'E-mail'. 'Software'. Fascinating concepts which I am only glimpsing. Good!

He lingers long enough to get the second pocket everything (to be taken apart), set up an e-mail account (which is a random string of numbers), and find Summary Bank (and be surprised that it's free.) 

Then he goes back to his ship, careful to keep the shiny new devices dry, spends a few minutes admiring the pretty decorations he brought along, and starts poking and prodding the expendable pocket everything. It turns out his ship is impenetrable to wi-fi, but he pokes his head out the top with the intact one every once in a while.

He receives an e-mail with the contents of all the public alien-related news coming out of Tapa and a note that they can get him secondary sources on request if he wants to know more about the commentary abroad.

Secondary sources sound interesting, please send one each from a few different countries!

And what kind of things are they saying?

They are saying that the aliens landed near Shi Alassei, details classified to avoid people mobbing the place, and here are some pictures, and it turns out the first pictures are of some kind of robot and here are pictures of what they believe is the real thing, and there aren't very many of this kind of alien but they know of more kinds, and the alien's telepathic!, and a few factoids about what they've learned about the aliens.

Hmm, nothing very surprising, they're not sharing all their secrets with everyone else.

He researches robots on Summary Bank to see if they're an accurate description of the projection.

Robots are mostly conceptual; they have industrial machinery that can do repetitive tasks, but the idea of a robot that can move around in arbitrary environments is not implemented in practice because of terrorist opposition thereto, it seems.

The projection is not a robot since he has to pay lots of attention to it to make it do anything, but he's not going to go out of his way to explain that. Doesn't seem relevant to diplomacy. And it'd be admitting a weakness.

Ah! So they're not all one eerily-cooperative hive. He notes that for later before getting distracted into a wiki-crawl that starts from a big list of job names.

How do new job names happen? There aren't enough.

Some people have the same job name, but they can invent new ones using other words in the language. What aren't there enough for?

That was a bad phrase. I expected more because there are very many Amentans. I could say that every Draak has a unique job name.

Job names are only so interesting in the abstract, it turns out. Much of the interestingness was in how Amseli and Satkafintesh thought of their job names, the feelings called up by the question and what the choice implied about them.

The pocket everything is being trickier than he expected, which is delightful. It's definitely worth being called 'Treasure', even if there's billions of them. He gets lost in poking away slowly at the task of re-encoding survey data and ignores his emails and the radio for hours and hours, only checking them late in that evening.

He has an email saying that they've found some good representatives from the castes he hasn't talked to much yet, and another with some more news items (some foreigners agitated that there hasn't been much news suggesting the Tapai have gotten more info out of the alien in the last few hours; opinion pieces on why prime numbers were so appealing and some descriptions of what-all else people were trying; pundits opining on the odds that this means PLANETS; coverage of the conference Tapa has decided to throw on terraforming).

He is briefly tempted to respond somehow to the more annoying articles, then decides that they're definitely beneath his notice.

Amentans seem very impatient. Draak can easily spend multiple days on one task. I will come out to talk again in twenty minutes.

And there he is.

They have found two purples, two oranges, a grey besides the boat greys, three yellows, and an extra green.

The alien would like to know all their job names! And what they think of them! And what they think of the alien, and what their jobs are, and what they think of the Tapai government.

(Probably the Tapai government has found people who like the Tapai government but perhaps this question will be informative anyway.)

The purples' job names are Skenatshua, which means "last puzzle piece" and was chosen because this purple is a mechanical engineer; and Ahumu, which is onomatopoeia for a noise the vehicles she maintains makes when they run well. The first orange is a doctor whose jobname is just Aktem, "healer", a fairly standard doctor jobname, but the second one is an education consultant who calls herself Noptan, "awakening", because she likes finding ways for school environments to wake up their students to new ideas and opportunities. The nonboat grey is a retired general whose jobname is Kanteko, which is actually a strategy board game she likes which is in turn named after the (given) name of an admiral from hundreds of years ago. The yellows are a software engineer, Amseli's assistant, and a government press correspondent, whose jobnames are respectively: Ikto meaning "sorted" and referring to sorting algorithms, Hehata meaning "invisible" and being a reference to a famous quote about how a good assistant's value is unobtrusive; and Kimahk meaning "scoop" in the journalistic sense. The extra green, a theoretical xenologer, is Itamime, after a fictional character who is an alien and studies other species (including, in said fiction, Amentans).

Job names are pretty delightful. Noptan's is particularly delightful, and Skenatshua is very good too. He'd be grinning if he were Amentan- Instead his tail swishes back and forth excitedly in the water and the crest feathers fluff up a bit. (Exposed teeth is aggression, to them, he explains to Amseli.)

He wants to have possibly long conversations with all of these people, perhaps even several at once - Except perhaps Hehata since it seems like she might rather not? - and says as much to Amseli along with, I suppose there are fewer reds than other castes, or they are busier, or they are less needed at sea, and that is why there is not one here?

Hehata doesn't mind! She prefers that her work be invisible; she doesn't herself need to be.

Amseli says, It's not customary to transport reds by sea; boats are confined spaces and need to conserve water for any purpose that sea water can't serve, which would make it especially hard for others to be around reds. They're also much rarer than most castes, about as rare as blues, and unlike blues their skills aren't relevant to first contact.

They handle disgusting things for you... They are disgusting themselves? He sends polite incomprehension. Strange. But not stranger than not desiring Treasure. You are aliens. Perhaps some other time. Perhaps the projection - shiny robot(?) thing - could be used once I understand Tapap better.

Meanwhile, he has told most of the visitors he'll want to talk to them in a bit, and started barraging Ikto with questions about format encodings! His encoding for the survey images is like so, and the rest of the survey data is something like this, and turning it all into something Amentan systems can display without feeling kludgy or ugly will take some doing, here's what he has so far.

Ikto can do his best to figure out how to hack something together, though ideally this kind of project wants a large team and at least a month.

Oh, that sounds like a challenge. He intends figure it out in a few days, at most. The images he can separate into different channels - a set of red-green-blue is more or less straightforward - and in fact here's a picture of one of those barren planets (emailed), the rest will come later - and different black and white scans for the other light-based data he has should work alright, but this other thing will be more challenging because......

He asks Noptan how young Amentans are taught. Draak don't do anything formal. The closest thing to 'formal education' he has ever heard of is old stories which have a widely-agreed-upon version.

Noptan's most recent consulting job was for a computer science magnet school for green and yellow four year olds and she can chatter about how their computer lab setup needed updating so all the students could reliably access customized work environments even if they left their laptops at home, and how she had them replace their calculus textbooks to better hew to those students' strengths (they weren't even having them solve the problems by coding!), and so on.

Yes, everyone is different! His hatchlings all grew wiser differently - this one had no head for math but had a way of seeing alternate perspectives so he did a Socratic Method sort of thing and this one would bite down hard on a challenge with a promised reward so he metaphorically dangled shiny things just out of reach and that one did best exploring more freely so he simply made himself available for the occasional question and that one learned best from long lectures with the chance to ask questions afterward...

(He doesn't love them despite the clear fact that they're alien babies, and his. He finds them fascinating and something to be proud of and something to protect and likes them like one might like a friend, but definitely doesn't feel the way an Amentan would.)

Well, that's interesting and lightly creepy but not something they can't work around. Amseli wants to know if the babies have only one parent.

Two are necessary to create them, but with very rare exceptions only one will mind them, find a place for them, and teach them in the egg or afterwards. I preferred to do that for all my children, and my partners did not care except for once - we made two, she took the first and I the second.

Did you miss the first one?

A little bit. Not quite the way you mean that word. I would have been greatly agitated if I thought her other creator would do a bad job teaching her, if I thought she would become foolish or die through no fault of her own, but I respect Web of Tunnels greatly and knew this was not true. I wish I could have taught her in her first two years, but since I knew she would be taken care of it was no more than an annoyance. I like that she did well for herself, in a way that I might not have been able to help her do, creating tunnels that deepen and extend the ecosystem in her territory.