---
title: Stars
author: "[Madison Rye Progress](https://makyo.ink)"
plainAuthor: "Madison Rye Progress"
character: "Sasha — 2404"
spoiler: "*Mitzvot:* medium"
canonNote: The canonicity of this story has not been decided yet!
type: story
---

There are many things that Sasha supposedly owns.

She supposedly owns all that is in her tent. She supposedly owns a large portion of what is in their side of the duplex that she shares with Aurel. Certainly she shares much in the apartment that lingers in the town sim, that place above the coffee shop, though it has been some years since she visited the apartment itself. She supposedly owns a great many books.

More concretely, she owns her exos, her information, even a few archive boxes. She owns her body, her form. 

She owns her history. She owns who she used to be and who she has become. She owns her memories.

She owns her identity. She owns her queer femininity. She owns her love. She owns her firm beliefs in anarchy. She owns her starry-eyed fascination with the future.

She has thoughts on ownership that are certainly more complex than some mere quip, but were she pressed to boil them down to a single sentence, she might say, "I own my name, and that is enough."

The complexity is a matter of refinement. She would say that she owns her body in a way, but would acknowledge the role that others played in forming it. She would say similar about her history: no one person owns the entirety of their history. Even her information was built up from the life she lives surrounded by others.

What she feels instead of ownership is protectiveness and responsibility. She owns very little, but she is the custodian of much.

Of the things that she is most protective of is the last gift of Tycho Brahe: a star-filled sim. A little bit of the Pacific Northwest snatched out of history, all Doug Firs and mossy ground and fiddlehead ferns (and, thankfully, no invasive blackberry canes), perpetually in the deep-dark of 2AM with no light pollution to speak of. Perpetually with the stars piped in.

The real stars, as they are, too.

The sim has several settings ­— many of which she constructed herself. By default, it collects information from the astronomical instruments lining the counter-rotating ring around the Lagrange station, a belt that rotates opposite the station's own rotation such that its instruments always point outward to the stars, inward to the Moon, occasionally down to Earth below, though of all the views, she finds this least exciting.

On this setting, the night sky is a constantly shifting view of stars, for the Lagrange station lags behind the Moon relative to Earth, and so, over the course of hours, the view of the stars changes, and she sees many different constellations.

These stars are not real. They are information *about* the stars piped through some algorithm Tycho had labored over, taking information about position, brightness, color, relative size, and so on that they might be displayed against the purity of the night background, and when the sun drifts across the view of the telescope, they grow blurry, for, while the sun itself is not shown, the aberration that exists within the sensors themselves will distort the data coming in.

Those are not the only telescopes available to her, though. There are several scattered about that offer her plenty of data. Her favorite is the LIBERTy Constellation, the Large Infrared Band Extrasolar Regional Telescope, set to explore nearby stars through a broad array of small orbital telescopes ordered in a grid, all set to observe stars within the Solar System's region of the Milky Way, effectively acting as one very large telescope. 

Her favorite thing to do is watch when astronomers trigger a shift in the orientation. It is dizzy-making, watching the stars slide across the view of the sky, as though the Earth, having grown weary of its simple rotation, threatened to throw humanity off its surface to get a better look at some far-flung region of space.

But more often than she looks at these data visualizations, she looks at the feed from a simple telescope that lingers at the Earth-Sun L<sub>5</sub> point. An ancient thing, relatively cheap by most standards, it provided a simple but very high resolution feed of the visible spectrum from its point lagging millions of kilometers behind Earth in its procession around the Sun. This movement was the same movement that produced the constellations as seen from Earth, and so over the year, those same constellations would drift before her eyes.

And they really were the same, as, since the advent of the technology behind AVEC, this was not just the data as interpreted through Dr. Brahe's algorithms. This was the actual visual feed read through those inputs and cast as her very own sky.

No, not her very own. It was her charge. It was her duty to protect this place. She was its guardian, its custodian. She was set to watch over it — the how unimportant to all but her, for was she not the docent of own her memories? — that it may remain pristine and true to its original purpose.

That purpose was not strictly naked-eye observation — though there was a shed set within the trees that contained nearly a dozen telescopes and, when it was open to the public for some hours every day, those who visited were encouraged to bring their own — for such had little place in the world of astronomy as it stood today.

The purpose was for dreaming.

This was a place for dreamers. Dreamers like her and dreamers like Dr. Brahe and dreamers like those who visited, remembering dark-sky sites they had visited back phys-side and how they had dreamed of the stars even so many years ago.

This was a place where she could go by herself or with those closest to her, with Ioan or Aurel, with May Then My Name or even E.W., where they could lay on the mossy ground, soft enough to be a cushion, and stare up to the night sky and talk about their dreams, or fears, or nothing at all.

Sasha, on a technicality, owns many things, but of all of those things she technically owns, this is one of the most important to her.
