Chapter 5.24: The Sixam's star

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From Cassy's diary

As you have surely noticed, my dear diary, Sirio is always cheerful and smiling when he's at home with us. However, we are all starting to notice that this doesn't always reflect in his school environment. 

Halley: But do you have any friends at school?

Sirio: Ahm... I don't know. It's hard to find a true friend, you know. Apart from you. And Techna is also very nice, I think they are a friend of mine too, yes. Even if, with them, I can never catch what they feel, quite the opposite of you. But I think they think we're friends too. Yes, it's probably so.

Halley: Oh.

Sirio has inherited a stronger telepathy than most of us, we realized this right away. He is not able to perceive whole thoughts as Toq does, but he still understands the emotions of all the people around him on the fly. I suspect his senses are slowly becoming sharper as he grows up, as well.

So, he can sense when others are happy, confident or playful, but also when they have bad intentions or are lying to him. He also clearly feels the distrust that many show towards him when they notice the tiny tendrils on his head, which to me are adorable but that for others are puzzling, if not worse. After all, people still don't fully trust the ancient sixamians, and this also partly affects him.

While no one has ever been openly hostile to him, it's hard for Sirio to ignore the negative emotions he feels coming from many of the people he meets every day, and so he ends up staying with us at home for most of the time, spending his afternoons drawing, or playing with Techna and Halley.

Techna: Your last drawing presents a very balanced choice of colours! 
Sirio: Thanks! If you want you can keep it, I'll give it to you!
Techna: Oh, thank you so much!

Sirio: (whispering) Hey, monster of the bed, why are you always hiding down there? Is it because they call you "squid head" too?

Toq and I talked about it quite a lot about this, for him all it is even more evident than it is for me. Actually, he was the first to notice it, well before Sirio mentioned it for the first time. 

All of us, sooner or later, learn how people often judge you harshly without even knowing us, and how these judgments can be difficult to bear. The more I spend time with Toq and Sirio, the more I realize that their telepathy only amplifies this awareness even more, making this lesson even harder to shallow for them... 

However, now that the other kids have started mocking Sirio by calling him "squid head" they have really passed a limit they shouldn't have passed, this is called bullying. We definitely have to talk to his teachers, as soon as possible.

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From Venus's diary

Halley: Ehy, mom, where's dad?

Venus: I bet he's upstairs fixing Techna, why?

Halley: He has to fix this toy too, it doesn't talk anymore!

Steve: Well, I filed it down by half a millimetre compared to before, it should cause a little less friction this way.

Techna: According to my calculations, the rotational speed of the shoulder should increase by 5.3%.

Steve: Great!

Steve: Give me a minute, then we can start the testing...

10 minutes later...

Venus: Here you are! Halley is looking for you to fix that toy robot of hers, it seems that it started croaking in an incomprehensible way.

Steve: Oh, probably it's just the loudspeakers, they always break! It's the weak point of that prototype, I haven't really found a solution yet... 

Steve's main project is precisely that of developing reliable prototypes of robots like Techna, he and all his colleagues are working full-time on it. We don't know yet how the government of New Sixam plans to employ them, but we all believe that the aim is to use them for all those tasks that are considered too complex or dangerous for us.

However, Steve does not seem to want to follow this directive and, instead of trying to build a robot resistant to adverse conditions of all kinds, he is concentrating on the development of an all-purpose robot, the type of robot that every New Sixam family would want.

So for now Steve is teaching Techna how to use carpentry tools, how to cook and how to play chess. He's also teaching them to self-repair, so that they don't risk being wrecked if they break down while he's not around.

Steve: Your AI is improving at an impressive rate, I think my bosses will be very impressed!

Techna: I analyzed my parameters, the lowest score remains the battery capacity.

Steve: I know, but without the material I can't do much about it...

Yes, Techna would really benefit from larger batteries, currently they have an autonomy of about an hour and an half. They always end up spending half the day plugged into an outlet for recharging. But until we find the necessary raw material we can't do much, Steve is right. Just another reason to look for that damn lithium, isn't it, my dear diary?

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From Cassy's diary

Toq: Wait, these are...

Cassy: Hey, hi Toq! I saw you watering the plants this morning, I didn't know you liked gardening!

Toq: I cannot say to be particularly proficient in this activity, but it does not seem too difficult.

Cassy: I see. (Perplexed) Why do you look puzzled, though?

Toq: I did not expect to find these plants here, the last time I saw them I was on Sixam.

Cassy: Um... I think that those plants were already there when I was little. Actually, if I'm not wrong, dad once said that they were a present he received from an uncle of his when he and mom bought this house. I don't know exactly where they took them from, but you're probably right, you know? They really look way more like Sixam species than Earth ones.

Toq: ...

Cassy: (cautious) Do you miss your home planet at least a little bit?

Toq: ... Some aspects about it, a little bit. In any case, however, Sixam has certainly changed a lot, over these centuries. 

Well, for sure a lot must have changed on Sixam in all those years. By now the cities are empty, no one lives on that planet anymore and the only people you can meet around are tourists from New Sixam.

He has a lot of horrible memories of that place. He never talks about it, I was convinced he just wanted to forget and move on, and so I was quite surprised when instead he said:

Toq: ... I do not know how much of what I know may have remained up there. But I think I want to see it with my own eyes.

Well, regardless of everything else, his curiosity seems to have won, in the end. Seeing a home place irremediably changed over the century wouldn't be easy for anyone, but he eventually decided to face it.

I briefly talked about that conversation to Venus and Steve, and we decided to organize a trip to Sixam all together the following weekend.

Sirio: Wow, why are we wearing spacesuits now?

Cassy: They are special suits, they allow us to move easily on any other planet without worrying about the temperature, the air and so on. So the teleport portal located here automatically provide one of these to everyone who teleports here, it's programmed this way.

Sirio: Cool! 

The kids were thrilled, they reminded me a lot of Venus and me the first time we visited the place. We barely had time to walk out of the teleport machine that they started to run all over the place, looking and touching everything they could. Techna was trying to keep up with them to the best of their ability, even if they are still much slower than any excited children and clearly couldn't keep up with their pace. 

Sirio: Are you tired, Techna?

Techna: Battery level 26%, estimated autonomy 25 minutes...

Halley: That's a lot of time, let's play!

Cassy: (softly) Are you all right?

Toq: (softly) I'm fine, don't worry.

Toq appeared calm as he examined his surroundings, but the nostalgia in his eyes was evident to everyone.

Toq: I remember that city, Nashtot. I lived there for some time before they put me in charge of space travel.

Venus: (looking around) They always say that on Sixam the vegetation is dying because of the star it revolves around, which is slowly switching off. However, to me, the situation doesn't seem so different from the last time we came here.

Toq: It is not that different from how I remembered it either, in that respect. The extinction of the star was mostly problematic because of more severe implications, actually.

This was new, we had always thought that Sixam had been abandoned because there was no longer enough energy and food to support the entire population. Not to mention the temperature, it wouldn't be possible for us to survive without these spacesuits now. But what was Toq talking about then?

We didn't even need to ask him aloud, as he immediately spotted our sudden curiosity burst from our thoughts.

Toq: (serious) That star produces a peculiar magnetic field that we have not been able to find anywhere else in the universe, not with this same amplitude at least. The original sixamians evolved in to exploit it to carry their telepathic signals, but their physiognomy did not allow them to communicate and interact with their surroundings in its absence. Because of this, they could not leave this planet, and their health started to suffer more and more as the star's irradiance decreased. This was also the real reason behind their plan to conquer the Earth, as well as the hybridization of the species.

We were all intent on thinking about what Toq had explained to us, looking in the direction of the star he was talking about. By now its light is so dim that we can look at it directly, and also the external temperature and the dark surroundings don't leave doubts about the very weak light flux. It's so dull that it looks like it's starting to solidify, if you look more closely...

Steve: (thoughtfully) A magnetic field unique in the whole universe...  I might have had an idea, you know?

Next Chapter -->

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§HermioneSims§ corner

And we are back to the suspense!

For today, I mostly want to close with a reminder for you dear readers: staring directly at the Sun is a surefire way to burn your retinas, so you're strongly advised against repeating the last scene of this chapter with our star ;) 

On a funnier tone, apparently I have managed to find one of the other ancient sixamians I abandoned around the save some time ago. 

^I don't remember his name, but he seems to be enjoying local food quite a lot.