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Dear Condor,
Father has not yet written to me. It’s fine, I’m not disappointed. I don’t
know him at all, so I can’t know what I should expect out of him. I just
wanted to give you an update before it happens that I’m going to be out of
communication range again. It won’t be too long, but it’s out of my hands.
You see, when researchers first discovered Vacuus, they thought to send
probes here before they sent people. Unfortunately, they lost contact with
these probes, and were never able to gather much information about the
planet. They obviously decided to just send a manned-mission without enough
information, and that’s because the ship they were using was
self-sustaining. If, for some reason, it wasn’t possible to reach or land on
the surface, it wasn’t like a death sentence. We could have been living on
it this whole time. It’s still orbiting us right now, and people regularly
go back and forth. I could have gotten a job up there instead. In fact, I
told you that I’m the only one doing what I do, but that’s not technically
true. Someone is up there right now, using their own instruments to track
nearby cosmic events. They just don’t do it for the same reasons, and have
other responsibilities. It’s not for safety, they’re mostly studying the
effects of deep space survival as it pertains to remoteness from the host
star. I kind of forget about them, because we don’t really interact. Anyway,
that’s not really important. The point is that, once we arrived here, we
discovered why communication with the probes stopped working. It’s because
of a periodic meteoroid shower called the Valkyries, which causes a
blackout. These meteoroids are very close to one another, and interconnected
via weak, yet still impactfully disruptive, electromagnetic fields. It has
to do with the ferromagnetic composition of them, and the occasional
electrostatic charge that builds up when they scrape against one another.
This can last for years, but it’s a relatively rare event, and has only
happened twice since Earth sent the probes. What’s not all that rare is when
one of these meteors becomes dislodged from the shower, and we end up
between it and all its friends. If we’re in the right position, it’s pretty
as it’s streaking across the sky, but it’s problematic too. We don’t always
know when it’s going to happen, and we don’t always know when it’s going to
affect us, but it too knocks out signal transmission, though for a much
shorter period of time. Our astronomers have devoted most of their careers
to studying these phenomena. At first they thought that the shower was
falling apart, but they now believe that the stray meteoroids eventually
find their way back to the shower. Earth is aware that this is going to
happen, and have upgraded their protocols to account for it. So if you send
a message, it will end up being stored in a nearby buffer until the relay
station receives word that signal transmission has been restored. I’m sorry
to spring this on you so last minute, but if you reply, I doubt that I’ll
receive you for a while. Please let your father know as well, thanks.
Hopefully not for long,
Corinthia
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