The Amentan explorer Scout III opens up its radio and subspace transmissions in case the other ship is listening and starts saying hello in various languages and also prime numbers.

The strange ship responds in subspace with prime numbers and some more math and a lot of data that looks like a text corpus with an attempt at a translation package using physical constants, like the mass of hydrogen.

The Amentans have a text corpus to send back! The ship computer starts chewing on what they have received.

After a while, the ship says it is Many Water Prospector and does not want to fight in a dozen different ways.

Scout III also does not want to fight! It is glad they agree!

Many Water Surveyor is also glad! It is not a science ship and is having difficulty with translation. It does not want to cause misunderstandings! But not fighting is very important. It talks about not wanting to fight some more. Why do they have so many different communication standards? It is very confusing. (This is again said in many languages at once.)

Their planet has many languages spoken! They use machines to translate them, and sent lots in case Many Water Surveyor would have an easier time with some of them than others. Scout III's crew's favorite is this one here though. They are so glad they have found some aliens and that the aliens don't want to fight.

They will only use that language. Having many languages spoken seems inconvenient. They used to do that but it gradually creoled into one that was eventually revised and simplified.

Scout III is the first alien ship their species has met! They are glad but also worried! Aliens existing has scary implications like there being LOTS of aliens, and that some of them might want to fight.

Scout III's species, Amentans, has not met any aliens before either, so it does not know if some third species of aliens might want to fight.

Their species can be translated (imperfectly!) as Many One Many, Bubblehead, or Wall Builder. They like 'bubblehead' the best among those. Communicating with Amenta is clearly very important! They want to go inform their government soon! They don't think [untranslatable 1] is possible at this time but they can send someone to Scout III (in an isolation life support suit!) as an [untranslatable 1]-replacement if they want.

The Amentans call themselves after the name of their planet, Amenta, which means "land" in an older version of the language they are speaking with the Bubbleheads. Could the Bubbleheads say more about untranslateable-1?

Their name for their planet is 'Planet'. Or 'Ululam' in phonetic translation. Untranslatable-1 is a method of communication that is much faster than talking, and the way to spread skills and knowledge and memories and perform negotiation, and necessary to maintain psychological health. Do they not do untranslatable-1?

Their translation is still new, so they might have something like it, but it does not sound very familiar.

They are confused how an intelligent species can develop without untranslatable-1. Their scientists theorized that aliens might be very weird, though. They wouldn't want the confusion to grow worse. They think it may be best to agree to send one science ship each back to this system in [a quarter season].

That sounds like a good plan. Should they have some contingency contact arrangement, like subspace messaging protocols, in case one or the other ship fails to make it on time?

They can work out contingency contact arrangements, including leaving probes and subspace protocols.

And then Many Water Prospector will leave.

A bigger ship is present a quarter season later, when the Amentans return. It identifies itself as Many Water Prospector and Science Eater and Elegant Coordination Minister and Climbing Engineer Scout and Beauty Of Life.

The Amentan science ship is called the Neutrino and it is pleased to meet them. Does the ship have some relation to the Many Water Prospector from before?

Many Water Prospector is on the ship with everyone else, yes! They think their translation is a lot better now and would like to translate untranslatable-1 as brain-exchanging.

...brain-exchanging, gosh. Amentans cannot exchange their brains.

How do they learn things then??? Or negotiate credibly??? Or deal with the fact that some kinds of work don't require much brain at all and other kinds need LOTS of brain???

They learn things from experience, and negotiate with... iterated trust-building setups and consequences for defection and such, and usually smarter people work on more-brain stuff and dumber people work on less-brain stuff.

There's a pause on transmissions for a bit, then they ask what does an iterated trust-building setup... Look like? Elegant Coordination Minister has some idea how spoken negotiations work but they are always dispreferred compared to brain-exchanging, especially for high-stakes things.

Well, like, if someone dealt generously and fairly with you in the past you can guess they will keep doing that, and they'll be motivated to because they will want you to keep negotiating with them in the future.

That makes sense.

Do the Amentans have a broader agenda for this meeting in mind? The bubbleheads have no specific agenda except getting to know them.

They would like to find out if the bubbleheads want to trade things, like star maps and telemetry about habitable planets, and if they'd like to exchange crewmembers to do in-person visits they are equipped for that too!

After much debate at home it has been decided that they can trade star maps and telemetry with aliens! Data for data sounds reasonably fair. Science Eater has been working on Amentan file format conversion already. In-person visits sound exciting too, but perhaps later.

They haven't found any habitable-to-them planets yet but they have only very recently started exploring, about one Amentan year ago. Their requirements for habitability are thus: A slightly lower gravity/oxygen content and slightly higher temperature/atmospheric pressure than Amentans, but they don't mention a year length.

Amentans have found a couple candidates that they rejected on those grounds, and will highlight them in the data set!

That's very exciting! They found one planet that's a bit of an ice-ball even by Amentan standards, but has the right year length and a good atmosphere, here. With techniques like orbital mirrors it might be quite colonizable for them. They think the fact that the two species will not be directly competing for living space is a great relief.

If they did find a planet with overlapping suitability it might be neat to try an experimental integrated colony but it's certainly convenient that they don't have to figure that out right away.

That's something far off in the future for now. They're relieved they don't have to immediately think about the prospect of interstellar war. They're prepared to defend themselves and have various classified plans to that effect but it is usually better to negotiate a non-war solution even if it involves giving concessions.

Is there a reason they were so concerned about meeting warlike aliens?

They used to fight each other a lot, on both small and large scales, mostly over living area and resources, and eventually stopped. But the solution involves educating everyone on game theory and also doing a lot of brain-exchanging so that every part of the world has some small part of every other part of the world, and they can't do that with aliens, and aliens might have different interpretations of game theory.

Oh! Amentans used to fight each other over living space but they had that sorted with strong international agreements on population control even before they discovered warp.

That's good to hear. The bubbleheads hadn't yet industrialized when they managed to stop fighting all the time, and came to agreement on population controls very quickly when it started to be a problem. They're still pretty far below carrying capacity and expecting to find planets soon so their allowable growth rate is about 6% per Amentan year.

The Amentans are holding growth down a little lower than that till they find a planet they can get underway on but it seems to be a reasonable number.

They're still having trouble wrapping their heads around being an isolated brain. Do they limit the creation of new bodies instead of the creation of new colonies? A bubblehead colony can have as many bodies as it can support, it just can't subdivide without permission.

...they limit the creation of new bodies, yes, since each one is a separate person. A bubblehead can have several bodies?

...A bubblehead is a collection of bubbles, which are fleshy tendrils attached to their heads. Bubbles are neural tissue in a tough outer casing. All the bubbles on a body come together to think and react to the environment and such, but all the bubbles that consider themselves to belong to a colony constitute a person. Whether they're on one body or thirty bodies. That's why frequent brain-exchanging is psychologically essential.

It does sound like that would be important. If Amentans could have several bodies they would probably still limit the creation of bodies, since bodies are what take up space and eat food and stuff, but doing it the bubbleheads' way seems like it would make sense for them.

If a colony loses too many resources it'll recycle its less important parts, or merge with another if things are very bad. Needing to do that is bad and hurts, but when an Amentan body dies it's a whole person dying? Not just part of them? That seems terrible!

Yeah, the whole person dies if an Amentan body does! They don't have a way around that, though they have science fiction about it.

They should share fiction and other art! (It turns out bubbleheads don't have anywhere even remotely near as much of a literary tradition or societal output of writing as Amentans, but they really like elaborate visual art and have lots of that.

The Amentans brought a selection of their assorted art for the bubbleheads! They are excited to see what the bubbleheads do artwise.

Landscapes, still life, portraits(?) (they have six limbs, moving around hexapedaly and using the front limbs as manipulators, though they almost have 'hair' of the bubbles, which are variously colored tentacle-like tendrils about an inch thick and six inches to a foot long), stained glass, mandala-type things, impressionistic painting, sculpture, photography, animation, lots of time-lapse videos of things growing or being built or decaying...

Most of their architecture seems to be centered on compounds with a large outer wall, elaborate gardens inside, and a smaller singular building in the middle that again usually looks like a fortress of some kind. Their cities are all separated with lots of internal gates and fences and checkpoints, though there's still some open spaces there. They see the same colors as Amentans but use them very differently. To bubbleheads, blue indicators mean 'ok/yes/go' and brown means 'bad/no/stop'.

Amentans use white and red for those meanings, and they explain along with the art transfer the caste system and how it's color coded.

Well, Amentans have to specialize somehow if they can't split and combine themselves as needed. They like what Amentans have done with glass and steel in the cities, though it all seems... Insecure, like wild animals could just wander into places?

What do Amentans eat? Bubbleheads are technically omnivores, though the vast majority of their diets are plants.

(Beauty Of Life is mostly various flavors of biologist and would like to discuss Amentan ecosystems now please!!)

Amenta doesn't have that many wild animals and the ones which are issues in cities are things like bugs that wouldn't be stopped by walls. Most animals don't actually want to be around Amentans anyway, so even in the tropics and poles where there are more animals they tend not to wander into cities. Amentans are also omnivores, and eat more meat than it sounds like Bubbleheads do, but still lots of plants. Here are pictures of Amentan foods and ingredients. They have an ecologist, who can talk about Amentan animals! They have birds and fish and mammals (Amentans are mammals) and bugs!

They also have things that fill the niches of birds and fish and insects and mammals, though the evolutionary history is different. For example the 'mammals' typically lay eggs and have a different spinal column layout. Beauty Of Life is fascinated. They are now trying to figure out if Amentan foods would be safe for bubbleheads to eat, and vice versa.

Climbing Engineer Scout, having looked at both species' starmaps, observes that building a subspace relay between their two homeworlds would not be too terribly expensive - here, it would need just 47 satellites, one around each of these stars - and having a channel of communication would be good. Does Amenta have the ability to build those? Also, have they built any megaprojects meant to make getting into space cheaper like launch cannons or skyhooks? He really likes the bubbleheads' history of that kind of thing, before better shuttles made the idea obsolete. Or maybe big space stations?

Amenta can build those! They have stations on their moons and on some other planets in their system but they aren't seasonable so it's hard to staff them. They don't have any free-orbiting stations yet.

The bubbleheads can build those too. Maybe they can split the project? Bubbleheads are good at building very large structures, if Amenta might want big space stations later! Look at these huge hydro dams! And artificial lakes and islands! And really big particle accelerator! And these superheavy cargo rail and ocean networks! And this cylinder-orbital habitat! (Climbing Engineer Scout is as much of a nerd as Beauty of Life, in their own specialty)

Coordination Minister wonders, how many Amentans are there exactly? There are approximately 380 million bubblehead colonies, but that leaves them with about six billion bodies inhabiting their planet. Also, they're a bit concerned with how many different Amentan countries there are. If their people have to deal with conflicting expectations and policies from Amentans of different countries, they might find it confusing and frustrating. There are potential problems there.

Sure, splitting the project sounds good. The artificial islands are their favorites, what great islands!

There are coming up on fourteen billion Amentans these days and a few dozen countries, but this ship is a representative of the biggest country, Tapa.

(He will talk about the engineering challenges of building artificial islands! Beauty of Life will chime in about ecological concerns as well.)

The bubbleheads don't have anything exactly recognizable as a "country", instead they have an overlapping web of regional, global, local, occupation and social role-based agreements. They created a body capable of making pan-species agreements when they started properly exploring space, though, and Coordination Minister will report back to that body. Though it is again not quite a country.

The Tapai reported to the other Amentan countries as soon as they found the Bubbleheads! They have a few representatives from other countries aboard.

Which countries? What are the differences between countries? Does being the first country to find them give Tapa an advantage like how Many-Water-Surveyor is very rich and desirable now even though the encounter was mostly down to luck?

They have some Anitami (the inventor of warp is Anitami) and some Voans (the next largest country) and some Cenemi (also pretty big).

Anitam must be very proud of their scientific achievement. Warp is considered the culmination of a huge collaborative project for them. They'd like to do the in-person crew visits now if that's still possible!

Anitam's representatives confirm that they are very proud!

How many Amentans should go over? Amentans are THIS big. How big are Bubblehead bodies?

Up to five would be fine. Bubblehead bodies are less tall than that but longer, since they're hexapeds. Particularly tall Amentan bodies might have to duck under doorways on their ship.

The Amentans choose five not-too-tall people to go over and think they can accommodate six or seven Bubbleheads. Do the Bubbleheads have a better idea than getting the ships pretty close together and then doing tethered spacewalks and undoing the tethers once they're secure on the other side?

They have this tube thing they use for collecting samples, it can stick to their hull and provide an enclosed transit space. Tethers are a good secondary precaution, though. Also, they want to bathe the outside of the suits in UV radiation as a decontamination precaution, will that be a problem?

The suits protect the occupants from UV so that's fine and very sensible of them, they should do that in both directions.

It takes a little while to make all the arrangements and do careful slow maneuvering. Then the bubbleheads scoot a cage-like structure covered in intense UV lights into their airlock and scour the suits worn by five bodies, before they move into the tube's artificial-gravity-free zone and wait for the Amentans to clear their own airlock.

They are clear to come across! The Amentans are standing by to go the other way.

A bubblehead waves cheerfully at the Amentans as they carefully make the crossing! They've learned the gesture from the art exchange.

And then the Amentans can come into the opposite-side airlock and get UV shined on them and then the pressure equalizes and the inner door opens onto a plain metal corridor, just a bit less tall than the Amentans would build it. A bubblehead is standing there in a bright blue uniform and holding an oversized pocket everything. It says something and is translated into Tapap, "Welcome to our ship! It's very exciting to welcome the strangest strangers I have ever seen! I can lead you to the common area, which is probably best for talking!"

Amentans wave back! They sent across three greens, a blue, and a yellow. "We'll know soon how worried we need to be about crosscontaminants!" says a green cheerfully.

"Is it all right to take photos?" asks the yellow.

"Yes, we need to be careful. I'm sure most of Beauty of Life is working on it already. It's fine to take photos and videos and sound recordings! This way."

The bubblehead turns and walks down the corridor, past a bulkhead that opens up when they approach and closes behind them. From this angle it has something that looks like personal electronics stuck to the end of several of its bubbles. Then another bulkhead opens and leads to a large and mostly open room where several other bubbleheads are waiting, with varying numbers of bubbles on their heads. The room has things recognizable as couch-like furniture in a circle, a kitchen, exercise equipment, and a series of wall screens showing video of crop fields. Uniform colors include light blue, green, a different shade of green, grey, and purple.

The yellow records avidly. "What do the uniform colors mean?" asks one of the greens.

"At home each colony present wears a different color or pattern or symbol so as to be uniquely identifiable, and today we chose colors meant to be legible to Amentan castes, though of course we don't actually specialize the same way. Light blue is Elegant Coordination Minister, light green is Science Eater, dark green is Beauty of Life, purple is Many Water Prospector, grey is Climbing Engineer Scout."

"I'm Kaska Tuanke," says the blue, "and these are our xenologer Osika Mai, our astronomer Shian Dekanti, our linguist Ten Tahmu, and our documentarian Ito Atamsho."

A purple uniformed body says, "These bodies are all loaded for communication and intelligence, so we can understand you better. Please be aware that if you encounter bodies with few bubbles on their head they may be unresponsive or easily confused."

A grey one asks, "What is your role, Kaska Tuanke? And can you describe the role of a xenologer briefly?"

"We don't have linguistics as a field," one of Science Eater says to Ten Tahmu. "The closest equivalent is cryptography and data compression, I think!"

"Tuanke means 'outreach'! I'm here as the government oversight into the project and also coordinated the international representatives aboard our ship," says Tuanke.

"But you did use to have multiple languages, isn't that right?" says Tahmu.

"I serve a similar role," Coordination Minister says.

"-Hundreds of years ago, it makes the study of languages ancient history, not science. Everything I know about it was learned since our friend Water reported back!"

"A xenologer is someone who studies aliens! Of course until recently it was speculative, but we have to start somewhere," says Mai.

"Indeed. There is so much to learn that it is difficult to begin."

"I tried reading some of your science fiction," a Water Prospector body says. "Nuna Sasan moves to the dark planet. It was an interesting experience. It felt slow, reading one perspective at a time. I couldn't tell what most of the characters wanted beyond very simple things, though."

"I've read that one," says Dekanti. "Is there a way to read multiple perspectives all at once in your writing?"

"Yes. It looks like your machine translation simply places them sequentially? Here, the usual style is roughly time-ordered from the top to the bottom."

He reveals a tablet with text that follows elaborate splits and merges as it flows down the page, like ripple patterns in sand. It's about a group trying to make shelter after a shuttle crash, with eight different entities all acting and thinking at once. At first there's an eight-part view of the panic and fear of the crash, then a lot of brain swapping to concentrate memory and critical thinking and creativity, leaving five less capable and three smart bubblebodies. One trying to salvage the shuttle systems, one directing the 'dumb' ones in building a snow wall, and one sorting through damaged cargo for anything of use. Cargo tallies up food cans while Salvage figures out that the warp core is fixable but not easily while Foreman designs a shelter and yells at the other bodies about where to point their shovels, with the simple thoughts of the 'near empty' bodies as thin footnotes.

"Huh. Are you able to read several lines at once? We can't do that."

"Oh. Yes! We can focus on several things at once, and reading each line is a thing. If I were walking and balancing something I was carrying and remembering the path I need to take to bring it somewhere I could only read one line at once, unless I was very heavy in the head at the time. But you are individual thinkers, right. That is a serious hinderance to reading and writing our way."

"We can multitask, but it helps a lot if the things we're doing are very different - we can also walk and carry and pathfind and read at the same time, as long as bringing whatever we're reading doesn't interfere with peripheral vision or having enough hands to carry the object, for example. But our eyes focus on one area at a time and even if you had two lines of text right next to each other, or overlapping in different colors or something, it wouldn't work," says Tahmu. "- I guess people who learn to read music can do something sort of like reading multiple lines at once, but only one line is text."

"Our eyes are multifocal and can point in different directions, yes. Tasks being very different or very similar does not change how well we can focus on them. It's almost as if you have just as much mind as us, but can't retask portions like we do..."

"I suspect that is the case," Science Eater interrupts. "Something like that. Each piece of our minds does learn to be good at different skills, even if we can focus all our minds on very similar tasks. I notice that Amentans have very fast reflexes. I watched a video where an Amentan caught something that another dropped, as if part of them was always watching for falling objects and another was always thinking about where to move your hands! We do not do that. If I drop something it will hit the floor unless I was specifically prepared to catch a falling object. Your reflexes are amazing."

"I wouldn't have expected that would be something that'd make us stand out in the galaxy!" says Mai. "A lot of animals on our own planet are more coordinated and quick than we are."

"Many of our planet's animals are like that as well, the evolutionary class that we are descended from does not dominate many niches. But not people. Watching greys play complex sports will be a spectacle for us. We can do things like dance or fight if we devote our all to it, but to run and swing and dance and also think about the state of the game and the other players and react to all of it quickly..."

"We'd love to have you attend some sports games and performances whenever there might first be bubbleheads on Amenta," smiles Tuanke.

"That will be fun."

Coordination Minister says, "We have already received many requests to allow merchant groups to try to trade with Amenta. They think that alien products will be fascinatingly exotic and very valuable at home. For now we are restricting Amentan contact to centrally overseen ships until biological and culture shock concerns are assuaged, however."

"Culture shock concerns?" wonders Mai.

"If something we consider ordinary and normal is shocking and appalling to you and it came to light during less filtered contact, or vice versa, there could be impulsive reactions and unpleasant consequences to our relations. We want to at least attempt to understand each other first, though it will be a very long process for our species to truly know each other."

"That makes sense. Are there any questions your reading so far has prompted?" Tuanke asks.

Bubbleheads of different shirt colors look at each other and the devices on the ends of their 'hair' flash activity lights, presumably talking to each other.

"The history of the red caste seems to have been handled nearly as well as it could have been, but our handling of similar issues is one potential conflict point. We do not have a concept exactly analogous to pollution, but it is the closest word and a viable translation to something we have. The connotations are more like infected. Should we go further into this now or is it an unpleasant topic?"

"It seems like it should be covered at some point," says Mai. "The pollution response evolved to deal with infections and things like them, anyway."

"There was a historical parasite spread by brain-exchanging and another that could infect via crops thanks to the pre-modern practice of using waste in compost, which is now eliminated. These parasites are now eradicated aside from two sets of samples stored at high-security laboratories, thankfully. Our pollution screening involves fewer cleaning steps but longer total time - four thirty minute showers spaced out over a day, essentially. And medical tests."

Pause.

"It is common for a group to designate one body to regularly deal with pollution related issues. Occasionally, that body will pass pollution screening and interact with the greater whole for a time, before returning to isolation and continuing work. However, if such issues no longer need dealing with, bodies that once did polluted work and passed screening come out of isolation entirely and sometimes end up reproducing."

"What does the screening consist of?" asks Mai.

Coordination Minister gives more details on the exact steps. The medical tests check for any possible infections, and flag things like unusual hormone levels for another cleaning process and more invasive examination just-in-case.

"If there is doubt about whether a body is clean after all this it will remain in isolation indefinitely or even be disposed of."

"I think that's a - sufficiently compatible process," Mai says. "Obviously a theologian will need to consider it to be sure."

"Good."

"How does one teach when you cannot brain-exchange to show the parts that have to learn exactly what to do?"

"People learn by example, and by practicing, and by making guesses and forming theories and trying them. I imagine it would be a little like how you learn things no one has learned yet," says Mai.

"New research is notoriously difficult. The body of work that led up to warp took several decades. It looks to us like Amenta's technology has been advancing faster than ours."

"Do you expect Amentans would be interested in visiting our planet?" A Coordination Minister body asks the group.

"Amentans would be very interested in visiting your planet! Enough that we'd have to filter the volunteers pretty heavily!" says Tuanke.

"Our chat room shows that Beauty of Life is growing more confident about there being no bio-compatibility issues." Coordination Minister says.

A Many Water Prospector muses, "I wonder, do we do the same things for fun? Sports are less common for us, socializing, video games, making and watching video is common, though we seem to have less emphasis on text..."

"Hobbies vary but working on miniatures and puzzles, massive multiplayer games, community gardens, and things like that are common," two of Climbing Engineer Scout add.

"Massive multiplayer games and video games in general are big on Amenta, and the other things exist but are a little more niche except for fairly trivial puzzle games people use to fill irregular bits of time," says Mai. "We do have a lot of emphasis on text, a lot of socializing is done online via text even though we have video and audio calling. But we love video, both professional and amateur."

"I think reading and writing is less common among bubbleheads because we can brain-exchange so readily. Even these... Bubble caps?" It gestures at the device on its head. "They keep us constantly background-aware of the broad strokes what the rest of us is doing, which is very comforting."

"I'm curious to know more about brain exchanging," says Mai. "How much is usually exchanged at a time, is it usually two-way, how do the updates propagate, how does a colony stay in sync with itself..."

"There's two kinds really, where we connect the ends of our bubbles, and where we actually move bubbles from head to head. Well, three kinds I suppose, since the bubbles on a head also talk to each other, but in a different and more... Direct and constant way that results in consciousness. The first kind is a lot like some depictions of telepathy in your fiction. It can be factual information or sense-impressions or anything really. Before bubble-caps became common these exchanges tended to be infrequent but somewhat lengthy and in-depth. Now they are constant and shallow. Some complain that modern technology is destroying old ways of socializing. The second kind is... We are not individuals. Colonies are somewhat individual, but we also have a distinct sense of kinship and connectedness because in many cases we literally are partially another colony. Science Eater and Beauty of Life in particular have [untranslatable]. Have... Blurred into each other. Colonies stay in sync because every small part understands that it is a small part, and the consciousness in each body knows that it is part of something greater and instinctually seeks the good of the entire group. This is why bodies to be discarded or bubbles that are old and damaged don't fight it, they know the whole lives on. How exactly ego and goals and consciousness gestalts out of bubbles is a question we are still studying."

"That makes sense, we don't know much about the hard problem of consciousness as it applies to us either. How do the bubble-caps work?"

"The first ones were bulky devices passing short distances to allow polluted bodies to brain-exchange without spreading it. Over time they were miniaturized and networked and made portable. It was only significantly later that they became input devices for computers and a way to consume media. It's much easier to transfer electrical impulses than interpret them."

"I wonder if any of the same technology is adaptable to Amentan brain-computer interface frontiers," wonders Tahmu.

"We have natural interfacing capability already. I doubt it would be straightforward. It would be fascinating to investigate, though," Science Eater replies.

"How specialized is each bubble?" asks Mai.

"...That is surprisingly hard to describe. Not debilitatingly so in most cases. The function of a bubble depends on where on your head it goes, a bit. You can definitely pick out a few bubbles that are especially good at calculus or something, skills bleed over between bubbles on the same head, but only a bit and it depends on what kind of skill. Physical or sensory things transfer well, abstract skills like technical writing or warp math much less so, memories hardly at all without deliberate effort."

"Effort? What is that like?"

"I don't know if you have the concepts. There is a basic action to put a bubble into a receptive state, then you do mental-" The translator program hesitates. "-Exercises. It demands most of our attention and feels like meticulously doing the same thing many times at once."

"...like meditation?" suggests Tahmu.

"...Allow me to look up the meaning cloud for that."

Pause.

"...Not really. It is a disassociative experience. It disrupts consciousness."

"Huh. - like a seizure?"

"I don't know how you experience those. It probably doesn't make sense to you without the qualia of splitting but you split until you're not conscious anymore, until suddenly you are again. It's relaxing and pleasurable if there is actually anything to learn. There are addictive drugs that create the same feeling? You do nothing for hours and feel like you've understood something profound but actually have learned nothing..."

"We have those," remarks Mai. "So you go on a bit of a trip and at the end all the insights are real, that must be amazing."

"Well, insights vary in quality," Science Eater says with a wave of two forelimbs. The other bodies make chittering noises.

"But yes, it's a good feeling, spreading knowledge," Many Water adds. "And you can get paid for teaching directly this way or sharing interesting memories. Our memories of meeting all of you are going to be a popular craze."

"The Amentans back home are going to have to settle for recordings," laughs Tuanke, gesturing at the photographer.

"For now, at least," Coordination Minister says, having been quiet for a while. "I think your mention of mind-interfacing technology has set off our pair of science siblings a bit... Would you like to see any other parts of the ship? Perhaps that will expose more areas where we can give each other insights into technology."

"Yes please!" says Atamsho.

They show off the science labs (lots of little robot arms and self-delivering tables, all networked) and bridge (big overhead consoles that have dozens of plugs for their heads) and the crew quarters.

Here are some bubblehead children complete with miniature bubbles on their miniature heads! They're cute enough, in a six-limbed alien centaur sort of way, and babble about FINDING ALIENS and SPACESHIPS and LOOK AT THE THING I PAINTED (a spaceship). The bubbleheads treat them protectively but aren't doting on them quite as much as springing Amentans.

"We'd love to get some robotics knowhow from you, we're sort of doing catchup in that field for historical reasons," Tuanke says. Atamsho gets MANY pictures of BABY ALIENS but the Amentans stay back from them so as not to trigger alien parent instincts. Mai does ask, "How does having children work given how you have multiple bodies per colony?"

"I could describe the biology, but is that what you mean? Or more like social structure?"

"They are more separate than adults while growing, with only the first kind of brain-exchanging possible," Engineer Scout comments. "Typically prospective parent colonies plan two good genetic combinations and each take responsibility for one resulting egg."

"And then they join their parent colony?" Mai asks.

"Yes. Beginning slowly in adolesence, then fully as they mature. Welcoming an adolescent is a cause for a party."

"I think you may be underestimating how much internal differentiation we have. Different bodies do have somewhat different internal experiences, habits, skills, and preferences. We blend and share, yes, but we are not composed of all identical minds. That would be... Disturbing and obviously unhealthy."

"Do bodies ever want to leave their colonies?" Mai asks.

"Yes, that happens. One can join another colony to deal with it, if you find someone compatible. Splitting into two colonies tends to be better, but requires a credit, of course. Or occasionally, a body will commit suicide."

"Does the rest of the colony usually want to salvage some of the bubbles in cases like those?"

"...It is a very personal decision. There are a lot of factors at play and it can be stressful to discuss."

"Of course, our apologies," says Tuanke.

"Those are not necessary. We expect occasional misunderstandings in such a momentous occasion."

Many Water breaks the silence with, "I would be interested in hearing more about life on Amenta." 

"Is there anything in particular you want to hear or should we just ramble generally?" wonders Mai.

"I don't think I can even ask questions that narrow down things much! A lot about children and teaching must be very different, I think."

"Oh, yes, our kids are expected to grow up into their own individuals - one hopes to have good relationships with them, of course, and to inculcate one's values, but it doesn't work every time and we can't do it so directly. Children go to school, where oranges with careers in education teach them all the things they'll need to know and help them figure out what they should specialize."

"School is an entire category of institution, that all individuals attend? We have universities, but those are generally for adults."

"Children aren't capable of much but they're very good at learning!" says Tahmu. "Especially languages, adult Amentans are much worse at that. The ideal is that our kids reach adulthood about ready to take up productive work and support themselves economically."

"Our children are mostly expected to learn as well. Sometimes they will do light and simple and low risk work, the kind that mostly isn't cost-effective to automate yet like helping wash clothes... Amentans must talk a lot, I think."

"We do, yes, lots of talking and writing - we don't have other ways to make ourselves understood or coordinate," says Tahmu.

"This is more talking than we usually do. These are exciting times!"

"Is there trouble coordinating on prisoner's games and stag hunts and similar situations given the greater individuality of Amentans?" Coordination Minister asks.

"Sometimes! We're more cooperative in iterated games," nods Tahmu.

"Aha. Yes, you mentioned earlier that politics is often a matter of expectations and reputation for you. We've tried to build cooperative political systems that are robust against disturbances, and admittedly failed in some respects. There are subcultures in disagreement with the general world consensus on some points and they have much lower happiness and prosperity because nobody will trade with them without markups. In the past there have been global wars of extermination over such differences, but we're hoping separate planets solves the issue without violence in the modern age."

"What are the disagreements the trade sanctions are about?" asks Tuanke.

"The Fwortli exercise very strong central authority, reporting, and coordination, where the rest of the world thinks too much homogeneity is negative all on its own, and also creates too much administrative overhead. The situation is stable and of course, they don't wish to change their ways. There is a not-quite-a-state established on a large but remote island with cultural practices that cause a lot of unnecessary deaths. The Celoe region was dominated by an abusive oligarchical structure where access to electronics and information is limited for most of the population, but they suffered internal dissent and eventually an invasion was coordinated as the least bad option. This was about forty years ago. And there is a growing traditionalism movement that aims to reject the changes to life that modern technology allows us, with people spending most of their time in isolated compounds with only fellow colony members and using bubblecaps far less. Those are the ones that spring to mind, any others would be less extreme examples."

"Are we likely to meet any representatives of these groups?"

"Perhaps some Fwortli, later. The traditionalists generally reject space travel, the island has a population in the low tens of thousands of bodies, and the Celoe Directorate is gone as a culture. Does Amenta have any similar general-departures-from-consensus?"

"Amenta has many countries. You could loosely categorize them by our population control methods, which tend to cause some loose cultural similarities across countries that match. There are some standout oddities along various axes, though - differences in caste system implementation, for instance."