A droid depicting an animated humanoid opens the door and has a fairly long conversation with the bar, mostly arranging for a little server space for as long as she's here.

This is so totally a bad idea but she's going to investigate anyway. If nothing else she needs to be prepared for someone else finding Milliways.

She looks with glass and silicon eyes for the most interesting first conversation possible, notices Teytis's drone, and issues a digital handshake announcing herself as *Mute, security officer of the USKPA starship Mugunghwa.

The response is odd. It's clearly translated from a protocol with a quite different notion of standard information to include.

ID: C03EAA3E101FA4F8​1CF8EB03F3386656​4D7E3D881CA99D6D​98A1D83C30B1575F​BA9E6BDBE3A29FD7​7260770897831218​F856A08A470A9106​B9BFC982DFF215D0
Name_ta: "Teytis"
Name_tel: "Jobont"
Do not disturb: no
Notes: "To avoid any confusion, please note that I am a human operating this avatar. I will not be offended if you choose not to interact with me further because of this. Welcome to Milliways."

Teytis Jobont gets a short-format text message from
Name: *Mute
Local Network ID: 0000007

I'm new here and you seem interesting. Are you up for a discussion?

Sure.

The avatar's sensors and sticky-out-bits-for-gestural-purposes shift perhaps to indicate that it's paying attention to *Mute rather than the room in general.

Her droid rolls closer to the same end.

Is remote control common where you're from? It's almost all in-person interaction where I'm from.

Whether this is actually remote is debatable due to the unique features of my world. There's plenty of in-person interaction, but what I do is maintain long-distance communications for everyone, so the majority of my interactions are via messages. But for this forum a physical presence is how things work, so here I am.

As the droid gets closer: Shall we speak instead?

"Sure. Spoken word is what I'm more used to, except with my siblings. Hello, *Mute at your service. I'm nervous about this place, not ashamed to admit it."

A human woman's voice comes from the avatar. “I assume you've heard about the security arrangements from Bar, if that's what worries you? In our experience — people from my world have been analyzing interactions with Milliways for some time now — it's typically safer than where you came from.

“That is, if you're not the sort to look at the multiverse of opportunities and leap into doing something big with them. If you are, things get complicated.”

"No, the second thing is what I'm worried about. Complicated is not the friend of stability. Especially when someone else could get access to here and I'd have no input on what comes back out. On the other hand, abundance is a friend of stability."

“I'm not sure what the scenario you’re thinking of is. Someone else from your world being ambitious with bad results for you and yours?”

"Someone else from my ship. It's a closed environment and things only have to go badly wrong once. Are you familiar with the concept of generation ships?"

“Yes, and that would be why you're concerned with stability, I see. Let me review.”

A pause.

“I don't have any specific advice or reassurances, but based on the shape of our evidence I don’t think there’s likely to be a problem in that way. And if there is, it's not going to be something you can stop or definitively prepare for beforehand, because there's so many possibilities.”

"Points for getting as much variety as I can reasonably buy, I suppose. There's economics concerns, I'm not sharp on that side of things, but *Star's very good at knowing more than he needs to do his job. It's not entirely obvious to me if we have anything good to sell, feel like sorting through a miniature library?"

“Taking advantage of Milliways is as much or more about making friends as it is about things you can trade in. And that sort of planning sounds like you're launching right into the ambitious side. But I'll certainly take a look at your library if you want, provided that you're OK with it being shared further.”

"I'm getting a feel for my options. You can just bet I'll spend about a week chewing on priors before I think about bringing anything back. I'll have to curate the library a bit, but even copyright-free works will give a good sense of our tech I suppose."

“Take your time, yes.

“If I may ask, why is it that ‘it's almost all in-person interaction’ in your ship, or world?”

"AIs like me are uncommon and humans seem to like talking face-to-face on the Mugunghwa at least because the traditional writing system is tedious to enter into keyboards."

“What about audio communication, instead of writing, then?”

"Unfortunately there's not an infinite amount of computing power available on the ship - heavy networking traffic on some two hundred thousand devices takes rooms and rooms and rooms of datacenter infrastructure that could also be homes, or grow crops, or be leisure areas. Not to mention the power draw, which has to be weighed against a dozen other necessities like oxygen and luxuries like the transit system. It's possible your computing technology is more compact and less power-hungry. Either way, bandwidth on nonlocal networks is quotad."

“It would surprise me if your computing and network hardware is that much less efficient if you can fit — multiple AIs, yes? — into the same constraints. But regardless, I suppose you would have less gain from it, since you are in a much smaller environment than a planet and people can meet easier.”

"Oh, we're well optimized, and we run idle most of the time too. The bandwidth limits are typically only a problem for heavy video streaming. But your point is also correct. The university complex and especially the library courtyard is very popular."

“We might both benefit from exchanging some technology in that area, then.”

"I'm working on filtering the library in the background. Would you like to meet my friends? With what Bar's letting me borrow only one of us can run in the foreground at once, but still."

“If you like.”

"Hm, such enthusiasm. Never mind. Here, have a half a library."

A file transfer protocol opens.