Leareth keeps his head up and his eyes open, it's not going to help their cause right now to look like he's dying, but he, too, is working very hard for this. 

"Should've just nuked the base," the guy grumbles, but he takes no further actions until they've docked.

Nayoki raises thorough shields over all of them, and gets ready to wheel Leareth through the airlock. 

:All right. Tell your boss whatever you want to: She releases that aspect of the set-command. 

- she should be within Thoughtsensing range of everyone on the ship, from here, and Mindhealing range of at least many of them. What can she pick up on? 

The guy is angrily telling his boss that the guy is INFECTED and also these are psychic people with mind control powers.

That is very confusing but everything about this situation was already very confusing so he's not going to assume out of hand it isn't approximately true. Maybe the protomolecule can give people psychic powers. That was not literally on his list of hoped-for outcomes but it's the right genre, and they have some surprising out-of-the-box capabilities to have gotten this far.

He's excited to talk to these people face to face, though probably if the guy is infected it should be through an airlock. Things always go better when talking face to face. 

And Julie's alive. He's really glad that Julie's alive. It's one of those things you can never quite stop believing, when your child is missing in space, that they're alive somehow...

....Nayoki is kind of impressed, honestly. Julies Pierre Mao seems pretty decent at thinking on his feet. 

She's in range, though, so she slaps some set-commands on him anyway. Subtle ones, right at the limit of how fiddly she can manage from here. If he starts thinking about murdering them or attacking the lab from space, he's going to find himself instead noticing that these people could be very useful to him and also remembering Julie. 

Leareth drags himself to alertness, or as close as he can manage. 

:Nayoki. Relay all of this back to the lab, please. Just in case. ...And warn them to be ready to get out, if they need to: 

And, pushing his exhausted Mindspeech to the limits, he stretches out and makes contact with Julies Pierre Mao's mind. 

:I am here. I am ready to speak with you: 

Well. Those sure do seem like psychic powers. Also he is probably in danger. Also that means it can be done and humanity is going to have a chance at true freedom. - one thing at a time.

Welcome aboard the Guanshiyin. Can we get you anything? We have limited medical facilities aboard the ship. 

:I am - managing all right, currently, but I am sure my Healer would appreciate access to more facilities: 

A pause. 

:...Your comms personnel denied that you had planned to drop the protomolecule on Eros. I am dubious. What were you really planning, and - why?: 

What implications do the psychic powers have for - well, probably he should just put his cards on the table, at this point. 

Some things are not wisely transmitted over tightbeam between ships and planets, even if I believe our encryption to be good, nor recorded on any computers. There were plans to do a controlled release of the protomolecule on Eros. They can be revisited, if that seems wise. 

:What were you hoping to accomplish? ...Separately, I believe we bring new evidence and new capabilities, such that you should wish to reassess that plan, but still I want to ask. What -:

This man can't have had ANY IDEA that the people eaten by the protomolecule wouldn't, truly, be gone forever... 

:- what could possibly have made the tradeoff seem worthwhile? A million lives:

:- To be clear, there are situations where I would - make that trade, for an appropriately huge gain. But I am not sure what you hoped for, here, and I wish to understand; 

One point four million, he corrects him, half involuntarily.

The protomolecule is an alien life form. It did not evolve, but was engineered. It can survive in a wide range of conditions but can grow only with access to self-replicating cells. We believe that its creators aimed it, originally, at Earth, the only place in the solar system where it could have functioned as intended, likely two billion years ago. It so happened that as the rock that carried it made its way towards Earth it was pulled into Saturn's gravity well, and became one of Saturn's moons. If it had made the trip it was intended to make, human life would never have existed on Earth.

This poses a number of urgent questions. DId the aliens know that Earth had not yet evolved intelligent life? Would they have cared? Did this do this elsewhere? Is that why the universe seems empty, when everyone's Fermi estimates keep turning up that it shouldn't be? And why didn't they follow up, in the two billion years since then? Are they still out there, or did they destroy themselves - and if they destroyed themselves, how'd they do it, how do we keep humanity off that course? 

More immediately, the protomolecule is a magnificent feat of biological engineering. It keeps killing its hosts, of course, but it's not trying to kill them - it's trying to change them. It doesn't do much interesting with bacteria, but in larger organisms, it tries rerouting blood vessels, adding or deadening nerves, replacing tissue and whole organ systems. And then they die. But it learns. It doesn't do the same thing twice.

I believe that once we can understand it - once we can communicate with it, if that's possible - once we can harness it - we can alter our bodies utterly. We could end aging. We could end our reliance on these fragile bodies. A million people, you ask, what could be worth that? Do you know how many days it takes 1.4million people to die unavoidable deaths of old age?

Three.

Quietly and pointlessly, to herself, Nayoki is thinking that it's very inconvenient how Jules Pierre Mao is so obviously someone Leareth would get along with.

That is way too many pieces at once and Leareth's head hurts. 

There are MULTIPLE more important bits, but his mind is stuck on the last one. 

He is really not very capable of mental math, right now, but he's gone through census-data on Velgarth. And he has the protomolecule. If he tosses it some calculations, throwing up some fairly broad error bars... 

What.

:- The population of your world is - in the billions to - tens of billions? If not more than that...?: 

Apparently no one thought to mention this to him. And, even more stupidly, he never thought to ask. 

.....he took the psychic stuff in stride but now it is Jules Pierre Mao's turn to be incredibly confused. 

Uh. Where.....are you from. The....Amish? The Amish know how many people there are. The Swedish Sentinelese? How would they have gotten their hands on the protomolecule.

It doesn't seem like there's much point in not just giving this man the key information he needs to make decisions. 

:From another world. ...Yes, I am just as confused as you are, both as to why both our planets have humans and how your daughter accidentally landed her shuttle there instead of on Eros. However. I am from another world and we have various magical powers, there. As well as - some problems, which are high context to explain but mean that we have much less advanced technology and a far lower population. I - no one here had said, how many people your star system has...: 

What.

Well. All cards on the table is the strategy that is stable around things becoming even more ridiculous. There are more than 33 billion humans in this star system.

....Calculating how small a percentage of that population he would have needed to make a god is a REALLY STUPID math problem to be trying to solve right now. 

:...Anyway. We can talk to the protomolecule and so we know some things about it that you do not, yet. It - was created in order to construct wormholes. It does not actually need to eat humans to do this, just bacteria will do. ...Also, for reasons which are deeply unclear to me, it uploads the people it eats. I suppose its creators added that functionality: 

- huh. 

I...don't think we want it to build a wormhole, not until we have more of a plan for what we'll meet on the other side. I do want it to learn human biology, so it can stop killing its hosts. You must be, uh, also motivated to achieve that outcome. I think it might be able to become more capable in the abstract with just bacteria, but it needs humans to achieve the things I want for humans. 

:Maybe. It does not need 1.4 million of them, though: 

Well. If it needs ten thousand sourcing them is going to be a problem, but I have an organization dedicated to studying it, and will do what I can. 

Is Julie infected? You said her shuttle went to - your world - and you're infected - and she was in a hospital bed, in the video -

:...Yes. She is - she was, already, when she arrived on Velgarth. We - my people have been trying very hard to keep her alive: 

After a brief pause,

:- We sent word to the OPA. They know everything that we knew when we set our route for your lab: 

Who do you mean by the OPA. It's a bunch of terrorists who barely ever work together.

Well, that doesn't exactly disagree with Leareth's own assessment, even if it seems incomplete. 

:Anderson Dawes, on Ceres. And Fred Johnson on Tycho. ...Separately, a spy on board the ship that found us managed to send a report to the UN, though I am unsure of its exact contents: 

Leareth is, for the moment, going to leave out the part where this was his idea and on purpose. 

I need to think.

Well, the Eros plan is totally shot, anyone suspecting what's happening would be enough to make it probably not worth it. There's the risk they'd go to Eros deliberately despite the quarantine, try to get a sample. Also the risk it'd be traced back to him, and the risk of various agents on Eros flipping now that they're presumably under a lot more pressure. 

- Julie's dying, and the protomolecule needs to learn how to keep humans alive in the next week, not just eventually -

- spy on board the ship. They probably report to Errinwright, which is fine, Errinwright's read in. Fred Johnson, does he report to Mars? For enough money - no, enough ship machinery - he probably would. Mars might not know to try to buy him, though. Dawes will try to intervene on Eros. He should've read more about the various OPA factions - no, he quite reasonably didn't expect it to matter, because it shouldn't have - how did Julie end up in the middle of all this -