Sorgaþa sort of expected them to teleport grandfather to an operating room or something, but you know what? Fair enough.

"Thank you for agreeing to attempt to treat him."

She leads the way down into the hospital, eventually ending up in a room in the palliative care ward.

"You're welcome."

The robot follows forming tiny wheels where necessary to keep up the pace. Once they've arrived it inspects the various machinery the grandfather is attached to and looks to see if there's some sort of convenient chart or set of medical records to use as a basis.

"May I use scans of you as a basis for comparison to identify problems in your grandfather? Our[ex] imaging techniques do not expose tissues to radiation in ways that risk chemical reactions or temperature shifts."

"Uh. Sure, I guess that's fine. Do I need to sit down?"

Patient medical records are stored on the end of the bed, on a clipboard that is more-or-less like the one that would be found in an Earthly hospital for reasons of convergent evolution, except that this one has a metal flap that falls down over the paper if nobody is holding it, so that only the bottom two inches of the paper (which contains anything urgent that a doctor or nurse might need to know when glancing with their hands full) are visible.

There are also a number of brightly colored reversible symbols on the wall above the bed, held in place by a set of elastics so that they only move with deliberate effort. The only one reachable by the patient is red-and-blue diagonally striped on one side, and solid red on the other. The remaining ones can be read — with the aid of a copy of the regional Standardized Medical Care Signalling Codebook — to say that the patient is AB-, consistently oriented to own identity, but not consistently oriented to time, place, or identity of others, is on medicine schedule A, and is currently on medication that is part of generalized-contraindication-class B.

"For a full set of scans you'll need to accompany me and your grandfather to the medical station that will shortly be arriving, but I can do initial ones with the equipment I have here; you don't need to sit down. From what I'm reading in your Grandfather's file I'm moderately confident I can restore much of his physical health. 

"I'm less confident that I can arrest or reverse his cognitive decline. Neural networks tend to be exceptionally finicky and your medical science doesn't know how much of your mental decline is due to biochemical factors as opposed to structural factors.

"Are there any doctors or hospital staff we[in] should speak with before we[in] go?"

"Well, I can't imagine that having cells committing apoptosis and accruing mutations and getting clogged up with prions is going to be helpful. So it seems likely-to-me-as-a-layman that fixing the biochemical parts will be helpful. Our brains are plastic, and can generally recover from changes in circumstance, although somewhat less with age."

And that is a very good question about the doctors. Sorgaþa flags down the duty nurse and advises them on the situation.

    "We[in] can get a doctor to consult if it would be helpful," the duty nurse advises, "But if you expect your own medical science to so totally eclipse ours[ex], or you've already read all of our[ex] medical literature, I can take care of the discharge paperwork."

"If the records here are comprehensive then discharge is likely sufficient, my understanding is that there's usually things not included in the records that professionals might be able to communicate in person. That may not be true for your society though you do have a stronger archival drive than many societies.

"I haven't internalized all your medical literature yet there is quite a lot of it and it takes time to synthesize such records into functional knowledge. As for our[ex] medical capabilities, I do expect that those eclipse yours simply because of technologies enabling comprehensive diagnostics and more precise and sophisticated treatments."

... does that mean that a bunch of alien knowledge has been lost, and they don't even care?

Yikes.

They make a note to relay that tidbit of information to Emergency Services' newly formalized First Contact Department. The aliens don't seem particularly committed to not sharing information, which is weird given what the news summaries have been saying about what they said their concerns were.

"... Yes, that makes sense. I'll page the doctor. In the meantime, here's what I would say about him if I were doing a shift handoff to a new nurse:"

They then say a set of things appropriate to the circumstance that an author with more medical knowledge would be able to write out in full.

Life shaper will ask a few clarifying questions and when the doctor arrives have a similar conversation with them.

In the meantime the aliens will ask about where a good place to put their medical and cultural research station. It's roughly 10km in diameter but only a couple hundred meters thick they would prefer to place it in orbit of this planet but they're flexible on that and could instead place it in orbit of the moon, in among the asteroid belt or in orbit of another planet in descending order of preference. They're very flexible about the exact orbital details.

There's actually an established procedure for this! Satellites are sufficiently useful and expensive that people don't want them to crash into each other, so there's a registry and continuous CVG-like orbit auction that all the launch-capable alliances of cities agree on.

Luckily, space is big. So they can have any of these orbits for free because nobody else wants them, and any of these orbits for the prices listed in the price sheet due to increased interference and collision risk. Since they're not launching from a planet, they can probably just pick any of the free-and-unpopular low polar orbits.

They're happy to take this low polar orbit. Their station will be inserted presently.

One neat thing about space is that it's hard to hide things in. Lots of telescopes will be pointing at the selected orbit to see what the 'insertion' process looks like.

Diplomat Tatenika is on the phone with one of the DSN operators.

"No, I don't think the aliens would prefer to negotiate an agreement where we[in] don't look at their construction technology."

...

"Because I think you are overestimating the degree to which they care about both information leakage and any additional costs required to obscure the construction methods from us[in], and I think you are underestimating the degree to which they are hesitant to make complicated deals with us."

...

"Yes, it would be a complicated deal. No, it— No, listen, they don't have the same background understandings of how negotiation works."

...

"Yes, I know that they've demonstrated huge computing power. No, I don't particularly know why they aren't using that to understand cultural details faster. Maybe that is actually computationally intractable for reasons unknown to us[in]. The point is— No, I never studied computability theory. It doesn't come up much in my work. Look, the point is that no, you're not going to cause a diplomatic incident by pointing telescopes at them."

...

"Yes, I will send a notice of indemnification to your insurance. Point the damn telescope."

...

"Thanks, you too."

Infrastructurer is blissfully unaware of this. There isn't much for the telescopes to watch though. One second the station isn't there and the next second it is. It's largely a ring though there are five spokes that go to a central point. There's a larger module around each of the attachment points. The main ring is composed of an outer shell with substantial transparent segments encompassing most of its surface area with a moving inner ring nested inside it. Those inner segments do have large numbers of windows though less than some of the native designs have planned for.

Iiiiinteresting.

Speculation about what the scale and design of the structure say about the aliens morphology is rife.

And now that the station is in place and presumably the conversations with the medical staff are finished the little robot in the hospital will make sure the grandfather is disconnected from everything and the grandchild is ready to go and then they'll all find themselves elsewhere.

The room they're in has large windows with a view looking down at the planet below. That's probably the first thing worth noticing. The second is how lush it is, there's little bits of plant life in planters on the walls and a sort of moss covering the floor. The ceiling has soft recessed lights that gently illuminate the room with a sort of diffuser light. The bed for the grandfather is a sort of tightly woven cot hanging from a frame with a small amount of give but overall on the same level of firmness as the hospital bed he was moved from and with the same sort of railings. There's a couple chairs of similar make nearby. Strips of fabric layered over metal frames.

Sorgaþa is not the first person in orbit. Human astronauts have gone up to conduct experiments before.

But they're standing in a place that no more than thirty-six people have stood before, and just for volunteering to be used as a baseline for medical experiments.

They stare for a long moment out the window, entranced by the wheeling planet below. Lifeshaper will have to prompt them if there's a next step that should happen, here.

Lifeshaper is not going to make requests of them right now. They have full sensor suites available, so they'll do some baseline comparisons and begin with treatments they have high confidence in. Mostly shifting the concentrations of various compounds in his blood and working to reconstruct a stable genetic baseline.

Reconstructing a stable genetic baseline doesn't have much immediate effect, but fixing his blood causes a cascade of changes as stress comes off of his organs and his endocrine system reequilibriates. Unless Lifeshaper is doing something to keep him asleep, he'll wake up a few minutes later.

They don't see a reason to maintain sedation. They also repair the various minor fractures and bruising in his bones before he wakes up. Bones are conveniently regular.

He blinks awake, and is confused about where he is. His family has a history of neurodegenerative diseases, though, so he established a habit in his 20s of always writing what he was planning on doing on his wrist. He glances down at his wrist, and sees that the cords have been tied to spell 'hospital'.

It doesn't look much like a hospital, though. He glances around the room, and sees his granddaughter — who was telling him ... something about his Walk for science ...

And then he sees the planet out the window, and lapses into his own awed silence.

"How long has it been?" he quietly asks.

Sorgaþa jerks into motion.

"Barely 100 minutes, grandfather," she replies. "They aren't ... I'm sorry, you were going to scan me, weren't you? Where should I go for that?"

This latter part is directed at Lifeshaper.

"I already have been. I didn't see a reason to interrupt your appreciation of the view. This is a medical room our[ex] highest resolution sensors are already present to facilitate diagnostics and precision teleportation."

They turn to the grandfather. "I'm maintaining the concentrations of a wide variety of chemicals in your blood to take up the slack for the issues with your internal systems and I've repaired the macroscopic damage in your bones. I'm also working to correct for smaller scale issues so your bones will be as durable as they should be."

He nods.

"Right, good. Carry on, then."

It seems best to let doctors go ahead with things, as a general policy, even if he is only mostly sure he's been swept up to an alien space station.

"As I said to your grandchild, I'm fairly certain that I can restore most of your organ systems and based on my recent scans I believe I can at least arrest further neural degeneration, I may also succeed in restoring enough neural plasticity to reverse your decline but I can't promise you'll recover any memories or skills you've lost."