The first sign of anything strange are a set of relatively small (for space so still tens of meters across) telescopes that appear in distant orbits (far above geosynchronous) two for each of the planets and several more in the asteroid and outer cometary belts in the system to take pictures of space infrastructure.

There's a delay of about five minutes as those images are collected and evaluated. Then the next round begins, communication and mapping satellites are inserted in and among the various existing satellites all carefully placed to avoid collisions and hopefully to be able to snoop on EM communications that aren't transmitted in tight beams. These are far more likely to be noticed especially once they start transmitting a first contact package based on mathematical principles in their best guess at a compatible transmission range from a few seconds of observation.

A close observer may notice that simultanaity as evidence of superluminal capabilities.

Space is big, and telescope coverage is spotty. But the Deep Space Network cannot miss an intentional radio transmission made from inside the solar system, actually.

Highly periodic transmission detected. 
No recognized packet header.
No scheduled transmissions expected.

Hey mission control I think you might want to see this. Relaying transmission ...

Those are prime numbers!

A different civilization might panic, or have to race to come up with a response. But the thing is, Þereminia planned for this. There are festivals where people dress up in silly makeup and explore this exact scenario.

So Director Ŋaceta makes an announcement on behalf of Larger Continent Emergency Services and mathematicians and linguists and (not-so) speculative xenoanthropologists are woken by urgent phone notifications. A Network-wide protocol announcement goes out, and the Network shifts to 'oh shoot our encryption is probably broken' mode and suddenly all RF communication audible from space is encrypted with one-time keys.

And the Emergency Services of two continents compose a response.

"Lunar Mapping Orbiter, stand by to relay a verbatim radio message at best power."

New verbatim relay request acknowledged.
Destination coordinates acknowledged.

Standing by for relay.

Ready when you are, mission control!

The þereminian first-contact package has its own set of math problems and carefully built physics-based translation. But if the aliens made it here, they might be Sufficiently Advanced, so it also contains a plain-language message. In text, audio, and video, in LCTL and SCOL:

Three diplomats in black and purple uniforms stand behind a podium. One has a beaming smile. One needs to keep surreptitiously wiping their eyes.

"Greetings, on behalf of the people of þereminia. To one who has come an incredible distance: we[ex] convey our[ex] sincerest greetings and well-wishes. It is our[ex] utmost hope to come to know you and greet you as friends, and to arrange for peaceful contact and mutually beneficial trade between our[in] civilizations."

Them deciding to switch to one time keys is inconvenient. It will make learning about them take longer and they might need to consider more... invasive actions eventually.

But for now it's more important to act in good faith. They'll work through the mutual first contact packages and try to get to mutually intelligible conversations as soon as they can. With only a couple minutes of corpus that's all encrypted there isn't much acceleration so it'll be around a full rotation of the planet before they can respond in kind.

"We[ex], the people of the rings, greet you in turn and convey our[ex] own sincere greetings and well-wishes. We[ex] share your hopes for peaceful contact and mutual benefit and learning. Our people seek to offer infrastructure and biological maintenance support once we[ex] are confident these will benefit you."

"Okay — Jarnegh, you said that the linguists have a report on their probable computing power based on how long it took them to reply? Let's go through that."

"So we[in]'re dealing with FTL-capable ships, with orders of magnitude more computing power than our[in] whole planet. How does that impact the contingency plans?"

"Damn it, I know that you swore to — no, head Archivist, I don't want to see an uncoordinated release — look, there are security concerns ..."

If the visitors had not demonstrated FTL capability, then Emergency Services would have executed the planned contingency and sent out a last warning, to any other alien civilizations listening, before fully committing to cooperation. But it looks like their understanding of physics was even wronger than expected, and þereminia will not have a chance to get one last word in.

Instead, the head of the Archive, the world's oldest (and probably most soft-power-having) institution, sends a message via the Deep Space Network.

"Hello, people of the rings! I am Head Archivist Zamerast, the coordinator in charge of ensuring that our civilization's written and creative works are preserved in the long-term. I have gotten an agreement to share our[ex] corpus with you. I would be immensely grateful if you were to store a copy. Please stand by for a transmission of the index, and protocol documentation on how to make prioritized requests. Transmit bandwidth on this frequency is somewhat constrained; are you able to pick up the test broadcast originating at the attached coordinates?"

"Greetings Head Archivist and associated team. We[ex] would be pleased to store such information. If it would be more efficient and desirable we[ex] could retrieve a physical storage medium if you specify its position and dimensions in this same coordinate system. If EM transmission is preferred, we[ex] are receiving the transmissions from the specified sites."

"Thank you. What are your limits on lifting capacity to orbit? You could take the entire Smaller Continent Secondary Archive, located at the attached coordinates. It is quite large, however, because it's optimized for storage durability and not for storage density. If it would be more efficient, we can prepare a site with denser physical storage, although that will take approximately 10 days to arrange. In the meantime, we will continue transmitting in that same band from available sites."

With most Network traffic having gone to physical links, the Archive has no particular difficulty bidding on the unused radio spectrum and getting volunteers to set up planet-wide transmitters for better bandwidth.

"Our[ex] lifting capacity is sufficient to relocate that complex but we[ex] do not presently have a suitable location to place it and according to your own archives it is an inhabited complex. We[ex] would be happy to arrange a transfer of denser storage media.

"We[ex] could also offer higher bandwidth transmission interfaces capable of transferring up to 1.3 TBs over optical feeds or electrical feeds per second, full specifications attached. We[ex] can supply as many such interfaces as you can make use of up to a limit of 3 million. We[ex] will leave it to your discretion what combination of methods we[in] will use for this process."

The promised technical specs show small devices about ten centimeters cube that have an internal power feed and no discernable antenna that can have a number of data lines attached at the specified ports.

It's going to be a lot faster and less expensive to just hook a box into the Archive's existing high-speed Network connection, compared to purchasing and transferring enough high-density storage media.

The head archivist requests 20 such boxes (a primary and a backup for each of the six Archive sites on the planet), and can get them hooked up in short order.

The boxes appear at the specified coordinates promptly after the request comes through. There's no sign they can easily detect heralding their arrival, they just become present where previously there was empty air.

Sweet!

AAaaaaaahhh!

"People of the rings, we should have everything hooked up on our end in another few hours. Thanks!"

"People of the rings, I am Diplomat Tatenika. My job is to facilitate coordination and understanding between people of different polities and cultures. I have a number of people here who are worried about the implications of your arrival, and have been working to put together a single question packet," a different transmission comes.

"Could you please elaborate on what you mean by 'infrastructure and biological support' and what criteria you would be using to decide whether it is good for us[ex]? And could you share a copy of whatever rules of engagement you have for interacting with us[ex]? I have attached a copy of our[ex] Global Minimum Standards (the rules to which every person of our[ex] civilization is subject, and that we[ex] hope to be able to continue to enforce planet-wide, although the relevant standards body is capable of renegotiating them), and our[ex] Standards for the Behavior of Diplomats and Ambassadors, to which I am bound (but that we[ex] don't expect you to follow unless you choose to become a signatory)."

"We[ex] hope to offer improved infrastructure to facilitate space travel and space habitats to be scaled based on need and preference. We[ex] may also offer planetside infrastructure for scaling food, sanitation, power production or housing structures as needed but the intervention standard for those is higher as there's a greater risk of unduly destabilizing or reinforcing existing power structures.

"Biological support consists of using our[ex] imaging and computer modelling capabilities to make breakthroughs in extant adverse biological conditions and to facilitate changes to individual's body plans where such changes are sustainably scalable and again are not unduly destabilizing or reinforcing existing power structures.

"Our[ex] standards for engagement are to avoid deliberate deception except where necessary for information gathering purposes or to prevent early disclosure of advanced technological capabilities, and to minimize it when needed for those purposes.

"In addition, we[ex] should avoid destabilizing any existing power structures to the point of prompting large scale interpersonal violent conflict, with certain exceptions where the existing actions of the power structures are evaluated to have similar harm profiles to such conflict.

"Further, we[ex] should avoid substantially reinforcing power structures which are causing substantial harm if possible and avoid if possible incentivizing peoples we are in contact with towards becoming substantially more homogenized or otherwise making it less likely for new opinions and patterns of life to emerge.

"We[ex] have no substantive objections to our best understanding of your provided Global Minimum Standards and will take your standards for Diplomats and Ambassadors under advisement."

Well, that is a pretty promising response, all things considered! It makes sense that the aliens must like something about the status quo ante, since they have teleporters and yet the planet remains unconquered.

Tatenika workshops responses with her colleagues.

"It sounds like one of your biggest concerns, that informs your other priorities, is not interfering with existing power structures. Could you elaborate on why, please? Is it that those kinds of interferences tend to provoke other harms, or is it that you prefer governmental systems to remain stable as an intrinsic end?"

"Also — we[ex] are curious about more details of your culture and language. Do you have a general civilizational history, or some set of relevant popular cultural outputs that you would be willing to share so that we[ex] can get a better understanding of your culture, purpose, and attitudes?"

"Social structures are potentially delicate. Yours have most likely been substantially impacted by our arrival in ways that won't be clear for quite some time. It isn't our[ex] goal to make no change to your social and power structures it is to allow you collectively to continue to choose your path rather than forcing you to assume a shape to our[ex] liking or to empower one or more groups among you to claim an unassailable position of control over all others.

"We[ex] are not inclined to share cultural outputs at present, the majority of those we possess are generated by other civilizations like your own that we have made comparable contact with. To the extent that we can be said to have our own language it is challenging to translate as we share experiences and knowledge in lieu of more compressed concepts such as those used in your own language."

Well, in the presence of actual aliens and absence of actual facts, the speculation is going to be wild. This, too, is something that þereminian authors have prepared for, even if writing alien-abduction slashfic is not, maybe, the most adaptive response to this situation.

"I believe that I understand. Thank you for sharing. If your worry is about exerting undue influence on our[ex] culture, would it be helpful for us[ex] to try generating our[ex] own suggestions for how you might go about providing space-based infrastructure, so that we[in] end up building something primarily shaped by our[ex] designs?"

Diplomat Tatenika can't actually stop some enthusiastic people with software defined radios who are listening in on their conversation from chipping in with links to various designs for O'Neill cylinders, even if she wanted to. Hopefully the aliens just interpret it as willing.

"We[ex] would welcome such inputs."

"Attached is a general prospectus on types of space infrastructure and their properties."

The attached document has material constraints on how large they can make structures under various levels of force and also goes into the various tradeoffs in power consumption, maintenance, size and performance of active support structures.

They will receive a flood of suggestions. "Design your ideal space habitat" is the sort of dinner-party conversation that everyone has an opinion on. A substantial subset of those designs are even proper engineering diagrams that take their expressed material constraints into account.

As a general trend, the þereminian designs tend to completely eschew active support structures. They overwhelmingly prefer spin gravity and solar power, although some smaller designs have backup thermal radioisotope generators. They also have a strong dispreference for things that involve a lot of maintenance.

When freed from budgetary constraints, þereminian designs tend to be overbuilt, with huge safety margins and multiple redundant systems. A few people submit six variations on the same design, expressing different points on the tradeoff between assumed-construction-cost and redundancy.

Also in evidence: big windows for natural sunlight, deep soil beds for growing trees, dubiously practical space-efficient micro-gravity hydroponics, and bedrooms that consist entirely of cushions.

Each design will get replies with notes about practical issues they might have missed like potentially wanting static wrappers to protect rotating habitats from space debris and also how large windows may be undesirable given now fast even large habitats rotate if they are built in proximity to other objects such as planets or if they have direct exposure to sunlight.

The minimal use of active support structures is acceptable though they are the only available surface to orbit option that doesn't require independent aerospace craft or teleportation.

Teleportation is actually preferable, if they're offering? But mainly people are planning to just make every space-habitat self-sustaining, since the aliens seem happy to build quite large structures for them. If they're all self-sustaining, then there will be a lot fewer urgent rescues, and they can probably cover that with rocket-based infrastructure, at least in near-planet orbit.

They definitely, absolutely can't have a space elevator. A space fountain is similarly bad.

Sure, it would be way more efficient for lifting things to orbit, but have you seen the calculations of what would happen if one of those had a structural failure? That would be species-ending. They've only got one habitable planet at the moment and they intend to keep it that way. Maybe once there are 6 independent self-sustaining colonies they could do a space elevator. But teleportation just seems better in every way.

Active support structures are extremely reliable with reasonable maintenance (have some figures about the details of that) and some structure designs have much less catastrophic failure modes than balanced tensile lift structures (see attached calculations for this). That said it's entirely reasonable to prefer to minimize risks with even relatively low likelihoods.

Teleportation in particular is one of the things they're least willing to part with, because of how easy it is to abuse.

Hmm.

There are now Network arguments about skyhooks versus magnetic launch solutions versus other stranger designs.

One group of people have gotten together to collaborate on designing a large space city intended to house a million people and the infrastructure necessary to support them.

"Hi — super excited about space, thanks for the opportunity — we[ex] were wondering whether you just object to giving us[ex] teleporters on an ongoing basis? Like, even if you're going to build something to our[ex] specifications, we[ex] still don't really have the launch capacity to handle initial relocations, even if we[ex] can probably handle ongoing resupply. So if we[ex] got everyone who wants to settle in Space City to get together in a particular location with our[ex] belongings, would you be willing to teleport us[ex] up?"

"We[ex] will offer support with relocating people and materials if there is a plan for supporting them though reasonable contingencies without our[ex] direct intervention. Gathering all of the materials and individuals to be moved is not required so long as adequate assurances are made that their relocation is uncoerced."

That's ... a slightly baffling response. Putting someone who doesn't want to be there on your space station sounds like a great way to stop having a useful space station. They're building in as much redundancy as they can, but that's not going to stop a dedicated saboteur.

... maybe the aliens just don't think the average þereminian will be capable of making their presence on the station an obvious net negative?

The Space City Planning group responds with a new design that includes prominent, well-marked, accessible levers for wedging the airlocks open and venting sections of the city to space.

It takes markedly longer than usual for a response to be formulated. "We[in] appear to be having a substantial miscommunication. Allowing individuals to end their lives and those of substantial numbers of individuals around them is not a response we[ex] expected. The worst case of mass forced displacement does not seem likely given your communication thus far, but making it easy to shift that into mass death does not address it. We[ex] will seek confirmation from individuals before relocating them."

A miscommunication seems pretty likely, yeah! The aliens clearly think death is bad ... so they either don't believe that þereminians believe that, or they think þereminians are sufficiently bad at planning that thinking that won't be sufficient incentive to take steps to make it not happen?

Ouch. That feels really rude, actually.

But the correct thing to do when someone from a foreign culture seems to have given you a grave insult is get a specialist involved. Diplomatic Corps! We choose you!

Diplomat Tatenika has been having an extraordinarily busy day. Maybe when first contact is over she should retire and take up a nice relaxing hobby like herding cats.

"Speaking on behalf of the Space City Planning Group: We[ex] apologize for the inadvertent miscommunication. SCPG is an initiative to found a new city. Historically, we[ex] have found that attempts to found new cities with non-volunteers doesn't work, and often ends up with everyone having wasted a lot of time and resources. See the attached Archive references for historical accounts. This makes sense from the perspective of game theory: if someone doesn't want to be involved in founding a new city, they are incentivized to make including them in the process as difficult and unpleasant as possible. That way, when the city-founders are rational, they don't involve those people in the plan."

"As a result of this historical knowledge, modern attempts to found cities are traditionally done only with volunteers. There is no actual law against not doing that, for the same reason that there isn't a law against lighting your own face on fire — people mostly know not to try. There is a law against forcing people to belong to a political group or forcing them to work when they do not choose to. See the global minimum standards that were previously shared. If the SCPG had attempted to do those things, they would have been subject to a GMSB tribunal, which is an additional disincentive."

"When you said that you were worried about people who didn't want to be part of Space City being added to the transport list, the planning committee inferred that either you didn't believe that their screening procedures for volunteers were sufficiently robust, or that you didn't believe the cultural disincentives from our existing institutions were strong enough, in the face of getting to live in space. But since you have evinced a preference for not informing our decision making, they assumed that you wouldn't be willing to improve screening procedures. So they added additional ways to disincentivize the use of involuntary colonization, so that you could see that they were trying their best to avoid involving non-volunteers, even if you didn't trust our[ex] established legal system."

"When you responded negatively to that and said that you would implement your own screening procedures, the planning committee took that to mean that you didn't think that they were rational beings capable of responding to incentives. I have assured them that this is almost certainly not the case, and that, in my professional opinion, this is very likely a miscommunication caused by missing cultural context. I have encouraged them to assume that aliens are even weirder than they were assuming, and that they should avoid making assumptions about what you will or will not be able to infer from our[ex] transmissions."

"In that spirit: I do not believe that you have done anything incorrectly, and I have done my best to convey to the planning committee that they have not been insulted. But we[ex] have multiple probably-evolutionarily-designed* involuntary decision-making procedures in our brains, and while the committee is rationally committed to continuing to work productively toward our[in] goal of seeing peaceful settlement of space, some members of the committee would be emotionally reassured if you would confirm my assessment. It would, in my opinion as a diplomat, smooth further relations if you were to compose and issue a brief apology. See On the Purpose and Composition of Apologies for an explanation of the underlying psychology and how to compose an apology that will be correctly received."

*i.e. stupid.

"Thank you for your thorough evaluation of this miscommunication. It is a standard part of our[ex] procedures to seek confirmation from individuals before relocating them and ensure that their relocation is freely chosen. We[ex] apologize for our[ex] lack of care in communicating this such that it seemed this was an expression of mistrust particular to that group or to the people of your world in general.

"Our[ex] procedures are built on the assumption that those we[ex] are communicating with may be attempting to deceive us[ex] and while we[ex] have no reason to believe that is the case here, and indeed the evidence so far made available to us suggests the opposite, we[ex] will continue to follow those procedures out of an abundance of caution. We[ex] hope you will not take this caution, especially at this relatively early stage as further insult.

"The suggestion of making it easy for individuals to vent large sections of a habitat does make sense under the assumption that individuals consistently behave rationally. If your people can be modelled under that assumption, that is an exceedingly unusual trait. Most societies we[ex] encounter have at least some significant portion of the the population, typically more than one person in one thousand, have at least one emotional episode which makes them a danger to themselves and those around them during their lifetime. Typically this dangerous behavior is not something they would endorse outside of that episode.

"To clarify our[ex] earlier statement regarding allowing you to select your own path we[ex] have an interest in not directly facilitating harms such as forced relocation. We[ex] do not consider checking for consent when moving individuals to be an example of influencing your decision making process over and above the influence already entailed by offering such relocation."

"I see; that makes sense and I appreciate the explanation."

"With regards to rationality: you're quite correct that we[ex] are not purely rational actors. See, for example, the potential for emotions to cloud decision making. But there is a set of cultural assumptions around attempting to approximate rational actions, especially on a collective level, that I have never needed to explain from scratch before. The dictionary has a definition under 'pride', but that definition assumes cultural familiarity with the concept. Allow me to attempt a more grounded explanation:"

"Even though we[ex] are not rational, it's broadly accepted that being more rational in some ways is a better way to obtain desired outcomes. Therefore, many of our[ex] people want to be more rational than they are. This is difficult, because we[ex] cannot directly alter our own cognition except through repeated practice — and altering it too much is prone to introducing worse failure states — so people who do act rationally are perceived as having accomplished a difficult and desirable feat, which is high-status."

"On the level of groups acting collectively, membership in a group that behaves according to standards that are widely-acknowledged to better approximate the rational response to something itself, therefore, confers status. That makes people want to be associated with the group, which is generally beneficial to the group's collective interest. So people in groups such as the Space City Planning Group often try to structure their group's responses in ways that are widely believed to be rational, or to showily exhibit rational principles, in order to gain status for themselves and additional support for the group. Since this set of tendencies is broadly present across the cultures that we[ex] were familiar with prior to your arrival, it is often assumed as a background fact about how people and groups behave."

"Notice that this cultural tendency is about appearing to do things that many other people believe are rational and difficult. That means that the impulse from this kind of pride is often actually not the rational thing to do in a situation. The whole institution of cultural pride is only useful to the extent that we[ex] can tie the appearance of being rational to its actuality, something that different groups have succeeded in to different degrees over time."

"Does that serve to clarify the motivations of the SCPG in this case? Are there further questions on which you would appreciate my elaboration?"

"We[ex] understand the concepts of striving and social signaling but this is not entirely sufficient to grasp the choice to make space habitats easier to sabotage. Our[ex] best guess would be that it increases the incentive to notice and address sources of distress in others. However, based on the incentives you have described, it seems if anything more likely that individuals would attempt to conceal their own distress until things reached a breaking point. Perhaps there is another hidden assumption on the part of the SCPG that individuals cannot do so effectively."

Being a diplomat means constantly guessing the right level of detail for people to understand; she's well used to breaking things down, if usually not quite to this degree.

"Ah, I see — yes, I think there are additional hidden assumptions here. But you are right that the core thing the SPCG was trying to do was to make it obvious that their incentives for noticing and addressing these things were aligned with your own."

"I think it is not actually likely that concealing distress until reaching a breaking point would be high status, though? Reaching out to others for help in dealing with difficult situations is one of the simplest things-that-people-believe-to-be-a-component-of-rationality. It's something that children are explicitly instructed in how and when to do, so failing to do it makes one appear childish. That isn't to say that people don't routinely conceal their feelings rather than reaching out for support, but it's generally looked down on."

"Also, living on a space station is already going to be complicated and difficult compared to living on a planet: having levers to force the airlocks open makes it easier to destroy a section of the city, but it is always possible to do that without explicit affordances in various ways. High-velocity kinetic impactors will be a problem at unknown times, for example. So the kinds of people who would not function well in that kind of high-stakes environment, where everyone is relying on everyone else to stay alive in the grips of a delicate, hostile system, can display restraint and wisdom by not going to live there. Restraint is another one of the things-that-people-believe-to-be-a-component-of-rationality, as is accurate self-reflection."

"You might worry that people without accurate self-reflection might be more prone to the kinds of impulsive destructive tendencies that could lead to a tragedy here. That correlation is less strong than one might naively assume, because humans have multiple competing kinds of decision making in our brains; doing things impulsively leans on a different set of systems than making considered, deliberate decisions such as moving to a new city. Those kinds of decision making can be flawed in an individual more or less independently. That isn't to say there is no risk, just that the correlation isn't perfect."

"That doesn't get to the core of the matter, though, which is that you must consider that different people have different incentives in this situation. Individual people who move to Space City might have individual incentives to try and conceal their stress or impulsivity. But SPCG, as a group, is only* incentivized to care about that insofar as it impacts the success of their project, and that incentive competes with other aspects of the situation, such as the desire to be seen as making difficult decisions, and the desire to convince you to help move people. Also, on an individual level, the desire to solve problems facing the group in ways that are not personally inconvenient."

*Translator's note: rhetorical only, not mathematical only.

"So, from the point of view of an individual member of the SPCG, it becomes a question of: is the increased risk of someone behaving in a low-status, dangerous way, even when we are already screening against that because of the inherent dangers of space, worth scrapping a plan that feels clever and does not require re-working the already-in-progress recruitment and screening procedures, and that should logically assuage the concerns of the aliens upon whose cooperation this entire enterprise is founded, given that it makes our incentive to ensure that screening is sufficiently comprehensive clear? And that is a question that is much closer to being balanced, and less obvious, than the question of 'does this modification increase risk to the Space City at all?', which of course it does. From SPCG's point of view, the project is actually less successful if you refuse to transport everyone than if you agree to transport everyone and then a tragedy happens to a subset of the population — even though, if the question were presented with that framing, the SPCG members might actually answer differently, or abandon the project. How a question is framed internally can have a large influence on the answer decided on, since we[ex] aren't rational."

"Are there additional things that remain unclear, after reading this message?"

Hey, sorry again about the misunderstanding. Diplomat Tatenika says that she's working through it and that our plan was suboptimal. Here's some details on our current application and prioritization procedures; if you're going to be doing your own screening, are there things that we can cut out of ours so that people don't have to deal with unnecessary bureaucracy? What questions will you be asking people?

Also, here are some revised designs for the maintenance hatches and changes to the neighborhood layout for some of the peripheral buildings if we're specifically not making it easy for people to sabotage things. Some people backed out when we announced that, but others signed up for some reason? So the overall population timeline is actually unchanged.

Also, there are questions about the design of the debris shield. In particular, the university thinks this aperiodic shield tiling is actually marginally safer according to their impact simulations — if you're willing to confirm or deny that, here are the plans and the reasoning for the modification. Also, ....

To the ambassador: "We[ex] believe we understand well enough to proceed. Thank you for your thorough breakdown of the psychological and cultural factors at play."

"Our[ex] process involves asking relatively few questions but combining that with offering alternatives and providing details.

"We[ex] will explain that we prefer not to move people under coercion but that we are willing to do so under circumstances where we cannot address the source of the coercion.

"Further, we[ex] will explain that we[ex] can instead send individuals to alternative destinations based on the details of the individual's situation if they prefer not to be moved to the original destination and offer assistance with retrieving individuals being held hostage to ensure their cooperation if that is a factor.

"Once these explanations have been completed and are understood we[ex] will ask if they still want to move on to their original destination or require additional assistance. In addition, we[ex] will ask whether they plan to sabotage the destination station or enact violence on others present there and if so why. Depending on their reasoning, we[ex] may decline to transport them on those grounds."

Infrastructurer is happy to provide further feedback on design implications and empirical evidence from existing habitats. There are benefits to aperiodic tiling though it can make automated maintenance more complicated...

Meanwhile, city planners and diplomats aren't the only people trying to get in contact with the aliens.

"To the people of the rings: caution is admirable, but undue delay is just as dangerous as undue haste. My grandfather is dying. The doctors don't know how long he has, but he's gotten worse recently and I don't think he has very long. The announcements say that you're going to offer 'biological support' once you can be sure that doing so won't destabilize things. If that means you can cure grandfather, or even just diagnose him, please, please do. But even if you can't, can you teleport him out, put him in cryosuspension while you finish your investigations, and teleport in a dummy so that it looks like he just had a stroke or something? The coordinates of his hospital bed are attached, and I can arrange for him to be detatched from the medical monitors and unsupervised at 53:00 tonight."

"We[ex] do not have sufficient knowledge of your biology to offer any guarantees of success at this time. Cryonic storage is not among the options we typically offer.

"If your grandfather is cognitively incapable of expressing opinions on his own medical care and you have the right to make such decisions on his behalf we[ex] can transport your grandfather and attempt to treat him based on our[ex] limited knowledge as part of improving our knowledge."

Uuuuugh aliens were supposed to be better than the legal system.

Sorgaþa engages on a 4.3 hour quest to obtain a legally valid certification of power of attorney. Luckily gramps is awake when she visits with the part he needs to sign.

"Hey Baba."

She wraps her hand around his.

"You know how you were talking about donating your body to science as your walk? I think I have something you'll like better ..."

Fifteen minutes later, she is standing on the hospital roof with a power of attorney signed in a shaky hand holding her phone up toward the sky with its transmitter power cranked.

"Hey, I have legal authorization from him to make his medical decisions! And based on my conversations with him I believe that if he were still forming long-term memories correctly with any reliability and had time to think about it he would prefer you to take him to treat and/or learn from so that you can help others."

A strange many legged robot about the size of a cat appears next to him. It has four branches each of which bifurcate repeatedly until the smallest limbs are too small to make out with the naked eye. "Hello, please take me to your grandfather."

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."

"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."

Could we just promise not to do that.

No, that sounds like the kind of thing that she really would mess up if she tried to negotiate on humanity's behalf.

"Ah. Hmm. And I guess you don't have black-boxing techniques that can really stand up to centuries of determined effort," she surmises. "That's a tricky one. Are there any other species with whom you've shared your teleportation technology?"

"Oh, we[ex] do sometimes provide blackboxed technology. Your grand archive project was already provided with some black boxed communications technology to speed up the process of making a full copy of it. The issue with that is just that we[ex] need to maintain and monitor each device we[ex] provide and it can get a little tedious if there's too many of them.

"As for full sharing, out of the million civilizations we[ex] have encountered, we[ex] have moved to full technology transfer with thirty-one of them. I think your civilization has a better chance than most though."

A thirty-one in a million chance, or slightly more. The barest sliver of a possibility, among the infinite futures, that their legacy won't be lost.

Sorgaþa tries to think through what properties of a civilization are likely important here, and what she can do to demonstrate them. Except ...

Whatever criterion the aliens are basing this on, it pretty much has to be a property of the civilization as a whole, right? And her actions as an individual are a part of that, but not a large part. So probably the best thing she can do here is to not make wild, grand changes to her behavior based on a five-minute conversation, since that is just going to add noise to the aliens' perception.

So she will ... sit here, and hold her grandfather's hand, and ask about things as her curiosity strikes her, without letting herself get too worked up about the answers.

And when she returns to the planet, if they let her, she is going to send such an email to Emergency Services.

While all this has been going on Lifeshaper and Envoy have collaborated on an announcement with respect to this new station.

We[ex] now have a research and medical treatment station in place and able to accept patients and healthy people willing to submit to non-invasive analysis in order to refine our[ex] model of your biology.

We[ex] will prioritize individuals likely to die within the next month even with the best medical care that's locally available to them. More precise details on this prioritization are available here.

Beyond that we[ex] will prioritize a broad cross-section of adverse conditions to build a broader understanding. A full list of known conditions from your archival records that we[ex] have not seen sufficient examples of will be kept updated here.

The list of criteria for healthy individuals desired for cross comparison can be found here.

Finally, we[ex] expect to offer positions for skilled medical professionals to help determine overall prioritization and the exact form of broader medical aid work. We[ex] will accept applications, and input on what criteria we should use in our selection process here.

Ah! An organized queue with clear criteria for distributing a limited resource! The þereminians totally know what to do with that.

Hospital systems across the world figure out how to produce dumps from their patient databases in compatible format (only those patients that agree to data sharing, of course) and set up a single collated list. If the people of the rings' criteria leaves any room for ties, those get resolved with auctions, with proceeds going to an account held in trust for the aliens to hire medical workers from. Since ties are rare, the account doesn't end up holding much, but it's the principle of the thing.

Healthy individuals who meet the selection criteria get picked by sortition and — depending on the city — are either paid for their time or told that this will satisfy their government-mandated science-participation quota for several hexades. Some still refuse, which is fine, but most þereminians are understandably excited about getting to see space and get a routine checkup from an alien.

(Governments have mostly stopped doing things 'for life', because that is no longer a well-defined number, given the aliens with unknown medical technology.)

Lifeshaper is happy to works through this backlog. The little metal robots become a common sight in þereminian hospitals facilitating patients being moved up or being returned.

The people with urgent medical needs are stabilized as needed. If a cure is within the current boundary that's applied as quickly as possible. Some people spend as little as minutes up on the station in the sky. This is mostly for cancers and other similar conditions with a straightforward fix that simply exceeds þereminian surgical abilities.

Other cures, like replacing or repairing organs that are failing take hours instead of minutes. An increasingly small portion of patients are retained for long-term care.

Most of the healthy points of comparison get to spend a couple days up in orbit to collect information on how processes like sleep function. While a few volunteers get longer stays of a month or two to record longer hormonal cycles. A couple families are invited to live there on an ongoing basis to monitor their children's development from infancy to maturity.

Individuals wishing to have children are also invited to be monitored through the entire process of conception and pregnancy.

Sure, makes sense!

Obviously they don't want to do this for the first couples — you don't mess with the control group, even in an observational study — but what are the aliens' opinions on helping people who would not normally be biologically compatible have children? If cost of living goes down much more (which everyone is hopeful that it will, given that the future looks bright) there's going to be an orphan shortage, and some couples are going to want children that are biologically related to both of them.

... also, what are their opinions on providing genetic screening for embryos, that being beyond the reach of current þereminian science? Some pretty bad diseases are heritable. And then there's non-disease conditions. Right now, the standard advice is that if you don't expect to be able to find it within your heart to love all statistically likely children you could have, you should probably not have children. But some people would be willing to have children if they could guarantee that they wouldn't be face-recognizers, or that they would be verbal before age six, or that they would have gentle teething.

(þereminia doesn't have a population crisis, exactly, but their birthrate is only hovering above replacement because of various cultural institutions and tax-breaks for parents.)

If they just want a black boxed machine that produces embryos from provided blood samples, the aliens would be willing to provide a small number of those until the ability to do it themselves is transferred.

Developing retroviruses and chemical stimulants which can prompt cells to undergo either meiosis cycle is something the aliens would be happy to collaborate on to that end. Obviously, the ability to manufacture retroviruses is something þereminia should exercise caution around. Biological warfare is so much easier once you have that capability.

Developing working external incubation systems is another project they're willing to collaborate on. In theory it should be possible to design an engineered organism or, with more effort, some sort of mechanically device and a nutrient solution.

Genetic sequencing is a capability that will most likely become more reliable and cheaper as their collaboration continues and that should allow them to do whatever screening they wish assuming those traits are reliably predicted by genetics.

Overuse of such capabilities does carry risks, especially if you take it to outright genetic engineering, but that's ultimately a choice they will allow þereminians to make for themselves.

... fair.

There is a lot of debate on the topic. Children's rights were already a bit of a divisive political issue, and the possibility of increased ability to screen and shape future generations just inflames that. On one side, the people who think that if (if) civilization can find a way to make children healthier and happier they should do that. On the other side, the people who think that things are changing too fast already, and that they really shouldn't mess around with something as fundamental to the evolved design of their species as reproduction, in case something snaps. On the (much less relatively popular) third side, the people who believe that now that life-extension is an option, people should have fewer children, which makes the whole thing sort of irrelevant; an unexpected population boom is going to put strain on all of their support systems, and also having children is kind of inherently cruel.

There are emails. There are blog posts. There are debates on the floor of the diplomatic clearinghouses. There are proposals in city government, counter-proposals, bad-faith readings of existing laws, judicial ruling, popular debates, dramatic hysterics, and all the other things that signal social change.

Eventually, the cities of the world come down in two new general alliances. The pro-trying-it faction, lead by No Tariffs Technically Not a City, and the pro-leaving-the-issue-alone faction, lead by Largest Waterfall City. This being þereminia, the alliances end up settling down in a way that is slightly askew from all of the existing planetary divisions, adding another complication to the great and terrible Venn diagram that is modern þereminian politics.

No Tarrifs Technically Not a City starts offering a number of grants for better DNA sequencing, and better experimental design to figure out what genes are actually involved in all these things that people care about. They agree to restrict any actual use of genetic screening to conditions that have a more than one-in-six impact on childhood mortality statistics for the next 200 years, as a temporary measure, in response for a 430,0000 kroner/year commitment from the cities that wanted to take things more slowly, to be used to benefit child welfare in the cities that wanted to charge ahead.

The Space City Planning Group has questions about whether the aliens think it's worth investing in biological radiation hardening in the relatively near-term, or if external technological shielding solutions are more efficient for now. Also, how do they feel about sharing the technology to do blood tests for cancer screening? They're thinking of making those a requirement for coverage under the joint healthcare optimization agreement of the city, if they're feasible, given the higher background radiation in space.

Well shielded habitats should have similar radiation dosing to living on a planet for people who don't work outside the habitat or in smaller craft that need to worry more about mass trade-offs associated with shielding.

They would be happy to collaborate on ensuring any habitats they design meet this criteria.

There are ways to optimize shielding for smaller craft but they can't really equal the simple solution of just using more mass.

Engineered radiation resistance is a fascinating project and one they would be happy to collaborate on but it's not likely to be one that has no trade-offs or be ready for mass application in the short term.

There are also substantial limits to how resistant multi-cellular organisms can be to acute radiation damage especially over sustained periods. As such, a focus on external shielding is advisable.

Work to improve the availability of screening tests for cancers is also something they would be happy to assist with. It's likely to be more successful in the short-term.

Based on their research so far, here's the chemical markers which seem most common among the cancer patients they've treated. And these ones specifically seem to indicate cancer as opposed to being an indicator of stress on the body's systems. Obviously, more research will still need to be done before that can be refined into a test that the þereminians can manufacture and some particularly unusual cancers won't be detected with this sort of test.

Preparations continue apace. With an entire world to work with, many of whom are excited about space, a lot happens simultaneously.

Still, one of the big concerns people have about a push for space-based infrastructure is the extraterrestrial availability of materials for expansion and repairs. What are the aliens opinions on helping to develop asteroid-mining craft? Or just putting a bunch of resource-rich asteroids at some convenient Lagrange points so that ships don't have to go all the way to the asteroid belt? Even a few big asteroids would take centuries to mine out, by which point they'll have had time to figure out better spacecraft propulsion.

They would be happy to move some asteroids do they have particular opinions about what size and material composition they want? Also what specific orbital dynamics they should be placed with? They would slightly prefer to put them in lunar orbit to be extra safe about things.

As for designing asteroid mining ships here's some considerations about size and structure and ways to use the engines they already have the technology to manufacture. Also here's some information about typical material characteristics of different kinds of asteroids and what the implications are there for conventional mining (mining without teleporters). If they want to use automated systems here are some standard guidelines for biphasic replication systems where two or more separate systems are responsible for building more of each other. Typically for both safety and practicality reasons you want some of the manufacturing for precision components to be separate and not part of the cycle.

Oh, they were thinking the planet-sun Lagrange points one-sixth tau radians ahead of and behind the planetary orbit. But putting them in Lunar orbit should be fine too, if they can be placed sufficiently precisely. As for materials, they're currently expecting to want minerals in roughly these ratios, but those might not be present in the asteroid belt so anything in this set of tolerances would be great!

They were not really intending to design complex manufacturing systems that don't have humans present in the loop. Not least of all because that sounds like it requires complex robotics knowledge that's outside their current skill envelope. But thanks for the heads up?

Do the people of the rings use that kind of manufacturing setup, or do you just do it manually because you can have enough attention to allocate it across your manufacturing base?

They can also place asteroids into Lagrange points, those are just further away and so less convenient in terms of Delta V budget.

They will begin surveying asteroids to try to meet those requirements, it will likely take at least a month or two, even limiting to large asteroids there are quite a few of them.

Systems like that are always technically challenging to develop even with prerequisite knowledge.

And yes, conscious attention is a resource, in theory they could generate more of it but that trades off against other things and they are not immune to boredom.

... huh. Boredom seems like it serves some important purposes for evolved life, but the speculative xenopsychologists (a field that consisted entirely of arm-chair speculation until about a week ago) are a bit surprised that it would be relevant to engineered life. Maybe there's a deeper connection between boredom and intelligence that's not obvious from their current understanding! Neat!

Why is that kind of bi-phasic approach notably more secure? Surely there's still plenty of information flow between the two components. Given that the separation between 'self' and 'environment' is something of an illusion, in what sense does it make sense to consider a manufacturing apparatus like that to be composed of two parts instead of just one bigger part?

(This kicks off a supplementary debate between the theoretical computer scientists and everyone with common-sense about the difficulty of manufacturing 'viruses' jumping between the components of a bi-phasic manufacturing pipeline.)

The Ring People's analysis of their mental architecture suggests it may have been partially based on an organic mind, there are at least substantial similarities with their studies of organic minds.

The purpose of boredom isn't entirely clear and it impacts some of them more than others but overall it represents a desire not to be repeatedly doing the same task endlessly. Given that it's strongest for their manufacturing specialist they speculate that if it was an intentional design decision, it is partially intended to be a safeguard against endless replication without variation.

As for the benefits of the biphasic model, they're correct that, in the long term, it isn't sufficient but the separation means that it's less likely for random chance to result in deviations from the intended design in both sections, internal cross-checks can naturally serve the same purpose though.

The true advantages come from separation and a reduction in the generation count. If the manufacturing stage is physically separated from the resource gathering and assembly components then conditions are unlikely to impact both components in the same way and thereby add additional security to those cross-checks.

In addition, this design typically allows for fewer generations of manufacturing components and therefore reduces the overall number of generations which makes it less likely for repeated deviations to compound and provides a more manageable number of elements to recheck externally.

Even if the ideas aren't something that þereminia has already incorporated, it's an appealing framing: extending the useful lifetime of a design not through material wear analysis, but through memetic wear analysis. They work the concept into the many emerging designs for zero-gravity factories, even if none of these feature that level of automation quite yet.

And eventually (in four days — bureaucracy and consensus-building can be slow, but not that slow when SPAAAAAAACE!) the Space City Planning Group has a final approved design for the initial habitation module, an orbit to park it in, and a chosen first-wave of colonists to test some of the inevitable assumptions that they had to make when trying to adapt a city design to work in an O'Neill cylinder.

Could the people of the rings please assemble this design in that orbit, and then bring these people up to get things started?

Based on the size that will take a week to assemble. In the meantime they'll start inviting the planned residents up for brief interviews. Are there any standards the SCPG would like them to enforce for bringing personal possessions? At a baseline, they would enforce a weight limit of a ton per person but if SCPG would prefer a higher limit that can be negotiated. They'll also decline to transport any nuclear or high-yield chemical explosives as personal possessions, if SCPG has an institutional need for such things that can also be negotiated.

Well, some critical backup generators are radioisotope thermoelectric? They're just there in case the solar collectors fail, and they were hoping the people of the rings would just assemble them in place because the amounts called for are not critical masses. But if they want the SCPG to provide the plutonium pellets that's fine too.

The SCPG actually has a set of guidelines for personal belongings — mainly, this first wave of people is just going to put the station through its test paces and figure out if there are any critical deficiencies or redesigns, so they've agreed not to bring anything particularly important with them. So the maximum expected personal baggage at this point is only 200 pounds. But there are initial food stores and test plants that also need to go up ...

Is their concern here about teleporter throughput, individual teleportation-trip size, or do they just have opinions about how much individuals should be allowed to own in space? Or do they think the SCPG is completely incapable of people who would bring thousands of tons of rock as a 'personal item' as a joke? Actually they're not asking that one because they made this mistake already and they're capable of not doing it again when the alternative is a disappointed Diplomat Tatenika lecturing them.

They'll provide the materials for the generators in this habitat though future habitats will need to be made with materials from their solar system which will take longer. This one will be made with imported materials.

If the SCPG wants a lower personal allowance limit that's absolutely fine. The concern is mostly practicality of identifying those possessions and finding room for them. A smaller amount of possessions makes for a more streamlined process and while their attentional capacity is vast it isn't infinite. They could have specified the limit by volume instead but they've noticed that weight limits are just slightly more common in the archives they've perused.

Oh, that makes sense! The SCPG has set a lower personal limit, but doesn't need help enforcing it. We[in] can ask everyone to print out a particular label and stick it on all of their luggage, if that would help? Or paint a circle on the ground and put everything that should go inside it? Is there some variation on that general theme that would work best?

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."