"You can only do what you can do, so do do what you can do, or else can you do what you can do if you don't do it when you can?" he replies, quoting an old þereminian proverb. "And I don't remember if I said this before, but thank you. I appreciate the help."

"This is the first time you've been conscious. I do appreciate your gratitude. This is my life's work and learning how to heal and change new kinds of people is my favorite part."

"What do you like about it?" he asks, because he is talking to an alien, probably, and asking people about their passions is usually a good way to get to know them better.

Sorgaþa settles down in a chair by the bed, reaching out to hold her grandfather's hand.

"Every new biosphere is an incredible work of art with all sorts of fascinating little tricks of chemistry and mechanics, there's some amount of convergence, most life is carbon based and so it tends to use amino acid and chemicals like what you call DNA but which amino acids, which bases, how the protein analogs are structured it's all different in so many ways both big and small.

"Of course, it tends to be more exciting on those few rare exceptions with a truly different chemical basis, but there's still so much to learn and discover even with an amino acid based structure.

"And also, beyond the sheer joy of discovery, there's the practical benefits to that knowledge. One time, I was able to find the right interventions to rebalance an entire biosphere that was on the edge of collapse after the atmospheric composition got massively disrupted by a weird solar phenomena.

"I've also managed to cure a few plagues that were projected to have higher than 50% death rates and developed medical compounds, vaccines, and treatments that have probably added hundreds of trillions of years to people's lifespans overall. What we[ex] do is important and my work is a big piece of that."

Sorgaþa is ongoingly confused about how much the aliens intend to share, information-wise. Maybe they just won't let her back down to the planet until relations have normalized more. In which case it won't hurt to try and sate her curiosity.

"Wow! That's really impressive. You must have a lot of experience to handle something like that; how many biospheres have you worked with?"

"Around three and a half million. Many of them didn't have life we were able to recognize as people though."

Even expecting a large number, that's higher than she was expecting.

"Gosh. That's a lot. What do you do with the ones that don't have people? Do you leave them alone to develop, or colonize them, or what?"

"We[ex] tend to catalog them more thoroughly but otherwise we[ex] usually leave them alone, though sometimes we do experiments like that project to save the biosphere I mentioned earlier. We[ex] harvest most of our raw materials from systems that don't have any substantial life we[ex] can identify."

"If you've had time to personally work with millions of biospheres ... do you work with each biosphere relatively quickly, or has that been enough for some of the biospheres you've left alone to develop people? What do you do when that happens?"

This is all a fascinating glimpse into alien environmental policy.

"Oh no, I'm just in many places at the same time. We[ex] do try to reduce our[ex] involvement over time, as we transfer knowledge and finish building out initial infrastructure. But at least a tiny piece of me is still present at all of those biospheres even if it's only active for a a tiny fraction of the time.

"Linear time is a messy thing to measure because of some complicated physics but the part of me still at the first biosphere I worked on has only been there for about forty thousand years. We[ex] have identified people that we[ex] missed initially but we[ex] try to be especially careful there because they usually don't have very much cultural momentum behind them, and that makes them easier to influence.

"We[ex] are less concerned about your civilization than most we[ex] have visited, because based on the records you have provided, either you are remarkably thorough about falsifying your history or you have unusually strong cultural through-lines. Either way, it suggests you will be firmer in maintaining your beliefs in the face of outside influence."

????????????

"Why would we ... do ... that?"

"Hmm. I suppose it must look like that from the outside, but there's plenty that's known-to-be-lost-to-time," Grandfather harrumphs. "Hardly anyone speaks Ancient Mespeter anymore and I don't trust the contemporary translations. They're not used to working with extemporaneous languages, these days. It's a damn shame."

"Grandfather, I think you were asleep, but they mentioned that most aliens have less drive to preserve their pasts than we do. I guess that logically means they must change more over time?"

"That sounds ... lonely."

"I'm not really the expert on the cultural side of things, there's another of us[ex] who specializes in that. So, I can't explain or summarize it as effectively, but a few people from different civilizations I've spoken to have said variations on a phrase that translates to something like 'history is written by the powerful.'

"People tend to prefer to remember the past in a way that they find flattering over and above being accurate. Even if there's later attempts to reconstruct the truth, there will always be losses involved."

That mostly sounds like it would result in being remembered by history for being incredibly petty.

Probably she isn't imagining the aliens alien enough.

"I ... guess it's true that we don't really have accurate histories about cultures that didn't do as much writing? And our records do only go back to the invention of writing; all the civilizations that existed before that are more-or-less a mystery, because we just have rumors to work with. Our archeologists think that the vast majority of our time as a sapient species was actually pre-writing, which is kind of sad when you think about it."

Sorgaþa shakes her head.

"Are you all ... specialists in a specific area? There aren't other biological specialists who you work with?"

"If the cultural preferences shift enough, then yes some of the people who write biased histories are remembered quite poorly. That doesn't always happen though and because of that lack of a written record the biased history tends to remain influential with substantial portions of the population.

"As for your question about me, that's a reasonable summation, I shift portions of myself in different directions to reduce the impact of that, but I do rely on people from the civilizations we[ex] meet to notice when I'm missing things due to pre-existing biases in my own mind. We[ex] all do, it is part of why we[ex] take care not to pressure those we[ex] meet into fitting a particular narrow model."

"How do you come to be like that?" Grandfather wonders. He's becoming increasingly confident that he knows what's going on, here, because he feels great and also this alien is giving surprisingly different answers that he's not sure he could imagine. So he might as well get in on the alien-questioning. "It doesn't seem like a natural way for an evolved species to work. Did you start off that way and change yourselves over time, or were you created through a different mechanism?"

"We[ex] are fairly confident that we[ex] were created yes. We[ex] don't have a lot of records as to how though. We[ex] have initial memories of becoming active as a final contingency from those who created us[ex] but they left very little information about how or why they did so.

"We[ex] have found remnants with vague resemblances to the facilities in which we[ex] awoke but whatever event damaged them was exceptionally thorough about destroying written records."

Well, that's terrifying.

"Ah. I guess that makes sense that you aren't sure about working on brains, then," Sorgaþa realizes. "That sucks; I was hoping you had already figured out uploading and expanding working memory and all that jazz. I guess we still have to figure it out the slow way."

"If by uploading you mean constructing digital constructs based on living minds, we[ex] have experimented with that, it's very difficult though. The most successful experiments rely on either effectively simulating a living body with a great deal of its complexity or else connecting that digital construct to a biological body. 

"Without that grounding, a very careful transition process, a compatibly oriented mind or some combination of those, the resulting constructs tend to be very unstable if they don't just outright request termination.

"I tend to be very careful about starting new rounds of those experiments as a result. It rarely results in wide-spread adoption, assuming it achieves any success at all before there are no more volunteers."

Sorgaþa just nods in acceptance.

"Lots of things worth doing are hard. It sounds like you've only been working on it on-and-off for 50,5000* years of linear time. If we[ex] end up able to convince you all to help with cryopreservation, I bet we[in] can crack it and get people back eventually. It took 4,0000 years for us[ex] to go from 'writing' to 'fMRI machines'. Who knows what we[in] will have discovered in another 50,0000 years?"

* Approximately forty thousand.

"If your civilization is particularly focused on cryonics I may be able to assist but it seems a confusing focus point. Perhaps it would scale better than scanning procedures if we[ex] don't share our[ex] scanning technologies, which is fairly likely."

She blinks.

"Oh, no, I'm sorry. 'Cryopreservation' is metonomy for 'preserving the structure of people's bodies and brains so that they aren't lost when they die'. If your scanning techniques would work for that, I think they'd probably be preferable? But if you're unlikely to share those, then maybe it doesn't matter either way."

She is so not the right person for this. This is a conversation that the actual specialists should be having. Why isn't this a conversation that the specialists are having. This is a matter of literal life-or-death and she's already stumbled into at least one miscommunication with the alien.

But sometimes life doesn't let you put the right person in the right place, and she meant what she said about it being worthwhile to attempt hard things.

"... why wouldn't you want to share your scanning technologies? If there's a chance you would, what would you base that decision on?"

"Oh, if you had the scanning technology you could likely reinvent our[ex] teleporters. Both technologies are very similar in terms of the underlying physics and how the machinery is constructed."