Oh, that would be quite a bit. "Hm..."

After more flipping through notes, and searching for a couple other notebooks and more flipping through them, he's able to provide a list of plants, mostly smaller ground-covering plants that compete with or parasitize the flowering vines. The vines themselves already regrow from the portions of their network that cling to the trees, though.

"Honestly, it's not related to plant life, but I'm a little worried about the dock. It's pretty durable, since the currents in the Zestsaksanrewp Strait were quite violent, but much heavier yearly snowfall might start wearing it down in a way I'm not really equipped to repair."

"We can take care of the dock," Tateneka, who can make recommendations to the First Contact Bursary Board, promises. "How often do you typically need resupply?"

He considers that question pretty thoroughly as well, putting away the seasonal weather notebooks and finding his resource usage logbooks. "Back home, food delivery and waste management came by once a month, but that was also when I was just a couple miles offshore, not in the middle of the ocean. The stores I have here right now can hold out for six months before I need to start foraging. I'd have to start defecating in the woods once my septic tank starts backing up though, which I'd like to avoid. I don't know exactly how soon that'd happen, but to be safe I'd probably guess a little over two months?"

Tateneka frowns.

"We usually design septic systems with a larger capacity than that. Is there something about the layout of your site ..."

She will spend a good amount of time talking through a plan for keeping the nature reserve functional, while continuing to subtly absorb cultural context from Rermjetsest. In the background, the Archivist makes a serious dent in the library.

The scanned pages get striped across a local redundant disk array. The presence of books with new metadata triggers an automatic push notification to the Archive's geographically distributed indexing servers. The backup servers notice that there are books registered with the index system that are not stored locally, and automatically add the missing books' UUIDs to their content-request advertisements.

The networking hardware between the Archive's backup servers and the CSLSS Contemporary Account's terrestrial downlink negotiates for reserved priority capacity — the benefit of having an institution as old as the written word, and with connections to every government on the planet. The books saturate the ship's network link, radio packets flying from the Archivist's device, to the ship, to the mainland where they become laser pulses, and spread out across the entire planet. All automatic, all designed with the most robust possible protocols, on a network stack that was recently proved formally correct.

And then the Archivist radios in a check to make sure the books are making it through anyway. Because you don't get to become the oldest institution in the world by just assuming that a battle-tested, proven-correct system works without actually checking.

Most þereminians don't really think about the details of how the Network, the Archive, the various territorial agreements, the networking standards, the spectrum-allocation systems, etc. all work together to smoothly save alien books — for one thing, they're distracted by the alien books. But if you told them, they would not be particularly surprised. The þereminian Network is a machine made of rules, wires, lasers, transistors, and, at every turn, the soul-deep understanding that getting written words to eyes that want to see them, forever, is important.

Someone who would be considerably more surprised is hiding in a storage closet.

Previously: