1.02

Eriadu was the fourth planet of the Eriadu system; inventive naming convention, that. Only a little bit smaller than Earth or Coruscant, it had the same standard gravity due to above-average deposits of heavy metals. It had fewer seas, a lot more in the way of mountains, and the rest was covered by a semi-industrial urban area. Whatever forests or grasslands had once existed, they had long since been swallowed by human expansion, and the planet was polluted enough to look like a dull grey orb from space. Despite a population of twenty-two billion, its urban sprawls were an order of magnitude less densely populated than Earth's simply because they covered thirty times as much total area. That, along with much more efficient and reliable technology, and transportation that required neither tracks nor roads made living there far more pleasant than one would expect. The planet's citizens were also fairly rich, their massive factories producing consumer electronics and mid-quality textiles by the gigatons every year.

Or so I was told. According to my Robotic Autonomous Tutor, a twelve-year-old girl had no business getting off-ship when she had a ginormous amount of material to study. Kuati noble families were among the premier shipbuilders and merchants in the galaxy, and they did not believe academies or any form of standardized education was good enough for their children. As the Andrim family was one of the ten oldest, richest, and most influential noble lines in Kuat, I was to remain in the spaceship for the foreseeable future, followed by Ratty the tutor-droid everywhere for twelve hours a day. Mummy Kuat had been lost to pirates several years before and Daddy - Captain Andrim - had finally decided to take his daughter along on an "educational voyage" to keep her out of trouble and ensure she'd get a proper education. From what I'd seen from Astra Andrim's personal effects (five hundred and sixty two pairs of shoes? Really?) it had been a good decision. Unfortunately, it was yours truly that had to live with the consequences.

Thus I had been taught about the Eriadu system, its position as a junction of several hyperspace lanes - the most important of which being the Hydian Way and the Rimma Route. That its innermost planet was a ball of molten rock smaller and hotter than Mercury, the two volcanic planets that followed had yet to be mined due to their high surface temperatures and the relatively costly mining droids such operations would require, that the fifth planet was a gas giant with seven moons where Tibanna extraction was slowly ramping up, and that there was a sixth planet far to the edge of the system that was as cold and useless as Pluto. All that information and a dozen pages more, all useful to a budding merchant princess. Naturally, I'd also confirmed my own less economically useful but far more significant knowledge about this place; yes, the Tarkin family lived there. Yes, the youngest scion was looking forward to a military career as a stepping stone towards politics and eventually governing the system when the previous Governor Tarkin retired.

Leaving the words and images in Astra's... my datapad's screen to scroll by unseen, I wondered what, if anything, I should do about that knowledge. A few minutes and a couple prompts from Ratty later, my inability to do anything about Tarkin and his future atrocities registered; I could barely escape my robotic tutor's attention after all. It had taken me the whole trip to Eriadu, all four days of it, to work through the hysteria and accept this entire situation was too real to be a nightmare or a hallucination. It took only minutes after the first confirmation of my setting knowledge to understand how helpless I really was.

The Star Wars galaxy was large. Really, truly, humongously large. No, it wasn't any larger than the Milky Way... but it was inhabited to a far greater extent. There were a million planets passing the billion inhabitant mark, ten times as many that had any sort of interstellar trade, and forty times as many outposts, single-town colonies, and remote stations. The Republic was so large that being a successful interstellar trader required a million pages' worth of background knowledge just to be aware of the various ports you could do business in, and the Hyperspace routes were so complex that after a thousand generations of trading, the government itself did not have anywhere close to complete maps. In a civilization of that magnitude a single individual was utterly insignificant unless, through sheer damn luck followed by great ability and years of effort, they became famous enough to influence anything beyond planetary scale. Foreknowledge or no, simply getting noticed by someone important might be the result of a decade-long effort.

Sighing, I forgot about Tarkin and returned to my lessons. I had to learn a great deal before I could even risk moving around the ship, let alone influencing anything beyond personal scale.

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

As luck would have it (or was that the Force?), I retained a great deal of the girl's rudimentary knowledge. Remembering how to read and write Aurebesh - the common trade language - came within only a few hours. Math was largely the same, even if what was University-level courses back on Earth were basic knowledge for anyone in a technical job in Star Wars. Where I would have truly been lost without little Astra's hazy memories was Physics, Biochemistry, and Information Tech. Not only was the Star Wars universe millennia more advanced than anything back on Earth, the sciences themselves were different. Sure, the natural laws and basic principles themselves were the same - but only in general. The existence of Hyperspace alone complicated things immensely. In theory, it was an entirely different dimension with no bearing on the physical realm... as long as matter from it was not physically present. And millions of years of various civilizations using hypermatter in their star-drives, ship reactors, and weapons meant that significant amounts of it had been brought into reality. Concentrations of it created hyperspace anomalies, places where natural laws worked differently. Use of it in machines to cheat Einstein and Newton enabled cheap interstellar flight to begin with. And its effects all over the galaxy had resulted in the large-scale formation of natural metamaterials with properties that would give scientists back on Earth aneurysms. Memories not my own allowed me to navigate the complexities of a physics system full of situational exceptions, exceptions that no model could predict before some prospector in a newly explored backwater world literally stumbled upon.

In some ways though, the weird science the Star Wars universe was full of made things easier. I wasn't going to be some science Jesus that had to show to an entire Galaxy how stupid they were for not getting physics right, or for developing technology in outright stupid ways - more stupid than a thousand years of executive meddling from corporate masters that weren't scientists had made things, anyway. Discovering why things were the way they were was even fun. Also, learning new names for substances and phenomena I already knew of back on Earth was a good puzzle.

Heretical as it might seem, being a teenager again was a good thing. Astra Andrim had a good head when she decided to use it. While she knew a great deal about make-up, fashion, and alien cats, she knew just as much about ships. Daddy Andrim would probably be disappointed if he wanted her to become a merchant princess, but she would have had a good chance as an engineer. Not for the first time, I wondered if whatever unfathomable force (or Force) had brought me to the Star Wars galaxy had intentionally chosen someone close to my own personality. Was this similarity, at least on the surface, a coincidence? Or was Astra Andrim what I'd have become if I'd been born in another Galaxy?

It probably didn't matter. This whole thing, even if not a hallucination, was still a nightmare. I was a minor member of a noble family with ties to the Techno Union and the Trade Federation, with less than a decade left till the Clone Wars. The Techno Union was our parent company, and Daddy Andrim was owner and captain of one of the Federation's doughnut ships. We might be on a normal trade mission right now, but a few years down the line we'd either be rounded up and executed for sedition and rebellion, or be under the control of Sheev Palpatine, ol' Darth Frog-Face himself.

And with that happy thought, I returned to my lessons...