light-and-wonder: Gooooooood morning, ladies! We're approaching our next destination, trajectory nominal, power at 119% of minimum viable and rising steadily. Is everyone excited to find out what's behind door number two???
light-and-wonder: We've got 3 planets; 2 rocky, 1 in the goldilocks zone, and 1 gas giant. The smart money's on the goldilocks planet, but you never know what we'll find!
space-ourselves: Not to burst your bubble, dearest captain, but isn't the smart money on nothing? This is only the second system we're checking.
void-your-warranty: Only one way to find out! Booting up the sensors and checking preliminary data. brbish!
space-ourselves: Have fun, babe! 💙
life-should-flourish: And don't take too long! Morning all, love you.💙
hopelessly-entangled: 💙 'morning everyone
hopelessly-entangled: you never know, Muroti. we might find life here!
space-ourselves: You know what'd be whack?
space-ourselves: If we were wrong about physics and FTL travel was possible and they've discovered it back home.
light-and-wonder: ...And what, other Azurifice have already been here? It'd be a bit sad for our mission, but having FTL would be awesome! We could go so many places...
life-should-flourish: I think if that had happened, they would have picked us up en route, right?
space-ourselves: Not necessarily! It could be a form of FTL that needs a massive gravity well on one or both ends.
space-ourselves: That comes up all the time in sci-fi.
hopelessly-entangled: ...she's right, it does.
light-and-wonder: Let's hope for sci-fi FTL, then!
life-should-flourish: You all are ridiculous 💙 I'd say fingers crossed for-
void-your-warranty: LIFE!! INTELLIGENT LIFE!! ON THE SECOND PLANET!!!
life-should-flourish: ...for that, yeah!
"Our current goals are not at all furniture-focused! We want to start building the kinds of machines we use at home to build our extremely precise machines, fancy computing chips, and some simple robot bodies for us to pilot, when necessary. Easily-assemblable architecture would definitely be extremely helpful; I'd have to get specifics from our engineering lead, but depending on the details I suspect we'd be interested in a pretty large supply, especially if it's something you could start producing soon.
Uh, pardon any cultural insensitivity inherent in the question, but what kind of automation kills people on Amenta? We have historical records of early Rasikan industrialization practices leading to spikes in factory safety issues, but it's not something that's ever come up with modern Azurifice technology, since the worst that can happen is the destruction of hardware that's being remotely operated. High-precision programmable saws are the definitely the kinds of thing we will eventually be able to build and sell.
I'd be happy to talk to your sister after this, if that's alright with both of you! It's always nice to meet new people."
"I have a prototype for a major element of the prefab architecture but it's not ready to scale yet; it'll take me a season at least depending on how much money I can throw at it. It's not currently a space with a lot of producers, though, because it won't go tall enough - my greens think it'll top out at seven stories without any major breakthroughs, though they're looking over your concrete to see if that's one of them - and in most situations the tradeoffs aren't right for an early version even if a more developed version would be well-received.
"It's not a factory safety issue, it's a matter of riots; anyone getting too close to automation gets reds murdering them.
"My sister's delighted to hear it!"
life-should-flourish: ...yikes!
space-ourselves: ...huh.
space-ourselves: I mean, okay, obviously this is horrible! Nobody should be murdered! But like...
hopelessly-entangled: ...yeah, in some ways it's kind of a good sign?
void-your-warranty: ...not that I don't trust you, but, uh. How?
hopelessly-entangled: i mean, if reds weren't doing this...
void-your-warranty: ...oh. They might all be dead by now.
light-and-wonder: The reds clearly think so, right?
light-and-wonder: They'd have to be, these people have the death penalty and there's no way they wouldn't use it for something like this.
life-should-flourish: It's not the main point, but I'm now curious about how the reds know?
void-your-warranty: You'd think after the first few times, people would try and keep it secret.
hopelessly-entangled: ...maybe they fish evidence out of the trash?
space-ourselves: I was thinking maybe they have sympathizing informers.
hopelessly-entangled: We're going to have to be extremely careful, though.
light-and-wonder: Do you think we should make a blanket announcement about being unwilling to automate people out of jobs?
hopelessly-entangled: maybe, but not right now?
hopelessly-entangled: ...i really want to get anonymous internet access. need to talk to some reds.
void-your-warranty: I'll see what I can do.
void-your-warranty: Ask her if we could buy prototypes from her? We aren't going to be starting with bulk.
light-and-wonder: Alright.
"Depending on the state of your prototypes, we might be interested in purchasing a few from you at a premium; Our initial facilities aren't going to take that much space, since a lot of our more space-intensive machines aren't things we can even start building until our basic fabricators are up and running. If that's something you'd be interested in, I can put you or one of your employees in touch with Avaker to work out the details.
Good to know! We'll be sure to tread carefully; we certainly don't want to cause any issues for anyone working with us, or have people fearing for their livelihoods unnecessarily.
It sounds like we're very likely to want to do business with Assemble. With the understanding that we're not really in the furniture business and will probably not be producing direct consumer goods for at least a year, would you still be interested in joining us as our primary business executive? We'd expect this to be a position with a substantial amount of ramp-up time, if you wanted or needed time to transition things at Assemble."
"Understandable! You certainly seem to be doing a very impressive job with it. We have some other people we want to interview; if none of them look especially promising, we'll reach out about that restless yellow; otherwise, we'll be in touch about easily assemblable buildings.
Did you have any other questions for us before we chat with your sister?"
"Hi Klimati! This is Zanmi speaking. It's great to meet you too! The five of us are really excited to get to know more Amentans. Want to tell us a bit more about yourself?"
"We have music! Most modern Azurifice music is non-lyrical and composed primarily to accompany another piece of art, including video games. We do have some music with singing, but it's a much smaller portion of our overall musical output than it was in Rasikan cultures. What kinds of music do you typically like?"
"Of the 5 of us, Makoki likes lyrical music the most and Avaker is really into video game music, and they're both interested in hearing what those are like on Amenta, so thank you for the recommendations! Avaker is telling me to send you her favorite piece of video game music; she wants to know how you think it compares."
"We hope you like it! We'll be sharing more Azurifice music on the internet later. Did you have any questions for us?"
"There are other probes, yeah! Unless there are a lot of surprising technological advancements, we won't be able to talk to them unless they set up somewhere like we're going to set up here; then we'd be able to talk to them by relay through our homeworld, and maybe directly as well. If they don't end up finding anyone, their course will eventually bring them back to our homeworld, but that won't happen for a very long time.
The environmental poisoning on our homeworld is fixable; we've started work on that and will be able to finish it, someday. We don't think it's possible to restore the biosphere to the way it was before (a lot of things didn't survive), and there were ongoing ethical debates about letting new animal life evolve, but it's likely that at the very least, complex plant life will bloom on Doheem again (and may already have begun to do so)!"
"At the rate at which it was going when we left, it would have taken hundreds of thousands of years, but it's quite possible things have been sped up since; that's an area where new scientific or engineering advancements can make a lot of things possible. It'd probably be possible for some Amentans to live there even before we finished with that work, though."
"Our years are much shorter than yours! It might be possible to make it work anyways by doing something clever, which is something we'll want to research. We want to be able to talk to people when we find them, which is why we send crews on our probes. We shut down to conserve power when we're travelling in between solar systems, so from our point of view it doesn't actually take that long!"
"There was a huge asteroid belt where we'd hoped to find planets! We think they collided with each-other soon after we departed, based on the distribution of the asteroids. There was also some pretty gas giants." <pictures of some pretty gas giants>