Rating: As a whole, Stardust is rated E due to mature themes (smut, trauma, violence, etc.). Content warnings can be found directly on applicable chapters. Please be mindful of your media consumption; take care of yourself.
Chapter: 1/__ (ongoing; currently paused)
Chapter 2 | Stardust masterlist
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Summary
Special Operations Executive (SOE) Agent Danica Magennis is determined to prove she's just as—if not more—capable as her male counterparts. When she finds herself on the World War II battlefront, she believes this is her chance...however, one charming, American Sergeant soon becomes a distraction she wasn't prepared for.
Sergeant James "Bucky" Barnes has never met anyone quite like Danica. She's clever, strong, beautiful...and completely immune to his flirtatious ways. At first, he simply enjoys playfully bantering with the feisty redhead, but it doesn't take long for a friendship to form.
As the War rages, the pair continue to grow closer...until one night—and one mission—changes everything.
When they reunite after decades apart, will they find solace in each other's arms, or are some things just too broken to salvage?
NOVEMBER 10, 1943 — DANICA
"Dani, you should have seen Steve's face when Stark suggested we have a 'late-night fondue'."
My tentmate by assignment and friend by choice—one Agent Margaret "Peggy" Carter—lets out a soft, ladylike chuckle as she rolls her eyes...no doubt at Howard Stark's shameless attempt at flirting. She continues speaking as she gathers two large photographs and exits our tent.
"Then he just leapt from the plane as if it was nothing!" She pauses, the small smile that had curved her lips slowly fading as we approach the main tent and hear Colonel Phillips speaking, along with the clacking of typewriter keys.
"...unfruitful. As a result, I must declare Captain Rogers killed in action. Period."
Peggy halts just outside one of the open side flaps, inhaling deeply before squaring her shoulders and stepping inside. I follow her inside but remain by the entrance, standing with my back to one of the walls as I watch her approach the Colonel.
"The last surveillance flight is back," she informs him as she places the photographs onto one of the tables set up inside the tent. "No sign of activity."
The Colonel picks up one of the images, staring at it while he dismisses the man who was typing. "Go get a cup of coffee, Corporal."
"Yes, sir."
As the Corporal exits the tent—giving me a short nod as he passes—the Colonel resumes speaking.
"I can't touch Stark. He's rich. And he's the Army's number-one weapons contractor. You are neither one," he turns to Peggy.
"With respect, sir," her tone is firm, "I don't regret my actions. And I don't think Captain Rogers did either."
"What makes you think I give a damn about your opinions? I took a chance with you, Agent Carter. And now America's golden boy and a lot of other good men are dead 'cause you had a crush."
'What an arse,' I think; though I refrain from reacting outwardly, I internally roll my eyes.
"It wasn't that. I had faith," Peggy asserts.
"Well, I hope that's a big comfort to you when they shut this division down."
He and Peggy engage in a staring contest of sorts; Colonel Phillips is the first to look away, a hubbub outside drawing his attention.
"What the hell's going on out there?" he strides from the tent; after a beat, Peggy and I follow.
"Look who it is!" a man shouts.
Peggy turns to me, and though she quickly schools her expression, I don't miss the hopeful look on her face. It turns out she's right to be hopeful, because the cause of the ruckus soon becomes apparent: Captain Rogers and a group of men are striding towards us. Colonel Phillips steps forward to meet them, and Peggy is right behind. Knowing that she'll want a moment with Steve, I hang back slightly, doing what I do best and fading into the background. Several soldiers move closer, standing in front of me, though they don't completely obstruct my view; I'm still able to see Steve...and the sinfully handsome, dark-haired man standing close to him.
"Some of these men need medical attention," the tall blond says; amidst quiet calls for a medic, he continues. "I'd like to surrender myself for disciplinary action."
"That won't be necessary," Colonel Phillips replies.
"Yes, sir."
The Colonel turns and begins to walk away. "Faith, huh?" I hear him ask Peggy as he passes.
She waits a moment, then steps forward. "You're late."
Steve holds up a broken radio. "Couldn't call my ride."
"Hey! Let's hear it for Captain America!" the dark-haired man shouts.
The troops all cheer and clap in response, with several surging forward to pat Steve on the shoulder...but he and Peggy just stare at one another. Meanwhile, I notice that one of the nurses has approached the other man and is standing close, speaking to him as she claps for Steve.
'Of course Charlotte would move straight for him,' I think, surprised at the surge of jealousy I feel. 'Don't be like that, Danica,' I scold myself.
Eventually, the crowd disperses, though Steve and Peggy remain. I watch as the dark-haired man follows Charlotte to one of the medical tents, the nurse tittering as they go.
'Yes, because a man who was just rescued from HYDRA needs to be bedding a woman.'
As soon as the thought enters my mind, I once again admonish myself.
'You don't get to dictate how someone reacts to trauma. And, honestly, can you really blame the man? He probably needs to shut off his mind...to feel comforting physical contact after what he's endured.'
'I'll happily provide that,' a part of me sassily adds, and I feel my cheeks pink slightly.
'Stop it.'
Peggy turns from Steve, catching me staring after Charlotte and the soldier. She gives me a pointed look, arching her brow; the expression on her face clearly tells me that she knows some—if not all—of my thoughts.
"Steve," she looks over her shoulder at the Captain before turning back to me, "this is Agent Magennis of SOE. D—Agent Magennis, this is Captain Rogers."
"Steve," he says as he shakes my hand.
"Danica," I reply.
After a few moments of exchanging pleasantries, the three of us part ways, with Peggy and I returning to our tent. As we begin to pack our belongings—though the order to clear out hasn't been given yet, under the circumstances it's obvious that a return to England is in the not-too-distant future—she attempts to draw me into conversation.
“Dani, can you believe that Steve rescued those men all by himself?! Isn’t that incredible?!”
“Mm-hmm,” I noncommittally reply.
“And can you…”
Peggy’s voice fades into the background as my mind drifts, and while I ‘mm-hmm’ and nod at appropriate times during her monologue, I’m content to let her blather on. She doesn’t seem to pay any mind to my near-silence, never missing a beat in her gushing about the Captain, which allows my mind to fully focus on the thoughts swirling within it…thoughts of that absurdly-good-looking, dark-haired soldier.
'Stop it,' I again tell myself. 'A man who looks like that is definitely an operator. I mean, it's obvious that he and Charlotte were going t—"
"Agent Carter! Agent Magennis!" Colonel Phillips's voice carries through the open flap of our tent, pulling me from my thoughts.
Peggy and I exchange a look, then—with matching sighs—make our way to the main tent.
NASA heliophysics AI foundation model launched to support scientists, enhance space weather forecasting
NASA has launched Surya, its new heliophysics artificial intelligence foundation model to empower solar scientists with tools to enhance research and space weather forecasting. Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo led a team of scientists from several institutions and universities who played a crucial role in tailoring the scientific data and validating a powerful application to predict solar activity such as coronal mass ejections and other space weather events.
"Surya is like the visual GPT (generative pretrained transformer) for heliophysics," said Muñoz-Jaramillo, a solar scientist fluent in project leadership and machine learning. He works in SwRI's Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. "We trained the model using vast amounts of high-resolution Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) data. This beautiful imagery reveals the activity of the sun and provides insight into the underlying physics creating it."
NASA's SDO is designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously. Developed by NASA in partnership with IBM and others, Surya is an important step forward in helping predict space weather, which can severely affect power, communication, aviation and agricultural operations.
"The sun contains a variety of structures, all governed by the same basic yet complex physics," Muñoz-Jaramillo said. "If you look at a movie of the sun, you start recognizing elements such as active regions that are bright in ultraviolet or dark in visible light. You see loops and coronal holes. These structures repeat because they are produced by the same physics.
"With Surya, we are training an AI model to learn the visual language of the sun, to establish relationships between various structures to better understand the overall solar environment."
For the last 15 years, SDO has been continuously collecting high-resolution data using three instruments across multiple wavelengths to better understand solar activity and its effect on space weather. The only feasible way to truly exploit such massive data is with AI models. NASA is encouraging the science and applications community to test and explore this AI model for innovative solutions that leverage the unique value of continuous, stable, long-duration datasets.
Surya is part of NASA's Chief Science Data Officer's 5+1 strategy for AI, building foundation models for each science division, plus one large language model tying them together to accelerate discovery and decision-making. NASA's Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) AI under the Office of Data Science and Informatics at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, jointly developed Surya's AI architecture with IBM and a collaborative science team.
"We are advancing data-driven science by embedding NASA's deep scientific expertise into cutting-edge AI models," said Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA article. "By developing a foundation model trained on NASA's heliophysics data, we're making it easier to analyze the complexities of the sun's behavior with unprecedented speed and precision."
"The 12 members of the science team developed performance metrics, while the overall Surya team leveraged the experience of building IMPACT AI's first foundation model for Earth science data, focused on satellite imagery about climate and landmasses," Muñoz-Jaramillo said.
"Improving on the first model, the heliophysics model included scientists at every step in the development process, as well as changing the task used to teach the model from filling gaps to predicting the future."
The system was trained using nine years' worth of data from SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument. The science team enhanced full resolution data, correcting for instrument degradation or other data anomalies, while ensuring that it was temporally and spatially aligned.
"Surya uses transformer AI model architecture to revolutionize and add meaning to the data," Muñoz-Jaramillo said.
The goal is to determine how the sun's magnetic field is generated and structured and how its stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles and variations in the solar irradiance.
Ultimately, Surya could be extended beyond solar imagery to incorporate magnetograms, irradiance, and other heliophysics datasets—laying the foundation for a unified AI model of the sun–heliosphere system.
"Translating the visual language may be kind of like translating a GPT from Spanish to Portuguese, languages that are very similar," Muñoz-Jaramillo said. "It requires work, but it can be done."
TOP IMAGE: NASA and IBM led the development of a groundbreaking new heliophysics AI model, validated by a team of scientists from eight American institutions led by Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo. This powerful tool uses ground-truth SDO data to forecast solar evolution. These images compare the ground-truth data (right) with model output (center) for solar flares — the events behind most space weather. Preliminary results suggest that Surya has learned enough physics to predict the structure and evolution of a solar flare by looking at its beginning phase (left). Credit: NASA/SDO/IBM/Marshall Space Flight Center
LOWER IMAGE: Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo led science team efforts to validate Surya, a first-of-its-kind heliophysics foundation AI model using a wide range of scientific downstream applications. The goal is to provide the heliophysics community with a powerful tool enhancing the ability to predict and understand complex solar phenomena that impact technological society and life on Earth. The model uses ground-truth SDO data to forecast solar evolution. Credit: NASA/SDO
Since Elon Musk announced that he’ll be stepping back from his daily work with DOGE, perhaps you’ve been wondering if he has anything else to fill that time now that he’s shut down operations at America’s humanitarian-aid provider, wrecked much of the nation’s scientific-research infrastructure, and disrupted the communications systems at the Social Security Administration. One way to find out would be to ask Grok, his entry in the A.I. sweepstakes. “Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has been making significant moves in Memphis,” Grok reports. “But these have sparked controversy.”
Indeed they have. Last year, Musk’s team secured an abandoned factory that used to belong to Electrolux, the vacuum-cleaner people on the edge of the city’s Boxtown neighborhood. As Musk explained at the time, “That’s why it’s in Memphis, home of Elvis and also one of the oldest—I think it was the capital of ancient Egypt.” With typical modesty, he renamed his vacuum factory Colossus, and started stuffing it with Nvidia graphics-processing units, or G.P.U.s, the basic building blocks of A.I. systems. At the moment, he has two hundred thousand of these G.P.U.s, and he’s headed for a million; by some estimates, he is expected to build the “largest supercomputer” in the world.
All that processing takes power to run, and so the xAI team moved about thirty-five mobile methane-gas-powered generators onto the site to support the data center. These are truck-mounted units, many of them designed by Caterpillar, which give off some of the same brew of pollutants as other gas-combustion device—including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde—and which are currently operating without a permit. “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” the Southern Environmental Law Center said, in a report released in April. (Full disclosure: I volunteer every year to judge the S.E.L.C.’s Phil Reed prize for best environmental writing about the South). The S.E.L.C. has called for an “emergency order” from the city to require xAI to cease the use of these generators, with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar daily fine if the company refuses. The mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, a supporter of the project, addressed the concerns at a meeting with community members in March. “I want to figure out how we can exploit this project for us,” he said. “I know you all feel like it’s us getting exploited, but we need to speak from a place of strength.” After the S.E.L.C. issued its report, Young explained that the company has a permit application pending with the Shelby County Health Department to run fifteen generators. “There are thirty-five, but there are only fifteen that are on,” he said. “The other ones are stored on the site.”
It turns out that Young may be wrong about that number. SouthWings, a group of volunteer pilots who help monitor environmental problems, overflew the site with thermal-imaging equipment that showed at least thirty-three of the generators giving off lots of heat—indicating that they were fired up and running at the same time. (Young’s office and xAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Taken together, they would produce about four hundred and twenty megawatts of power—the equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s big gas-fired power plant nearby.
Memphis was, indeed, home to Elvis—but it was also, of course, where Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to the city to support striking sanitation workers, was assassinated, and it remains a place of sharp economic and racial division. It will surprise no one to learn that the neighborhoods in South Memphis surrounding Musk’s facility—including Boxtown and Westwood—are predominantly Black and also home to a number of industrial facilities, including chemical plants and an oil refinery. The area already has elevated levels of pollution compared with leafier precincts, and, according to Politico’s E&E News, “already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.” Those same neighborhoods came together at the beginning of the decade to fight, and ultimately defeat, the proposed forty-nine-mile-long crude-oil Byhalia pipeline, which would have run through the area. In that process, a new political star emerged: Justin Pearson, a young African American who rode that battle into the state legislature (from which he was later expelled for joining an anti-gun-violence protest on the floor of the Tennessee House after a shooting at a Christian school, only to soon be reappointed by the county and reëlected to office in the next election).
Pearson and his brother KeShaun, the director of a group called Memphis Community Against Pollution, are now helping lead the fight against xAI. They were prominent voices at a town hall of the Shelby County Health Department in late April, which a local NBC affiliate described as “unlike any other town hall in recent memory, with dozens of Shelby County sheriff’s deputies, Memphis police officers and Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers standing inside and outside of Fairley High School.” Citizens were allowed two minutes each to speak, but there were no responses to questions; after two hours the proceedings ended.
A company spokesman was shouted down at the meeting, but his written statement insisted that “XAl is going above and beyond the required emission control requirements. The Solar SMT-130 turbines will be equipped with SoLoNOx dry low emissions (D.L.E.) technology and selective catalytic reduction (S.C.R.) systems that lower nitrogen oxides (NOx) to 2 ppm.” The “Solar” here, though, has nothing to do with the power source—it’s the name of Caterpillar’s turbine division, which stems from the Solar Aircraft Company, founded in the late nineteen-twenties, whose name was derived from the fact that it was based in sunny San Diego.)
“I feel like my community is being disrespected,” Justin Pearson (whom I got to know during the Byhalia fight) told me in an e-mail. “I feel like my friends and neighbors and family members are being ignored—both by xAI itself and city leaders championing this data center that is emitting pollution into our air. Some of those leaders have mentioned the money that xAI will supposedly bring to Memphis, but what good is money if we have to struggle with polluted air? As the elders here say, ‘All money ain’t good money.’ ” He added, “Folks are angry and fearful. Some neighbors have expressed fear about letting children play outside or not enjoying time in their backyards because they don’t know what kind of pollution is in the air.”
Had Musk wanted to proceed differently, he could have. A report last year, from researchers at a number of energy and tech firms, made it clear that building arrays of solar microgrids is a quick and highly affordable plan for powering such data centers. “While building off-grid solar microgrids of this magnitude would be a first, it’s very possible to do with technology that exists today, and to scale it quickly,” the researchers found. They actually looked at Musk’s Memphis project and concluded that its use of portable gas generators was at best a one-off solution: “Most users of rental power plan to transition once possible because this approach carries very high costs and generally reliability is lower than permanent infrastructure.”
But cost is evidently not a big issue for Musk. (DOGE claims to have saved a hundred and sixty billion dollars in government spending, but a new analysis by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that it only did so at a cost of a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars, because it has operated so quickly and ineptly.) Neither, judging from DOGE’s performance, is saving lives, but he could help do so in Memphis, if he wanted to. Pearson says, “Solar panels and battery storage would be a much cleaner alternative to methane gas turbines. Solar panels also don’t pump smog-forming pollution or chemicals like formaldehyde into nearby communities.”
More to the point, Musk’s actions in Memphis seem to presuppose that his experience in Washington will prove typical. There, he managed to enact his slash-and-burn damage in a few short weeks before leaving town, albeit with an approval rating even lower than the President’s. In Tennessee, he’s running into forces seasoned by several generations of struggle. During the Byhalia-pipeline dispute, Pearson recalled, “a representative from the pipeline company called my community the ‘path of least resistance.’ It seems like corporations don’t expect us to fight back, but we’ve proven that wrong time and time again. We’re going to do it again.”
What department of the csp foundation would be responsible for monitoring and investigating og miku and all the sekais?
The artificial intelligence applications division? I am not sure if the vocaloids are artificial intelligence but for what I understand the sekai are technological in general.
Or it would be the The Department of Mythology and Folkloristics, they manage human culture and miku is part of world music culture so maybe?
Hm I'm not sure... It's explicitly stated that although they are accessed through phones, SEKAI are a physical construct that is not supernatural or technological, strongly suggesting an alternate dimension. I'm not sure if either of those would cover it, is there one for cross-dimensional shit? If not and I had to pick one then I guess the second one?
On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater.
It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen — a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit — not only had no law degree, but didn’t exist at all.
The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute.
“The appellant has submitted a video for his argument,” said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. “Ok. We will hear that video now.”
The New York State Supreme Court First Judicial Department Appeals Division listens to an AI-generated avatar address the court. Appellate Division, First Department/YouTube
On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater.
“May it please the court,” the man began. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.”
“Ok, hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said. “Is that counsel for the case?”
“I generated that. That’s not a real person,” Dewald answered.
It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased.
“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir,” Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off.
“I don’t appreciate being misled,” she said before letting Dewald continue with his argument.
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