They were your only family, and though you mourned the loss of your brothers and sisters they helped you move on. You graduated from MIT with a master... degree in astrophysics just three days before it happened, one morning, Gramma and Grampa didn't wake up. The cause of death was listed as 'heart attack' but you know the truth, they just decided it was time. The reading of the will happened three weeks later, and you were shocked. It wasn't that you were the sole beneficiary, other than a few. "Aw, put a sock in it, Mel. I wanted to see my old buddy here. He doesn't mind, do ya, John?" Uh," I said. Brodie swung his glass towards me, nearly spilling the rest of his wine over the table. "See that? A real friend right there."The rest of the night was a blur. Monica brought forth more appetizers, which Melvin and Brodie wolfed down and Elaine took small, polite bites out of. All three of them were equally eager to drink, though I think for very different reasons. Elaine seemed. I was afraid she would tell me that she loved that son of a bitch I almost killed, so I cut her out of my life. Ruben was a casualty of that fear: if he came, she would come with him and I would be able to see the truth in her eyes. That would have killed me then.Now I had some things to consider. Eileen told me when she visited that Nancy had sold the house and moved to a small town east of Columbus. She and Ruben lived alone and Nancy had gone to work at a vet's office. I wondered about that,. Watchers were placed on the planet, to record and study its people and guard against outside interference. It's easy to become a powerful figure on a planet with inferior knowledge and technology, and this was precisely what the Societal Conservation Board was set up to prevent. The cultures lowest social caste were slave girls. Slave girls were selectively bred for specific physiological and psychological traits. The slave-wardens of Acteon also developed a drug that the female slaves ingested.