Editing Dale Arden (section)

===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.