They have labels made of sufficiently unusual material structures that they're easy to identify for their automation, the residents can use them to streamline the process, they'll give them to people during their brief interviews.

If anyone is interested in samples for analysis they can do that too, though they don't expect that their current material science is going to be able to reproduce them. They're made of precise carbon structures with inclusions of other elements in a repeating pattern contained within partial carbon cages.

There are experimental techniques for lab-grown gemstone structures that are kind of similar? But yeah, that's probably well beyond current chemistry. Samples would still be cool to look at, though!

And the first wave stands ready to apply the special labels to the correct items when the moment is right. Þereminians love putting labels on items.

A robot patterned after a small cat arrives at Þeroda's door to facilitate one such interview.

She looks down at the visitor.

"Oh, come in, please. I'm ... not sure that I have furniture that will fit your size, but perhaps you'll find the couch navigable?"

"Certainly, though I do plan to interview you up on our station if that's okay. I'm simply here to ensure you're ready and that this time works for you, rather than teleporting you without warning."

"Oh, of course! Yes, that's fine. I need to be back in six hours for an engagement, but I think the message said it would take less time than that?"

She steps through the door and closes it.

"I'm ready to be teleported at your convenience."

"Then we'll go." And in a moment they find themselves standing in a well tended garden. It's certainly darker than daylight but the bioluminescent lighting of the plants and a glowing tinge to the water of the streams and tiny waterfalls is more than enough to see by. The ceiling is an enormous skylight, she can see the opposite side of the ring of in the distance set against a deep field of stars. Off to one side, she can also see the planet below.

Wheee! Space!

Weirdly lit space. The lighting is actually throwing her more than she was expecting; it clearly isn't in conversation with typical þereminian lighting standards, which is unsurprising after a moment of thought.

She sits on the grass and spends a moment looking up at the arch of the ring.

Envoy will be patient and give her some time to admire the view.

After a minute, she shakes her head and refocuses on her host.

"I'm sure you've heard this already, but thanks for helping us get to space faster. What would you like to ask me?"

"Hearing it from one person is always nice. Even if I work on a larger scale, I try not to forget how important individuals can be. As for my questions let's start off with the required ones; to start with can you confirm you want to move to the space city project group habitat? If you feel you're being coerced we may be able to help provide you with other options."

Þeroda smiles.

"Yes, I do want to move there. I've always been interested in space travel, and it will be an honor to get the first proper orbital colony set up. I'm not being coerced, except insofar as scarcity and mortality are inherently coercive."

"Indeed, I also need to ask, just for our records, if you plan to sabotage the project and if so how. I fully expect the answer is no, but the formalities need to be observed."

"I mean, yes? Obviously I have plans for how to sabotage the project?"

She looks at Envoy with confusion.

"Given my current state of information, I don't intend to sabotage the project, or particularly want to, but I'm loyal to the ideal of bringing þereminian culture into space, and getting to explore space myself, not to this specific project as it exists. There are things you could say to me that would make me want to sabotage it. And it's ... really easy to sabotage space-based infrastructure, compared to ground-based infrastructure. And it's important to think about how space-based infrastructure can fail, since it's a new domain. So I have plenty of relevant plans."

"From least to most complicated: the evacuation alarms are fail-off, not fail-on, since loss of power or communications to a sector of the city does not always indicate that evacuation is the safest course of action. So cutting the evacuation alarm wires and the backup wires — which need to run through less secure conduits near the entrance to each neighborhood because of the integrity of the pressure walls — would make it easy to cause people to shelter in place, instead of evacuating a damaged section, at least until any atmosphere leaks triggered the non-networked pressure alarms. Also, the wastewater recycling system is a bit fragile, since it needs to rely on bacterial cultures. There's effluent monitoring, of course, but it ..."

Þeroda can continue in this vein for a few minutes, pointing out all the ways that she could, hypothetically, cause problems for the city.

"... and since you're aliens who are critical to the success of the project, I could lie to you or try to plant information that would cause you misgivings about the project. That would pretty conclusively kill the city before it gets off the ground, so to speak."

After the first time this particular misunderstanding manifested, Envoy decided to keep prompting it. It makes for somewhat more useful signal on people's intent and Infrastructurer is interested in the ideas people have for sabotage.

"That makes sense. I was centrally focused on the question of intent but it's enlightening to hear about your thoughts on vulnerabilities in the project. Onto a more personal question if you don't mind, what made you want to join this project? You already said that space travel has been an interest for a long time but I'm curious if you can expand on that."

"Oooh, that's a tricky question. I mean, there's a lot of facets to it — for one thing, there's just the drive to explore a thing that you can see but not touch, and the ... idealness, of thinking about things that work in a vacuum. And there's the pragmatic advantages around reliability, of course ..."

She looks into the distance and thinks about how to formulate her answer.

"I think the main thing that fascinates me about space travel is that, unlike the built environment planetside, all of the little details of what keeps you alive and functional are explicit, and planned for, and reified. Like, here's a certain fascination to the idea that you not only can but have to balance everything to form a closed cycle, and you can do that in a space smaller than a planet, with less ... buffer. It's an interesting puzzle that pushes at the boundaries of life itself in interesting ways."

And then she can deliver a five-minute monologue about the emotional feeling of pinning down otherwise fuzzy details of the interaction between self and the environment, because asking a þereminian how they feel about their special interest is more or less an invitation to that.

It's a welcome monologue. "Do you have similar feelings about habitats in other extreme environments?"