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The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgamesEARTHDATE: May 11, 2008
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HOW TITAN GOT ITS GROOVE BACKby HazedA few weeks ago, Fedders suddenly noticed that something strange had happened on Titan. The planet display was showing that the world did not have an economy! This would have been understandable if someone had bombed the exchange, or if the workdroids had all gone on strike, but the exchange was still in operation, and goods were being produced and consumed as normal. It was all very odd.
Nobody knew how long the planet had been missing its economic level - which should of course have been resource. Now, I know I am nominally the owner of Titan, but that's just on paper - I don't actually pay any attention to the day to day running of the planet, and I certainly don't have anything to do with its economy or its exchange. So this odd state of affairs was as much a mystery to me as it was to everyone else. But even using all of my investigative powers, I was not able to come up with a viable theory as to what had happened. I questioned the workers, but they didn't know or care, so long as they got their paychecks on time. I questioned the managers, but they were more concerned about deflecting any hint of blame away from themselves than they were in actually figuring out what happened. I questioned the planetary bosses, but they just shrugged: as long as Titan continued to make money for them, they weren't concerned about such trivial matters as what its official designation was. I visited the Traders Guild on Earth; I spoke to Messrs Trumble, Cruikshank & Bone, I even popped into every Armstrong Cuthbert office in Sol to see if anyone could shed some light on this oddity. No luck. Nobody knew anything, and they couldn't see why I was making such a fuss about it. I tried to talk to the bureaucrats in the Galactic Administration's HQ, but they kept shuffling me from one stuffed shirt to another; nobody wanted to take the responsibility of actually giving out any information. Finally, I used some of the contacts I had developed from my centuries of work, and spoke to someone from the DNI - that's the Department of Naval Intelligence, the spies and the spooks that do all that clandestine work to keep our Solar System safe. The agent I spoke to wouldn't tell me much, but he blamed the Martians for the unexpected change in Titan's status. I should have expected that, because DNI tend to blame our old adversaries for just about anything that goes wrong in Sol. So, none the wiser as to the cause, I decided that as the owner of the planet, I should fix things. After all, since the problem appeared to be merely cosmetic, I guessed it would be easy to plaster over the error with the correct designation. And so it transpired. One pot of paint later, Titan was once again labelled as a resource planet, with a workforce: If only all problems could be solved that easily. |
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