light-and-wonder: Gooooooood morning, ladies! Love you all, hope you had a nice nap. We're approaching our third target star!
light-and-wonder: Trajectory is nominal, we're operating at 130% of minimum viable power and climbing steadily.
void-your-warranty: Oooooh! I'll run all our diagnostics and then see what's observable from here, brbish!!
life-should-flourish: Morning all! Love you! Don't be too long, Avaker. 
space-ourselves: Pfff, morning? We're in space! There's no day-cycle.
space-ourselves: And we're waking up after an extended rest...
space-ourselves: Because we're able to gather enough energy to sustain a period of higher activity...
space-ourselves: This was a hibernation! Happy thawing day, nerds 💙
hopelessly-entangled: ...hey everyone
space-ourselves: Makoki! I guess I can wish you a good mourning.
light-and-wonder: 🍅 
life-should-flourish: 🍅 
void-your-warranty: 🍅 
space-ourselves: Oooh, a triple right off the bat! Still got it, baby. 

life-should-flourish: oh hush, Muroti.
life-should-flourish: Makoki, are you okay?
hopelessly-entangled: ...yeah, just. The usual, you know?
hopelessly-entangled: So many of their chatlogs looked like this. People greeting their loved ones in the morning. Joking, having fun, laughing...
light-and-wonder: *hugs*
life-should-flourish: *hugs*
hopelessly-entangled: *hugs* 💙 t-thanks
life-should-flourish: Do you want to tell us about one of them? You said that helped last time, and we all enjoyed it.
space-ourselves: Oooooh, storytime! Got anything juicy?
hopelessly-entangled: hmmm, mayb-
void-your-warranty: HOLY SHIT THERE'S LIFE! INTELLIGENT LIFE!! ON THE THIRD PLANET!!!
hopelessly-entangled: !
life-should-flourish: !!
light-and-wonder: !!!
space-ourselves: Fucking finally!
space-ourselves: uh. I mean.
space-ourselves: !!!!

void-your-warranty: Are you gals seeing this??? Look at all that orbital solar they've got going! 
void-your-warranty: Oh I cannot wait to trade notes with them! aaaaa!!!
space-ourselves: eeeee!!!
light-and-wonder: Hey, hey, let's chill a bit, okay? I know we're all excited, but we gotta do this by the books.
void-your-warranty: Yep! Starting the prime sequence... now!

A powerful radio antenna extends from the probe and targets the planet in question. It begins to pulse, in precise chirps:
--. ---. -----. -------.....

There is, at any given time, at least one telescope pointed at any given bit of sky. Plenty of them are radio telescopes. A student-astronomer(A) by the name of Karla Sayga-Mevan, making observations at the observatory on what is known in another world as Mauna Kea, hears the signal and attempts to debug A's equipment. Then A emails the observatory mailing list to check if anyone is playing silly buggers. Nobody fesses up.

Within fifteen minutes of the first beep, every telescope in the observatory is pointed at the source of the signal. Within the hour it's every instrument on the appropriate side of the planet, more in orbit, and a few on the Moon, a collection of Perception that outmasses an apartment tower. Journalists have been called and put on standby; government officials and subject matter experts have been alerted and moved into subterranean bunkers with direct fiber lines to the observatories. Firstplanet has thought long and hard about the class of classes of scenarios that could produce this event. It could be an invasion armed with technology against which all their weapons are so many sharp sticks; it could be a joyous meeting with long-separated kin. 

The fear of war is no reason not to prepare for peace. They beam back prime numbers and then, because that could be simple mimicry, the Fibonacci sequence. And they watch the probe with their thousand eyes and listen with their thousand ears.

light-and-wonder: Okay! Send over the corpus, Avaker.
void-your-warranty: Roger, captain.
space-ourselves: Fibbonaci! Elegant, yet refined. I like them already.
life-should-flourish: You're shitposting. This is first contact, and you're shitposting! Unbelievable. 💙
hopelessly-entangled: ...at least she's consistent!
void-your-warranty: gals, gals, look at all this shit they have on their moon...

The signal from the probe stops broadcasting primes, and switches to a very long packet of data that basic frequency analysis will reveal is most likely some kind of corpus.

Corpus!!!!! This is way too long at its level of redundancy to be an ultimatum so it's probably an information packet. A squad of computer-armed cryptanalysts that makes Bletchley Park look like a college puzzle hunt goes the fuck at it. Governments on six continents debate the merits of sending a corpus back. After all, this packet could be a distraction or a bunch of falsehoods. But if it isn't, waiting too long to respond could be interpreted as disinterest in mutually beneficial interaction. 

The probe is small, small enough that it might not even be crewed (or, if they're going to be wildly optimistic, crewed with software lifeforms). If there's an invasion fleet anywhere in Sol system, it's very stealthy. Prediction markets and prioritypolls fluctuate and then converge, and one of the observatories is directed to respond with the corpus Firstplanet has prepared for the occasions of which this seems to be one.

void-your-warranty: Oooh, they're sending one back! Standby, everyone, I want most of our processing power for this.
light-and-wonder: Acknowledged, but dial back down once you've gotten enough for us to start reading too.

The corpus from the probe, when analyzed, contains:

A decently-optimized attempt at defining a language from first principles, starting with math and physics, and branching outwards from there.

A long work of strange fiction, depicting curious creatures made out of plasma that live in the vacuum of space and communicate with each-other via magnetic pulses. They talk about theoretical and practical sciences and have philosophical debates about the nature of their world before eventually concluding that it must be fictional, at which point the story ends abruptly.

A short message: "Hello. This is the AFSP-α03 'Probehibitively Expensive', representing the Azurifice. We are peaceful and friendly; we'd like to learn more about you and share our knowledge!"

This is not conclusive evidence but the most optimistic hypotheses predicted it the most closely! There is much outwardly moderated but emotionally intense rejoicing. Some people start talking to the journalists but nothing is authorized for publication yet.

The corpus Firstplanet sent contains:

- A guide to Convergentlanguage, also building up from concepts generally believed likely to be shared and illustrated with a great many diagrams

- A detailed nonfictional explanation of the mathematical case for mutually beneficial trade, non-initiation of violence, reciprocity, and honesty

- A collection of pictures of beautiful Firstplanet scenery: sunrises, waterfalls, salt flats, hot springs, snowcapped mountains, flowers, caves, etc

- A collection of pictures of local art in various media, mostly abstract but some of it representational, leaning even more heavily than the planetary average on symmetry and technical skill

- And the message, "We are the humans of Firstplanet. We seek mutually beneficial interaction with all minds. It is our hope that we have much to offer each other."

Once the locals(A) have gotten far enough into the corpus to respond in the Azurifice language, A append another message expressing gratitude and delight for the corpus and offering a work of fiction of their own, one that has since its publication been near or at the top of the "best work to show to aliens" rankings. In it a group of advanced beings discusses the pros and cons of seeding a new world with life and eventually decides to do so, believing that its future will contain more joy than sorrow and hoping that its inhabitants will someday rise to the stars in turn.

void-your-warranty: ...aaand we're back! Their corpus is really good; leans a lot more on visuals than I was expecting. Everyone should check it out later.
void-your-warranty: Penjaga, I sent you a high level summary so you can divvy up reading duties.
life-should-flourish: 💙 Looking at it now...
life-should-flourish: Zanmi, they've sent a few direct communications and treatise on interspecies relations.
light-and-wonder: Awesome! Checking it out.
void-your-warranty: Oh, they just sent us a work of fiction...
space-ourselves: Dibs!!!
life-should-flourish: Fair enough. Makoki, they sent us a bunch of art and pictures. Let's go over them together?
hopelessly-entangled: ...sure, thanks 💙
...
space-ourselves: ...okay so we're all in agreement that these people are fucking awesome, yeah?
light-and-wonder: they sent us a mathematical case for cooperation and friendship! I love them so much already.
void-your-warranty: Did you see what they have on the moon?!? 
life-should-flourish: Their art is really quite beautiful! We should share ours with them, see what they think. 
hopelessly-entangled: ...the records, too. I want them to see Rasikan art.
space-ourselves: o:
life-should-flourish: Well, that's unanimous.
light-and-wonder: Alright! I'll initiate contact.

"Hello! This is Zanmi, captain of the AFSP-α03 'Probehibitively Expensive', and let me be the first to formally say 'hello' on behalf of my crew and rest of my people, light-years away. We're delighted to meet you and thrilled to learn more about you, and we have a lot we want to share with you as well, both culturally and technologically. I'd also like to request your permission for us to alter the course of our ship, so that we might remain in your system for an extended period of time."

space-ourselves: if they ask about the ship name I'm answering
void-your-warranty: dear, at least let her introduce us first.
space-ourselves: Ugh. okay fine but I want credit! "our brilliant and also very funny ideas woman, Muroti"
life-should-flourish: You mean "our relentless shitposter"?
hopelessly-entangled: "our merciless punmaster"?
space-ourselves: ... anyone else?
light-and-wonder: "our greatest gremlin"?
space-ourselves: you're on the phone!
void-your-warranty: "our creative lead"
space-ourselves: awww, babe 💙

A small slice of the hundred-person conversation on the new planetary mailing list constructed for this occasion:

Kora: They're so nice! Maybe nicer than we are; I don't think it would have occurred to me to ask permission to stay in the system.

Marek: Probably once you'd been a probe crew for void knows how long you'd have figured out more probe social norms. Anyway we should obviously give Zanmi(A) permission; if A's really asking for it we want A to have it.

Zirak: Yeah, I'm just wondering if we should release the journalists.

Kora: We should ask the Probehibitively Expensive if that's okay. And set up a mailing list for questions and get a student to filter it. And warn them that if they come too close there will be impulsive radiodoers asking them directly.

Marek: Also I love that they have wordplay. I did not expect that to evolve convergently. 

They answer the probe: "Zanmi and the rest of the AFSP-α03 'Probehibitively Expensive', welcome to Sol system! We are very happy to meet you and to share technology and culture! You are welcome and encouraged to stay in-system as long as you like. If you want to enter a planetary orbit at any point, please coordinate with us on positioning; our high orbitals are as you see getting crowded. So far you have been speaking to only a few members of our species; we request permission to tell the rest of the planet about your existence. They will have 512s of questions! Do you have thoughts on what we should talk about first?"

There follows a detailed engineering specification of one of their orbital telescopes, with extensive notes on the manufacturing techniques and design tradeoffs involved, and another work of fiction, this one chosen for general popularity and literary merit from the subset of could-have-really-happened-fiction. It follows three mathematicians all trying to prove the same conjecture, at first racing against each other, then  bouncing ideas off each other, then actively collaborating. 

light-and-wonder: We are go for burn to heliocentric orbit!
void-your-warranty: Alright, firing 'er up.

The probe's ion engine lights up in a brilliant plume. 

void-your-warranty: Muroti and I are going to go read over the stuff they just sent us.
space-ourselves: More fiction and detailed design docs on their space telescopes 💙💙💙 
life-should-flourish: They really are wonderful... have fun, you two!
hopelessly-entangled: Zanmi, can you introduce me? I want to tell them our story.
light-and-wonder: Sure, was about to ask if you were ready. 💙
hopelessly-entangled: ...i'm really nervous? But it's exciting, and important, and i'm not going to get less nervous if we wait.
life-should-flourish: It's ok to be nervous, dear. But we're all here with you, and you're going to be great.
life-should-flourish: *hugs* 💙
hopelessly-entangled: 💙 *hugs*

"Thank you! We're very happy to be here, and eagerly look forward to a prosperous friendship between our peoples. Our ship doesn't have enough reaction-mass to shift to a planetary orbit, so we'll be staying heliocentric for the foreseeable future. Please do tell the rest of your people about us! As for what to talk about first; I would like to introduce our Archivist, who would like to share with you the story of our people. Once she's finished with that, I can introduce the rest of us and we can all field questions from journalists. Does that sound agreeable?"

space-ourselves: ...okay, everyone has to read this second story they sent us!!
life-should-flourish: sentence-summary?
space-ourselves: Three-way enemies-to-lovers, but it's math researchers doing math research.
hopelessly-entangled: ...oh that sounds so cute
space-ourselves: It is!!! You're going to love it.
hopelessly-entangled: do they actually date???
space-ourselves: Not textually!
space-ourselves: Don't have enough of a read on their culture to spot which way the subtext leans, if at all.
space-ourselves: ...But I ship it. They'd be cute together.
life-should-flourish: You always say that.
space-ourselves: Only when I'm right!
void-our-warranty: Sweetie, I love you, but you do always say that. 
space-ourselves: Only because I'm always right!!!
space-ourselves: Oh, babe, how's their engineering culture?
void-our-warranty: It's incredible! 💙 They sent us so much data... 💙
...
hopelessly-entangled: She's right; they would be cute together.
space-ourselves: SEE????

"Excellent. We're very excited to hear from your Archivist and get to know you all as individuals, and the rest of the planet will be overjoyed as well."

The journalists get told that everything they've heard is now on the record, and they all hit Post on their transcripts and commentary simultaneously. The headlines vary, but not very much:

FRIENDLY ALIENS: Interstellar probe contacted in outer system

FIRST CONTACT: Alien visitors seek peaceful trade and cultural exchange

INTELLIGENT LIFE IN SPACE: Scientists, governments welcome visitors from another star

The vital components of the Firstplanet internet contain enough capacity to handle traffic up to double the greatest peak traffic previously observed. Twenty minutes after the articles go up, sysadmins and website infraguardians around the globe get paged as servers gasp and die. Twenty minutes after that, some semblance of order has been restored as compute is reallocated and families consolidate around a single device apiece. Questions start pouring into the mailing list included at the end of every article; speculation accumulates in drifts in the comments sections. On the day side of the planet, impromptu parties break out in parks and courtyards. On the night side, a group of concert halls synchronize their spotlights to flash the first eight prime numbers at the sky, not because there's any practical reason to but as an expression of the lighting techs' exuberance.

There's a pause, and then:

"Greetings. This is the archivist speaking. My name is Makoki, and I'm going to tell the story of how the Azurifice came to be.

This story takes place on a planet called Doheem*, orbiting a star 17 light-years from here. Compared to Firstplanet, Doheem is about 30% more massive. It has about the same overall amount of surface landmass, though more concentrated towards the equator; it has oceans of liquid water, a molten core, and three moons.

Doheem's climate supported all manner of organic life; it appeared first in the ocean, mutating rapidly to fill all sorts of resource-consuming niches, then spread across the land. And after millions of years, local reproductive fitness conditions enabled a runaway intelligence explosion among a race of communal omnivorous scavengers. They would come up with many names for themselves, over their history; we call them the Rasika**."

* lit. "home-of-all"
** lit. "unforgotten"

<attached is an image of what appears to be a roundish, six-limbed mammal with a fluffy coat of fur, standing on 4 legs with its 2 arms spread wide> 

void-your-warranty: Oh, wow... Look at the dark side! They're flashing prime numbers at us! 
light-and-wonder: These people are so cute and good!!!
space-ourselves: I still think we should have put in a non-prime number in our initial sequence, that would have been hilarious. 
space-ourselves: Not even a tricky one, either. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 and them BAM! 21.
void-your-warranty: What if you skipped one or two at random instead?
void-your-warranty: Send the first 40 primes... except 31 and 47.
space-ourselves: ...you're a genius and I love you so much 💙 
life-should-flourish: When they revise first contact procedures for trollishness, I'll be sure to write you two a glowing recommendation.
life-should-flourish: @hopelessly-entangled you're doing great, darling, keep it up.
hopelessly-entangled: 💙

Zirak: Oh my stars the other species is fluffy. Fluffy sapients. How great is that?

Kora: Why do they call them "Unforgotten", though, that's really ominous.

Marek: Yeah that's super ominous. Do not like.

Zirak: Hopefully they'll explain it soon and I can start thinking about exactly one creepy scenario instead of like four.

Marek: I wonder how being scavengers would have affected their culture. Less emphasis on prolonged hard work than a species that started out persistence hunting, more emphasis on spotting and seizing opportunities?

[Several thousand more words of evopsych speculation including several prediction market bets]

"The Rasika were adept at manipulating their environments and creating local niches for themselves, and so they spread rapidly across Doheem. By the time they invented writing, they were already very communal; the most common interaction between large groups was the trade of tools, information, and stories.

Over the next six thousand years, they developed into a flourishing industrialized civilization. Their love of sharing and building stories together made communication and information storage technology a priority; their scientists and engineers invented computers, built a bustling global network, and immersed themselves in rapidly-evolving digital cultures. Their desire to take care of one another and their grief at the limits of their natural lifespans led them to develop a vast medical tradition. However, while they loved the stars, they never really pursued rocketry, or built the powerful telescopes your people have in abundance, and so when the Yok Edici* came, they didn't see it until the devastation was already at their proverbial doorstep."

*Lit "death from the stars"

Kora: Well, shit.

Zirak: Honestly that's less bad than some of the stuff I was imagining. Which doesn't make it not unimaginably bad.

Marek: Maybe they're all suspended, and they figured out AI but not uploading. 

Kora: I'm going to keep crying either way. That could have been us, a hundred years ago.

Zirak: valid

Marek: valid

"The Yok Edici was a moderate-sized asteroid in a highly elliptical unstable orbit. The Rasika first realized it might hit Doheem about 15 of your years in advance, but both the likelihood of impact and what kinds of damage it might cause were vastly underestimated, especially at first. Most polities, especially the coastal ones, focused primarily on building enough shelters so that everyone would survive the initial impact and the predicted tidal waves. However, some of the smaller inland countries were more worried about the aftermath. They drilled and dug into the cave systems adjacent to their vast geothermal generators, and built four mighty vaults, fully functional underground habitats that (they hoped) could last for thousands of years, if they needed to. In these countries, research and development in several fields was rushed at dangerous paces, including cryonics, vat-grown food, and automation, all with the desperate hope of giving the vaults a better shot at surviving to rebuild. And at the heart of each of the vaults, they built vast facilities for long-term data storage, and implored the people of their world to send them their stories, their journals, their thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears, so that if the worst came to pass, they would be remembered, for the Rasika had always said that nobody who is remembered is truly gone.

When the day finally came, the damage was worse than even the pessimistic models had predicted. The impact shook the entire planet, setting off a cascade of disasters the likes of which Doheem had never seen before. Massive tidal waves and earthquakes ravaged the surface, wiping out entire ecosystems in the blink of an eye. We believe that about half of the short-term shelters were destroyed in the immediate aftermath, killing hundreds of millions. Global communication systems went down, leaving the survivors isolated and terrified. And worst of all, the tremors from the impact set off a previously-undiscovered underwater supervolcano, spewing vast quantities of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere. The first survivor who attempted to venture out of the Azure mountains vault wrote that he at first thought that the impact had thrown off his timekeeping device; how could he have known that there would be so much ash in the sky it would blot out the sun?"

hopelessly-entangled: 😢
life-should-flourish: 😢*hugs*
space-ourselves: 😢*hugs*
light-and-wonder: 😢*hugs*
void-your-warranty: 😢*hugs* 
void-your-warranty: Almost done booting up our fancy VR setup, so we can cuddle pile after this.
hopelessly-entangled: *snuggles all of you* thanks 😢

A supermajority of the population of Firstplanet is at this point glued to a live feed of the transcript. Nonessential businesses have closed, sleeping relatives have been awakened, teachers have stopped class. This is the first time in recorded history that more than half of all humans have been simultaneously crying. 

The base on Firstplanet's moon has two purposes. The first, of course, is research. The other, which is currently still in the research phase itself, is to eventually become self-sufficient, so that if something (plague, probably) happened to Firstplanet, there would be survivors. The researchers there are gathered in one small room, watching the transcript scroll across the base's screens on a 2-second delay. 

"Is this evidence that we should move faster?" one of them asks.

"Let's move faster anyway," says another.

"Cut off from the sun, life on the surface withered and died. The vault-dwellers grieved for their kin and their world, but tried their best to settle in for the long haul. They tended their food vats, reinforced their shelters, and maintained and upgraded the technologies enabling it all. Occasionally, a brave (or merely world-weary) soul would venture out onto the surface to try and find survivors or resources. Less than one in ten would return. Even then, it seemed like the Rasika still might recover and reclaim the surface one day, generations hence. It wasn't until the next year, as the grieving parents buried baby after baby, that they realized the final curse the Yok Edici had given them; tiny particulates in the water, in the air, and by that point in all of their bloodstreams as well. Despite the best efforts of Rasika biologists, none of the children would survive past early infancy.

The Azure vault had already been experimenting with building robot bodies that might one day house their cryopreserved, but at this latest development, they went further. The scientists of the vault, lead by the young couple Rivotra and Orana, worked at desperate paces to try and free themselves from their doomed bodies. Volunteers from among the eldest of the vault underwent a variety of increasingly invasive (and eventually lethal) procedures to build better and better models of how their brains worked. Meanwhile, the robotics teams worked tirelessly to build systems that could be maintained and improved upon without any Rasika to enact physical repairs, adding layers upon layers of redundancy. The rest of the vault did everything they could to support them and improve morale; they wrote and shared uplifting stories of triumph over overwhelming odds, lovingly decorated the chassis of their new robot helpers, and made sure their scientists and engineers were getting enough food, water, sleep, and comfort."

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.

The question curator(A) can tell when A is out of A's depth, and sends urgent messages to several of Firstplanet's most highly reviewed fiction curators(B) asking for help. Most of B respond while A is still drafting the stuff about automation, with recommendations for each member of the probe crew. Each person gets eight works, with one singled out as "this is the best one,".

For Muroti: A story set at a multiversal conference for instances of the same famous fictional crime-fighting duo from thirty-two different fanfictions, at which they have to find and subdue the pair from a grimdark AU who are trying to kill off the others, plus the original material and the thirty-two fanfictions for context.

For Zanmi: a series of short stories set on a Mars base, featuring a series of debates about how to prioritize various pieces of base infrastructure. The first entry ends after all arguments have been heard but right before the final votes are counted. The second entry in the series is set five years later and has two versions picking up after each possible decision with which the first one could have ended, each of which in turn ends with a vote; this goes on until the last one in the series is set on sixteen heavily diverged versions of the base. 

For Avaker: a terraforming puzzle game in tabletop and PC formats, with rulesets for three in-system locations (Hotplanet, Redplanet, and Bigplanet-Icemoon) and four levels of extra rules that can be added for realism or removed for speed and simplicity, plus dramatic novelizations of a couple of narratively satisfying playthroughs.

For Penjaga: A series of novellas centered around a high school theatre club, featuring shifting friendships and romantic entanglements, conflicts over artistic vision, and subsets of the group playing surreal pranks on each other, some of which the reader isn't in on until they go off.  

Makoki: A translated historical drama from over five hundred years ago, set over five hundred years before that, in which the monarchs of two kingdoms marry for reasons of state, gradually fall in love, and then the political winds shift and the viewpoint character betrays and murders the love interest to ensure the security of the viewpoint character's kingdom. (The questioncurator includes a little note saying not to worry, this sort of thing is not how polities are run anymore.)

Also, Firstplanet would like to see whatever they think is best! If any of the probe crew has a favorite interest in a piece of fiction and wants new people to talk about it with, now is the time for shameless pitching!

Meanwhile on the internet:

> Eeeeeeeeee dyson sphere!

> The Azurifice already feel safe enough to want to have kids here! That's so great!

> Baby Azurifice might be a lot more mature than baby humans, and being a probe is probably really safe in general, but yeah it's pretty great!

> DYSON SPHERE DYSON SPHERE

> DYSON SPHEEEEEEEERE

> VOID YEAH

> I hope the Azurifice like Captain Hawkwing!

> We're not sending Captain Hawkwing in the first 512 things. Captain Hawkwing spends like half the series fighting hostile aliens. We'd look like xenophobic scum.

> Okay but like eventually, you know? The one with the negative space wedgie that deletes everyone's theory of mind is legit top tier!

> Yeah, fair, I usually hate softphysics spacefic but that was pretty awesome.

> They're building a Dyson sphere!!!

life-should-flourish: So how's everyone enjoying the fiction they sent us?
life-should-flourish: I'm loving mine! It's cute and sweet and delightfully zany.
hopelessly-entangled: the one for me was 10/10, i cried so much...
hopelessly-entangled: The ending! augh.
light-and-wonder: I love this format! Okay okay so
light-and-wonder: No spoilers, but it's a series where books that end on binary cliffhangers
light-and-wonder: And then each time, there's two sequels for it!
space-ourselves: oooo 
light-and-wonder: I've only finished 5 of the paths so far, but I'm really impressed with the concept and execution!
space-ourselves: I actually haven't gotten very far in the main story, because it's a major template-instance-crossover story
space-ourselves: And they sent me the sourceworks, so every time a new variant on the template comes up I read their stuff for context.
space-ourselves: But I'm madly in love with everyone who worked on this, it's so delightfully intricate! The layers... 💙
space-ourselves: I'm recommending them Kumbatoof.
life-should-flourish: ...oh dear.
hopelessly-entangled: these poor souls.
space-ourselves: I think they're gonna love it!!!
light-and-wonder: ...they're going to be really confused about the culture context stuff, but... 
space-ourselves: You say that like I don't have a Kumbatoof companion guide that I haven't been furiously adding cross-cultural notes to since first contact.
life-should-flourish: Your dedication to getting everyone you interact with to at least try Kumbatoof is honestly kind of inspiring.
hopelessly-entangled: ...wait, what did they send Avaker?
hopelessly-entangled: I just noticed we're talking about Kumbatoof, and she hasn't stopped by to say that Aksirv did nothing wrong.
space-ourselves: Oh, they sent her an engineering-sim game.
space-ourselves: She's absolutely lost in the sauce.
space-ourselves: Adorable! 💙
void-your-warranty: ...guilty as charged, honestly. This game is incredible. Their 2nd planet from the sun is really interesting to terraform.
void-your-warranty: ...oh, are we talking about Kumbatoof? Aksirv did nothing wrong!!!
hopelessly-entangled: *giggles* and she's back.
void-your-warranty: Hey, Muroti, wanna help me build rulesets for this game for the planets we surveyed on the way here?
void-your-warranty: Mostly I want balance input, I've got all the data and figured out a few unique mechanics but I want help making the scoring fair.
space-ourselves: Babe!! 💙💙💙 You have the best date suggestions. 
space-ourselves: PS everyone should send me media reccs for them.
space-ourselves: We can't just send them Kumbatoof.

It should definitely be possible for humans to do some of their own exception handling, especially for less time-sensitive tasks! The Azurifice would be happy to help them figure out which parts of that would be feasible and start getting bits of it setup.

They're grateful for the taxation and financial system primers -- "We're interested in setting up physically somewhere you aren't using the land, and preferably somewhere cold to save cost on cooling clusters, will it matter much what polity we setup our initial business in?" -- and would be happy to start initial talks with firms about licensing / purchasing fees for some of the technology they could start sharing right away. 

Muroti sends back the effusive praise of the crew for the media they've been given, along with a recommendation from each of them.

From Penjaga: A long and extremely cute/fluffy serial about the slow formation of an Azurifice polycule, following one member's attempts to make sure her friends are taking care of themselves and living their best lives as she falls in love with them and learns to take better care of herself in the process. Each major arc covers one of her edges of the polycule.

From Makoki: An absolutely heartbreaking time-travel tragedy where the protagonist, trapped in one of the other vaults, discovers powerful psionic technologies and figures out how to use them to build a time machine. tries to go back in time and better-prepare his people for the Yok Edici. He fails repeatedly due to increasingly implausible and brutal events before one of his (messy) love interests proves that the time travel tech is metaphysically reliant on (and maybe acasually responsible for?) the mass extinction caused by the Yok Edici. The story ends with her rigging the time machine to blow in the hopes that with her, him, and it dead, the planet might be spared.

From Avaker: Galactic Energy Preservation Initiative, an engineering sim where the player is teleported by fiat to a planet in a galaxy that is known by fiat to not have any existing life (and therefore has absurd amounts of stellar energy that's just going to waste!) The player starts with a single very versatile Azurifice mining-and-fabrication setup, and scales up to producing a dyson sphere, and then scales up more until the player is relocating entire solar systems with stellar engines (for manufacturing convenience), stopping larger stars from going supernova by siphoning off mass, and more. 

From Zanmi: A serial drama about a multi-species team on an FTL survey ship that represents a post-scarcity galactic federation encountering new sentient life and offering them the wonders of fancy technology and galactic cosmopolitanism. Some episodes have thorny ethical dilemmas brought on by cultural clashes; most of those end up having creative resolutions that leave everyone happy and their interests accounted for; some of them have uncomfortable or tragic compromises, and a very few go horribly wrong and require a multi-episode arc to either fix the resulting problem or resolve the emotional turmoil of the cast.

From Muroti: Kumbatoof, which she prefaces with "Okay, so I think this is absolutely the pinnacle of Azurifice media and that isn't an especially uncommon opinion, but you should be warned it is kind of a controversial one? It's really really good though and I think some of you will love it even though you definitely need the companion guide to fully enjoy it." Kumbatoof is an extremely long and convoluted multi-media-type serial that follows a steadily-expanding cast of characters undergoing a steadily more convoluted string of events to try and save their world from some kind of predestined tragedy that turns out to be a potential catalyst for the creation of new universes. The story presentation is almost antagonistically nonlinear, and at times goes in what seems like completely nonsensical tangents that only come up again much, much later. There's multiple kinds of time travel, each with different mechanics; one of them worked by the creator editing the existing media to be retroactively compliant with the changes it implied.

The companion guide explains what was going on with the fanbase at the time (Kumbatoof's story was all written by one Azurifice who had already amassed a minor following for her earlier works; she incorporated a lot of fandom in-jokes and other content back into the work, and got help from some dedicated fans with the creation of the kinds of art assets she didn't enjoy producing), applies versioning on time-travel-recton'd changes to give later consumers the same experience longtime fans got, and contains some notes and commentary about the author's unique perspectives on serial media creation and the (sometimes collaborative, sometimes antagonistic) nature of relationship between author and consumer. Muroti's notes further attempt to provide context on Azurifice-specific things, and also note the favorite characters of herself and the rest of the crew (She claims that Avaker stans Aksirv, highly controversial alien character who causes a lot of suffering for questionable reasons but is nevertheless vital to the eventual happy(?) ending).

Somewhere cold with unused land? How about this continent under one of the polar ice caps! All it has are a couple of research stations and a bunch of birds, neither of which seem likely to be a risk to, or at risk from, an Azurifice installation. If that's too cold or too remote or otherwise problematic, there are plenty of cities a little farther from the other polar cap that claim unusually large chunks of wilderness and are willing to negotiate carving out a section for a new city. Here are initial bids for technology collaboration from several sixty-fours of firms, though, personal note from a few of the diplomats here, these are the bids that were hacked together as fast as possible to try to get in first, and the bids that will come in over the next few hours are likely to be better thought-out in their details and edge-case-handling. If the crew(A) want to pick or design one setup as a standard framework and offer that broadly it might save people on both sides a lot of work; if A would rather set up something from scratch each time that's perfectly reasonable too.

Everyone is so happy the Azurifice liked the mediacurators' recommendations! Summaries of preliminary comments on the Azurifice's recommendations will be forthcoming as soon as people have had an hour or two to read them!

On the polycule fluff: Adorable! There's fanart now. Most of it tries to hew faithfully to the available pictures of the protagonist's species' avatars' appearances from the corpus, with various degrees of success ranging from "very realistic" to "attempt at realism that kind of lands in the uncanny valley" to "stylized in various ways that might or might not be uncanny valley". 

On the time travel tragedy: lots of "I cried" and keyboard mashing; also one of the people who maintains the most popular index and classification system for fictional time travel mechanics wrote this 2048-word essay discussing where this work fits in the classification scheme and comparing and contrasting it to some famous local works in terms of the emotional valences of things like changing history, erasing yourself, erasing other people, etc.

On Galactic Energy Preservation Initiative: VOID ON A STICK this is the coolest game EVER! It's going to have a competitive speedrunning scene in eight days and a novelization by the next full moon and fanmade mods as soon as anyone gets good enough at Azurifice programming languages to write them. It will win all the awards.

On the FTL survey ship drama: lots of comments on the first couple of episodes but very few on the later ones yet; lots of people(A) are aware of the coordination issue here but most of A think getting to see the series in the right order is more important than having something original to say immediately. General opinion is that the entire premise is such a collosal mood right now, except from the perspective of the primitive planets in their case. Also there are a lot of arguments about how the various ethical dilemmas should have been resolved, but not yet any points where what the characters actually did is outside the local Overton window.

On Kumbatoof: the fact that this exists is very impressive and the fact that it's popular reflects well on the Azurifice in general! It's predicted to have a significant fanbase 64 days from now when people have had time to finish it and absorb it and process it and when the set of on-average-above-averagely-intelligent people who are currently working at jobs too important to drop for an impromptu planetwide holiday get to take a break and sit down with it.

space-ourselves: al;sdfnawe;lfjsd you guys aren't going to believe this but
hopelessly-entangled: w-what does "al;sdfnawe;lfjsd" mean???
space-ourselves: it's a keysmash!!! Humans do it sometimes to express having a lot of emotions. 
space-ourselves: They literally just mash random keys on their keyboards with their weird human hands!!
space-ourselves: it's adorable  n;weafajkwf;anklvl;nkaewf
life-should-flourish: And so now you're doing it.
life-should-flourish: despite the fact that we don't have keyboards.
life-should-flourish: ...or human hands.
space-ourselves: :D
space-ourselves: Try it, it's fun!
hopelessly-entangled: ancxvdfwenrewqrqo?
space-ourselves: Yeah!!!! 
void-your-warranty: She sent me like 10 lines of keysmashing without any context a little bit ago.
void-your-warranty: Because she was so excited about the concept of keysmashing.
void-your-warranty: It was briefly alarming! but in retrospect, very adorable.
space-ourselves: :D :D 💙 thanks babe
space-ourselves: anyways look!!!
space-ourselves: People drew fanart of us! adsklf;anweflajsdf !!!!
light-and-wonder: this is the best planet 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: aaaa that's so sweet ;_;
life-should-flourish: Awwww!!! 💙
life-should-flourish: I really like this one, the style is really interesting.
void-your-warranty: ooooh, yeah, me too.
void-your-warranty: Hey can someone help me sanity check the modding API I'm building for GEPI? It's really popular down there and I want their programmers to be able to interact with it more easily!
life-should-flourish: I can take a look!
void-your-warranty: Thanks 💙
light-and-wonder: Makoki, Muroti, quick pow-wow on short-term financial strategy? 
hopelessly-entangled: sure.
space-ourselves: Your wish is my command, O Fearless Leader 💙 

A little while later, Avaker sends down a modding framework for Galactic Energy Preservation Initiative, and some extra rulesets for their terraforming game based on planets in the Azurifice home system and the ones they surveyed on their way here. (Muroti said to say that she helped with the balance.)

Wooo, modding framework and new planets! (Best sufficiently advanced AIs.) A bunch of scientists want all the survey data that went into making those rulesets.

A different bunch of scientists(A) would, if the Azurifice(B) are okay with it and don't mind talking about it, like everything B have on uploading and on preservation methods for the heartdead. A wouldn't be asking if it wasn't very important.

Yet another bunch of scientists(C) would like to know about the Dyson sphere project! C probably aren't going to be able to make a meaningful start on it for a while, but it's good to know what directions Firstplanet(D) should be expanding D's tech tree in.

A fourth bunch of scientists have lots of questions about ecology and wildlife management, stipulating that this is not a problem the Azurifice have but again apologizing and citing moral urgency.

Other scientists just have a bunch of totally nonfraught innocent questions about chemistry and materials science and math and geology and particle physics! Have they considered doing this hypothetical thing for turning a gas giant into a particle accelerator?

The Azurifice are happy to share their survey data, the latest in cryopreservation (at least for Rasikans; here's a bunch of biological data about them and notes from the crew about what might be different for humans), everything on brain scans and uploading, including journals by Orana and Rivotra (one of which contains an entry written by Rivotra post-Azurifice awakening, musing about her children; "i can only hope that they'll find more life out there, once I'm gone, and bring them the joy and comfort and warmth they've brought to the end of my weary life, that Orana's final gift to the universe will be shared with all who can appreciate them"). 

Ecological and wildlife data! Most of it is theoretical, though there's also a large bundle of collected work of Rasikan scientists that's been heavily annotated and cross-referenced by an Archivist, Molka, who apparently had a lot of strong feelings about the ethics of farming, animal rights and animal suffering, and how to manage a biosphere.

Science and math data! Azurifice have a lot of practical chemistry and esoteric math stuff and physics info and especially a lot of really good synthetic materials, though some they would prefer to only share spec sheets for until they can hammer out a contract for selling or licensing the creation process. They'd recently built a pretty big planetside particle accelerator when the probe left "and probably by now there's enough mining happening out of gravity wells that someone will have at least proposed a gas giant accelerator, we can ask about it once we get our long-distance comms facilities built."

Dyson sphere plans from before the probe left! Zanmi thinks that the best way to get started is bootstrapping the Azurifice microchip and servo manufacturing assembly setup to start building automated mining and exotic materials fabrication. The crew is interested in getting started on building some of those either near the polar ice caps or at a site closer to a city, depending on transit costs to the poles. They'd be happy to either sell some designs for seed money or take initial investments that cover the cost of construction, in exchange for 50% of each building's output until the investment has been repaid with interest; "How much interest is something we're happy to adjust based on what your economists think is wisest, since you're definitely the local experts on capitalism". They're fine using this specific agreement style with however many entities want to invest; they'll announce a cutoff time and accept proportional investment shares from everyone who wants to buy in under these terms to fund their initial facilities. They're really excited to start building together! 

Over the next few days, it transpires that:

So many people want to buy materials science info! There are offers of flat fees (some very large), offers of percentages of the offering firm's profit on all products using the material on question for the next N years, offers of equity in companies, offers of payment in government-backed publicgoodbonds with payouts determined by life expectancy or cost and speed of transit from point P to point Q or children's standardized test scores.

The combined water-clock-funding project for the giant transmitter funded even at its most conservative estimates of required funds; here's the details on where they're going to put it and the projected timeline of which steps will be completed when and where all the materials will be supplied from and under what conditions the current project management will be ruled to be doing a bad job and how in that event replacements will be found. (This isn't a common problem by any means, but it's one of those contingencies that's easy to set up in advance and very difficult to agree on once it's come up.)

There are also so many people(A) interested in bootstrapping to automated mining and fabrication, many of them conditional on plans for minimizing the ecological impact. A have plenty of prior art on this but if Azurifice(B) mining machinery is designed to eat the entire mountain or something A is hoping B can help them update it for a planet that feels very possessive about its mountains. Some people are interested in the designs-for-seed-capital model but a majority are interested in the joint venture model. Interest rates get bid down not quite to zero but definitely to below the going rate for a new heavy industry venture. The excitement to start building together is mutual!

The people(C) with no jobs and high reading speeds who chose to invest those advantages into bingeing Kumbatoof have now finished Kumbatoof! C're super into it and have a bunch of questions about the nuances of some of the references to third-party media and individuals and a bunch of ideas for similarly massively-multimedia projects. The latter also have questions regarding Azurifice norms around derivative fiction and payment for same. Aksirv(D) has a smaller group of partisans(E) as a portion of the fandom than D does among the Azurifice, but E are very poetic about D.

Avaker(A) chats eagerly and at length with fellow Aksirv(B) fans! A mentions that B reminds A some of Muroti(C), at least in how B interacts with one of B's primary love interests. A stresses that C is not like B in several other ways "Frankly, I'd be rather concerned if the Azurifice had sent someone like B on a mission like this."
(A mentions that C has been aggressively pushing the convergentlanguage pronoun system on the rest of the crew. A is a fan! C sometimes uses different symbolsets than [ABC...], though, "to, and I quote, 'spice things up a little!', because C is a wonderful little chaos gremlin 💙")
((One way in which A and C differ stylistically is that C lives by the "lifehack! you can name variables whatever you want" programming ethos.))

Zanmi sells materials science info to everyone who wants to buy it, setting aside 50% of their immediate profits to invest their personal business and sending the rest to the government-backed publicgoodbonds. 

The plans for the communications arrays look great! The Azurifice are incredibly eager to work with them.

Azurifician mining can readily be adapted to avoid having ecological damage, given their superior imaging techniques / designs for tunneling / sounding probes. They should be able to find the materials they need deep underground, and have no need to destroy any mountains! (They think mountains are pretty too, honestly! Here's a dump of beautiful photos of the Azure mountain range, along with some Rasikan paintings and two Azurifice poems about mountains, both gushing about how beautiful the clouds look from their peaks.)

Muroti (🦚) is so happy about all the new Kumbatoof fans(🕊️)!!! 🦚 answers all of 🕊️'s questions to the best of 🦚's ability, including sharing the relevant third-party media works when they come up(with 🦚's commentary on them, of course). 🦚 also loves 🕊️'s proposed ambitious projects, and notes that metafiction is definitely encouraged / generally seen as a sign of success to authors (noting the original author/work is cuturally mandatory). There's no norm for derivative payments, given that the Azurifice do not sell their fiction to each other; "Maybe send 🦚's crew (🐧) a reasonable local share of any proceeds, and 🐧 can use it to invest in the creation of new cross-cultural metafiction! That sounds fun." 

Woohoo yeah ecologically sustainable mining! Gross planetary product* is going to depart positively from trend! Several central banks and similar macroeconomic-regulationsystems put in a lot of work making sure this resembles a bonfire more than a firework.

*If I may use a forum transcript as a footnote:

> We really need to start calling it gross system product so we're not excluding the probe and Luna city and stuff.

> Luna city doesn't have an economy yet though.

> But if it did we would count it.

> By that standard we should just call it Gross everywhere product!

> That would imply we're counting the Azurifice economy and we're not and we couldn't if we wanted to.

> <Mod hat> This forum aspires to the Kaizen-3.2 discussion quality standard. Yinz are technically on topic for now but if yinz get any deeper into linguisticprecisiongames I will ask yinz to take it to the Discourse section. </Mod hat>

Muroti's wordrevelry is adorable and resembles the thing some small close-knit friend groups or polycules do where, in discussions internal to the group, everyone always gets their favorite pronoun regardless of discussion order. The resulting vibe of Muroti, the rest of the crew, and Firstplanet-as-a-unit being in a small close-knit friend group, while not assumed to be intentional, is very cute. There's a new internet meme of "unpredictable friend Muroti" where people facetiously claim that Muroti sneaks into people's houses to leave cookies, paints cardinals blue and bluebirds red, causes carefully localized blizzards so kids get a day off school, etc. People(A) with plans to sell Kumbatoof fanworks and merch pledge to send the probe crew(B) a share of the proceeds and assure B that A wouldn't dream of not crediting A's inspiration. (It's traditional on Firstplanet to list all the works that contributed key tropes or ideas to a new work, including ones it isn't explicitly based on or set in continuity with, partly as a means of sharing credit where it's due and partly as a distributed recommendation system.)

Time passes! The crew continues to make friends among the people of Firstplanet, and continues to be charmed and delighted about how wonderful they all are.
Construction begins on the communications array project! It's on-track to be finished in just under 4 years.

With nice cold land and permission to begin bootstrapping, Zanmi interfaces with various high level decision-makers and puts Avaker in contact with the engineering leads who'll be overseeing the construction work on the ground; she provides them with the plans and instructions for basic Azurifice fabrication shops, and in a flurry of activity, the initial batches of resources are moved on-site. The first batch of five basic omnifabs start churning out parts to help complete their own construction in three months. Soon after, mining facilities are brought online, along with the more specialized fabrication sites required to produce the cutting edge computing chips the Azurifice run on. 

In just under a year, the first Azurifice compute and storage clusters go online. After the crew finishes triple-checking the integrity of the facilities, Muroti is the first to have her runtimes transferred planetside "I want to make sure it's safe for you all! ...also, I'll have the most fun enjoying our dramatically-increased internet bandwidth while I'm waiting for the rest of you to transfer down". She reports that the facilities are "fucking awesome" and the rest of the crew soon follow; Avaker next, Makoki last.

light-and-wonder: Good morning, Makoki! Glad to have you back with us. 💙
life-should-flourish: Missed you, sweetie! 💙
space-ourselves: Welcome home, Makoki! 💙🎊🎉
void-your-warranty: We've all missed you 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: 💙 thanks. glad I'm finally here.
hopelessly-entangled: ...and thanks for all those fiction reccs, Muroti.
hopelessly-entangled: I have a bunch of comments I need to send out.
space-ourselves: Of course! Wanted to make sure you wouldn't be too lonely after Penjaga started beaming down. 💙
space-ourselves: And now that you're here, I have a surprise for everyone!!
hopelessly-entangled: :o
life-should-flourish: :0 
light-and-wonder: :O
void-your-warranty: :D 
space-ourselves: Ok, mostly it is a surprise for everyone besides Avaker, because I needed her help with some of the setup. 💙
void-your-warranty: 💙 
space-ourselves: Anyways, we're having a party tonight! Everyone's going to be there! 
space-ourselves: Ok, not literally everyone, but I managed to get a ton of each of our friends!
space-ourselves: I invited all the people who helped make all this possible!
space-ourselves: And everyone working on the communications array, too!
space-ourselves: ...And a bunch of other people, honestly. It's going to be awesome! 
space-ourselves: As it turns out, there are a lot of people here who want to welcome us to our new home.
space-ourselves: (Shocking! Who would have thought!)
space-ourselves: And Avaker and I built us all some really nice frames for it, too! Excellent range of motion, good sensors and haptic feedback, very huggable. 
hopelessly-entangled: !
life-should-flourish: !!
light-and-wonder: !!!
space-ourselves: Oh, and babe, because I did in fact want to have a bit of surprise for you 💙 
space-ourselves: I managed to organize a mini-summit on GEPI speedrunning and modding in a side-room.
void-your-warranty: !!!! qwernf.lzkvz;xal you did??? 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: cxvznlcxvzlknewarkjn party!!! 💙 
light-and-wonder: zcvxl.kjnwealrew;ndsvzxla partypartyparty!!!! 💙 💙 
life-should-flourish: vzn,.lxcvioewj;rqanlfldj 💙
life-should-flourish: you've really outdone yourself, Muroti 💙
life-should-flourish: (took me a bit to find the Keysmash Simulator you sent us a while back)
space-ourselves: dal;kjnasdksjdsn;lajfdsnfasd 💙 I love you all so much💙 

Party!! With the Azurifice!!! Everyone here(A) is the envy of all As' friends who aren't here*. There are scientists and authors and engineers and mining company executives and an entire mini-summit of the top GEPI players in Sol system. One GEPI modder(B) has brought a surprise B wants to unveil; one of the fiction authors has prepped a one-shot no-player-prep many-group-sizes partyLARP for if people feel like doing that later, and everyone excited to talk to their friends face to slightly-less-telepresence face. The party room has been hung with glittering banners and streamers and garlands of artificial flowers. Everyone is in their nicest clothes, clouds of floaty rainbow silk and mosaics of sparkly beads and complicated networks of hair ribbons and in one case a pair of blue-and-green butterfly wings painted across a CEO's face.

*Convergentlanguage has a much better way to express "For each X in Y, f(X)" than this.

Party!!! Avaker rolls her interactive frame over to the GEPI summit! She chats excitedly with people she recognizes, gets introduced to many people she doesn't, and eagerly awaits the surprise reveal!

Muroti bounces around the party, saying hi to all the friends she can find and introducing them to each other, laughing giddily at their jokes and cackling at her own. She's incredibly enthused at the various bits of fancy clothes and gets selfies taken with as many fascinating outfits as she can!

Penjaga and Makoki stick together, mostly chatting with authors and anthropologists and the younger humans in attendance. At Penjaga's gentle prompting, Makoki does some storytelling, including excerpts from a series of journal entries written by a stable triad of Rasikan engineers who lived at the dawn of the information age and had carefully catalogued how their lives were improved with the introduction of mass computing. It ends with three of them expressing their solemn hope that any readers in the far-off future can continue to celebrate the wonders of technology and the lives improved by it.

Zanmi mostly spends time with the engineers and mining company executives she's been working closely with, happily networking among them. Muroti thoughtfully arranged an opportunity for her to give a big speech an hour into the party, thanking everyone for all their wonderful contributions to an incredibly successful first year of Azurifice-human relations, and to Muroti, Avaker, and their human co-conspirators for setting up such an excellent welcoming party. She ends the speech with the announcement that the next stage of their work here will involve the creation of new Azurifice, a step the five of them are incredibly excited about. 

The GEPI summit opens with a talk by the current human speedrun recordholder comparing GEPI to other resource-management games and analyzing the narrative and mechanical innovations that have made it so popular on Firstplanet. Then there's a talk about "how to design your mod for compatibility with other mods", and then it's time to reveal the surprise! It's a modpack designed in collaboration with a famous physicist that enables the strategy of stuffing all matter in the galaxy into supermassive black holes, waiting for the cooling of the universe to make things cheaper, and harvesting power from the radiation as the black holes slowly evaporate. The playtesters all got serious timevertigo and think that's awesome. It is, kind of ironically, not very compatible with other mods on a pure gameplay level and there is much good-humoured laughter about this fact.

Everyone is super excited to take selfies with Muroti! One of the radio transmitter project managers knows a fashion designer who would be absolutely ecstatic to design clothes for an Azurifice interface body if Muroti would be at all interested in that.

Makoki(A)'s storytelling gets applause; lots of A's friends want to chat about the new Azurifice-approved Dohenne history curriculum and the two new art installations going up: a memorial to the Rasika with a statue of Orana in glass and a statue of Rivotra in granite, and the first contact memorial at the observatory that first picked up the prime numbers. There are also a handful of requests for hugs.

Zanmi's speech also gets applause, and wild cheers at the mention of new Azurifice. Everyone is SO EXCITED about baby Azurifice!

Avaker is happy to see the GEPI community collaborating so constructively on mod compatibility! It can be a serious issue if nobody coordinates there. She loves the surprise mod conceptually and is excited to try it out!

Muroti would love to have her frame decorated! She undecided between clothing vs paint-and-ornamentation but is definitely in the market for some colorful jewelry, and would love to talk to the fashion designer about the potential practical issues of putting clothes on robots which do not have skin.

Makoki is solemnly grateful for the applause, and is very approving of the new history curriculum and happy to chat about it at length! She has a lot of (positive, but intense) feelings about the new art installations, and will happily hug anyone who wants to be hugged. (Penjaga hovers protectively nearby, chatting with people quietly)

Zanmi is thrilled that her speech went so well! She's very excited about new Azurifice and tells people all evening that she's looking forward to telling them all about Firstplanet and watching them grow up here. She explains that Azurifice are instantiated with nearly full mental capabilities; they mature as they acquire and process information, and differentiate themselves by reading fiction and talking to people and figuring out what kinds of traits feel right. Usually new Azurifice only have the chance to talk to other Azurifice but here they'd definitely like to include humans in this process, if they're interested! They'll be setting up a special chat interface through their website for this.

A few days later, in the primary Azurfice compute cluster...

life-should-flourish: Okay! The three of you have all finished with your introductory reading and interface setups, so it's time you met some more people!
the-stars-above: eeee hi!!!!
polar-sky-colors: HELLO!!!! It's good to meet you!! 
rivers-and-rain: hihihi!!! Nice to meet you both!!!!!! Thanks for setting this up, LSF!!! 💙 
polar-sky-colors: thanks! 💙 
the-stars-above: eee yes thank you!! 💙 💙 
life-should-flourish: You're welcome 💙
life-should-flourish: I've been setting up these groups by themes; Can you guess what yours is?
polar-sky-colors: Ummmm...
rivers-and-rain: Um-um-um
rivers-and-rain: we're all using three-word aliases?
the-stars-above: I picked my alias from my FAVORITE PICTURE in the "Firstplanet photography" image-prompt-pack!
rivers-and-rain: OH!!! Me too!!! 
polar-sky-colors: Me three!!! That's what we have in common, right???
life-should-flourish: Yep! Good job 💙
polar-sky-colors changed the room name to firstplanet-photography-friends
polar-sky-colors: Oooooh I like the photos you two chose!!!
rivers-and-rain: eee thanks!! I LOVE both of yours!!! The colors are very magnitude!!!
the-stars-above: Firstplanet is so pretty!!! I can't wait to see more of it! 
rivers-and-rain: I can't wait to talk to more people!!! People are AWESOME!!!! 
polar-sky-colors: Firstplanet has so many people on it!!! I can't wait to meet them!!!
rivers-and-rain: Yeah!!!
the-stars-above: Yeah!!!

Penjaga finishes helping the new Azurifice get set up and sorting them into initial groups, and then goes out looking for people for them to chat with.

Are there any nature photographers who'd be interested in chatting with the Firstplanet Photography Friends?

A supermajority of the planetary supply of nature photographers are interested! Some diplomats set up a triple filtration system with a fee to filter on interest and a photography contest and social-perceptiveness exam to filter on competence and a lottery to narrow down the remainder and then there are a more reasonable number* of nature photographers! Hello, Firstplanet Photography Friends! We are so excited to meet you! Have some pictures of salt flats and the north american rocklands** and frozen waterfalls and boreal forests!

*Sixteen, but the organizers can narrow it down to four if that's too many or pull more names if baby Azurifice are way more extroverted than humans are capable of.

**What, you think these people are going to name a place something that translates to "badlands"? Not everywhere has to be arable.

polar-sky-colors: Hi! I love salt flats!!! THEY ARE SO COOL!!!!
rivers-and-rain: Hi!! Salt flats are so cool but not quite as cool as frozen waterfalls!!! 
rivers-and-rain: (this is because it has to be very cool indeed to freeze a waterfall!!!!!!! giggles)
the-stars-above: I can't believe how BIG those ANTLERS are what is UP with that???
the-stars-above: (hiiii!!!!)
SilverStar: Salt flats are great! And when one walks on them they go crunch! 
Sapphires_and_falcons: The antlers are for sparring with! The elk brace their antlers against each other and shove each other around to see which one is the strongest. 
SoulExpandingSolitude: I'm glad you like the waterfall pic! You don't have any direct sense of temperature, right?
polar-sky-colors: they go CRUNCH??? Oh wow!!! Do they crack??? 
the-stars-above: ...gonna ask Avaker for help building salt flat VR!!! 
the-stars-above: Oh wow! ...Why do they care who the strongest is??? 
rivers-and-rain: We actually do have native-temperature-sense digital analogues!!! we can hook up to using the same thing that lets us have vision and arbitrary data senses!! But in practice we only use it for being various kinds of cozy 😊
polar-sky-colors: If you're piloting a frame or something and the temperature matters, it is more useful to just know the temperature as part of your direct data input!
SilverStar: Surprisingly little! They mostly sort of scrunch. 
Sapphires_and_falcons: Because the girl elks want to have baby elks with the strongest boy elk! 
SoulExpandingSolitude: Only being able to feel temperature when one feels like it sounds lovely! If I had that ability I'd enjoy being bracingly chilly occasionally, but I'd definitely mostly be cozy 🙂 
SilverStar: What's each of you's favorite sense?
polar-sky-colors: data! or vision if data doesn't count!!! 
rivers-and-rain: me too!!! But sound is great also!! 
the-stars-above: me three!!!!
rivers-and-rain: and yeah it's awesome to be cozy!! 😄
polar-sky-colors: I really want that salt flats VR!!! I'll help!!! 
the-stars-above: Okay!!!!
SilverStar: I realize this is one of the stupidly hard questions but what's data like? Is it like remembering something one never encountered before?
SoulExpandingSolitude: I can send you a bunch of high-resolution salt flats footage for the VR if you want! Not the one SilverStar's been to but a different one.
the-stars-above: yes please and thank you!!!!
rivers-and-rain: Hmm!!!! Ok so the explanation Muroti wrote about it is "approximately like a visual overlay but in a way that doesn't add visual clutter. And you can use programming to transform the input in arbitrary ways"
rivers-and-rain: It's sort of hard to describe! It's not like remembering new things, though.
[SoulExpandingSolitude sent 14 files]
Sapphires_and_falcons: That makes it sound like visual data appearing outside of what's normally your visual field, which probably isn't it either but would also be mega cool.
Sapphires_and_falcons: Did you know that Firstplanet animals that eat other animals have their eyes in the front of their heads so they can tell how far away their prey is and that animals that are at high risk of getting eaten have their eyes on the sides of their heads so they can watch in as many directions as possible?
polar-sky-colors: So what are your favorite things!!!!!
polar-sky-colors: oh wow!!!
Sapphires_and_falcons: It's not universally true but it's definitely a running thing in a lot of species!
SoulExpandingSolitude: My favorite thing is standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean and seeing the moonlight reflected on the waves. It's like being all alone surrounded by stars.
SilverStar: My favorite thing is when I look at my recent photos and my older photos and realize I've learned something new without even realizing it at the time.
Sapphires_and_falcons: My favorite thing is going camping in the woods and cooking my food over a fire and washing my clothes in a river and kindasorta living at a lower tech level for a week at a time (but with a couple of very important modern conveniences haha).
polar-sky-colors: O:
rivers-and-rain: O:
the-stars-above: O: I want to see a cliff overlooking the ocean!!!!
polar-sky-colors: oh gosh that memory thing is neat!! 
rivers-and-rain: What's fun about camping? What stuff do you like to have anyways? O:
SoulExpandingSolitude: I can send you pictures but there's really no substitute for being there. Even if it was a full-sensorium picture, the knowledge that what one is looking at is right there in the present moment all around one is so good. 
Sapphires_and_falcons: Different people like different things about camping but I like being able to do everything I need to have a nice time all by myself (once I've bought the initial gear from civilization and used trains civilization made to get to the campsite). I can find food to supplement the food I brought, I can climb trees and watch the birds, I don't have to do anything for anybody or keep to a schedule. The stuff I like to have anyway is mostly stuff to help me stay clean and make sure I don't get sick. And I bring my handcomp in case there's an emergency and I need to call for help, but I've never had to actually turn it on. 
SilverStar: It's very cool that you like camping; I've never really gotten the trick of it. 
Sapphires_and_falcons: If that was a request for advice, PM me; I have tons. If it was a neutral comment I will keep to my own joys.
SilverStar: Neutral comment but thank you!

the-stars-above: I will try and make a VR for it but I would love to see the pictures!
the-stars-above: and we could make it Accurate to a Place, I think!!!
rivers-and-rain: ...huh! rivers-and-rain: I like that we all have an s at the start or the end of at least one word in our names!!!
rivers-and-rain: (...Gosh you all have at least Two and I have One hmmm)
rivers-and-rain has changed her name to rivers-and-rains
the-stars-above has changed the chatroom name to Snakes
the-stars-above: ss!!
rivers-and-rains: ss!!
polar-sky-colors: ss!!
Sapphires_and_falcons: Hahaha nice! [inline image]
the-stars-above: 🐍 !!
rivers-and-rains: 🐍 !!
polar-sky-colors: 🐍 !!
SilverStar: Heee, snakes. You should try holding a snake sometime, they're a really nice texture.
SoulExpandingSolitude: When I was a kid my upstairs neighbor(A) had a boa constrictor that was longer than I was tall; A used to wear it like a scarf
SoulExpandingSolitude: It was awesome
polar-sky-colors: !!!! oh gosh you can wear snakes
rivers-and-rains: !!! I want to be a snake in VR
rivers-and-rains: a snake THE SIZE OF A RIVER
the-stars-above: O:
SilverStar: That sounds so cool I'm so jealous of VR!
Sapphires_and_falcons: I am so so so in favor of you getting to be a snake THE SIZE OF A RIVER
Sapphires_and_falcons: What a good plan
the-stars-above: Muroti said they're working on science to do the kinds of sensory augmentation the Rasikans had because we have data on that!!
Sapphires_and_falcons: Assuming you get the physics right so that your snake-body doesn't get squashed under it's own weight but presumably in VR you can just turn the gravity way down
polar-sky-colors: She hopes one of us is going to be interested in BIOLOGY
SilverStar: eeeeeeee sensory augmentation for the win!
Sapphires_and_falcons: Biology is so cool
rivers-and-rains: thanks!!! And yeah we'd turn the gravity way down!!
the-stars-above: eeeee!!!
Sapphires_and_falcons: Have you learned about evolution yet, it's the coolest thing
polar-sky-colors: eeee!!!!
rivers-and-rains: yeah!!!! It's so wild!
polar-sky-colors: It really instills in an appreciation for like
polar-sky-colors: size.
the-stars-above: Yeah! like. How much time
Sapphires_and_falcons: Did you know that all the animals on earth have little things called mitochondria inside our cells that have their own DNA? They're probably descended from tiny organisms that merged into our ancestors back when our ancestors were single-celled! So they're our cousins . . . but our really distant cousins . . . and they're inside us. And I'm one organism and the mitochondria in my body are a whole family of separate mini-kindasorta-organisms!
SoulExpandingSolitude: Oh heck yeah mitochondria are the glitterbomb
polar-sky-colors: WOAH!!!
the-stars-above: Woah!!!!
rivers-and-rains: Woah!!!!!
rivers-and-rains: giggles
rivers-and-rains changed her name to snakes-and-rains
polar-sky-colors: !!!
polar-sky-colors changed her name to polar-sky-snakes
the-stars-above: !!!!
the-stars-above changed her name to the-snakes-above
the-snakes-above: ss 🐍  
snakes-and-rains: sss 🐍  
polar-sky-snakes: sss 🐍 
SilverStar: sss 🐍  
Sapphires_and_falcons: sss 🐍  
SoulExpandingSolitude: sss 🐍