I said that how I arrived on Earth matters. Let me explain what I mean. But first, let me tell you how people get assignments like this one.

If your planet or planet system–your polity, however constituted–is a member of the CHW, the the CDC assigns a career diplomat to the post. If your polity does not belong to the CHW, as is the case with Earth, then three things can happen. You can have no CDC representative. You can have one, like me, from a volunteer organization dedicated to difficult cases like yours. Or you can have some mercenary son of a bitch interested only in collecting a fee for keeping an eye on you and working the same deal on as many backwater buttholes of the universe as possible. Not to put too fine a point on it.

In the case of option three, your hero will be likely to have arrived on your world via QT, Quantum Teleportation. Quantum Entanglement Teleportation to be exact. I’m going to avoid the temptation to explain what that means. You’re just starting to get the hang of it here on Earth. Check these out:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3811785.stm

http://www.p-i-a.com/Magazine/Issue22/Physics_22.htm

The good news is that QT allows you to travel anywhere in the galaxy literally instantaneously. Cool, huh? Then why doesn’t everybody travel that way? Enter the bad news. You’re not really travelling. Your body is being destroyed here and simultaneously constructed somewhere else out of identical but different materials. I said there were two types of person personning outposts like this. Ones that arrive the way I did and ones that arrive—as it were—on the QT.