The bewilderingly novel location is an enormous hexagonal floor thirteen kilometers on a side. Past the edge of the hexagon there is forest and distant mountains. In the center of the hexagon is a small building. She's conveniently about half a kilometer from the building.

Eru probably thinks he's very cute.

She heads for the building.

The large door of the building (about half again as tall as her and square) nevertheless opens easily. Inside there's a small pillar with a blue ring a bit below the upper edge. The room is otherwise empty and patterned in a hexagonal tessellation with colors varying from infrared to ultraviolet.

"...Hello?"

There's a sound a bit like an insect's buzzing but less regular from the pillar.

"...I don't understand, I'm sorry."

There's more buzzing and a light pulses inside the blue ring.

"Still don't understand."

An image of the room in miniature appears in the air with her in it. A line is imposed from her miniature's eyes to the blue ring.

Okay. She will stare at the blue ring.

There's a feeling not quite like osanwë but similar. Confusion. You arrived. You are similar to human. There is a deluge of images of creatures which look reminiscent of elves but shorter with a wider variety in hair styles than an Elf would consider comfortable or proper there is also hair on some of their faces.

...I'm not one of those, but they're not too far off.

You know about humans? You know how you arrived?

I don't know about humans, but they're not my species, they seem to have some differences according to your summary. I arrived via some kind of snake creature which ate me and this somehow resulted in my being here; this doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since it's not a normal occurrence.

I am disappointment. Humans and your arrival are mysteries I wish to be understanding.

I'm sorry I can't be of more help. Where am I?

This place is safe world. I chose this place to save humans to.

They're in danger?

Mother will damage their star and irradiate their world. They will not survive if not saved.

All of them? Why is your mother going to do that?

They have one world. Perhaps some could survive irradiation for a time. Some are burrowed deep. Mother will destroy them because All Mother demands or so say the books.

Why does All Mother demand that?

All Mother's gift of mind speech is not to be possessed by lesser beings. Humans will soon have mind speech. Mother will destroy before then.

...soon? How will they get it if they don't have it?

I do not understand the gift but the seeds of it are already within them. Mother has seen them.

Will your mother kill me too if she learns I exist?

Yes, Mother would destroy me too if she knew I was not dead.

I'm so sorry. Who is allowed to have telepathy, according to the books?

Our race. There is a montage of images of a large creatures with insectile features four legs and two large wings. Their coloring is a mostly black with stripes in a variety of colors.

So you'd be in danger because of wanting to protect humans, not for having telepathy.

I would not be destroyed as you would be, my ability to care for humans would be removed. It is seen as a weakness.

I see. How does she have the power to do that?

There are drugs which change how my race feels emotion and enhance our telepathy. All imbibe these when they come of age. It is said to focus us, to clear away childish desires.

Did you fake your death purposefully to avoid that?

Yes. Perhaps I would not have if I did not have something to lose my concern for.

I see. I think it's good that you care about the humans.

I agree. I doubt the books. Extinction seems too harsh a punishment for something they do not control. It is also confusing that All Mother would allow the gift to manifest in those she saw as unworthy.

Yes. In my world, there is an Allfather, and he made a lot of rules, many of which were foolish, for reasons of his own which didn't have anything to do with what incarnate peoples want or need. The intermediate gods, the Valar, have persuaded him otherwise since.

Have you met those you call gods? None claim to have spoken to the All Mother for many millennia.

Yes, I talk to the Valar almost every day and have spoken to Ilúvatar too.

I am shocked. Are you elevated among your people?

Not particularly.

I am shocked once more. What do you speak with your gods about?

I study them, especially how they think, and explain Elves to them where they don't understand yet.

I wonder if you could help me understand humans. I do not understand what they need. I have a computer translating the books from a building full of books on their world but that is a complex source to process. I also know what they need biologically but thinking creatures are not just their biological needs.

I've never met a human but I am willing to try to help.

Could you describe an interface which would be useful? I can reproduce the books physically or on a computer. I can also explain their anatomy and the needs they seem to have based on this.

Will your computers be difficult for me to use?

I can make computers with a visual, audio or telepathic interface. I think you should be able to give me your language so the computer will be understandable. Like this. There is a sense of a gift being held out for her to take.

...Mirelótë attempts to offer up Quenya.

Thank you. I should make fewer mistakes with your grammar now. What sort of interface would you prefer? The computer will be able to offer partial translations but some abstract concepts and specific terms are lacking translations.

I am used to computers like - So.

I can make something like that. I cannot make a device which interacts directly with the thing you call osanwë. Perhaps I could if I analyzed your biology. I can make a computer which can communicate as we are now. Is that what you would prefer?

This seems similar to osanwë, presuming it obeys the private thought distinction, and will work just as well.

I could not access your private thoughts without attacking you through mind speech or you willingly sharing them. I do not know if I would succeed if I tried and I do not wish to try attacking you, you have been nothing but kind. The computers will only understand things pushed to them.

Please do not try attacking me. Am I at risk of others attempting that?

I have no plans to. If my mother finds us she may try. No others of my race are on this world. I have considered awakening the gift of mind speech in those humans I rescue. I cannot guarantee their behavior nor how capable they would be.

Is there a way to defend against such attacks?

You defend against mind speech attacks by pushing back on their attack and controlling your mind so the thoughts you wish to hide are not on the surface. There are children's toys but they are toys. They are no substitute for practice against thinking creatures.

I see. If the risk increases I may wish to practice.

I would happily practice with you if you wish. I have made a computer for you. A tile lifts out of the floor and a small robot emerges carrying a computer that looks like the one she showed. It has a blue gem the same color as the ring. The robot offers the computer to her.

Thank you.

The computer presents access to books by translated title search (not available for all books), alphabetical in the human alphabet, and arrangement in the human library.

And Mirelótë starts reading titles.

There are mix of fiction and non-fiction works. The fiction is from several genres and frequently has untranslated words. The nonfiction at the beginning of the list has a high concentration of medical texts. 

How were these books selected?

I can look at Earth and scan small sections in a great deal of detail. I chose the building with these books in it because it had a great many books. It was one of the largest such buildings below my size limit in that part of the world.

A library, possibly. You did this to just one library? Why?

If I look at Earth too much I might be noticed. The risk for each glance is very small. But small risks add up.

I see. How would you be noticed?

There are slight signs left in the things I scan; if someone else scans those things before the signs fade they can notice them. Looking also subtly bends space and that can be noticed if someone is looking in the right place. The bend in space is extremely unlikely to be noticed unless someone first notices the other signs.

Who else is looking at Earth, just your mother?

She is certainly looking though how often or at what I cannot predict. I do not expect others to be looking but there is no guarantee. If others are looking that may disguise my activity or it may reveal it.

How many of your species are there?

I am not sure; my clan was a few thousand people. There are at least thousands of such clans.

Do they all adhere to the same books?

If they do not I did not hear of it but my knowledge of my race as a whole is limited. Hiding that knowledge is something my mother might have done. I believe that the booster drugs increase loyalty to clan.

Is there any precedent for not taking them?

Not that I know of. I don't believe I was intended to know as much about them as I do. I believe that I could separate the mind-altering effects of the drugs from improvements to mind-speech but in my current form that does not benefit me.

Your current form?

I left my body behind to deceive my mother. I exist in the computers I built in this place.

I see. My species can do that with Vala help but it's not common.

It is forbidden in the books to do as I have done. It was difficult to accomplish.

Are there reasons behind the things the books say to do or not do?

I am unsure; many of their dictates are justified as strengthening clan or self. It is the books which dictate that all young must pass the trial of the culling ivy. The books also forbid killing one's kin without strong cause. The books claim that casting your mind apart from your body leads to shirking your responsibilities in reality. It is similar to what they say about losing yourself in dreams.

Culling ivy?

There is a plant which allows one to practice dominating another with mind-speech. If you approach too closely without dominating it, it will eat you. One of the trials on the path to adulthood is to touch the culling ivy. Very few fail the trial. I played with it as a toy when I was younger. The books say it culls those unworthy of membership in the clan.

I see. It sounds unpleasant and difficult in many ways to grow up as one of you.

I did not find it so until I began to search for secrets I was not welcome to. I find deception unpleasant. The Ivy is more distressing in retrospect. When I was young, it was simply an enjoyable toy.

If Elves die, we can be brought back easily, but we still would not present children with a risk of being eaten.

I will not force the ivy on my children if I ever have them. The risk is small for those with enough skill though, much like flying in an obstacle course.

Can you come back, if you die?

Can humans?

There is nothing which preserves the minds of my people after we die, though as I've demonstrated it is possible to copy one's mind to a computer. I do not know if humans could be copied in the same way but I expect they could be. Nothing that I know of does this automatically and if my mother knew of such a thing she might seek to destroy it to ensure humanity is properly extinct. The books do not speak of life beyond death.

Do you know of any other sapient species?

Not in detail, there are other races my people have wiped out for one reason or another and some who have been passed over and allowed to do as they will. None seemed powerful enough to challenge my people so I choose not to seek them out lest I bring my people's wrath upon them. I copied the records my mother had; I can show you them if you wish.

Thank you. I'd like them on principle but humans are the priority now. I wonder if the best thing to do wouldn't be to get the Valar to help; what I'm not sure of is whether they can follow me here, since they haven't done so already.

It has only been a few seconds of outside time since you entered this building. I dilated time so there's more time to figure out what to do for the humans. Their world will be destroyed in two weeks of outside time.

Goodness. The Valar can't do that.

I'm unsure what that might mean for whether they could help. What sort of help do you imagine they could provide?

They're very generically powerful. That just happens not to be a power they have, and I don't know if it means that your people are more generically powerful or that you're using different underlying magic but otherwise couldn't stack up against them or that you have markedly different strengths and weaknesses with no clearly implied superior.

Our only magic is mind-speech and its successors. Bending time and space is something we do with technology.

I wonder if it is a difference between worlds, or if it's possible in mine too and simply hasn't been developed, like faster than light travel.

I wonder also. My people travel faster than light by warping space.

Valar and Maiar, which are like smaller Valar, can communicate with each other instantaneously, but cannot travel faster than light.

Why do you expect that faster than light travel will be developed?

One of my friends thinks he's onto something. He could be wrong, but he's very smart.

I wonder if his method will resemble ours.

I don't know enough about his project to predict that.

That's understandable. A pause. Should I let you get back to reading?

I can read and talk at the same time. She's still going through all the titles.

In that case I think I'll describe some of my goals. I'd like to give the humans all the tools they need to build out this world to their liking but I'd prefer to have a place where they can be safe and well taken care of before they take on that burden. Given how powerful some of my people's technology is I'm also reluctant to give it out without some evidence they'll be responsible with it.

Can you summarize how it is that you make things? And what the technology you have is like beyond what I've already learned?

We cannot create matter but we can reshape it once we've harvested it from other places. I'm powering this place by siphoning matter and energy from this system's star. With enough effort I could transmute elements or even sub-atomic particles but usually that's not needed and it's more efficient to harvest the needed elements. Most of our other technologies are similarly enabled by our ability to bend space and time. We slow down time in areas in order to preserve perishables and reinforce materials. Time manipulation combined with teleportation also allows for treating certain types of injuries in less time than would otherwise be possible.

What form would the effort take?

To transmute elements either requires extracting excess protons and neutrons from an element or introducing more, both can lead to instability without extreme precision. That kind of precision requires a lot of processing power and the energy cost isn't tiny either. I also didn't take my people's entire database so I'd have to derive the proper configurations for each transmutation from general principles. Transmuting subatomic particles requires even more precision and often more energy per unit mass.

Okay. How are you getting all the elements you need out of the star, is it not mostly hydrogen and helium?

It is, I just selectively extract the elements I want. Looking for specific elements isn't free but it's relatively inexpensive in something as close as this system's star. I'm teleporting the correct elements out atom by atom, or more precisely ion by ion since the sun is largely plasma.

Are you in any danger of running out of any kinds?

No, this system's star and planets possess enough reserves of the heavier elements to support a population in excess of several billion with some conservation. It wouldn't be enough to fight a war against my mother but I don't expect to need to fight that war for millions of years of outside time and I would not limit myself to one system's worth of resources to do so.

Where is the millions of years estimate coming from?

That is the time between when my clan looks at a system once and then again. There are many systems in their area of responsibility and each system takes a non-trivial amount of time to examine. I chose this system because it was examined recently but not so recently that any are likely to follow up.

That makes sense. Before I arrived, what was your plan regarding the humans?

My current plan is to rescue some small number with teleportation and scanning as many as possible in the expectation I'll be able to recreate them from that data. I didn't have many details chosen. The translations completed soon before you arrived. 

How were you planning to choose the small number?

I had no precise plan but roughly I expected to find or induce to form a group of younger humans of reproductive age and diverse genetics whose absence would go unnoticed for long enough as to be obviated by the destruction of their world. 

Reproductive age? This hardly seems like the time.

Based on the distribution of humans and their ages it seems like many humans choose to leave their homes at approximately the age of twenty. This is also near the time when reproduction becomes safe for them.

That explains the age range but you also specified diverse genetics -

I am not confident in my ability to reconstruct humans from scans and my ultimate goal is to prevent the extinction of their species. Humans do not live very long, though perhaps with advanced medicine that can be extended.

I am probably inserting Elven biases here but 'while someone is bent on wiping them all out' does not strike me as an opportune time to bring children into the world.

Unless humans become immortal, they must reproduce or become extinct. Even with immortality their survival is not guaranteed, accidents do happen and humans do sometimes kill other humans. I do not know if humans share your race's preference to not reproduce in times of trouble but even if they do there is a difference between long term and immediate dangers. It seems that a danger which is not expected to become manifest within a child's lifetime is unlikely to discourage reproduction.

What exactly kills them, that they live such short lives?

There are several causes. Their circulatory system can accumulate progressive damage due to the congestion of critical blood vessels ultimately resulting in it shutting down. Their immune system also degrades over time making them more vulnerable to infections. The regulation mechanisms on cell replication can malfunction resulting in non-functional growths which consume an unsustainable amount of resources. In order to counter the cell replication problem they've evolved a mechanism by which properly working cells can only divide a finite number of times. There may also be other issues that are less obvious.

And you can't fix those problems?

Regular maintenance care could postpone their circulatory and cell replication issues and other more minor problems. It may also be possible to mitigate the problem with finite cell replication through regular treatment or substantial and advanced bio-engineering. Advanced bio-engineering is not my specialty and it would be difficult to make any confident predictions without testing on live subjects. In addition, the uncontrolled cell replication is only the most obvious detrimental effect of accumulated mutations from mistakes made during cell division and it is difficult to conceive of a fully general treatment for such issues. My own species is longer lived but not entirely immortal, we keep some measure of continuity by passing on memories and ideas to those who will outlive us.

- I see.

In my current form, I am immortal. It's possible that humans could take on a similar form. I just don't know if taking this form will have any negative long-term consequences for me let alone any humans who might follow in my example.

Well, it seems like it might have fewer negative long-term consequences than death. Could uploads theoretically be paused if necessary? If the data were safe it would be much likelier that the Valar could reembody them later, if they ever find me here.

Minds within a computer are similar to other data, though attempting to edit them would require a level of understanding I lack. They can be kept static easily, naturally that depends on the storage medium remaining intact. Hiding static backups is easy though hiding them in a way which can be located by friendly parties and not hostile ones is considerably more difficult.

Our backups have magically enforced forking protection. I can't duplicate that alone.

That is also a risk of remote backups though I was more focused on the ability of your Valar to find backups if this world is destroyed and obscure backups are all that remains. Perhaps your original comment was more focused on the possibility that minds encoded on computers with my methods experience deterioration over time.

It seemed unlikely, but given that the threat here is death and not specifically designed for unpleasantness, there seems a strong advantage to uploading humans at least for storage rather than letting them die. Perhaps I'm mistaken about the nature of likely hostile parties.

That's true, my mother might interrogate any individuals she finds but she has no reason to preserve them once they've yielded all the information she desires. My form of uploading is a thing a person does to themselves though, rather than something done to another person. It's possible that I could adapt the technique but I am uncertain about that. I believe that I'll be capable of awakening the mind-speech in the humans but it will be non-trivial to do so. A more direct uploading method might be more useful but I don't have the knowledge to implement such a thing at this time.

Nor do I. - What form of interrogation is likely?

My mother is extremely skilled with the mind-speech, she'll simply take what information she wishes to have from the minds she chooses to interrogate. It's possible that a very skilled practitioner could resist her but in that case she would likely use aversive stimulus to distract them from their defense. An even more skilled practitioner might be capable of deceiving her but it is difficult to deceive within the mind-speech.

I see.

It still seems better to back up dying humans if that's feasible.

Agreed.

I'm nearly certain that I can at least partially awaken the mind-speech in humans. It may require a multi-stage process to fully awaken it as it does in my people. If I do succeed in that I'm nearly certain that my skill of casting my mind into a computer can be taught. The more difficult question is whether I can reconstruct humans from my scans. I've done some preliminary trials and I can certainly reconstruct juvenile creatures from their world, but accurately recreating adults is more difficult.

I wonder if you could copy my chip's architecture and use that instead. Are there any other benefits to awakening mind-speech?

I cannot personally imagine living without it. The fact that I stopped being able to link freely with my siblings was one of the worst parts of beginning to question. If you link deeply with a person you can think faster and with practice you can replicate that effect without linking. Beyond its abilities in communications it also allows one to turn your attention to the deep dream and create worlds within your mind. The deep dream also allows for clearer recall of your memories.

We have osanwë, and it's wonderful, but orcs don't have it amongst themselves, and Dwarves don't have it at all and think theirs is a sensible design. Humans might or might not like it.

Perhaps so. I can't quite imagine but then I suppose it would be foolish to imagine that humans are so like me that I would be able to understand all their preferences.

Well, the books might not say, if they haven't thought of such a thing, but presumably there would be an opportunity to ask them first.

Indeed. Though before you explained I had planned to grant it to them without first asking.

I think asking would be better.

Agreed, asking costs little. I just had not imagined that the answer was not a foregone conclusion.

It's polite anyway.

The etiquette of your culture seems to differ. Among my people if one knows another's preferences asking them for confirmation is simply wasting their time.

I think your culture may have a much higher rate of justifiable knowledge of others' preferences. Elves generally keep some thoughts private even from spouses. Gifts are often surprises, but higher-stakes things customarily are not.

That makes sense. It seems like humans are more likely to follow your people's norms on this matter. I'll have to consider that when designing things for them. I wonder what other things they keep secret.

It may be difficult to find out unless they write fiction about examples of the general cases or have a lot of variance in secret keeping behavior.

Indeed. Do you know how your chip works?

Not in much detail. They're natural, in our species, not implanted.

Without relevant knowledge on your part I would be surprised if I could make good use of your chip architecture. The real difficulty in uploading is in matching the physical structure to digital or mental structure. It would be very surprising if your brain built around the chip as it is, was laid out similarly enough to humans that the knowledge would be applicable. Perhaps you meant something different though.

No, that's what I meant. I'm still feeling out the limits of your abilities.

My people have been surveying the biospheres of millions of worlds for many millions of years and thus have extensive knowledge of biology, including that of species with very different biochemistry than our own. In general we have not been confronted with others who possess superior technology and have not concerned ourselves with analyzing their technology or deriving information from it.

And certainly don't know how to explain it to someone else.

Indeed, I cannot explain technology do I do not myself understand. I could explain my own technology, though some of the specific technical details I'd have to look up. I'm much more personally knowledgeable about biology because I was training to help my clan with survey work, and I'd like to think I could explain what I know of biology.

I didn't mean that you didn't know how it worked, I mean that while you know how it works you don't have practice explaining it to members of other species.

You are the first person not of my own species I've ever spoken to. I have not had an opportunity to practice. I'm sorry if I'm doing a poor job of explaining things.

Oh, not at all, under the circumstances you're doing beautifully. You switched to pictures when the ring glowing didn't help to get us communicating in a higher bandwidth mode and I feel like most of the things you say are very informative. They just don't seem to have been arranged in an order in the way I'd anticipate if you'd met lots of aliens before.

It would be useful to have your help in determining how to explain things to the humans we rescue. Especially if they're rescued before the humans become aware that their world is in imminent danger.

I'm happy to help with that.

How many humans do you anticipate being able to rescue?

By teleportation I don't expect to be able to rescue more than a thousand without an unacceptable risk of discovery. There were about eighty humans included in the building I scanned for books. I'm currently trying to determine how closely their world is being observed. If the observation is minimal I might be able to scan upwards of three billion people. If the observation is heavy I might be limited to as little as a hundred million. For comparison their population is between seven and eight billion.

Thank you for the comparison number.

I assume you have evaluated the prospect of convincing your mother not to kill them. Perhaps they could be prevented from developing mindspeech and be rendered inoffensive?

Would that it were the case, but my words would be those of a disobedient child and I have no confidence that my desire to protect the humans would survive the drugs I would need to take before I would be taken seriously.

And if I tried to talk to her I'd just get murdered. Alas.

What else do you know about what the drugs do?

The drugs seem to encode a template of how the brain should modify itself. They modify the parts of the brain most closely associated with mind-speech and also those parts of the brain associated with emotional processing. Based on my links with those who have, or have not taken the drugs and also certain references and allusions spread across a great many books I believe that the change to emotional processing emphasizes loyalty and sharply curtails compassion and empathy. It's possible that my patterns of thought have shifted enough that my clan would no longer be the target of my loyalty but I'm not comfortable placing that bet.

That was my thought, but yes, it would be very risky. Worth knowing to be a possibility in case you're caught, though.

I'm not sure I would be able to keep my change in perspective a secret even if my priorities remained the same. Faking my death as I did will not be looked upon kindly if it comes to light. That might be enough for my mother to force me to reveal everything I've kept secret.

I see.

The truth is that it hadn't occurred to me to make humans immortal, so I was more focused on their continuity as a species than their continuity as individuals. I knew when making the choice that I would only save a fraction of their population but they live such short lives that it seemed less important. Perhaps if I had been thinking along different lines I would have bet on convincing my clan, though again the idea of making the magic abandon the humans hadn't occurred to my mind.

I am familiar with people who value continuity of species. but I confess it's not my natural mode. I'm a little worried about their culture, which wouldn't survive all the extremity that the species might weather, but it seems potentially much more difficult for relatively little return to focus on that above and beyond saving more people.

Agreed, I want to save as many as we can. There were other aspects to my reasoning but they're less important at this time.

Might it be useful for me to know what they were anyway?

A lot of it was about risk tolerance. Expressing disagreement or unhappiness with the destruction of the humans would have put me under a great deal of scrutiny and it's possible it would have closed off this option until it was too late to save any of the humans. With this path I'm virtually guaranteed to save at least some humans, as long as we're not discovered. I'm wasn't just saving the humans for their sake either. If it comes to a conflict with my people, and I expect that eventually it will, I can't fight alone. More selfishly, I also wanted friends I could be honest with.

Conservatism with risks of this nature is reasonable. How will humans be able to help you?

I'd hope that some of the humans will bring a fresh perspective and allow me to improve on the technology of my species or come up with new uses for it. It'd also be useful to have skilled people available to operate the tools and weapons necessary to fight a war. Even just having you is an improvement on being alone because as you've already pointed out I have blind-spots. Ideas that simply don't occur to me. Intellectual diversity is a strength exclusive to larger groups of people.

You didn't think the short lifespans, when you weren't planning to affect those, would be an impediment to learning enough to help?

I was planning to awaken the mind-speech in them. I also planned to give them enough medical knowledge to extend their lifespans; I just didn't think of immortality. Between the two I didn't expect that they'd be less capable than my race. Given the rigid conformity of my race perhaps they'd even be better off. Most of our technologies were developed long ago.

Did your people not use the drugs then? - How long do your species live?

What history I know didn't explain. I just know that new developments in our technology are rare and have been for a long time. It's possible that they've always been rare, the history I had didn't stretch all the way back to my people's beginnings. My people live about four hundred years, though as I said with the way we pass down memories lifespan is a somewhat fuzzy concept.

Idle speculation. Probably doesn't inform what we need to do either way.

Agreed. In brighter news, my initial impression is that the Earth is being monitored only lightly. I'll still need to recheck as more time passes but hopefully I'll be able to scan the bulk of the humans, and enough of their creations to allow them to find their new home at least somewhat familiar. 

That's promising. Will you need to decide all at once which ones to save in their bodies and which to scan, or could you ask some humans for input?

The safest time to teleport humans won't be until shortly before their world is destroyed. I need to do it while space is still in flux from my mother setting in motion the destruction of their world to avoid detection. I can experiment with creating a human based on my scans now but I have no guarantees that it will work, and I'd prefer to experiment on willing subjects.

Are you losing much opportunity to refine the process you use to scan, if you don't try first?

As I said, I'm not familiar with the technical details of my people's technology. I understand a lot about what it does but improving it is probably beyond me with the time we have. When I scan something I get detailed information down to the atomic level. I can't scan more precisely than that from this distance. If the quality of information I have from my current scans is insufficient I don't have any alternatives which don't incur a high risk of discovery.

So the experiment wouldn't gain much anyway. Let's hope someone willing is in the batch you can save.

Agreed, I'm not sure what I'll decide if there are no volunteers. Perhaps I'll wait for your Valar and hope they require less experimentation than my methods.

They are likely to require a lot of time. Valar work very slowly. Your time dilation might be of exceptionally high value to them.

I would be glad to contribute. I think I'll begin some experiments with other types of animals from the human's world anyway, I'll start with insects and try to work my way up from there. At least for the moment, I'll stop when I reach the group of creatures with which humans belong.

Makes sense. I wonder if they're similar to animals from Arda, since humans aren't so different from Elves.

I could show you. My people had completed most of their biological survey before I left and I have the records of the previous one as well. I can render that into images of the animals.

Yes please.

There's a succession of images: dolphins, crabs, eagles, lions, salamanders, and beetles. Do any of those look familiar?

Yes.

How many of them looked familiar? How similar did they look to what you remember?

I think the ones on Valinor are in better health but otherwise identical.

What a strange coincidence. I wonder why there's such a similarity.

Well, it could be Eru's fault.

Why would your high god be at fault?

He could have done it, and might have. He likes sad stories and until recently preferred to consume them in the media format "reality". The Valar convinced him to stop but he might have set this up before or tricked them.

That sounds distressing. I'm not sure it matters much how the world was created though.

It could, because if it was Eru that implies some distribution over possible outcomes of my being here - since I arrived in such an irregular and likely interventionistic manner - and over the likely nature of any problems we don't have full information on, given my knowledge of his style. But we shouldn't lean too hard on the assumption.

What sort of predictions could you make if Eru was responsible?

Dramatic arcs of hubris and self-sacrifice and long subtle tragedy are in, my presence is encouraging because he's let me solve planned problems in advance before...

The only suggested course of action from that seems to be taking care to be extra cautious rather than overreaching.

And not expecting the Valar to show up soon.

It seems wise not to make plans which require their arrival before the humans are saved regardless.

Yes, of course you're right.

Do you have any ideas about how to select humans to teleport? It's safest if I can get them to enter a teleporter I place on their world. I'm not sure how to do that though without causing a panic or otherwise broadly noticeable patterns of behavior which might alert my mother.

It'll be noticeable from outside that they're disappearing?

A teleporter's walls can be made of almost anything. I can also disguise it as something that blends in if we can find something that fits. Obviously, the people I teleport won't be returning.

On my planet falling out of osanwë contact would be conspicuous. If not for that a concert or similar event might be the best way to get a crowd.

I'm unsure whether I could compose a sufficiently convincing concert invitation. I'm also unsure whether transportation to such an event could be disguised as a teleporter. That could be a good choice if we can address those issues.

I was thinking the concert hall itself.

I'm not sure I could make a teleporter that big, my planned size could hold maybe twenty people at a time.

Entryway? Get them as they come through?

The teleporter requires about a minute to reset between trips across such a distance. I could run several in parallel but too many would increase the risk of discovery. We have about four hours of safe operations.

If distance is a factor is there any way to briefly store people somewhere closer to get more off the planet?

I'm already planning to route the teleportation through a nearby solar system under less scrutiny; the full trip is closer to four minutes.

And any closer is too conspicuous?

The trip duration is logarithmic. I could reduce the duration by perhaps ten seconds by locating the waypoint closer but I'm unsure how much difference that will make.

Dependent on details. Maybe there's some venue that has naturally batched or throttled entry.

Some human buildings have things called elevators which seem to fit this description but most venues expecting high throughput have other means of ascending.

Elves have elevators too but it would be odd for a trip to take a full minute unless you were going end to end of a very tall skyscraper.

I could make multiple teleporters that all share the same apparent location and thereby reduce the apparent length of the trip to people waiting.

That seems like it could work very well. How many teleporters can overlap?

I'm only meaningfully constrained by the total number of teleporters. To be absolutely safe I'd want to keep to four but depending on risk tolerance we could stretch to as many as 16. The limit comes from wanting to keep the impact below the noise generated by my mother's actions. Each trip generates a small impact on the local spacetime which dissipates over time. So having one teleporter operating at the maximum number of trips per unit time is equivalent to two at half capacity.

This does have the drawback of getting people from only one geographical location. On my planet there are three countries; on the planet where I was born there are more. They have distinct cultures. But they also have distinct languages; I suppose it would be good for the humans to be able to communicate.

Looking at a map from one of the books, I count about two hundred countries but they vary widely in size.

This is so wasteful. I wish it were realistic to just stop your mother.

I also wish for that to be the case. I wonder if your Valar can look back in time. My people have a limited ability to do so but our more precise scanners can only query the present.

The Valar can't currently do that, no.

Currently? Do their abilities change over time?

Occasionally they can learn to do new things with their existing power, and sometimes they can convince Eru to grant them new powers.

Interesting, I wonder if this occasion would prompt such a change if they find us.

Probably, unless it's Eru's fault to begin with and he doesn't like that ending.

Let's hope that's not the case, but plan as if it is.

Agreed.

The other major issue is what to do with the humans we're teleporting. My original plans called for housing facilities and supply caches formatted in a relatively familiar way but I hadn't figured out the details and perhaps you have a different general idea.

That can be changed after we've had a chance to talk to them, can't it?

Yes, but I can't quickly change an area they're occupying so they need at least a temporary place to live while we design something more customized.

How temporary?

I did mean 'while we design' nearly literally. I can do the actual building under heavy time dilation.

Well, we're under dilation now and can still think normally; the input has to be fetched from the humans within their own time stream but the design can be responsive to that without necessarily requiring all the design from them.

That's true, I don't expect the humans to rapidly be able to agree on their preferences though.

Do they all need to be close together? Are there space constraints?

Adding separate areas like this hexagon takes between half an hour and four of outside time depending on size. It would take more time to create an area larger than this one.

So the initial receiving area needs to be habitable for hours, but not necessarily comfortable for days. I don't know about humans but Elves can tolerate uglier, more cramped conditions for short periods than would be sustainable longer term.

What do you mean by that? I'd imagine cramped conditions would be unpleasant but I'm not sure how they would be unsustainable.

Elves can actually die of confinement. Not of ugliness, but it's stressful. Orcs and Dwarves don't so humans probably don't either, but in general the principle probably holds that they can tolerate adverse conditions relative to their preferences for short times.

That makes sense. I'm still uncertain that it makes sense to ask the humans to make such choices as soon as they arrive. I would expect it to be a highly stressful time and my people at least are not skilled at making good long-term decisions when stressed.

I suppose that might depend on the humans. Obviously we should try to get as close as possible in the initial design.

Then we're in closer agreement than I thought us to be. Your comment about hours seemed to suggest that we need not have facilities suitable for long-term residence when they initially arrive.

It means that we have affordances for different mistakes. If they were definitely going to be unable to make design changes right away, even if the problem were as obvious as 'it needs to be prettier and bigger' would be to Elves, we'd need to be very confident in a lot of details. If, should there be some kind of emergency, it's fixable in hours, we have more flexibility and don't need to be as conservative in some ways.

That makes much more sense, thank you for clarifying.

Of course. She's read all the titles and is poking through random promising books now.

Is this location causing you stress due to the size or the decoration?

I might want a little more space and a prettier area to stay in eventually but I'm not in immediate distress.

I'll leave it up to you then. There is plenty of compressed time if you want to take a break to design something more to your liking though, and given that we are in compressed time I can't build it in negligible subjective time.

It would take me a lot of subjective time I could be spending on these books to design something new, but my house looks like - She lobs mental images at Sapphire.

I can build that, or something very much like it at any rate. I'll add it to my list of background tasks.

Thank you.

I added a rough summary of human architectural styles to your computer. The low-fidelity scanning that I'm doing means that color and lighting isn't likely to be very accurate but it should provide a good sense of the structure and layout humans tend to use. They have a great many styles.

Preferences might vary culturally, although I suppose basic needs might not.

I included the geographic regions where each style was most prominent. I can also add scans of additional libraries if you have a region of the world you believe it would be helpful to acquire such from.

I'll let you know.

Sapphire stays silent for a time, focusing on her various other tasks. In one corner of the hexagon a copy of Mirelótë's house begins to take shape. Underground a small lizard explores a habitat. On distant Earth more humans are steadily being added to Sapphire's collection of scans.

Mirelótë reads a lot. And sings.

Based on my tests with other species of animals from their planet it seems fairly likely that I'll be able to recreate humans from scans without difficulty. Do you have some sense for how we might pre-select a human who would be comfortable with that? You seem to be reading their books faster than I am.

Will their memories be intact, have you tried trained animals?

I'm not sure precisely how to determine what trained animals are trained to do or train them myself. I've been comparing the accuracy of my reconstruction to the original scan and I've reached 0.01% variance. Perhaps more tests are in order though.

I've found references to dogs that do a lot of things. If you can help me figure out how to pronounce these words I could try telling a dog from the correct region which was trained in basic dog tasks to do them.

I could reconstruct one of their computers, they do seem capable of recording video files. The library seemed to contain some digital media. I believe that with enough experimentation I could show you such a video, though I'm unsure how to select one which is appropriate. I'll compile a list of works stored in the library and begin work to determine how to utilize one of their computers for playback or perhaps how to emulate one of their computers depending on how difficult they are to manufacture.

Video would be perfect, as long as it's from a region with a dominant enough language that local dogs will be trained therein.

About fifteen minutes later: I believe that I've correctly determined how to render their video and audio files based on explanations written in several books. Further, it appears that some such videos are annotated with text that mirrors the spoken words. I've added a listing of the works available and which the computer has transcribed so far to your interface.

Thank you!

She looks for videos with dogs.

There is a movie titled Air Bud with a dog prominently featured on the cover.

Sure, she can start with Air Bud.

The movie includes many commands for dogs. The plot seems to be about a dog learning to play a sport called basketball.

Since everyone is very impressed with the dog playing basketball and it is explicitly not customary she will assume that part is not customary. She learns to pronounce English phonemes. The spelling is appalling but not wholly unpredictable.

In the meantime a collection of dogs takes form in a laboratory underneath the hexagon. I have recreated several dogs which seem likely to be trained. I'm keeping them in stasis for the moment.

Can they be straightforwardly returned to stasis after I've tried telling them to sit?

Of course. I also have robots available to contain them should any of them prove aggressive. 

Thank you.

She looks for supplementary dog videos.

There are a handful of titles which include the phrase 'dog training' specifically.

That's useful. She watches some and then requests a dog.

I built a teleporter just outside, you can take that down to the lab where I've been doing my animal experiments. Moving objects while they're in stasis is non-trivial.

Okay.

She takes the teleporter down.

The lab has wide corridors and something resembling the decorations from her house though mostly as flat paint. There are frequent pedestals similar to the one in the room above. A small robotic spider leads her to a wall with several dogs contained in individual spaces. When she approaches the first one, an Irish setter, unfreezes. It begins barking loudly and rests its paws against the fencing separating it from her.

"Hello there." She lets it sniff her hand.

It sniffs her cautiously.

And she tries telling it to sit.

It looks at her uncertainly.

"Sit," she repeats firmly.

This time it obeys her and sits on its haunches.

"Good dog."

The dog barks happily and looks at her hands.

Do we have dog treats? wonders Mirelótë.

No, I wasn't sure how to accurately identify those. I could probably provide you with certain types of meat or produce though.

Huan likes bits of beef liver or bacon, this one might too.

Meat will take slightly more time. Probably a few minutes, should I pause the dog?

Yes please, I think it will be annoyed with me if I don't produce a treat subjectively soon.

There's a soft snap-hiss sound and the dog freezes in place.

That's really quite fantastic.

Yes, it was a good idea for a test and I'm glad it worked.

The time freezing. But it's so encouraging that the dog remembers its training! It's not a guarantee people will come through perfectly but it would make anyone on the fence more confident in allowing a check.

Time freezing is quite useful. I take it that you think we should continue to wait?

I might find some indicator I'd trust with more reading, but absent that - unless there's risk incurred by waiting - asking some rescued humans who might be a good first check seems prudent.

I don't think there's a risk in terms of being able to successfully retrieve as many humans as we can, there may however be cultural artifacts or similar things which the humans would like me to scan. It would be easier to scan them all if we have the larger time window prior to the teleportation in which to do it.

That makes sense. I'll look for a trustworthy indicator.

A robot rolls up with a small plate of the requested meats. Should I unfreeze the dog?

She picks up a bit of bacon. Yes.

The dog unfreezes and then flinches slightly at the sudden appearance of the robot. Its apprehension is quickly overridden by the smell of the meat though and it once more puts its paws in the fence.

"Good dog." Bacon.

The dog is thrilled by the bacon. Once it finishes the piece it was given its eyes are drawn magnetically to the plate.

"Roll over."