The sun went out a long time ago. Light it again.

Something ended here. The star is cold, nine worlds are empty, and the only voice left is P.O.R.T.I.A., the caretaker who kept this system through a hundred thousand dark years. What the people left behind is the light you are about to spend.

Light the star. Grow the worlds. Bring them home.

Choose the star's color and light it. Sweep falling stars out of the dark and spend what they leave. Buy back Mercury, Venus and Earth, seed life in the first sea, and watch brown continents turn green as the count climbs from thousands to billions. Then Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn and its moons, and the cold worlds past them.

When a star has given all it can, let it go. Your worlds, your people, your cities and the record stay. The stardust and the forges reset, and the next star begins brighter. Every star you have let go leaves a faint ring in the sky, so by the sixth one you are playing under a sky with a history.

Earth is not a number on a bar. When it passes three billion people, lights come on along one dark coast, and she asks you to name the city. From that night on, the world keeps its own record: the colony ship that left for Mars, the sea wall that was finished in time, the first vote. Leaders are elected by name and hold office for years. That first vote is put off a season, because nobody in the city has a family name yet, and she offers the only ones she has: the names the dead carried.

Mars gets the same care. The first domes come down in a canyon, beside the ice, or on the open plain, and each place has its own weather and its own trouble. Rocks fall; a watch buoy flares at them, and later the Moon Base opens satellites. Storms and floods come too, and a sea wall is a thing you can build. A world can be hurt. It is never emptied, and what was lost stays in the record.

Each city prints its own paper, the Almanac: the tides of the first sea, the phases of the Moon, the best week to plant beans, which it admits is a guess. Small news from a world that is alive again.

P.O.R.T.I.A. was built from a woman's mind, and the woman is still in there. She keeps a log of what matters to her: first lights, hard years, the things people name. Her notebook opens one page at a time. And when the settlement on a flood plain sends up flares, the transmission comes to you with three answers and no right one.

She never thanks you. She counts the windows.

It is an idle game. Leave it running, or close it: when you come back, up to a day of what happened is credited, and she gives you her Watch Report of what she saw while you were gone. Standard or Relaxed at the start, and a calm sky setting any time.

Four star colors at first light. 57 themes for the worlds (watercolor, noir, stained glass, cats) and 34 tones for the glass, all earned in play, none sold. 59 achievements, eleven of them secret.

Her radio, with a piano you can play. A harmonograph, a double pendulum, a prime spiral, and her tap. Sealed ciphers, a word search, constellations to chart in the sky, and a novella in nine chapters that opens as the stars go by.

None of it is required. All of it is aboard.

A solar system to keep, and someone to keep it with.