Created Wednesday 22 December 2021
Most places are inhospitable. Most fights over locations and resources occur in unearthly environments. Thus the primary battlefields forces are trained for are as hostile as any foe. Fortunately (I guess), So's own system offers several environments ripe for practice and training for a good range of the types fought in heaven's deep.
And someone has to maintain these Solar training grounds. The Martian team has it pretty easy, and work hard to compensate for their frilly image.
The Mercry and Saturn teams are tough and careful; true professionals that take their job seriously . . . even though they only do it part time; Mercury is largely automated, and no one lives full time on Saturn (Jupiter is used less often as a proving ground since it's the same sort as Saturn and just a little too rough to risk the equipment when Saturn will do). The Belts have stations that are permanently manned, but their forces more resemble navies & MULES than planetary forces.
But Venus and Uranus do have permanent residents who maintain the stations, oversee the AIs and robotic fauna, and train visiting forces. The Venusian hermit is like my dad.
He's also called upon to oversee the Hagge force that fights the Buzzkills in that pivotal system. "
The Battle of the Hagge Hammers," how about that? But he hates it (too). Just because he is among the very few who can tolerate living nearly full time in a Venusian world doesn't mean he wants to. He wants out---a new assignment or retirement. Or death.
He chooses "retirement" and hatches a plan to lure the
Grey Wolf (I think) to the system, and then tricks him so that the Hermit can take is ship while stranding the Grey Wolf there. (I'm thinking the Tin Tin rocket is the Grey Wolf's ship, and that the Hermit has the robotic fauna cut off that cosmetic skin and wrap it around a near replica of his real ship while the Hermit steals the real Tin Tin rocket sans cosmetic skin.
And this it's the Hermit who flees the region, setting up dummy ships on jumps farther than his to loose any trackers and starts a new life---a new human lineage---away from it all, including the Really Big Space Monster.
Maybe along with the
Runaway? Maybe because of the Runaway?
He's a Bronze Age superhero. The likes of Mr. Robot and Jane. The Tick (RIP, he left us too soon. Really, worst fucking cancel ever.) The Suicide Squad.
All what they want to be but aren't. Real fucking bad asses. Rick bad.
He's kinda like a caveman who invents these crazy things. Well, O.K., actually more just very smart at their core but also a little out there somewhere I don't understand. Crafty son of a dad, he is. And doesn't show his cards. Even after the play uinless he needs to.
Whatever. But it's whatever comes after Superman's death.
It may be he who gets away. He may be the one who got away. Or didn't and died out there after our stories about him stopped catching up with him. (I mean, there are none of him in which he dies. And his progenity mayve kept going, too. He sure tried to ensure that.)
And sorry but the one who gets has to be male. Becuase a man has more variability in his sperm than a woman does in her eggs.
That's kind one of the points about having women around: They are a threshold, a limiting reagent for reproduction. They slow it down so it can last longer. The kids can grow more, including all that energy that it takes to make such a finely-tuned brain.
But when you're literally maybe the last man alive, you will need to be building out all the variability as you can. Because you don't have a lot of times to die out here before your lineage dies off.
And one of the stories that's known to be one of the most recent is of He Who Got Away is about Him working out a way to expand out human variability farther than the number in each generation (i.e., to make humans more---not less----inbred through the generations.
As long, of course, as that variability isn't going in the wrong direction.
Of the most recent stories of Him are of him thinking he figured out a way to work into the selection process for that variability to itself remain nearly constant through replications of itself. Of Him figuring out a way to hardwire humans (as---desipte Him nor any Human never knowing this---had the Blattids) to evolve in certain ways. To decide which way we speciate. Based both on his guess of what we needed to keep working on to not go extinct in space after our home world is destroyed2 . And based on where humans needed to be smarter. (He decides it's his definition of wisdom.)
Or was it the Botanist. A character from so far back that I forget his function.