undeveloped or even developing nation to build factories in, so he would have to do some research before he found a place to set up. He would also need to figure out which type of business he wanted to start. There didn’t appear to be any large scale shortages so that too would require significant market research.

He searched the communication directory to find a real estate agency. It seemed that the system used a eight digit code system for their communications. The first digit was the world the target was on. The large asteroid he was currently on, named Hermes, was zero, Planet B was one, Planet C was two, etc. This used the numbers zero through seven, eight numbers for the eight worlds. One could send messages to any number, but only chat in real time with numbers on the planet with you or in orbit.

The next digit was based on the quadrant the person was likely to be in. The center of the hot spot, which was on the equator, became the meeting point for quadrants zero through three. If you looked at the hotspot with the sun at your back, North and to your right was zero, the one below it was one, the one to the left of zero was two, and the one below it was three. The pattern continued on the cold, dark side of the planet with the even numbers on the north and the odd numbers on the south. The capital cities of planet D and E, where the elevator ended on the ground, were between quadrants zero and one, so most people planetside would have one of those two numbers as the second digit.

The next six were reserved for the first million people to get a number. This would mean that the planet’s population would need to reach the millions before they needed to add an extra digit. They would have went with one fewer digit, but with all of Planet D and Planet E’s population concentrated in two quadrants they were already running out of the one hundred thousand numbers available for that quadrant.

Having an eight or a nine for the first digit was special. Having an eight meant that you were based in space, and therefore weren’t part of a main planet. This would be used when someone started colonizing the various asteroids in the system, but for now it was only used for the various trade, cargo, and passenger vessels that traveled around the system.

Having a number that started with a nine meant that you had been given a temporary number by the immigration branch of Colony Services, and would need to have it replaced once you settled on a world. The number would be assigned to you until it needed to be recycled or you gave it up, but with ten million possible numbers it would be a long time before it would need to be recycled.

Gordan dialed the number 00023057. A woman picked up. “First Home Real Estate. Candice speaking.” she answered. She seemed young, he thought, too young to have been one of the original colonists.

“Yes, my name is Gordan McDowell. I just came in on the Terrance Proctor as an investor. I was hoping to talk to someone about buying an estate on Euporie.” The ship was named after the largest investor in the ship, Terrance Proctor. He was a trust fund brat that had managed to inherit a good portion of his father’s stock in a pharmaceutical company, and as such had the 200 million he invested into the ship. According to the news interviews from before they boarded the ship, he was hoping to open up such a company here, but Gordan doubted he would manage it on his own. Terrance had never worked in the upper management of a company, much less actually ran one, so he would have to find a manager he trusted if he wanted to get his company off the ground fast enough to capture significant market share. He might have ten times as much money as Gordan, but had less than a tenth of his skill, so Gordan was confident he could survive if he got into the medical industry.

“Yes, Mr. McDowell. We have several listings for estates on that planet. If you would be willing to come by my office I can give you a virtual tour, or if you prefer remaining where you are I can send you a link to the VR tour and meet you in the simulation.”

‘That must be a fairly popular option for it to be immediately offered.’ he thought. On Earth, one had to request a VR tour be done remotely if you wanted it as such. “That’s not a problem. I can come by your office immediately.” he said. “I’ll have my MindPhone show me the way.” He pulled up the map program. It should only be a fifteen minute walk away.

“Very well then, Mr. McDowell. We will await your arrival.” With that she hung up.

Gordan walked the kilometer or so to the office and found it in a block of office buildings, beside an accountant and a therapist. He went inside and asked for Candice, and a woman in her early twenties wearing a business dress came out to meet him. She had red hair below her shoulders, medium brown skin, and green eyes. He liked redheads. And it Had technically been 376 years since he had a lover. Maybe, once their meeting was over, he would ask her out to dinner.

“Hello, Mr. McDowell. I’m Candice Khalid. Nice to meet you.” She held out her hand and he took it. “So, if you would like to get started, there are private rooms in the back where we can view the houses.”