"How easy is it to change people's minds while they're stored?"

"Again, I'm not an expert but my understanding is that it's quite difficult. The modifications I'm using took a few years for a team of several hundred people to design and that was partially based on reverse-engineered magic. Everything in people's minds is connected and you need a lot of expertise and skill to make almost any change. The systems we distribute also use checksums and encryption to prevent minds from being modified between being copied and re-embodied."

"That's good to hear. Is there any way we can verify those protections?"

"After we've sufficiently assured ourselves that you're unlikely to abuse it we can provide you with technological means of creating backups that's something you could test and verify though the technological version is easier to subvert. Magic though, it resists easy verification or analysis unless you have magic of your own. We have magics that can verify our backups system and we could provide you with them but ultimately you would need to trust those magics."

The captain has a knowing smirk but doesn't interject.

"That is a hard problem. How would we go about establishing our trustworthiness?"

"There's a few routes. The first option is to demonstrate that you possess equivalent technologies and are using them responsibly. The second option is to provide a sufficiently verifiable account of your history so we can understand who you are as a civilization through that lens. The third option is just to wait, as we continue diplomatic contact we'll get a better sense of your society and peoples, assuming you're trustworthy we'll learn that naturally over time."

"I guess that's not too different from our stance regarding distributing technology. There is a note of superiority there though."

"As much as I wish I could deny that I can't. We mostly encounter civilizations less capable than ours and that tendency has shaped some of our approach to these matters. We're also acutely aware of the ways our technology can be abused and we feel we'd bear some of the responsibility for others abusing technology we gave them."

"It's good you take these things seriously. Interfering with the natural course of development for other civilizations isn't to be done lightly," says the Captain.

"I'm curious what you mean by natural. Do you just mean what would happen without any contact with other civilizations? What makes that a good outcome?"

"If you interfere too readily in other civilizations you deny them the chance to learn and grow. It's also hard to avoid sculpting those civilizations into copies of your own and destroying what makes them unique."

"There's definitely some truth to that. At a minimum civilizations are shaped by their circumstances and awful things like massive natural disasters or genocide are both things that would be highly influential circumstances and things we'd like to prevent. Finding or not finding solutions to such things are certainly formative moments for civilizations. It just comes down to whether you consider the cost in lives and suffering to be worth those formative moments, especially when you can't predict how they'll go in advance."

"You can't know what the consequences of interfering will be either. By interfering you're deciding that will be better in the long term as well as the short term."

"Our interventions typically cut death rates by at least 99%. In your place it's different. You might make people's lives better or worse but ultimately without technology like ours everyone dies eventually it's just a matter of when and how. Immortality changes the calculus."

"I'll admit that it does... the lessons taught about this at Starfleet Academy don't need to reckon with that."

"Back to the topic of trustworthiness. What technologies are involved in the first method?"

"As I understand it, the requirements are fairly advanced nanotechnology and either artificial intelligence technology or the ability to alter people's minds. The simplest way to meet the nanotechnology requirement is that we don't give you any nanotechnology, just the software and the hardware requirements so you can implement them using nanotechnology or other tools you already have. The issue of artificial intelligence and mind-alteration is harder. The fact that you have both telepaths and AI are strong signals you have similar tools available. It isn't in itself evidence you wouldn't abuse more general versions of those tools though." 

"What would be evidence then?"

"Ultimately, it's the same as the second and third methods of establishing trust. You handing us information that would be hard to fabricate or us collecting that information ourselves. Generally that information would be collected either by envoys like myself or field archivists."

"What are field archivists?"

"They're people who work to collect information for Starlight. It's an intentionally broad category, it encompasses everything from archeology to zoology, in this case it would be those with specialties in studying civilizations."

"Isn't that just another word for researcher?"

"Researchers as an official position are those who conduct experiments. Field archivists and archivists in general are tasked with observing the state of the world and translating the massive amounts of available information into more useful resources."

"That's an unusual seeming place to draw the line. In our experience people usually play both roles. Is there a reason you separate the responsibilities?"