Happy New Year and Note on the Next Episode

Apologies to everyone for the long delay since the last episode. I got distracted putting the "finishing touches" on some math notes, and those finishing touches took far longer than I had expected.

I also realize that the ongoing conversation between Alana and Karkov has grown quite large and risks becoming tedious if unpunctuated. The conversation has a couple more episodes to go, but I decided to first issue a standalone chapter that has a bit more action in it. Originally, this chapter was supposed to appear either as an epilogue to book 2 or a prologue to book 3. However, this seems like a good place to stick it in for a change of pace.

For the record, the President and year in this chapter are intentionally left unspecified. It was conceptualized quite a while ago and should not be construed as related to current events, even if there are some coincidental superficial similarities.