Editing Dale Arden (section)

==History==

===Term 1===
I could have been a great woman, if I hadn't been born rich.  You understand, most people on Drinax are rich by the standards of most of the worlds I've been to since I left.  The entire population isn't much more than a small town, so we build robots to be poor for us.  And if they follow through on giving them rights, I suppose the robots will have to build stupider robots to be poor for them.

In any case, Mother and Father were and are richer than most.  More importantly they're nobility, so they thought they'd have four or five children and see who had what it took for the next generation of service.  I was number two, and I grew up a normal child, raised by my robot nanny with visits every two or three days from Mother or Father and easy vid connections with other children my age.  I had a lot of fun, especially after I learned to turn nanny off, but eventually it was time to grow up.

Administration never appealed to me.  The thought of managing other people, organizing their lives for them, well frankly it's the most boring thing imaginable.  Being a soldier would have been an honorable career, but I hate violence.  That left a career in the sciences.  I don't think most citizens of the Imperium realize how much science has become the great religion of our age.  Understood by so few, but regarded with the reverence usually reserved for temples and churches in more primitive cultures.  And religion... well that's a traditional career for the second child, yes?

So I went to the Academy.  Pardon the bragging, but I've always been something of a genius and the program only sharpened my mind, as well as filling in a few educational gaps I'd neglected in my misspent youth.  I initially majored in Life Sciences, maybe in reaction to how boring the ecology of my homeworld was.  Soon enough I got to do some field work and fell in love with archeology.  Our galaxy has an imaginable past and humanti history is such a shallow surface crust on the soil of deep time.  I left that work behind a long time ago, but I suppose I never lost the passion for it.

===Term 2===
Perhaps calling the senior researcher a moron was too harsh, I was young, passionate, and used to speaking my mind.  The old moron was too stupid to be offended, of course, but his handlers saw to it that I was assigned to a small bio-research station to serve out my sentence for lack of politeness as a physician's assistant.  It was there that I met Joshua.  Even younger than me and so terribly, terribly earnest.  A quality that, I must say, he never really lost.  I did and do find it endearing.  On his end, I think he's always been captivated by my natural grace, beauty, and intelligence.  This is my story, and I say he is!

But I digress.  I was told that if I could just keep his little ship on the world for an extra few weeks, I could get off that rock a year or two early and advance my career in the bargain.  I had it half-way done too, a little fake bio-plague that would have kept them locked down in quarantine, but the it turns out that Josh's family hailed from the nobility of Arden.  Which just let's say my family name is no coincidence.  So of course I had to help him out.  I told him about the plot, and he was able to leverage the information into an early release for the ship.  We kept in touch since then, in our travels about the galaxy.

I never told him that I found out who was behind that little conspiracy, hacked their computers, and destroyed their financial records.  So naughty of me, not to mention highly illegal, but that delightfully earnest smile of his makes me want to help every time.  [1][/I]

===Term 3===
Databases have always sung to me, and I put the talent to good use in assignment to investigate some very high tech ruins on a primitive world.  We were making good progress in getting our machines talk to their ancients ones, but not enough for me.  I thought the low tech natives had answers they weren't sharing, secrets they must have possessed from living so close for so long.  I pushed hard.  Too hard.  Among us civilized folk, blackmail is a delicate game of move and countermove.  There are places in the galaxy, though, where all it gets you is a spear to the face.

I lost an eye, others lost their lives.  If I were the ice queen some have called me, no doubt I would have carefully covered up the evidence.  Found someone else to blame.  That's how these things are done.  Instead I confessed everything and left the Academy in disgrace.  It was a dark time for me, as I slunk back home to have my eye regrown.

It was at this juncture in my life that I met Zemmy Zarkov, at that time working as a doctor.  Zemmy is many things.  Smart, crazy, creative, a thief, a brilliant doctor, a cultural chameleon, and afraid of only one thing in this galaxy- did I mention crazy?  He's a hopeless addict, afraid to face his own mortality, and I think convinced that the lack of lines on his face means that his soul is still pure.  Over the years I've run into him more times than coincidence should allow, usually when he was desperate for help to score his next anagathic fix. [2]

Why is he my friend?  It's a hard question.  I suppose because no matter how little my troubles are compared to his, he treats them as though they mean something.  And because, though I've never needed a body buried, I'm confident that if I did he'd show up with a spade and no questions asked.  Zemmy's that kind of guy.

===Term 4===
So remember when I said that I could have been a great woman, if I hadn't been born rich?  It was right then, right there, that a great woman would have picked herself up and rushed out to take on the universe.  I could have tried forcing myself back into academics, become a spy or a master criminal, started a second career, something.  Instead I drifted.  In style, of course.

When you're born rich, it's easy to avoid taking on the universe.  I settled back, studied the web of communication and obligation that define what is referred to as the nobility, and I took some time off to bum around the galaxy.  Lots of folks were glad to see Dale Arden.

Still, I was new to the scene and I made a mistake.  Something I thought would be funny turned deadly serious, and a certain relative of mine has wanted me dead for it ever since.  Really most sincerely dead, not just socially dead.  Good thing for me I have such finely tuned survival instincts.  And that I know when to double-down on a good hand.

===Term 5===
After three or four years, I returned to an old love.  I've always been fascinated by AIs and information storage and how something with no physical existence can have such a strong reality.  At great expense I developed some specialized programs and started a little side business.  When the moment was right, I would stroke the computers so sweetly they'd give up the secrets of noble waters I swam through.  It's amazing how much you can tell about a person just from where in the data-sphere their computer has been swimming.  Sometimes I sold these secrets.  Sometimes I kept them for myself.  And sometimes passing them to the right ear earned favors and status like you would not believe.

===Term 6===
Prying out the secrets of my fellow nobles turned into quite the lucrative hobby.  I began supplementing my computer investigations with a little of the old-fashioned variety of observation and asking the right questions, using some of the skills from my old archeology career in quite the new context.  But then one day I got asked to go after some really big fish by folks who had no business knowing what I was capable of.  I left flattery overtake common sense and screwed up, hard.  And, well, it didn't make those folks very happy.  Not happy very happy at all.

So maybe it's time to begin a third career, somewhere safely away from the party circuit.  First I was scientist, then a nosy bitch.  Maybe... maybe it's not too late to be a great woman yet.