“The TNA is the big power here, the governing body. But it’s a corporation, run by a CEO and a CFO and a board, not by an elected official. If you want a voice in the government out here, you’d better be a shareholder. Still, the TNA makes and enforces the law, and keeps things running smoothly commerce-wise.” When it can, she thought. A lot of people fled to the edges of the solar system to get away from rules, and resented having the rules follow them way out here into the dark. Hence the need for people like Callie to make them cooperate, or chase them off. “So when you say ‘authorities’ that gets a little wobbly. I can get a meeting with just about anybody in the TNA, but their influence stops near the orbit of Jupiter. The Jovian Imperative is more like a corporation than a nation-state, too. If we told the Jovian Imperative or the TNA your story, they’d just try to figure out how they could profit from it, if they believed you at all. We could upload your testimony to the Tangle, and let everybody know what you found out there–”

“What’s the Tangle?”

“Oh. You called it, um, the net? The web?”

Elena nodded. “You ruined the net? You got it all tangled?”

“It still works a lot like your net did. There’s news, entertainment, gossip, complaining, jokes, music, images. There are also secret levels, dark commerce, weird cults, and Liar sites that do strange stuff to human brains when we look at them. Seizures are the least of it. Those dangerous sites are interdicted, but there are plenty of places in the galaxy where nothing is interdicted, and sometimes the consequences are ugly. Then you’ve got the AI, who do their own thing on the Tangle too, and the whole alternate-reality contingent, and rumors of the broken ghosts of experimental uploaded minds building their own raggedy sensoriums, stealing power where they can…” She shrugged. “All together, it’s the Tangle. But if we upload the sensational story of a woman from five hundred years ago who met previously unknown aliens, with proper proofs and verifications, we’d get all sorts of attention. Some corporate king or resource-rich polity would probably try to investigate, as far as their resources would allow.”

“But you don’t think it’s a good idea?”

Callie chewed her lower lip. “It’s just… the bigger issue is the bridge generator. That greasy black cube full of time-and-space-bending power. We found the generator on your ship, so it belongs to you. If it does what you’ve described, and what Ashok says it does, you’ll either get rich, or arrested, or assassinated, or all three, in some order. Assassination last, probably.”

Elena’s eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought about that. But you’re right. If that device can be reproduced, it would upend whole economies, wouldn’t it?”