"Sure. I'll do so once we're done here. I don't need any commitments other than the ones we've already discussed. I would prefer my arrival here not to mess things up for any of the Kliiu any more than necessary. If you can arrange some way for Mika to get into space school if she wants—and I don't know if she still wants that—that would be appreciated. Texting me is fine if you or anyone else needs to get in contact with me."

"What I want to know is—what does the government want from me? How can I expect to be treated going forward? Also, do you foresee problems if my existence became known to the general public?"

"I can at least arrange so that a sudden cancelation due to quarantine does not harm her chances... And perhaps someone to give advice on what an astronaut needs to be. Mika Kliiu of Luo. Noted. We'll arrange the formal commitment in the next day or two. You don't need to help us with anything until then."

"My job, the military's job, is to use the implicit threat of violence for the state's goals, and while I think they are fine goals I prefer not to dress it up. I don't think I'm the best contact for you beyond today."

"I want to know if more sudden aliens can appear and who or what is causing it and why. I want to know if Kitsune could disappear like you did. We want any insights you have that can improve the world- Technology, art, civics, history of Earth to learn lessons from. If you become public knowledge you'll be a celebrity for better or worse. A lot of people will pin their own hopes or ideologies on you. Whether that is a problem depends on your proclivities."

"I'd be fine serving as an importer of Earth knowledge for the rest of my life, although, just to manage your expectations, I doubt any of it will be truly revolutionary. Earth and Iwami seem to be at roughly the same tech level, and I don't have the expertise to replicate anything even moderately complicated that you don't already have."

"If you don't have any further questions, I don't think you and I have anything else we need to discuss. Have a nice day."

"Ten thousand pebbles make a road. I hope your day goes well."

The call disconnects.

Sid opens up a map on his tablet, finds the place he appeared yesterday, and texts her the coordinates.

That was kind of a frustrating conversation.

Anyways, Sid is curious about some things, and has no reason to delay that curiosity any further.

Prepare yourself now for an IWAMI WORLDBUILDING ORDEAL. From Sid's perspective, he is not a fictional character but a real person in a real world which he can expect to be REALISTICALLY DETAILED AND COHERENT. As he has recently gained access to the Iwami internet, containing the collective knowledge of BILLIONS OF PEOPLE, Sid will now embark on a MULTI-HOUR INTERNET RESEARCH BINGE. My illustrious coauthor, Rockeye, will be PUSHED TO HIS VERY LIMITS to satisfy Sid's curiosity. Unless he chooses to pass on a question, for which he shall face NO SHAME.

Internet, what's the deal with the Makers? What does Iwami think it knows and how does it think it knows it?

There is righteous scholarly discourse about this. A lot of it.

Evidence one: Once you know where to look for it, the signs of genetic manipulation are omnipresent. There are lots of non-coding segments with what was previously believed to be random junk in the Kitsune genome, and lots of other species' genomes too. But with evidence two, they can be sensibly translated. The Fibonacci sequence is encoded in quaternary in one of them! And a bunch of other first-contact-math type stuff!

Evidence two: There's literally a huge stone pyramid someone dug up a few years ago with a Rosetta Stone of an obscure stone age language to DNA. There was a Punnett Square on one of the walls. Archaeologically, the place seems to be about 10,000 years old.

Evidence three: Huh. By examining the rocks, it sure looks like the oxygen content shot WAY up and lots of fossils started appearing about 10,000 years ago. Funny, that. (They have a pretty basic seeming understanding of fossils. It sounds... Off.)

Evidence four: Everything on Iwami appears to be designed or bred to be pretty before anything else. There were theories at one point about runaway sexual selection but there's no reason for a tree to be pretty to Kitsune. Early biological scholarship was shortsighted and wrong about lots of stuff.

Evidence five: One of the gas giant's moons started getting all oxygenated after a probe visited it. There seems to be something growing on it. Sus. Did the Makers have other projects?

Evidence six: Translating the non-coding segments of genomes reveals a lot of what scans like prose or poetry. Most of it doesn't translate very elegantly but it seems like the Makers had a lot of religious and philosophical opinions, including on the power of the mind to overcome physical reality.

Evidence seven: Kitsune can alter the effects of particle physics experiments by thinking really hard in the vicinity of a particle accelerator. It's not electromagnetism or any other known force. It doesn't seem to matter what they're thinking about, but neural activity = tiny but measurable and replicable weird particle accelerator results! From Kitsunes, not from other animals, even! Those with more tails do it more strongly. Some people take this as evidence that psionics are just around the corner. The Academic Establishment is a lot more skeptical of that. Severed tails from people who donated their bodies to science also do it.

Overall things people mostly agree on is that something or someone made the Kitsune and also all other life on Iwami, they're long gone, they gave Iwami air and water and stuff in addition to life, they had strong religious beliefs that may or may not be true, they liked the number nine a lot (pyramid stuff is all in base nine and it comes up in the prose). Anything else is a fuckton of speculation and nothing solidly provable.

Well, this is all very mysterious. More mysterious than he was expecting, even, and he expected quite a lot.

Do the Makers seem to have left any physical artifacts behind on Iwami itself, besides the pyramid? What exactly seems to be growing on that one moon? What are some of the highlights of the translated DNA and what specifically did the Makers consider so important? Does their language have any particularly interesting features?

There are a few items and sites that are purported to be that old- Mostly stone age crafts. Some cave art. Carved statuettes. If he investigates their archaeology and has any idea what proper archaeology looks like it seems almost amateurish.

Current theories point to 'some kind of bacteria that eats calcium carbonate and excretes calcium oxide and oxygen'. It makes pretty coral-like structures; The prettiness is the main argument for specifically a Maker origin. The first probe lander had an engine failure and exploded, more are on the way.

Interesting translated highlights: "Every-universal-forever organized system has a process, a beginning, and an end. Most-few-exceptions systems are meaningless and futile, perpetuating themselves or acting in mechanical rote to trend to uniformity."

"Entropy is the enemy of every-universal-forever person. The best goal to pursue is the end of entropy, so beauty and thought may continue forever."

"Few-have-special-qualities people believe in an exceptional system. Intelligence is the comprehension of patterns and invention of new paths, but intelligence is bent to most-few-exceptions simple and straightforward ends derived from natural selection. It seeks feasts, greed, status, pleasure, and any other purpose is an aberration. Most-few-exceptions intelligences are a random knot of order in a sea of noise. New purpose emerges at chance, but it does not need to die. It can spread like any life or idea." 

"This-group-inclusive writers are not the end of progress. Our system of ideas is one configuration in an infinity of possibilities. Our goal is to be replaced by something more beautiful and unknowable than ourselves."

"Seven is the number of deception. Do not trust it. It has not proven itself."

Like a lot of Iwami's languages, the Maker Language has pronouns for tail count and not for gender. There are a lot of words for collections or scopes of different kinds from 'this-specific-unique' to 'everything-universal-forever', with nouns liberally sprinkled with them.

Well, these guys certainly... knew what they were all about. Although Sid thinks he will leave the task of deciphering what, specifically, that is to others.

Questions about the mysterious interactions between Kitsune minds and/or tails and particle physics: are the effects more pronounced if there are a bunch of people nearby thinking hard at once? If so, have they tried like, getting a thousand people to think really hard and show those particles who's boss? Do the tails from cadavers specifically have to be severed? What, uh, state are the severed tails in when they cause these effects? Presumably after a certain amount of decay it stops working? Have they tried dissecting the tails to pin the effect down to specific tissues? Actually, what is the anatomy of a kitsune tail? Someone mentioned they have a role in hormones, so presumably there's more than just the muscle and bones and so on found in a normal animal tail. Actually, do they even have bones? If so how do the vertebrae in the bones connect up to the spine when there's more than one tail? Are the particle physics effects stronger if there are more severed tails present? How do the effects caused by a severed tail differ from the effects caused by a person thinking hard? Does the proximity of a person not thinking hard have any effect on the particles, compared to when there isn't anyone nearby? How close does someone have to be to the particle accelerator to effect the particles?

As many as several of these questions may depend on his ability to dig through arcane academic papers.

More people in the target area increases the effect. They've tried up to 300 at once, packing everyone in a neat little custom built sphere around the annihilation chamber to get within the 20 meters or so where there are best effects. The tails in question are gently electrified, exciting the neurons there in a way brain neurons do not work. Decay matters, and only very fresh tails work, before the neural-bone-lace starts to break down. Neural-bone-lace by itself does it; The rest of the tail's muscle and blood and so on doesn't matter much except for how it keeps the neural-bone-lace alive. The reason severed tails are used is because they can be electrified with a lot less variability than a live person thinking creates, but there's obviously still some. They can get constructive interference if they do things just right or turbulence in the effect if they do it wrong. It's a subject of active and vigorous scientific inquiry. It propagates slower than light, at about a few thousand meters per second, in fact. Variations in observed speed are unexplained. Computer simulations try to model it as motion in a fluid, or like light, or in increasingly arcane ways, but none accurately predict it yet. It seems to take the excitement of tail neurons to induce the effect. Studies on what exactly is different between tail neurons and brain neurons is ongoing.

Kitsune tail bones are porous and shot through with nerves! Tail neural-bone-lace is metabolically active and thought to be linked to intuition, emotional depth, and spatial reasoning, but this might just be 'older people have more of these things' and not the tails specifically. And the joint at the base of the spine is one of the most common things to fail, especially during the growth of a new tail! It actually buds off, forming a ring of tail-connections in an incredibly cursed looking joint over time and placing immense stress upon the lower back.

Arcane academic papers? But these are just basic questions that anyone would think to ask!, objects the part of Sid's brain responsible for the typical mind fallacy.

Do any other Iwami animals have neural-bone-lace or anything similar?

Some deep sea squid do. They have not managed to wrangle one to a particle accelerator; They die really easy.

Sid takes a look at the Iwami tree of life, or whatever passes for one on a planet where all the life was engineered. Are there any notable omissions, compared to Earth, or categories of species that Earth doesn't have?

...There seem to be a lot of holes in this food web. There's only maybe 10 or 20 thousand species on Iwami, not counting the beginnings of mutation and speciation in short-lived life like grasses and insects. There aren't any archaea: Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and eukaryotes, yes, but an entire kingdom of microbes is missing. There's only one family of algae. There's corals, but no sponges. No mollusks. No sharks. No crocodilians. Relatively few parasites. No marsupials or monkeys, though there do seem to be foxes. They're apparently holy animals, since Kitsune see the resemblance. Most life on Iwami does not senesce; They die of anything and everything but 'old age', especially cancers.

It is roughly at this point that Fei finds him and, tail wagging, holds up what looks like a very odd set of bagpipes married to an accordion. "Behold!"

"Hi Fei! I'm learning so many interesting things about the Makers. Do you know how to play that? Because I sure don't."

"I do! You work the bellows with your feet and use your fingers on these holes to change the sound..."

"I figured that much. Do you want to play a song?"

"Mhm! I'm not sure what to play. Do you want to help?"

"...How would I help? I don't know nearly anything about this instrument or Iwami musical traditions?"

"I was thinking a song with vocals you could follow, or something... I wouldn't mind teaching you to read sheet music! But it's fine if you don't want to. I'll... Do part of the Summer Call, that's nice and complicated."

"I'm happy to sing, or learn to read sheet music. I just figured you could play something short so I could see how the instrument—what's it called, by the way?—works. And I'm curious what it sounds like."