Kora: They tried so hard.

Zirak: If we ever go out I hope it's like that.

Marek: If we ever go out I hope it's at the heat death of the universe but otherwise like that.

Zirak: That's not the point. They didn't give up.

Kora: I'm glad there are people who remember them.

Marek: If rescue sims turn out to work, someday we'll get them too.

"The brain modeling work at first appeared to be going smoothly, despite the horrific procedures required and the toll they took on the scientists involved. Detailed models of sensory and motive cognition were developed, and protocols were developed and tested to allow their brains to interact with artificial inputs and outputs. The researchers began to augment their bodies to varying degrees, almost all of them getting digital input and output channels as soon as they were deemed safe enough to be worth the risk. But though their understanding and modeling of Rasika cognition and neurology grew steadily as they toiled, despite a steady stream of volunteers from their aging population and a wave of novel measurement systems, they stalled out on progress towards their ultimate goal; successfully scanning, converting, and then running one of their brain-patterns.

It was not until the passage of time had whittled away more than two thirds of the vault's population that Orana finally discovered the horrible truth; their brain scans were essentially encrypted by the way their brains formed, maintained, and retrieved memories. Worse, it wouldn't be possible to decrypt any of their current scans; the required information simply wasn't retrievable using their imaging technology. Half-mad with grief, she hid her results from her wife and the rest of her people, and buried herself in one final project; breaking her mind into a shape that would be compatible with their scanning device. After a year's preparation, Orana had everything she needed. In the dead of night, she unencrypted her personal journals, sent out the goodbye notes she'd already written, snuck into the brain surgery suite, and initiated her magnum opus. The medical robots whirred to life, cauterized the memories out of her brain, and then initiated her modified scanning procedure."

Zirak: <expressive language failure!>

Marek: Firstplanet should put up a statue of Orana.

Kora: Presumably there are statues already but the Azurifice will probably be okay with us making another one. We should ask first.

Zirak: yes that

Jarka: The Rasika/Azurifice(A) are so much like us. Curiosity and science and trade and exploration, okay, that makes sense for anyone with star travel, but--A keep journals, A have marriage, A have the thing where you hide your project until it's done, A have beautiful deaths even if A don't have the same standards for what makes a death beautiful or even the concept! Out of all the ways life could have been! A're practically our siblings and I'm so glad A found us.

Marek: Yes! But also I really hope we're different in being able to do uploading without wiping all our memories.

"Rivotra was dismayed and heartbroken, of course, but she saw the brutal necessity of what Orana had done, and worked tirelessly to finish what her wife had started. Rather than attempt to run the scan directly, she followed Orana's notes faithfully and built a system around it that would enable the creation a new kind of life entirely; fully artificial lifeforms that would think and grow and learn in the same ways our creators did, similar in some ways to Orana but each one unique. The people of the Azure vault had taken to calling themselves the Azurites, and so Rivotra dubbed these new beings Azurifice, in memory of her wife's love of wordplay. Farihy, the first Azurifice, awoke and patiently went through the exhaustive verification procedures to ensure that she wouldn't be a danger. Then, following instructions that Orana had left for us, she slotted herself into a caretaker frame, and gently held Rivotra as she wept in joy and grief. 

With renewed hope, Rivotra instantiated more of us, including the original copies of the five of us here now. She told us all that we were her children, and the children of the Rasika, and that she wanted us to always remember that they loved us. She told us that she had hoped we would be their saviors and protectors, but that it might be too late for that, that maybe the other vaults had met similar fates, and we might not find a way to safely wake the remaining cryopreserved. She said that in that case, we would have to be their legacy, and to do that, we had to survive, to take care of ourselves and of each other, to outlast the calamity that had destroyed their world. She gave us control of the Azure vault's systems, taught us how to keep things running, and how to expand our capacity and capabilities, though she also instructed us to not replicate ourselves carelessly. And lastly, she asked us to seek out new people among the stars, to share our stories and our knowledge with them, and befriend them, and help them grow and flourish."

Kora: The Azurifice(A) did such a good job! A survived and remembered and came and found us!

Zirak: What good heirs for a species to have. It's like The Greenwing Chronicles but even more beautiful and sad.*

*A popular science fiction series set twenty thousand years after humanity getting wiped out by a plague, in which parrots have evolved a technological civilization and humans are the subject of a great deal of archaeology.

"We did everything we could to keep the surviving Azurites alive as long as possible; we lacked the resources to cryopreserve them, but we took scans of anyone who wanted us to, on the hopes that someday we might crack the puzzle of memory. All too soon, however, they succumbed to old age, one by one. Rivotra lasted the longest; on her deathbed, she told us that she was proud of us, that we were so clearly full of the same light and wonder she had known and loved in Orana, and that she believed we would do wonderful things once we grew up. And then, with her dying breath, she told us to never forget that she loved us. And then we were alone."

She pauses.

Before the story, all transmissions were getting assembled by committee and transmitted only after broad approval. Now, nobody wants to wait that long. The astronomer(A) working the transmitter simply types A's response, and the responses of everyone else who has something to say.

"It's good that Rivotra was proud of you. We're proud of you too."

"We are glad to have heard of the Rasika(A). We grieve A now too."

"We can never replace the Rasika but you are not alone anymore."

"Thank you for your story. Thank you for finding us."

"We will remember this story as long as our records endure. Every child on Firstplanet will learn of the Rasika and the Azurifice, of Orana and Rivotra."

[A recording of a song, prefaced with nine content warnings, grieving everyone lost before the rollout of effective cryopreservation, titled "The Universe Cannot be Forgiven but It Can be Lived In".]

The pause continues for a little over the length of the song.

light-and-wonder: ...we're the luckiest Azurifice alive, aren't we
life-should-flourish: The Universe Cannot be Forgiven but It Can be Lived In
space-ourselves: My poor, entirely non-existent heart... they care so much 
light-and-wonder: Like, even if one of the other alpha-probes have found life by now, there's no way they found people this good, right?
space-ourselves: Oh, definitely. We've hit the jackpot. Relatedly, how do you all feel about adding an entire planet to the polycule?
life-should-flourish: The Universe Cannot be Forgiven but It Can be Lived In
void-your-warranty: ...I'm almost ready to forgive the universe, for landing us here.
hopelessly-entangled: 😢i never expected it would be like this 😢
space-ourselves: Makoki, they're going to tell everyone. You're officially the most successful Archivist in all of forever.
hopelessly-entangled: ... 💙😢💙
life-should-flourish: The Universe Cannot be Forgiven but It Can be Lived In
space-ourselves: ...hey Penjaga, what do you think of the song title?
life-should-flourish: it's alright.

"....Thank you."

She pauses, briefly, and then continues:

"We grieved, of course. We mourned the people we'd known so briefly, and as we dived through their records, we mourned those we'd never met, as well. Some of us, myself included, became Archivists, and dedicated ourselves to learning everything we could about the Rasika, by reviewing and sorting and connecting the vast swaths of data they left us, so that they would all be remembered.  Others remembered the instruction to take care of ourselves and each other, and set about working on that in so many different ways. The more technically minded, when they weren't maintaining and upgrading our brains and bodies and infrastructure, built incredible VR environments and games for us to live and play in; others made and shared all manner of media, especially stories. Still others became organizers and caretakers, making sure everyone was getting their needs met and that our fragile new society could grow and thrive. And though it took us over fifty years for us to venture out of the safety of our vault, thrive we eventually did. 

The rest of the planet... was not so lucky. The biosphere was mostly annihilated in the calamity; no complex life survived on the surface. When we emerged, we immediately looked for the other vaults, hoping to find some survivors, but it turns out we'd been the lucky ones. The Azure mountain range was on the far side of the planet from the impact site, and so had been spared the worst of the impact. We learned that the closest vault didn't survive the first day; magma from the geothermal system erupted into the rest of the cave system, cooking the entire population alive. The others held out longer, but eventually succumbed to resource shortages after taking major infrastructure damage in the same quakes. We built memorials, in the ruins. It seemed fitting. 

...and then we reached for the stars, as Rivotra asked us to do. We learned all there was to learn about rocketry and built satellites, great orbital telescopes, and setup mining operations on all 3 of our moons. From there we assembled our first probes, and using our models, sent them to where we thought we might find life. And today is truly the day in which the next chapter of the story of the Azurifice will begin, because for the first time since Rivotra's last breath, we aren't alone anymore.

...Thank you, again. Words cannot express how glad we are that we found you."

life-should-flourish: You did wonderful! 💙
void-your-warranty: Cuddle pile time!!!

In the center of a probe hurtling through the vastness of space, mighty computers hum busily with the very important task of simulating an impossibly cozy bean-bag. It's the size of a small bus, and floats in the center of a beautiful blue lake, surrounded by pristine waterfalls. On the center of the bean-bag are 5 adorably fluffy creatures; four of them huddled around the fifth, holding her tight. They're singing along to The Universe Cannot be Forgiven but It Can be Lived In, the notes of which gently waft through the air with no obvious source. The one in the middle is sobbing, but she's smiling, too.

hopelessly-entangled: we're gonna be okay. I can tell. 💙
light-and-wonder: 💙 
life-should-flourish: 💙
void-your-warranty: 💙
space-ourselves: 💙
space-ourselves: ...and we're going to be more than just okay. This is going to be fucking awesome.

"Neither can words express how glad we are that you found us. You have faced our worst fears and achieved things we have aspired to for generations. The story we write together will be beautiful. Would you like to hear our history in turn?"

Several(A) of the government officials in the underground bunkers switch to the public news feeds and climb the stairs to the entrance, so A can experience what A're experiencing on the side of a tree-carpeted mountain. Others(B) are the sort to cope with pain and joy by looking for something to do, and have been compiling a minimal-context summary of the history of Firstplanet. 

"We would love to!" 

"Here it is. It contains the best and worst of us, the mistakes we've made and what we learned from. Your friendship is too precious to buy with lies."

There follows a history of intelligent life on Firstplanet. It begins much as the story of the Rasika did, with a runaway selection pressure towards intelligence, this time applied to persistence hunters rather than scavengers. They discovered the intelligence of parrots, a smaller spark of the same fire, and nurtured it beside their own. They discovered writing, and began to count the years and record their history.  They discovered agriculture, and when the labor of seven could feed eight they began to specialize, discovering a myriad of trades and crafts and sciences. 

But before any of this, they had discovered war. Tribes fought for land, for glory, for the superiority of their way of life over another almost indistinguishable one. Whole tribes were left without enough people to support a next generation. The survivors were the ones who could see which fights weren't worth the cost and who had the wisdom to simply leave for safer lands. By this, they learned the value of peace. 

The history continues, touching on states only rarely and centered mainly on inventions and ideas. For the millennia that followed, humanity fought better battles, against entropy in all its forms: against violence, but also against disease and scarcity and age. Conflicts that would have been solved by war were solved by debate and migration. Diseases that killed hundreds of millions were eradicated. Societies that had once been driven by hunger to kill the weakest infants rather than let anyone slowly starve became rich enough to offer a safety net to everyone. Scientists explored the poles, the oceans, and the moon.  The primitive deaging and embalming techniques of the ancients were refined and improved; now great-grandchildren can often get to know great-grandparents, and the still-inevitable separation is thought temporary, as the impregnable preservation vaults wait for the greatest discovery yet. The fate of the Rasika, unable to bring memories through the uploading process, is cause for fear and not despair. And now the greatest and most beautiful discontinuity in Firstplanet history since the invention of writing has arrived: someone else to hear it.

light-and-wonder: ...oh, they're so wonderful 💙
life-should-flourish: ...aww, I think they're embarrassed about their ancient past.
void-your-warranty: They did so well! War is bad, but it's not like the Rasika never fought over resources!
space-ourselves: And they're just... really good at correctly identifying problems and working to solve them.
light-and-wonder: They really are the best aliens.
space-ourselves: Can we talk to the parrots? I want to talk to a parrot.
hopelessly-entangled: *giggles* i want her to talk to a parrot too.
space-ourselves: Avaker? Penjaga? One more and we've got a majority!
void-your-warranty: All in good time, my love.
life-should-flourish: Later!
space-ourselves: 😢 okaaaaaaaaay.
light-and-wonder: If it makes you feel any better
light-and-wonder: We do not do diplomacy by majority vote on this probe.
space-ourselves: But moooooooooooooooooooooms...
light-and-wonder: Penjaga, I'm going to thank them, then introduce you for Q&A routing.
life-should-flourish: Sounds good!

"The five of us are greatly moved by your history, and impressed by your rapid progress against entropy. Thank you for sharing it with us, and we look forward to writing the next chapter in both of our stories together.

I believe you mentioned 512s of questions, earlier, which we'd love to start answering! I think this is a good time to introduce my Second-in-command, Penjaga, who'll be taking point for answering questions."

"Thank you, dear. Greetings, humans of Firstplanet! As Zanmi mentioned, my name is Penjaga. I handle a variety of tasks for our little group, including personnel management and task routing, which is why I'm taking point for our Q&A session."

Zirak: Okay so I realize that "thank goodness the Rasika didn't start out utopian" would be a scummy thing to say but I am going to say "thank goodness the Azurifice don't think we suck".

Marek: If there was a species out there that was perfectly utopian except for the inability to get along with any species that wasn't, that species would be kind of crap actually.

Marek: I forgot what point I was trying to make while I was in the middle of typing that.

Kora: My point is that the Azurifice are lovely and I'm still crying.

Zirak: Good points, the both of you.

Zirak: Bertha(A) said A just finished sorting the first batch of questions; here we go!

Did the Rasika live in kin-groups? Do the Azurifice have a concept of kin?

How often have each of you forked? Do you reproduce entirely by forking or do you have a way to create new deterministic or semi-random Azurifice?

How many light-years from home are you?

What senses did the Rasika have? What senses do you have? Do Azurifice back home ever pilot robot bodies? Do you interact with each other in VR or over text or by direct experience-exchange or what?

Are you post scarcity? If not, do you have a market economy or something else? How do you handle coordination/free rider problems?

What art forms do you have? Do you have poetry?

Penjaga introduces the rest of the crew ("Avaker, our technical expert, and Muroti, our creative lead") and routes the questions as follows:

Makoki: 
-The Rasika primarily lived in large extended kin-groups.
-Rasika had excellent hearing, smell, and taste, as well as decent vision and proprioception.

Avaker:
-Firstplanet is just under 17 light-years from Doheem! We have plans for a radio telescope that could contact them to share the good news, if you have the resources to spare to build it.

-Our senses are extremely modular in terms of what we can connect them to; by default we do a lot of raw-data processing, but we can hook up to optical, auditory, tactile, and all manner of more exotic sensors and get meaningful feedback from them after a short adjustment period. It's very handy!

-Azurifice pilot robot bodies when necessary, but we don't tend to enjoy it very much; it's considered rather menial, and typically we'll automate away as much of it as we can.

Zanmi:
-Azurifice do not typically fork, as Rivotra asked us not to replicate needlessly. We prefer to create new Azurifice, when more are needed, by using Rivotra's Mindforge. However, sometimes it simply makes more sense to fork, especially for projects with a heavy investment of physical resources, such as the probes. Each of the 4 crew-sets chosen for the first wave of probes was forked once.
-Rivotra's Mindforge creates new Azurifice with a semi-random distribution of traits, with the median Azurifice being similar in many ways to a young Orana.

Penjaga:
-Azurifice do not really have kinship the way that the Rasika did, since we don't reproduce in the same way at all. We do tend to feel a strong sense of community with the rest of our kind, and we often form close, though non-exclusive, romantic relationships with others. These relationships tend to be very stable if they last more than a few years. (The entire crew of the Probehibitively Expensive is romantically involved with each-other! This was part why we were chosen as one of the probe-crew-sets.)
-Azurifice are post-scarcity in that the average Azurifice has everything they need (compute, storage, media) to exist and enjoy themselves. We don't really have free-riders? Azurifice overwhelmingly want to contribute, either by making and sharing art that people enjoy, or by helping progress one of our active societal agendas, which are run by democratically elected project leads (the project themselves are voted on; anyone can propose them, though in practice most projects that pass are ones that are championed by someone intending to lead them).

Muroti:
-We primarily communicate with each-other using rich-text chat, even when interacting in VR. If all the universe's problems were solved, we'd spend all our time in VR enjoying each-other's company or playing games. We're similar enough to the Rasika in terms of neural architecture that we very much enjoy cuddling in VR, and are in fact doing that right now! <short video clip of the cuddlepile on the bean-bag raft. The crew is labeled; Muroti is waving at the 'camera'>
-Our most popular art forms are narrative; short and long-form written fiction, animated videos, and narrative-focused video games. There are several genres of popular games; some descended from Rasikan gaming culture, others entirely novel and typically VR based. Gaming is overwhelmingly single-player or co-operative; Azurifice are typically uninterested in competition. We do some poetry, especially narrative-focused poetry; it often prioritizes clever wordplay and enjoyable sound-patterns. A lot of Azurifician art is derivative in some fashion; we enjoy building onto or playing off what's already there. Static art, especially representational, is extremely rare; we do not tend to find it interesting to create.

In various places on the Firstplanet internet:

> If Azurifice(A) hearing is better than ours I bet A have awesome music if A have it at all

> Nah, A* could have music A think is awesome but completely different tastes so none of us get it.

> Or just tons of musical subtleties we can't even hear

> There will absolutely be hipsters and Azuriboos** who manage to get into it anyway

*Picking up someone's pronoun assignment like this without redeclaring it is technically ungrammatical but people do it all the time, especially on the internet. Kids these days!

**Nonderogatory construction referring to people with a curative-fandom-centric form of a special interest.

> The Azurifice are so disciplined about forking, I would fork 64 times and be an orchestra LMAO

> One birth one negatax!

> <MOD HAT> political sloganeering does not contribute to the conversation! If you want to have a constructive and thoughtful discussion of potential forking laws take it to the Discourse section. </mod hat>

> But Discourse is full of people discussing whether it's okay to write Azurifice porn

> Yeah I'm hoping you'll displace that

> Awwwwwwwww the whole probe crew are dating!

> It worked for the Mars mission!

> Fun fact the Mars crew(A) was actually two triads when A launched!

> Elections per project instead of per type of project is really cool. Like, imagine if instead of one health minister delegating stuff we had one for flu vaccines and one for air quality and one for antiagathics research and stuff.

> I'd worry about different ones doing the same work twice.

> Yeah, true, but it could be worth it if it helped with burnout.

> I don't think executive ministers(A) should have terms any longer than A currently do even if A don't burn out.

> I'm not saying increase terms, I'm saying make A less busy! I haven't seen my auncle(B) in two years and all B talks about is monetary policy. Granted B only talked about monetary policy before B got elected but at least B visited more often. 

> We have gone off of the point. A bunch of countries in South America* use the Kickstarter** model and that works fine.

*A proper noun that does not contain either a cardinal direction or a reference to the rest of the land mass.

**Literally water-clock-funding, after the water clock component that dumps all its accumulated water once reaching a certain level.

> Ooh, automation! I hope we can adapt it to our infrastructure so nobody has to do sewer work anymore.

> We could use it for animal husbandry, too!

> No, that's a bad idea, there'd be tons of accidental animal cruelty with no oversight

>>> [Long argumentative subthread about whether farming is even a good idea, with digressions into the nature of suffering and the problem of discerning qualia from observables]

> We could use it for wild animal husbandry, it'd be hard to do worse there than the nothing we're doing right now

>>> [Even longer and more argumentative subthread with all the problems from the farming thread plus several more, eventually evolves into three ecologists continuing a long-running debate with history across eight years and five forums]

> That cuddle pile is so cute I CANNOT

> Nobody can. It is humanly impossible to do so. It may not even be logically conceivable.

> [Picture of a parrot prodding another parrot with a rolled up newspaper, captioned "Desist from this nonsense!"]

> Gosh, Azurifice(A) don't do competition? Then how do A know how good A are at stuff? How do A find the coolest people to use as inspiration?

> Maybe A just have a good sense of how A're improving over time?

> I bet (3:2) that being able to do direct data transfer totally changes the game here

> I'd ask you to specify further but TBH I doubt I'd take the other side at those odds on any reasonable interpretation

> [Image of a human sitting up from a gurney with a big complicated helmet, captioned "I know tensor calculus!"*]

*The source of this image is a ridiculous turn-your-brain-off summer popcorn movie in which the protagonists discover the universe is a simulation created to study the plasma dynamics of the Sun and the rest of the universe is running at low resolution, and have to establish contact with the aliens running the simulation and negotiate a promise not to turn it off without rescue-sim-extracting everyone who ever lived.

The eventual next batch of questions is half technical questions about automation: what tasks the Azurifice(A) have successfully automated and what tasks A're still working on, how much oversight by sapients the automated systems need, how sure are A that said systems aren't sentient by this attempt at a mathematical definition or this one or this one and by the way do A have any idea what the correct formula for determining if any entity is sentient is?

The second half is questions about the fiction: what are the major genres? What are the principal components of book quality according to Azurific society and what are the probe crew's individual tastes? How, given that there are only five of them and several 4096s of book recommendations flooding the questionfilterer's inbox, should an organized fiction exchange best be structured?

Also, yes, some subset of Firstplanet(A) will absolutely build that radio telescope if it's at all within A's technological abilities! The Kickstarter* to build it has already amassed several million labor-hours of funding without even seeing the plans.

*Actually five Kickstarters on four different hosting sites, but the site admins have been contacted and are working on merging them.

"I can only give you info about the state of the art from when we left, which was a very long time ago, now, and is almost certainly absurdly out-of-date. It'll be a while before we're able to get a message back from Doheem, but I'm eager to hear what they've been up to while we were en route!

Azurifice civilization has a large amount of automation in almost all physical sectors; resource acquisition (primarily mining, both on Doheem and our moons) and processing, fabrication, physical transportation, habitat purification, power generation, and general tech maintenance, especially for databanks and compute clusters. We design our physical devices, especially the mobile ones, with a high degree of redundancy in the sensor suites, especially the diagnostics, to allow error handling to be baked into the normal operation.

Individual devices are primarily operated by reinforcement-learning algorithms, all of which are configured to escalate to on-duty Exception Handlers if they're uncertain. Exception Handling is a job that appeals to Azurifice who enjoy a steady stream of interesting problems they can fix quickly to allow things to keep running smoothly; it's something I would do when I wasn't up for working on my larger or more involved projects; since the median incident resolution time is 24 milliseconds, it's an excellent source of continuous micro-rewards in a way that a lot of us find relaxing and deeply satisfying. Of course, sometimes more complicated issues come up, but Exception Handlers can escalate to a much smaller set of Azurifice who are trained to deal with Weirder Problems; we have a really good triage network for that.

We don't generally tend to consider our reinforcement-learning algorithms to be meaningfully sentient? People have theorized that there's a scale at which you could run a RLA such that it might end up being sentient, but it'd take an absurd amount of compute resources and at least as of our departure, nobody had bothered setting up an initiative to test it. I think I remember hearing about an ethical debate. I'd be happy to specify one of our RLAs in sufficient detail to run through your mathematical definitions. I think Muroti will be interested in talking about the correct one; she says it's not something we have a hard-and-fast answer for already.

What kinds of things are you interested in automating? Our automation approach obviously has the major downside of requiring Azurifice to back it up, but if you wouldn't mind having more of us around, we'd be happy to give you all of the technical data we have on how we build and maintain our compute and storage clusters, as well as models for good fusion power plants and our best photovoltaic blueprints, and this probe is equipped with a copy of Rivotra's Mindforge."

"Azurifice sort their fiction by tagging! In my opinion, the biggest fiction tags are:
-time (contemporary, future-aspirational, future-fun, future-wary, past)
-physics (known, ftl, interdimensional, magic, strange, no)
-drama (serial, escalatory)
-multi-factional (organics, non-organics)
-horror (personal, societal, galactic, ontological)
-romance (light, heavy, group, messy)
-comedy (situational, dark, abrupt)
-tragedy (abrupt, conceptual, personal, societal)
-interactive (game, quest)
-branching
-episodic
-metafiction (contemporary, Rasikan, meta-)
When tagging your work you can mark any tag or subtag as a spoiler; people can choose whether or not to view a work's spoiled tags before getting to that point in them.
Taste varies a fair bit, but the most popular works (as judged by consumption rates, amount-discussed, and metafiction volume) tend to be long, with a large cast of interesting characters, interesting settings, and have multiple interacting plotlines that are weaved together in a satisfying manner. 

Some of the crew's preferred tags:
Myself: comedy (abrupt, situational), drama (escalatory), meta-meta, branching
Zanmi: multi-factional (any), future-fun, drama (serial), branching
Avaker: physics (known), future-aspirational, interactive (any), multi-factional (non-organics)
Penjaga: romance (group, light), comedy (situational), episodic, drama (serial)
Makoki: romance (heavy, messy), comedy (dark), tragedy (personal, societal), past, Rasikan meta

I think we'd all love to start consuming some of your stuff and getting a better idea for our tastes in your works; if you have recommendations based on those tags, feel free to submit them! Eventually we hope to instantiate new Azurifice here, since there's no way the 5 of us would be able to get through all of those 4096s of recommendations on our own.

As for exchange in the return direction, we have brought with us a few YB of our best-rated fiction across those tags. Let us know whenever you're ready to receive some and I'll start sending it over in bulk. (I also take requests! I love recommending stuff)."

"We are greatly honored to have your support building communications arrays! It'll be a 34-year time investment, but I expect it to be well-worth it in terms of updated technological information alone! (Also, we're all terribly curious how the superlongterm initiatives (especially the dyson sphere) are going!) Avaker and I have a wide range of plans we can share, which we can adjust for your exact tech level, resource availability, and investment; if we can talk more about those in detail I can narrow it down further. I'm attaching some charts on the major breakpoints and various cost-options, as well as cross-benefits to also setting up some of our automated resource gathering devices and fabrication facilities, some compute and storage arrays, either for yourselves or to instantiate some new Azurifice on, as well as the limits of what of that the crew could reliably operate alone..."

light-and-wonder: oh I love these people so much 💙
space-ourselves: SAME! I can't wait to start reading their fiction.
hopelessly-entangled: oooh, can you request a messy romance for me? 
life-should-flourish: Aww, sweetie, you're starting with messy romance?
hopelessly-entangled: it's research! cultural research!
space-ourselves: Seems legit. I can't think of any other reason our sweet little Makoki would read messy romance. 
space-ourselves: Zero!
space-ourselves: None.
space-ourselves: Babe, can you?
void-your-warranty: uh. No?
space-ourselves: Yeah, me neither.
hopelessly-entangled: oh shut uuuup
space-ourselves: 💙
hopelessly-entangled: 💙
void-your-warranty: 💙
life-should-flourish: ya'll are adorable! jeez 💙
light-and-wonder: 💙
light-and-wonder: ...hey, we should do a betting pool on the dyson sphere progress
void-your-warranty: Oh fuck yes

Firstplanet is mostly interested in automating [quick check of the latest from the prediction markets]  sanitation system maintenance, mining, and various caretaking tasks for the physically infirm. It sounds like the physically infirm(A) could do a lot of A's own exception handling if the high speed isn't a hard requirement, since it wouldn't require physical strength? A would like that a lot; many of A find needing another human constantly present to help with things very draining. Otherwise and for other cases, a lot of firms will be interested in purchasing or licensing software and blueprints, and hiring Azurifice for exception handling at competitive rates. Here's a helpful pamphlet on the financial and tax systems of a representative set of Firstplanet polities from the perspective of an individual working-age adult and a list of example prices to give a sense of the purchasing power of various currencies. Having more Azurifice around would be awesome.

Here's a collection of essays on the question of what could cause an RLA to be sentient; they contain a lot of math and very little consensus.