Meanwhile, the man quickly turns on his sampling machine, clicking the Petri dish into one of the compartments of the thick steel box, waiting for Minaiyu's return with the vial containing the spit sample.

Minaiyu sets his respirator back into place and ventures downstairs to drop off the vial. Everything seems to have gone smoothly with the spit sampling, he didn't get any spit on the outside of the vial or anything like that, though of course he did touch the vial with his bare hand so it's not like it's clean.

"...thank you for everything," he says. "I hope we can make this...situation...okay."

He smiles at Minaiyu before sealing the metal box within one plastic bag, sealing it again within another plastic bag before walking off to the helicopter. "I get the exceptionally strong sense that you're going to see the world, and to love a lot of what you see." Then he vanishes as the helicopter takes off, off to the faraway biosafety lab to see if there was anything from Minaiyu worth being scared about.

Well. We live in hope.

He smiles back, but the mouth area of his respirator isn't transparent. (It might be noticeable around the eyes, if the man looks closely.)

The farewell gesture Minaiyu makes, in any case, is clear.

It takes another 5 days or so before another helicopter returns to the clearing, carrying a stottering and slow, but vividly colorful bird walking around lethargically; they've seen that whatever supposed Novel Illness Minaiyu has didn't hurt the bird in the lab that they exposed to his microorganisms, and they want to see whether a bird exposed to Minaiyu more directly remains as healthy and unharmed. The bird has a clearly visible plastic tracking chip attached to one wing, and a wire fence gets built around the clearing to keep it within it. A bowl of food and a watering station is also left with it, and a robot replaces the food and water once in a while. Nothing much seems to happen to the bird randomly walking around outside Minaiyu's hut.

The first test subject was fine.

Yes, it's only been one five-day, yes it's possible that other species are more vulnerable than this one, but...

...he's been abstractly hoping things would turn out well and he would one day be able to leave quarantine, but deep down he didn't, really, believe it might happen. Now, there's just enough visceral hope to hurt.

But then, having enough hope to hurt is the first step towards getting the thing you hoped for.

Oh no, what's wrong with the-- oh, it's been sedated for transport, hasn't it. Never mind.

Aww, it's cute. If he does turn out to be dangerous to human-analogues (or they to him!), maybe it will still turn out safe for him to have a pet bird to cuddle. There's probably a robot that will clean up its poop for him and everything.

(He and the archivists finish going through and translating every computer-science encyclopedia article that looked like it might be relevant to the task of building a compatible mesh node, and they conclude that they don't have enough detailed information to pull it off. Otherworlders aren't supposed to be able to bring physical objects with them, "the possibility of needing to network a random isolated joey with alien computers" wasn't in his society's threat model, and they made no particular attempt to optimise for it.

Which means they're stuck converting all of his files through the analog layer, and that means a disturbingly high chance that the joey will break before he's done.

He experiments more with optimising his upload bandwidth. He finds, buried in the settings of his music-player software, an option to increase speed by up to 3x: he's not sure why that option is even there--maybe a nightcore fan submitted a pull request?--but it means he can get through an hour's a circuit's worth of audio in 12 loops and just slow the recording back down again afterward (he tests this, and it comes out fine). He puts his font size as small as it will go, and he tries taking videos of himself flipping through pages of an ebook so he doesn't have to stop to take photos: it takes a lot more Thomassia-compatible storage space, but that's not what's at a premium here, and if desired they can extract individual frames from the video later.

He might make it. The encyclopedia is very large in the way that encyclopedias get when they are unbound by the need to fit on a bookcase, and he has so many ebooks and a not-insubstantial amount of Mesh cache, but he might make it.

(And it's not as if it would be better if he had fewer ebooks, he points out to himself.))

...every sign is positive; the bird seems perfectly healthy, and at this point, it's probably now or never. Minaiyu gets a call. "We want to find, and send you, a human volunteer. We think it makes sense to take the plunge and see if you're as safe for people as you are for the bird. Do you feel comfortable with that? When do you think you'll be ready to have someone come over, and... see if they get sick?"

why did they make him do this by synchronous communication, "after an extremely stressful and lonely ten-day" hardly seems like the time to be making important decisions over synchronous communication

"Uh, hmm...

...yeah, if-- if someone's willing to take that risk, I'm not gonna turn them down.

Is-- is the contact going to be one-way at first, like with the bird? We still don't know much about how I react to you...I guess we should, uh, design a catch-up schedule for the vaccines you've invented, probably, if it comes down to it I can probably do a fair amount of in-person interaction with the world by wearing a respirator all the time and showering when I get home" even if that thought is kind of terrifying "but it would be good to have that layer of protection and-- and maybe be able to have housemates again someday.

...vaccines wouldn't even help with the day-to-day, would they, you don't have any endemic pathogens-relative-to-you. Sorry, I think I'm rambling a bit."

"Yes, that's correct; herd immunity, and our effective monitoring and quarantining, has meant that the vaccines we do have aren't very necessary to protect us. But we still have them, and we're happy to get them on you. We'd also be willing to equip you with something more convenient and practical than your respirator; you'd likely want to have such protective gear on hand, in any case. But... once we find a willing volunteer, we'll let you know, and let you see them. And maybe we can try one-way contact, and only then move to see if you can interact with people without a respirator."

"Yeah, getting some local protective equipment sounds like a good idea."

(He has a momentary mental image of a future him with a pet bird and a formalwear costume designed to match its plumage. Do they do birds for the nature-communing thing, or only mammals?

Anyway.)

"Okay. I'll-- see them then, then."

He can't keep the hope out of his voice, but then he wasn't really trying.

"Well, we'll send you a photo of the volunteer, once they've been chosen. And we'll send them as soon as is practical. It can't be more than 2 or 3 days; does that sound good to your ears?"

"Sure."

(He's a little surprised that they're confident they can find one quickly, but then, a planet is a big place: presumably, out of hundreds of millions of people, someone is well suited to this.)

It's early the next day that Minaiyu hears about it. "We have a volunteer! It's a middle-aged woman, we're thinking of having her wait outside for a bit to have you not be exposed. She looks like this." Minaiyu receives a picture; the woman depicted seems quite warm and friendly. "She's on her way already, and she'll get to you at any moment!" It's only a few loops later before Minaiyu can see the large blue vehicle, and a woman slowly steps out, before making her way over to the clearing with the bird in it. She waves at Minaiyu.

Oh wow, that was not much notice at all. It's a good thing he didn't happen to be in the shower.

He grins at her through the window, and waves back.

"Hello! What's your name?"

(...is that a sensitive topic? Were they deliberately avoiding giving her name in the notification that they'd found a volunteer? Well, she knows he's an alien unused to local cultural norms, and it's not like he needs her birth name specifically if she'd rather give something else.)

"I'm Iris, actually! Nice to meet you! I'm thinking of sitting outside and maybe petting the bird a bit, see if anything happens to me. Unless you'd be comfortable with me coming in now?"

Huh. She looks different enough that he can be confident she isn't the same Iris he met earlier. Maybe it's a very common name here, like Rellakri.

"It does look very pettable.

I think it's too soon for you to come in. And when" if? "we are ready to do two-way exposure, I'd rather have me go out to you.

...although doing it outside would introduce extra variables, potential allergens and all that. Maybe we can figure out an indoor meeting place that isn't, you know, where I live.

...come to think of it, maybe you don't know: maybe your culture has weaker feelings about the sanctity of the home, if you don't have endemic pathogens."

"Not that much? I don't really need to know someone too well to let them into my house, as long as they promise to be nice and non-judgemental about how I do things. But I can absolutely wait out here until you get more comfortable!" She moves to sit down on the grass, still slowly stroking the bird outside, before turning to her phone and starting to read something or other.

After a bit of contemplation:

"Maybe the next stage should be me going out there in a valved respirator, letting us interact more directly while maintaining largely one-way exposure."

And then he can pet the bird.

(...well, if he's going to try touching things, he could pet the bird in his non-valved respirator. But this isn't the time for that, since then he wouldn't be breathing on her anymore.)

"Yes you can do that; you're absolutely not getting into my personal space walking out of your house, that's for sure!" 

"...sorry, I don't think I parsed that?"

(He was worried for a moment, during the 'you're absolutely not getting into my personal space', that she was objecting to him getting too close to her, but that makes absolutely no sense in context.)

"Oh, is it that it's my yard and I don't need to ask permission to go out in it?"

(Well, sort of his yard, admittedly. He does not, per se, have a contract to that effect, and the house clearly wasn't abandoned even if it wasn't actively occupied. He supposes he is paying rent in the form of alien books. Or maybe it's more like government-funded safety-net housing.

...probably he is going to have to move out if it turns out to be safe for him to leave quarantine: even if they'd let him stay here indefinitely afterward (and he's not sure of that), it doesn't seem like a good idea for him to be a three-circuit walk from everything if he's going to non-remotely participate in society. He's more attached to this house than he would normally have expected of living in a place for one ten-day, but then, his clean-sense has now accepted the house as his and it's him and the house against the world right now.)

"Yes, that's what I meant! You'd probably want to get out here eventually, right? So why not come out and enjoy the beautiful nature with me?"

He nods. "I'll make arrangements for it, then."

He spends a bit of time researching valved respirator models, places a request for one (noting that it would be useful for one-way testing), then returns to his book-scanning.

"Would you like to hear some music from my homeworld?" he says. "I have some recordings on here."

Minaiyu would find out very quickly that it's common and expected for PPE like that to be custom-designed, with mass-produced models being the more niche option. Nonetheless, there are quite a few choices still available, with detailed sizing guides so Minaiyu can get something that he can be sure will fit.

 "Music? I'm very curious; please, play something for me."

It seems like there's a bit of a bootstrapping problem in making one's way to a PPE tailor, getting fitted, and only then having PPE with which to brave the world, but he supposes that's not actually true for natives in most cases.

In any case, he still has the tape measure from when he was getting local clothes that weren't made of towel.

He sets the joey's music player back to real-time mode and puts on an instrumental piece. It's a shimmering purple, not that he expects her to see it that way.