The Eris Watchers

My grandparents were pioneers—wild-eyed dreamers who traded Earth’s comforts for the solar system’s edge. They adored Xena: Warrior Princess, so when the outie rush hit in the 2050s, they aimed straight for Eris, the dwarf planet named for their warrior goddess’s mythic rival. With a modest loan and a rickety ship, they staked their claim, mining volatiles—methane, nitrogen, water ice—before anyone else saw the payoff. By the 2070s, they’d struck it rich, selling to venture capitalists gorging on the boom. The outie bubble burst when fusion and gravitic drives killed chemical rockets, but not before my family became one of the system’s wealthiest dynasties. Every liter of gas they’d stockpiled sold to the highest bidder on the spot market—no futures, just cold storage and cash. They were bandits in a lawless gold rush, and Eris was their vault.


Metals—iron, nickel, titanium—were too plentiful to fetch a price, so they turned them into infrastructure: pipes, tanks, tramways. Bulbous thousand-liter containers of liquified gas dotted the tunnels, forged from the planet’s own crust. Eris shrank as they hollowed it, leaving a labyrinth of mined-out paths sprawling billions of kilometers beneath hundreds of square kilometers of surface. The AIs crunched the numbers: spin it up, like Ceres, and the interior could host life. Centrifugal force would mimic gravity—Earth-normal at the outer edges, fading to microgravity near the core. Perfect for gestation, recovery, or just finding your sweet spot. Plus, those microgravity zones? Prime real estate for growing high-value crystals—silicon, quartz, whatever the tech barons craved.


The Spinning Dream


I’m Lira Vex, third-generation Eris baron, and I inherited more than wealth—I got ambition. Spinning Eris took time; out here, sunlight’s a whisper, barely watts per square foot. But we had patience and leftovers—mountains of silicon from the mining days. My factory fabbers churned out fiber-optic memristive cables and photovoltaic skins, coating every idle surface. Sunlight gave us power and wide-angle imagery; off-angle photons from moons, ships, and planets sharpened into high-res feeds. I could zoom in on a lunar dome’s graffiti or an Earthside newspaper, crisp as if I held it. But I cared more about the dark movers—ships, debris, anything dodging the light. After the 2040s, when China and the U.S. seeded kinetic-energy weapons (KEWs) across the system and obliterated each other in a single day, peace hung on mutual surveillance. Everyone watched, and Eris became my lens.


The setup doubled as a telescope. Xena, Eris’s moon, offered a second vantage point, a parallax backup for multispectral recordings—radio, infrared, the works. I tracked craft vectors, origins, destinations, storing it all in a system built for eternity. Tens of thousands of years’ worth of capacity, even with data bloat climbing ten percent a decade. Cross-platform backups spanned every sector, fragmentation correction fighting neutrino bit-flips. Those flips became data, too—indirect neutrino maps. Gravity waves rippled through, distorting light; correcting them layered in another dataset. Eris wasn’t just a home—it was a recorder of the solar system’s pulse.


The Server Glitch


A week into full operation, I checked the servers. They should’ve been a fraction full—exabytes of headroom—but the indicator blinked at 80% capacity. Something was wrong. I dug into the decision tree—filters, duplication protocols—when a notification pinged, tagged with my personal codes. A video loaded: me, but older, weathered, a century’s worth of lines etched into my face. “Lira,” he said, voice gravelly, “you’re a genius and a fool. This setup’s a marvel, but it’s a bomb.”


He explained: my photoreceptors and gravity-wave corrections didn’t just track ships—they reconstructed reality. Paired with Xena’s offset, the system caught wave interference so precisely it could recreate sound—words spoken in bunkers, ships, anywhere. Test after test proved it: every meeting, every whisper in the system, playable like a holo-drama. Nations plotting Eris’s destruction had tripped over their own shadows; their plans, voiced in “secure” rooms, echoed back through my data. The very act of scheming undid them—governments were toppled as the leaks spread. “They’re furious,” he said, “but too late. The machines are already upgrading—higher-density storage, distributed now. You’ll have decades to watch it unfold.”


The Retroactive Twist


Then he dropped the kicker: the system could send data back—to its own creation point. He’d uploaded AI patches and workarounds, letting it whisper to the past. “Keep that quiet,” he warned. “Focus on the holography. Release that, and you’ll climb the financial heap—short-term investments, my gift.” The video cut out, leaving me staring at a server humming with secrets.


I followed his lead. Gravity-wave holography hit the public feeds—proof of concept, not the full scope. Governments embraced it, a new leash on power. My wealth soared, futures bets paying off like clockwork. But the retroactive trick gnawed at me. I could warn myself, tweak the past, shape the future. I didn’t—just watched, listened, stored.


The Eris Legacy


Eris spun faster each year, gravity trains looping its guts—cruise liners for residents, tourists, dreamers. Crystal farms bloomed in the core, photovoltaic skins drank the void’s faint glow. The family name, once tied to gas and greed, became synonymous with vigilance. Future generations would inherit a vault of data—every word, every move, every ripple—preserved against collapse. I’d built a warrior’s watchtower, Xena at my side, guarding the system’s peace.


What would they do with it? Map the stars? Rewrite history? I leaned back, server lights winking, and smiled. The old man was right: genius and folly, all in one. I couldn’t wait to see the encore.