void-your-warranty: Are you gals seeing this??? They have two moon bases!!!  
void-your-warranty: And a ton of telecom satellites! This is awesome!! aaaaa!!!
space-ourselves: eeeee!!!
hopelessly-entangled: ooooo!!!
light-and-wonder: Alright, alright, settle down, dears. I'm excited too! But let's 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:
--. ---. -----. -------.....

The entire planet yells back at it very excitedly from about a hundred sources!

void-your-warranty: ...wow they're really excited about this! 
light-and-wonder: It'd be weirder if they weren't!
space-ourselves: I think what darling Avaker is getting at is that they're not very coordinated about it. 
space-ourselves: I think that's adorable.
void-your-warranty: Should I send them a corpus while I try and sort through these?
light-and-wonder: Yeah, go for it.

The signal from the probe stops broadcasting primes, and switches to a very long packet of data that basic frequency analysis will reveal is a language corpus. It repeats over the next several hours, reaching listeners across the planet as it turns.

void-your-warranty: Ok we've got primes, Fibonacci, pi, e, and a bunch of messages that are way too short to translate meaningfully.
light-and-wonder: Can you get anything by cross-referencing?
void-your-warranty: ...Some of them are similar??
light-and-wonder: Well, hopefully they'll figure out our language or give us more to work with soon.
space-ourselves: Incredibly adorable! I like them already.
life-should-flourish: ...I'm a bit worried about what this implies about coordination/unity, though...
light-and-wonder: We'll figure it out.

When the planet gets a big corpus to analyze they throw some back in several different languages.

void-your-warranty: I'm getting several corpuses here. Going to need a lot of compute for this, y'all, sorry.
light-and-wonder: Makes sense. Pull back once you've got enough to share?
void-your-warranty: o7

Meanwhile, Amentans all over the world analyze theirs to see if they can figure it out! They have done toy problems like this before but they were all in conlangs and stuff. Practice. The world record-holder for competitive conlang decoding three years running and her team are hard at work in Tapa.

void-your-warranty: Ok, back. They've got a lot of different languages.
life-should-flourish: Points for the uncoordinated hypothesis.
hopelessly-entangled: oh, i hope they don't fight...
space-ourselves: ...This many people and countries? There's no way they never fight.
space-ourselves: ...I hope it's at least rare, though. :\
light-and-wonder: We'll find out, I suppose.
light-and-wonder: Going to wideband first contact. Wish me luck!
life-should-flourish: 🍀
hopelessly-entangled: 🍀
void-your-warranty: 🍀
space-ourselves: 🍀

"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 permission for us to alter the course of our ship, so that we might remain in your system for an extended period of time."
 
(This message repeats in every language that a corpus was sent for, as well as the language the probe originally sent out a corpus for)

Ooh, known plaintext, very important. They can get to work a bit more informedly on the language. Everybody agrees (in their own languages) that they can stay in the system!

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. 

Videos of it are promptly all over the internet below.

space-ourselves: sooo... now what? 
light-and-wonder: I can't tell if they're waiting to decrypt our language before initiating formal contact, or coordinating, or what.
light-and-wonder: But I think either way it makes sense to wait a while longer to see who contacts us.
light-and-wonder: ...Let's see what we can observe from out here, too. Population distribution, that kind of stuff.
void-our-warranty: Scopes are open. And I'm working on booting up VR, too, we're fine on power.
hopelessly-entangled: ooooh, a cuddlepile sounds nice right about now.
life-should-flourish: Sweetie, are you ever not in the mood for a cuddlepile? 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: ...it sounds nicer than usual!
space-ourselves: That's fair, honestly.

Some people do ask after not too long if the ship should be understood to be willing to carry on conversations in Amentan languages while they work on getting machine translation up to decode the corpus.

void-your-warranty: We'll have to share our microchip knowledge with them.
light-and-wonder: Yeah, for sure.

"We have access to very good translation and are happy to carry on conversations in any language we've been provided sufficient data on. Feel free to ask us any questions you have about our language, if it helps!"

(this is again sent in all the Amentan languages the Azurifice have a corpus for, as well as their own)

The various nations of Amenta all start talking!

Many of them have already-prepared packets of information presumed to be of interest to aliens - facts about their solar system and themselves and their history and their planet and their language.

It becomes rapidly clear that these people are very crowded and want to be on other planets stat. They seem to expect that this will make aliens nervous and have remarked earnestly about the success of their population control measures.

light-and-wonder: ...
void-your-warranty: ...
life-should-flourish: ...
hopelessly-entangled: ...
space-ourselves: ...There's a lot to unpack here.
life-should-flourish: Wow.
light-and-wonder: Let's, uh, start unpacking! Caste system first?
 

light-and-wonder: Ok so at a high level this is just... specialization, right?
space-ourselves: kinda? 
space-ourselves: I mean, like... yes?
space-ourselves: It means they don't have to do as much generalized education.
space-ourselves: And the global limits on grey populations actually seem incredibly important.
space-ourselves: But if you flip the bit*, it's specialization where the categories include a "none of the above", and that's the largest category.
void-your-warranty: You all saw the weighted votes thing, right? Like, they vary but in no place do purples have a bigger effective voting share than blues.
life-should-flourish: Yeah, that + the limitations on who they can even vote for makes it tempting to just round their democracies to "blue-led oligarchy".
life-should-flourish: I wonder if we're being too harsh, though? it... seems like it's working for them?
light-and-wonder: I mean. It's a stable equilibrium? But there are lots of really bad social stable equilibria that are theoretically possible, given the right incentive structure.
light-and-wonder: And I think it's pretty telling that the blue professions include landowning.
hopelessly-entangled: ...okay, so I have 2 main observations.
hopelessly-entangled: 1. I think the grey/orange split on sex work across cultures is fascinating, honestly! 
space-ourselves: Yeah, seconded.
hopelessly-entangled: 2. Is anyone else worried that they're systemically abusing reds?
hopelessly-entangled: They barely talk about them, they don't seem to get to vote, and their job is "sanitation", which, given their cleanliness instincts...
void-your-warranty: ...oh no.
life-should-flourish: ...yeah, it seems really likely to be bad.
light-and-wonder: Yeah. Uh, let's table castes for now and move on to discussing the cleanliness thing?
space-ourselves: Sure, but real quick; they'll probably want to know what castes we are/would be, right?
space-ourselves: I think that's basically straightforward; Zanmi is blue, Avaker is yellow, Makoki and I are green, and Penjaga is... orange, right?
life-should-flourish: Yeah, that tracks. 

*Azurifice expression meaning "on the other hand"

space-ourselves: It really seems like how they think about cleanliness is basically... sanitation as a social technology, but on accident?
hopelessly-entangled: and maybe a permanent underclass!
light-and-wonder: hopefully there's just some misunderstanding there, but. yeah.
life-should-flourish: And lot of baggage, both as far as like... how far the associations reach and in terms of, like. Harming them??
life-should-flourish: Like, everyone read about why the Tapa-Voan war started, if you haven't already.
space-ourselves: ...wow. I, uh.
void-your-warranty: You're impressed with the impulse to do this but also think it's a horribly fucked up thing to do to real people and you're furious about the obviously-fumbled execution backfiring so predictably?
space-ourselves: ...yes. And also I love you. 💙
void-your-warranty: 💙
light-and-wonder: Augh, people starved to death rather than eat the food 😢 
hopelessly-entangled: 😢 these poor people 😢 
void-your-warranty: On the plus side, we're both extremely clean and have an excellent excuse for not being used to thinking that way.
void-your-warranty: I wonder if they'd let us do sanitation work for them.
life-should-flourish: Ooooh, that'd be an incredible source of income!
hopelessly-entangled: ...ummm. We might want to be careful with what we offer there?
space-ourselves: Oh. shit. she's right.
light-and-wonder: ?
life-should-flourish: ?
void-your-warranty: ...because they might conclude that we're unclean? 
space-ourselves: because we might be displacing the economic niche of a permanent underclass!
hopelessly-entangled: on a planet where there are international agreements are about limiting population growth!
space-ourselves: and countries seem to primarily incentivize their populations via the right to have kids!
hopelessly-entangled: and their for-aliens material contains lines like "it's easier to go a spring without having a new kid if we had one last year"
light-and-wonder: ...you two are worried that if we gave them sanitation automation they'd just let their sanitation workers starve?
space-ourselves: ...I know it sounds horrible but the incentives seem like they'd run that way?
life-should-flourish: ...right, yeah, it just...
hopelessly-entangled: it sounds insane and fucked up and horrible and you can't believe people would do that?
life-should-flourish: yes, that.
hopelessly-entangled: ...yeah, well. Sometimes the universe is, in fact, insane and fucked up and horrible, and sometimes people aren't good at handling that, and they make it worse. ☹️
light-and-wonder: ...Yeah.
light-and-wonder: So, uh, let's not offer to automate their sanitation stuff right off the bat, then.
space-ourselves: Good call, fearless leader.
light-and-wonder: Anyways. Let's talk about the population growth thing.

life-should-flourish: So what's fascinating to me about this is how their information is very tailored towards reassuring us that they aren't going to be a horrifying expansionist nightmare fueled by their need to reproduce.
life-should-flourish: But in a manner that sure seems to imply that
life-should-flourish: a) they kinda are, in fact, at risk of being a horrifying expansionist nightmare fueled by their need to reproduce
life-should-flourish: b) they kinda expect that this is normal?
light-and-wonder: Yeah, like M&M were just saying
light-and-wonder: "We know how to widen our fertility cycle arbitrarily but we typically find this really unpleasant"
light-and-wonder: "We find it easier to skip having a kid during any given fertility cycle if we had one last cycle"
light-and-wonder: "One of the major functions of government is stopping people from having too many kids"
light-and-wonder: "how they do that is a major axis on which governments vary, and if children permissions are auctioned people will spend so much money on them it's not necessary to have taxes"
light-and-wonder: Doesn't take much to read between those lines!
void-your-warranty: What are we supposed to do about it, though?
void-your-warranty: Like, we can give them better technology, but it's not like we can just print them land!!
hopelessly-entangled: ☹️
life-should-flourish: ☹️
light-and-wonder: ☹️
space-ourselves: ...babe, you're a genius!
void-your-warranty: ...?
space-ourselves: ...Ok so what I actually meant is that I'm a genius, but you are a perfect muse and I love you more than I love shitposting? 💙
void-your-warranty: sputters love you too?!? 💙 
life-should-flourish: you two are so adorable jeez 💙
space-ourselves: Fuck yes we are! Anyways.
space-ourselves: As our creative lead, I've just formulated the perfect plan to make life on Amenta better and also to make them love us.
light-and-wonder: ...go on...
space-ourselves: We print them land. 

light-and-wonder: ...Muroti.
space-ourselves: Yes, fearless leader?
light-and-wonder: As you know, we all love you very much.
space-ourselves: 💙 Love you too! You ladies are the light of my life.
light-and-wonder: And we have lots of faith in your mad plans creative problem-solving skills
space-ourselves: No, I like mad plans better! 
space-ourselves: More aesthetic.
light-and-wonder: But do you think you could give us a bit more detail than "we print them land"?
space-ourselves: Sure! Buckle up, kiddos, it's time to hear Muroti's simple 5-step program to halp Amenta. 
void-your-warranty: c:
hopelessly-entangled: o:
space-ourselves: Step 1: telling them about our probe and how it works and who we are (like as individuals, and also as a species)
space-ourselves: Standard first contact stuff! But standard first contact stuff that just sort of incidentally includes instructions on how to contact us, if you have the hardware.
life-should-flourish: ...Oh, to try and get randos to phone us?
space-ourselves: yep!
void-your-warranty: Ooooh, yeah. We'd get to talk to random greens and yellows that way, I think?
hopelessly-entangled: Maybe purples, too.
life-should-flourish: Maybe try and sound them out on hearing from someone from every caste?
light-and-wonder: Ooh, good idea.
hopelessly-entangled: so what's step 2?
space-ourselves: I'll explain in a bit. Zanmi and I both have important things to do first!
life-should-flourish: ...such as?
space-ourselves: Well, she needs to get started on that standard first contact stuff!
light-and-hope: Ok, fair. 
space-ourselves: And I need to make some shitty visual aids. To help explain.
life-should-flourish: oh no.
hopelessly-entangled: *giggles*

Zanmi reassures the Amentans that she is super unworried about competing for resources! You see, the Azurifice are digital lifeforms and aren't particularly expansionist; "We're building a Dyson Sphere in our home system and we expect that to cover the resources we need for our own usage for the next hundred million years or so". They also don't have a pollution instinct, because they're entirely software-based, "but we don't expect this to be a problem because we don't produce or harbor biological contaminants that could be at all dangerous to you, and we're way out here in space anyways".

She explains that they're curious to learn more about Amenta, particularly about the caste system, since the Azurifice have never had anything like that; "Our best guess for the crew's caste mapping is that I'm blue, Muroti (creative lead) and Makoki (archivist) are both green, Avaker (engineer) is yellow, and Penjaga (second in command) is orange, which is an interesting cultural difference I'd love to explain after our archivist tells you more about our people and history." They're interested in eventually talking to people from every caste!

The Amentans are really excited about them being digital life forms! That's cool and sounds so nice and clean and space-efficient. Were they uploaded? Can Amentans upload? Various governments cough up various members of various castes (not reds, but all the others, including purples) who are ready to chat whenever the Azurifice are. Are the Azurifice going to want electrical generation help at any point or are they solar powered or something? Here are more writeups of the caste system! Theology of caste. History of caste. Caste anthropology. Media samples popular differentially between castes.

hopelessly-entangled: yeah, I think it's pretty interesting that blues-as-government is a recentish thing for them.
life-should-flourish: Unsurprising that greys used to be in on it, though. 
life-should-flourish: Actually, having a very strong cultural opposition to military leaders probably makes internal military coups a lot less likely to succeed and therefore be attempted.
void-your-warranty: Oh, that's a good point. 
light-and-wonder: I think once we give them our history dump we should do a series of interviews of people from several castes.
hopelessly-entangled: seconded.
hopelessly-entangled: ...we will want to get a read on how likely we think those calls are to be recorded / the people in them punished for what they say.
space-ourselves: I have guesses but I think we should interact with their diplomats a bit more directly before we say anything sensitive. 
space-ourselves: Anyways, we should introduce Makoki to a green xenoanthropologist, if we can find one.
light-and-wonder: Weren't you working on the next step of the plan?
hopelessly-entangled: on a shitty visual aid, specifically.
space-ourselves: Just finished, actually!
light-and-wonder: here we go
space-ourselves: BEHOLD!!!

life-should-flourish: ...
hopelessly-entangled: o:
void-your-warranty: 💙
light-and-wonder: ...so what are we looking at, here?
space-ourselves: Another legendary masterpiece from the undisputed local champion of shitty diagrams!! 
light-and-wonder: besides "another legenda--
light-and-wonder: fuck
hopelessly-entangled: ...ok, the solar panels are a nice touch.
life-should-flourish: I think the shitty arrows are my favorite(??) part. You could have just done arcs! It would have been easier!
space-ourselves: This was more authentic.
light-and-wonder: Okay, so you're proposing that we do... something? In exchange for money.
space-ourselves: For shame, fearless leader! Have you forgot so soon how our numerous new friends are sorted?
void-your-warranty: ...honey, are those color-coded lines to indicate caste assignments of economic activity??
space-ourselves: Yes!!! Babe you are so smart 💙
space-ourselves: Petition to promote Avaker to cultural relations specialist, since she's clearly adapting the fastest.
void-your-warranty: What? No!
hopelessly-entangled: ...we can get money for doing green and yellow work? 
life-should-flourish: That makes sense. We have a lot of both software and hardware innovation we can sell, and Avaker is very good at the kinds of detail-oriented engineering work some yellows hopefully get paid a lot of money to do.
space-ourselves: We could also maybe sell some of our media, if any of our genres are really popular down there.
light-and-wonder: So step 2 is... make money?
space-ourselves: Yep! And lots of it.
light-and-wonder: And I'm guessing we'll hear about step 3 once you finish your next shitty diagram?
space-ourselves: Ah, there's our Fearless Leader's big brain back in action! 💙
light-and-wonder: You're such a horrible gremlin (affectionate) 💙 
space-ourselves: In the meantime, Zanmi and Makoki should work on giving them a history dump and answering their questions.
hopelessly-entangled: aaa *vibrates nervously*
life-should-flourish: awww 💙 *hugs* 💙 You okay?
space-ourselves: (You'll gonna do great, Makoki 💙)
hopelessly-entangled: yeah. I'm ready. Just. aaaa, you know?
life-should-flourish: valid 💙 
void-your-warranty: valid 💙 
life-should-flourish: valid 💙 
space-ourselves: valid  💙

Azurifice agree that being digital is awesome; "We care a lot about uploading but regrettably have never seen it done successfully, our Archivist will explain in more detail our history with it".

Zanmi would like to hold a small press conference for various xenoanthropologists and other interested parties so Makoki can share the history of the Azurifice with them; "Atun Nasumsa, Lucari Miando, and Anund be-Valu de-Naror, and of course any of their colleagues who'd like to join them; we can provide translation services if necessary."

"Our probe's photovoltaic capabilities will serve us just fine for the foreseeable future. However, we are definitely interested in doing some Green and Yellow work to earn local currency to spend on potential business ventures planetside, if that's acceptable to local governments."

The press conference can be arranged, with some greens who want to turn it into academic papers and some yellows who want to turn it into news items!

Lots of people would love to hire them! They can probably make better money at green work than yellow unless they're planning to contract out access to superior automation of some kind, especially since there are only five of them.

Zanmi and Makoki are ready to initiate the press conference whenever everyone who wants to show up is assembled! Zanmi will start by reintroducing both of them (herself as Ambassador and Makoki as Archivist); does anyone have any procedural questions before the Archivist gives them cultural and historical context on the Azurifice? (They'll take other questions after.)

Everyone is assembled! Not in the same physical location, since it's not like the Azurifice are appearing in person.

Makoki shares the tale of the Rasika, starting with brief summaries of their prehistory and history that touches on their highly communal nature, their love of stories, and their gradual industrialization. She tells them about the Yok Edici, detected too late to prevent, and the tale of the brave survivors who lived the Azure vault; the tragic discovery of the poison making them infertile and their shift to brain scans and uploading research, Orana's terrible discovery and sacrifice, and Rivotra creating the first Azurifice and giving them their purpose. She solemnly recounts how the Azurifice cared for the last of the Rasika as best they could, and their slow expansion into a thriving digital civilization with vast manufacturing and engineering capabilities and a drive to seek out and aid life throughout the galaxy. 

She wraps up by thanking them for listening. (Zanmi asks if there are any questions)

Oh wow, what a story.

Questions include:

- Do they have an assessment of Amenta's incoming-rock-detection systems? Do they seem okay?
- Is it possible Amentans could upload, based on either advances in imaging technology since then or different brain architecture?
- This cryonics concept is interesting, and wouldn't compete much for space since you could do it in the Arctic, can they say more about that?
- How do they do manufacturing? Automating manufacturing and suchlike is something Amentans suspect they're behind on.
- What kinds of tributes to heroic historical figures are considered welcome?

"We'd be happy to go over your incoming-rock-detection systems in more detail to discuss strengths and weaknesses! Our ship also has very good instruments for that, for redundancy, and haven't seen any cause for concern. <data packet on rocks the Azurifice are tracking and their orbits; one or two will pass within about a million km of Amenta in the next 25 years, but nothing closer than that>"

"Amentan uploading might be possible due to biological differences, though we have no experience running brain scans on other species and the Rasikan technique kills the subject permanently. We'll be interested in working with your scientists to see if it's possible, though the latest in our imaging technology requires some expensive manufacturing techniques that we'd need to scale up to."

They'd be happy to proselytize talk more about cyronics! The basic idea is to use a specific process to freeze people's brains when they die in a way that won't damage anything, and then store them safely until they can either be scanned and uploaded or thawed and given robotic bodies. The Azurifice have experience running cryonic vaults and would be happy to build and run them for Amentans, since they don't mind the cold.

Azurifice use a hybrid automation model that has advanced RLAs making most of the decisions and escalates to Azurifice in real-time if the RLA gets confused; "we don't expect this to work very well for organic life-forms natively, unfortunately; extremely low reaction times and ability to context-switch rapidly is basically required for this kind of system to work effectively, but if you're willing to let us build compute and storage clusters in your Arctic areas, we could instantiate more Azurifice here to help run automated mining and manufacturing facilities for Amenta."

The Azurifice have built statues of Rivotra and Orana with plaques telling their story. In general, the Azurifice honor their heroes by remembering them, reading their journals and any fiction they wrote, and honoring their legacy. They'd be very moved if Amentan schools incorporated Rasikan history into their curricula. (They also have a steadily-growing pile of translated Rasikan and Azurifice fiction available, which they would like to publish online using a "pay what you can/want" structure if that's legally permissible and something they can get a bit of help setting up.)

Voa is happy to let the Azurifice set up in their arctic regions, which don't have much going on since it's not seasonable that far north!

That's legally permissible, though irregular; Tapa is the first to get them set up with a bank account that has all the permissions of all the castes and won't automatically declare any of their income out of caste.

Then the Azurifice (mostly Zanmi and Avaker) will look into setting up a website where they can host translated fiction with a donation link! They start with their personal favorites, as well as some Rasikan classics and some other popular Azurifice short stories. (Muroti tells Avaker to add a comment section, with anonymous posting enabled.)

Makoki, now that she's finished giving her press conference, is recovering in VR, receiving cuddles from the rest of the crew as they work on their various tasks.

light-and-wonder: so what's step 3?
space-ourselves: hold on
space-ourselves: still drawing

Comments roll in! It's daytime in all but the most far-flung parts of Amenta now, and they are ON this "reading alien fiction" thing. There are some donations, though most of them are either very small or weirdly large, like they're coming from a mixture of children and rich people who have no idea what to do with their money but figure giving it to aliens can't be a bad plan. Their bank account comes with a financial advisor who suggests marking a "suggested price" for the fiction, once he notices this pattern to their deposits.

Amenta has lots of fiction too, and pretty soon the Amentans who most like each of the Azurifics have logged this into all the fiction recommendation engines. People Who Liked This Especially Also Liked: all these other things, apparently! For example, Makoki's favorite appears correlated with people who like profoundly tragic media, such as this piece about a purple who goes on a dangerous journey while pregnant to beg for help from a neighboring kingdom to save her people and they refuse her and on her way back she eats something poisonous and miscarries and then, weakened, stumbles into a bandit camp and is killed for her handful of possessions.

hopelessly-entangled: ;_; this story is so good and so sad.
life-should-flourish: *hugs* 💙
hopelessly-entangled: *hugs* ;_;

Zanmi appreciatively sets suggested prices on the fiction. Muroti recommends several more pieces of fiction to be translated and added to the catalogue; Makoki and Penjaga work together to translate and contextualize.

Avaker and Zanmi start looking into opportunities to sell their most-easily-marketable scientific knowledge to interested buyers. Their initial offerings are: 
-Designs for extremely efficient photovoltaic cells, steam and wind turbines, and power transmission facilities.
-Specifications and construction plans for a set of materials that can filter seawater all the way into distilled water without requiring too much energy input, and as a bonus, neatly sorts the byproducts.
-Recipes for several different kinds of reinforced concrete, including variants designed to be: ultra-lightweight, fast-drying, extremely durable, or self-scaffolding. (The last two are noted to be Toxic Until Dried)

light-and-wonder: ...what?
void-your-warranty: Oh
void-your-warranty: Oh I see where this is going 💙 
space-ourselves: 💙 okay so
hopelessly-entangled: ...wait, is that from...
void-your-warranty: Yeah, that's from GEPI! 
space-ourselves: So the plan is basically we earn enough money to hire a bunch of purples and buy a bunch of raw materials.
space-ourselves: And, with their help, Avaker basically plays out the GEPI early-game.
void-your-warranty: !!!!! :D :D :D
space-ourselves: We want to bootstrap having a physical presence and manufacturing capabilities that we can control.
life-should-flourish: Why purples in particular?
light-and-wonder: ...ohhh. We need businesspeople to help us navigate the local economy.
space-ourselves: Exactly! Almost certainly we'll end up hiring some people from several other castes
space-ourselves: But that'll be something a good businesspurple will be way better at than we could be, and most of the work will end up being done by purples.
light-and-wonder: Okay. So how do we get started?
space-ourselves: Zanmi, I think you should start interviewing purples for the job. We're looking for a skilled CEO who can see that we're obviously going to be the best business opportunity of their life and willing to work with us accordingly.
light-and-wonder: Alright, I'll put out the word.
life-should-flourish: I can help you look at applicants.
space-ourselves: 💙 I'll keep working with Avaker and Makoki on our money-making ventures.

Coastal countries bid up the desalination tech. Everybody wants the electricity and the materials science (though, like, how toxic? Do you have to eat it or just touch it or just be near it or what? Are they confident it's toxic to Amentans, how much do they know about Amentan biology at this point?)

It's not hard to put a job listing on WeViolet, Teacup, Marketspace, and/or GoodestServices looking for purples to hire! What would they like to put in the fields for job description, required experience, preferred nations of residency or work permit, qualifications held...?

The crew is delighted that their technology is in high demand! The high-durability and self-scaffolding concretes are extremely caustic to the touch until they've dried, and emit these fumes while drying, known to have been bad for lungs of the creatures of Doheem. None of the concrete should be eaten. 

To start with, the Azurifice are looking for a CEO-type person willing to do business in Voa on the crew's behalf, ideally with experience doing management in the manufacturing and fabrication sectors. They want someone confident in their ability to put together a team to do unusual and interesting work that will pay well.

They get plenty of applicants - working with aliens is a big draw - though some of them are from yellows who mention that purple CEOs are usually specific-industry experts, so anyone with experience is going to have mostly experience specifically with some industry Amenta already has and they might actually want a yellow for this.

space-ourselves: ...huh! I really thought that'd just be a purple thing, for some reason.
light-and-wonder: Can't win em all :p
hopelessly-entangled: she did say that Avaker should be our cultural relations specialist d:

The job listing is amended to "purple or yellow" and left up for another day or so to allow for more people to apply.

In the meantime, do they have any high priority incoming requests? Zanmi is happy to talk to any government officials who have pressing questions for them, with priority given to Voa since that's whose Arctic land they're planning on using. 

Yellow applicants join the purple ones!

Amentans want to know:

- What are the Azurifice's long-term goals?
- Would the Azurifice care to settle any of these longstanding arguments about science, political philosophy, or whether sandwiches are a kind of dumpling?
- Can they vet this curriculum on Rasikan history and provide more readings for it?
- The linguists want some Rasikan languages to chew on - presumably they had more than one?
- Did they pass any habitable-to-Amentans-looking planets on their way here?
- What are the prospects for communication with the other Azurifice out there?
- Would they like to give their endorsement to this script for a computer animated dramatization of the fall of Rasika?

space-ourselves: Oh, I have good answers for some of these!
space-ourselves: Sandwiches are absolutely a kind of dumpling.
hopelessly-entangled: ...wait, I thought dumplings were supposed to be enclosed?
space-ourselves: You don't roll your sandwiches into a ball before eating them?
life-should-flourish: what
life-should-flourish: I--
life-should-flourish: but--
light-and-wonder: Muroti! You broke Penjaga again.
hopelessly-entangled: patpats Penj
life-should-flourish: --we don't even eat!
life-should-flourish: I just... how does she manage to have such insane thoughts on things she's never done?
void-your-warranty: a lifetime of practice, really
space-ourselves: 💙
space-ourselves: More seriously, though, I think it'll be fine to tell them in broad strokes about the next few steps of the plan.
space-ourselves: Speaking of which

life-should-flourish: ...wait, would that work?
void-your-warranty: ...actually, yeah! I recognize this! Honey, you did you base this off the experimental artificial habitat proposal in 338?
space-ourselves: Yep! We should be able to use basically the same kinds of materials.
void-your-warranty: 💙 this is gonna be awesome.
space-ourselves: We'll need more data on their oceans to make sure it's still viable here, and we'll want to work with some greens and yellow to figure out the best hydroponics setup to get their food needs met, but
space-ourselves: We actually can kinda print them land once we get our manufacturing capabilities up. 
space-ourselves: Also, the boring-but-important part that I didn't draw is that we can effectively print them land just by giving them better tech, right.
life-should-flourish: Right, yeah. Better materials to build bigger buildings, better desalination and chemical processing for better agriculture...
void-your-warranty: Fusion reactors! *bounces*
light-and-wonder: ...if we build them fusion reactors they're going to want to know why we can't automate their sanitation work.
space-ourselves: ...yeah, that'll end up being true for a lot of things here, honestly. We are going to need to figure out what exactly the safest way forward on that is!
hopelessly-entangled: ...Once we hire someone to build blueprints we send them, the first thing we need to send them is a simple comm setup that we can setup for encryption.
hopelessly-entangled: We need anonymous internet access to do more research about reds.
light-and-wonder: Good call.
light-and-wonder: Penjaka and Avaker, can you two get started on looking through applications for promising candidates?
light-and-wonder: I'm going to go answer some questions.
hopelessly-entangled: ...oh, I'm up for vetting the history course and the film script, and I've got a linguistic history packet ready to share; I'll send it to you.
space-ourselves: Thanks angel 💙 

- The Azurfice's long-term goals on Amenta are to help Amentans by sharing their technology and culture and working alongside them! They want to bootstrap some of their technology and use that to build them things that will help them use the land they have a lot more efficiently.
-- These science things are known to the Azurifice to be true! These other ones are still unknown to them. That specific one they are pretty sure is unknowable? (They hadn't even heard of this one biology thing, gosh.) 
-- "It's hard for us to apply our political science opinions across cultures since our constraints are so different from yours, but personally I would say <extremely consistently socially-liberal left-collectivist opinions>"
-- The Azurifice don't really have informed opinions about sandwiches vis-a-vis their dumpling status
- Makoki vets the history curriculum and sends over several additional sources, along with some commentary she'd already prepared. 
- Zanmi forwards the Rasikan linguistics primer Makoki sent her.
- They did not pass any habitable planets at all on the way here! "The first system we went to had two planets in the goldilocks zone when we departed, but by the time we arrived they'd shattered into an asteroid field. We think they collided."
- Once they get their technology bootstrapped, they can build a basic super-long-range radio array and start transmitting home. Doheem is a little under 3 Amentan light-years away from Amenta, which means they can start getting the latest and greatest in terms of Azurfice technology in around 6 Amentan years if all goes well.
- Makoki reviews the script translation. She makes notes about places where she thinks important context is missing and changes some lines to be closer translations of what actually happened (she'll provide the source texts she's working from and explains her work to the greens doing translation, if they're curious)

Is there anything the Azurifice are hoping to get out of this enterprise for themselves or did they assign themselves this mission out of general philanthropy?

The greens are definitely curious but might find themselves taking some liberties just to make it more accessible or interesting.

They're really excited to make friends (both in the sense of "getting to know Amentans" and "instantiating more Azurifice to help maintain and scale their technology and local economy", but it is primarily the philanthropy! They like helping.

...Makoki is capable of appreciating accessibility and interestingness for a visual adaptation, and will only complain a little bit about it to Muroti later.

space-ourselves: Everyone ready for step 5?
void-your-warranty: Yes!!!
light-and-wonder: Probably?
hopelessly-entangled: Sure.
life-should-flourish: Lay it on us

life-should-flourish: ...those random blobs in space are things you didn't delete from the earlier version, right?
space-ourselves: Awww, you noticed! 💙
void-your-warranty: RINGWORLDS!!!!!
space-ourselves: :D We'll print them lots of land.
hopelessly-entangled: ...won't those take hundreds of years to build?
void-your-warranty: Yeah, and? 
void-your-warranty: We're not going anywhere, and neither are these people's population problems.
light-and-wonder: And there's a lot we can do in the meantime; we'll parallelize.
hopelessly-entangled: ...okay. 

That's... very nice of them, though of course if they want anything they should feel totally free to tell the Amentans who are very grateful for their generosity. (One might get the impression that it seems like they think there might be a catch, though whether that's because not having one is implausible outright or just the sort of thing one ought to be on the lookout for is unclear.)

hopelessly-entangled: ...do you think they'll consider "we really think sanitation workers deserve rights" to be a catch...
life-should-flourish: ...ooof
space-ourselves: hahaha burn!
light-and-wonder: Gonna, uh, keep that one to ourselves.
space-ourselves: Good call, fearless leader.
void-your-warranty: Hey, what do you all think of these resumes? I did a first pass...

Zanmi informs the Amentans that they're very happy to hear that; they're still getting themselves oriented but will be sure to reach out if they want anything. They look forward to a prosperous future together! 

Then the five of them start looking over resumes.

They have lots! Mostly Voans, some people from other countries who want in with or even without the promise of Voan residency. Cream of the crop includes:

- Vertically integrated food magnate, owns farms all over Voa especially potato and sorghum, processing and canning and packaging of everything from cereal to pet food

- Construction company whose head is applying on the assumption that the Azurifice will probably want something constructed

- Purple new grad from a snazzy engineering school who is also sitting on an offer from Integrated Chips North and would like an answer before their deadline please

- Yellow expat from Yvalta who is currently very much in the red financially (that being how the swap was secured) but can point to a work history including lots of managerial team-organizing and cat-herding

- A yellow whose past experience was mostly about hiring government contractors for public works; currently on indefinite parental leave but will come out of it for aliens and a big paycheck

- An up-and-coming furniture company founder from Anitam

- A shipping logistics manager excited for a good reason to build a train to the middle of nowhere in the Voan Arctic

space-ourselves: ...yikes Yvalta is a disaster.
hopelessly-entangled: ...oh no, this is-
life-should-flourish: ...not our primary concern right now, sweetie. We can look at it later, okay?
light-and-wonder: I think the construction person and the shipping logistics person are both people we'll want to keep tabs on even if we don't start out with them.
void-your-warranty: We might actually want to start building a train early. I'll reach out to them and ask how much it'd cost to build a train to the closer of the resource-rich sites I've picked for initial setup.
light-and-wonder: Sounds good, thanks. 
light-and-wonder: Everyone else; pick your top 3, based on resume?
space-ourselves: Furniture, Chips, Construction!
life-should-flourish:  Food, Furniture, Public Works
hopelessly-entangled: Furniture, Chips, Yvalta
light-and-wonder: hmmm. I liked Yvalta, Furniture, and Construction...
light-and-wonder: Alright, we'll interview Furniture first, Construction second, and from there we can do Chips and Yvalta?
life-should-flourish: We might want to Chips before Construction because of the deadline.
life-should-flourish: I'll double-check when that is.
light-and-wonder: Alright. I'll reach out to Furniture about the interview.

Furniture can be reached! What format would they like the interview to take place in?

They don't have the bandwidth to do VR or easy video connection to the surface, so it will have to be text! Zanmi starts the interview by introducing herself ("Zanmi, captain of the Probehibitively Expensive and leader of our group") and asking for a quick introduction and an answer to "What do you consider to be the most important things to keep track of when starting a new business venture?"

"Isama Lalail, proprietor of Assemble, delighted to meet you. Sticking to things that probably generalize across industries - keeping good and redundant records is essential, both for legal compliance reasons and for internal A/B testing of any process or policy. Anything that isn't directly related to a job description should have someone to handle it besides catch-as-can individual employees - if you want the kind of corporate culture where people get cake when they're promoted, that has to be somebody's job, not an informal thing people are tracking when they should be figuring out how to keep the stain machines from jamming, if you need everyone's payroll information you should have someone whose job it is to go around making sure they have everyone's instead of making it everyone's job to proactively arrange to be paid. Marketing matters, but it's very easy to overdo or mistarget. Investors who want money are much better than investors who want control. If you want people to respond when you ask them for an applicant's reference, you have to pay them, I haven't found a way around that. Some benefits and perks are more valuable in goodwill and retention than just paying people the same amount of money or charging them less, but most of them aren't, and removing them is very upsetting, so I tread carefully since the caramel incident."

light-and-wonder: Ooooh, that's a really good answer.
space-ourselves: caramel incident?
life-should-flourish: Awww, we should definitely have someone in charge of promotion cakes.
space-ourselves: Zanmi, ask her about the caramel incident!!

(Zanmi expresses appreciation for the detailed answer, and admits to being curious about the caramel incident)

"I used to put a caramel in every box of Assemble pegs, but then when summer hit they started melting and ruined a few people's pegs. So I stopped, and I got some unhappy emails from people who had gotten used to them."

Zanmi's next questions are:

-Can you tell us more about Assemble? What do you differently than your competitors, and why is that better?

-What made you want to apply for this job? 

-What kinds of technological advancements are you most excited about?

(Muroti adds "Out of everywhere you've been, what's your favorite place and why?")

Meanwhile, Avaker reaches out to the shipping logistics manager, introduces herself, and asks for some time+cost estimates for building a freight line into this specific part of Voa's arctic region.

"Assemble ships furniture that can all be assembled with one tool. There are other furniture vendors that ship already-assembled furniture - you can make it nicer in some ways that way - and vendors that sell disassembled furniture that takes nails and hex keys and screws and hammers and bolts, but an Assemble item, no matter what it is, can go together with an assembler and a box of identical pegs. It's less intimidating, you don't need to worry about the kids getting into anything sharp, all you have to do is follow the color-coded stickers.

"To be honest with you, I don't know what you're trying to accomplish and it may have nothing to do with furniture, but I've been thinking about expanding in the direction of prefabricated architecture, which I could kickstart if you're trying to build a lot very fast, and also my sister really wanted to meet you.

"I'm excited about automation - not the kind that gets people killed, you understand, but better factory automation. The saws that cut my joinery are currently pretty high-maintenance, because I use multiple complicated high-precision angles to get the Assemble result, and I think it's worth it, but it would be amazing if we could step up some of the bottlenecks there.

"I liked Alavet. They were unpretentious there, and the weather was nice when we went though I hear it's beastly in summer."

life-should-flourish: I like how she thinks.
void-your-warranty: Prefabricated architecture would be really helpful for setting up a base camp faster and getting started with omnifab production...
hopelessly-entangled: ...we need to ask her what kind of automation gets people killed.
hopelessly-entangled: because there's multiple things that could mean and some of them are really concerning.
space-ourselves: You don't think she just meant, like, the early Rasikan industrial problems with machine safety? 
light-and-wonder: Could be that-but-worse? They have so many people, maybe they're more culturally accepting of industrial attrition?
life-should-flourish: ...that'd be so sad, oh no. 
hopelessly-entangled: ...could be that, yeah.
space-ourselves: Makoki, what are you worried about?
hopelessly-entangled: i've read through everything they've sent us on pollution and it seems increasingly likely to me that reds are super oppressed.
hopelessly-entangled: pollution causes the average Amentan severe psychological distress, and they consider reds to be intrinsically polluted.
hopelessly-entangled: what if "automation that gets people killed" is automated sanitation work? if they can automate away red jobs...
life-should-flourish: ...oh no. 
space-ourselves: ...fuck. ugh, I should have thought of that!
life-should-flourish: (Makoki volunteered to focus on red-related issues; you've been focusing on other stuff. I think we're dividing focus effectively, don't feel bad 💙)
space-ourselves: (...okay 💙)
light-and-wonder: Good catch, Makoki. I'll ask for clarification.
light-and-wonder: Diplomatically.

"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."

"I'm fairly attached to Assemble, to be honest. I'm not saying I couldn't start another business but I like this one. I can recommend a yellow who gets restless and might be up for a new challenge soon, if you don't have a runner-up."

"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?"

"Nope, I'll put her on now!"

"This is Isama's sister Klimati! It's so amazing to meet you!"

"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?"

"I don't have a job name because I'm too disabled to have a job, so it's just Klimati. I play a lot of video games and listen to a lot of music. Do you have music?"

"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?"

"I like a lot of kinds, including video game music! Evaleen music is pretty-sounding, it's a pretty language, but I don't know if the same things are pretty-sounding to you. My favorite video game music right now is the Explore Up soundtrack, especially the storm level."

"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."

"Oooh, I'll have to get Isama to send that to my everything, I'm borrowing hers for this."

"We hope you like it! We'll be sharing more Azurifice music on the internet later. Did you have any questions for us?"

"Are there other ships going in other directions? Will we be able to talk to them too or just your homeworld? Could your homeworld be fixed ever?"

"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)!"

"How long is very long? Could Amentans live on Doheem one day?"

"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."

"Does it have years the right length? Is it possible to send unmanned probes to look for habitable worlds or do you have to do a lot of work while you're flying around?"

"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!"

"How long did it feel like to you before you found us?"

"Less than a season! This is only the second system we visited."

"Wow! Was there anything good in the first one?"

"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>

"Those are beautiful, wow! Is it okay to put these online?"

"Sure!"

space-ourselves: Awww, I really like her.
hopelessly-entangled: Me too!
light-and-wonder: Yeah, she's pretty great.
light-and-wonder: I can't wait until we can get more online and talk to more Amentans!
light-and-wonder: I know it's primarily important for humanitarian reasons
life-should-flourish: But there's a whole planet full of people down there and you're dying to talk to them?
light-and-wonder: Awww, Penji, you know me so well 💙
life-should-flourish: 💙 
void-your-warranty: I cooked up designs for a compact receiver and weak transmitter, it shouldn't be too long.
hopelessly-entangled: oooh. Good work!
space-ourselves: Great job, babe 💙

"Awesome! I have a blog I can put them on - I don't know if you have time to read blogs, you must be super busy -"

"We are definitely pretty busy, especially right now, and there's a lot of internet, but we are also very good at reading quickly! If you send us the link, one of us will find some time to come by and check it out sooner or later."

"Here it is!" She links them to a blog titled "failed step one".

"Cool! We'll definitely check it out at some point. I have some other stuff I need to get to, but it was really nice talking to you!" 

"It was super cool to get to meet you guys! I'm so glad you found us, it's the most exciting thing that has ever happened!"

"Likewise! We're all so incredibly excited about this!"

"I'll let you get to your thousands of very important things, bye! <3"

void-your-warranty: Okay, just finished talking to Shipping Logistics Guy.
void-your-warranty: He's amazing, really fun to work with and talk to, good at what he does.
void-your-warranty: If we're ok with spending the money (it'll be pretty expensive, understandably) we can have our freight line in a local season
space-ourselves: Excellent work, babe! 💙
light-and-wonder: If you think it's worth the cost, I'm fine with it. 
light-and-wonder: All our major costs are going to be things you're best at optimizing, so...
void-your-warranty: Yeah, it's a good deal. It'll save us at least that much on the cost of importing raw materials before we start mining in bulk.
void-your-warranty: And more on exporting our products afterwards.
space-ourselves: And even more importantly
space-ourselves: We get a TRAIN!!!
space-ourselves: :D Good job, babe 💙 
life-should-flourish: Yeah, nice work 💙
light-and-wonder: ^^ 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: ^^^ 💙 
void-your-warranty: Thanks everyone!
light-and-wonder: Alright, let's go do some more interviews.

Avaker talks to the Assemble employee working on the building prototype and works out a deal to purchase building components on a schedule where they'll be available once the train is ready to run.
The crew interviews the rest of the candidates, thanks them all for their time, and decides to hire the ex-Yvaltan yellow (Kaevy), given her work experience and how well she gets along with Avaker and Zanmi.
Over the next few days, Avaker works with Kaevy to get a quick-and-dirty communication relay setup online while the others do research, translate more Azurifice fiction to sell and share, and talk to various Amentans on request; Zanmi does a few preliminary interviews with some purples and yellows with the qualifications Avaker has given her for initial gruntwork and such. And then the internet access is available!

All five of them immediately start drinking in as much of the publicly available Amentan internet as they can. Most of them are looking for how people are reacting to the news of aliens in general (both on an individual level and on an announced government policy level).

Muroti stops by Klimati's blog to say hi and that Avaker loved the Explore Up soundtrack (her favorite song is the ice level's theme).

Makoki specifically is looking for: red communities, red reactions to the news about aliens, people talking about reds online in general and especially recently.

Kaevy sets up a web portal for filtering requests to interact with Azurifice and hires some people to help sift through things - there's a lot of volume once the word is out that they're friendly and sometimes like talking to random people. The portal has all the fiction hosted there, and the pictures of space, and the Rasikan history.

Klimati agrees that the ice level theme is very good, her third favorite after the storm level and the meteor level.

Red communities are -

- usually password protected.

People talking about reds online are mostly remarking on having encountered them at all ever and this being very unpleasant, or blaming them all for the Voan food crisis, or wondering if they have subjective experiences at all, or (in the case of items out of Doet), talking about them as useful experimental models for testing out all kinds of things before you try them on people.

Makoki fumes, takes notes, and looks at any unpassworded red communities she can find, and looks for sites that allow anonymous posts that looks like that includes reds.

Unpassworded red communities, on inspection, mostly turn out to be clean roleplayers who kink on it or like being edgy or something. Lots of websites allow anonymous posting in ways that don't obviously exclude reds (at least in practice), but the reds aren't telling that they're reds on those, they're just posting memes with everyone else.

hopelessly-entangled: so who has fun exciting internet facts to share?
hopelessly-entangled: I'll go first!!!
life-should-flourish: oh no.
hopelessly-entangled: I've been researching reds!
light-and-wonder: how bad? :c
hopelessly-entangled: Well, to start, most mentions of reds by non-reds are "Augh I saw a red and it ruined my day."
space-ourselves: ...
hopelessly-entangled: Fun fact: Voan reds are to blame for the recent food contamination scare.
void-your-warranty: Wasn't that orchestrated by, uh, that one blue?
hopelessly-entangled: Well, you see, the reds touched it, so.
life-should-flourish: *hugs*
hopelessly-entangled: It is debated whether or not they have subjective experiences.
space-ourselves: Wow!
space-ourselves: Horrible!
hopelessly-entangled: Doet uses them as test subjects for product safety, before trying new products on clean people.
hopelessly-entangled: Honestly the worst part of it is
hopelessly-entangled: I keep trying to think of solutions
hopelessly-entangled: And the one that keeps popping to mind when I'm stuck.
hopelessly-entangled: is that it would sure be fucking convenient.
hopelessly-entangled: if we could upload them. 
hopelessly-entangled: 😱😭😠
space-ourselves: Augh
hopelessly-entangled: I know!

light-and-wonder: Makoki, what do you need?
hopelessly-entangled: I'd like access to red communities? They're all password protected.
light-and-wonder: Avaker, Muroti, can you try and get her in somehow?
space-ourselves: ...You could patch precise spyware into our in our music file format decoder?
void-your-warranty: Target a specific list of red communities (perceived 15 most popular) and only upload data on match.
space-ourselves: Small offsets in update check times for data output?
void-your-warranty: Ooooh I like that. Gimme a bit. I'll add a fancy visualizer and weave it in there.
hopelessly-entangled: Zanmi and Penjaga, can you help me look for stuff like, uh. Radical/(Edgy?) academics who seem to think it's obvious reds are people and are angry about it online? Blues who ever appear to do things that aren't terrible to reds? 
life-should-flourish: Think we'll find much?
light-and-wonder: It's a big world!
hopelessly-entangled: ...yeah. 
space-ourselves: I'll take a shift answering upvoted questions. 
hopelessly-entangled: oh, that reminds me.
hopelessly-entangled: Someone search through those for any mention of "red", "trash", or "garbage" ☹️
life-should-flourish: On it. 💙  
space-ourselves: good work Makoki 💙
light-and-wonder: yeah good work kid 💙 
void-your-warranty: Should be able to get you some passwords 💙
hopelessly-entangled: thanks 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: good luck everyone 

Muroti looks at the most upvoted questions!

The most-upvoted questions - if one is casting a broad net and not just looking at the ones that various governments have cleared, anyway - include:

- Do Azurifice have sex or just romance?

- How did all the crew get together? Is it a typical relationship for Azurifice?

- Can you teach us about robotics?

- Are Azurifice superintelligent compared to Amentans?

- Will Amentans be able to upload?

Azurfice are approximately asexual! The Rasikan hormonal mating cycle that governs interest-in-sex is something the Azurfice choose not to emulate; it has a number of highly unpleasant side-effects. Rasikan women overwhelmingly chose to suppress it until they were ready to have kids, once the technology became available.  The Rasikans did certain kinds of grooming only in romantic contexts or very close friendships; the Azurifice do similar things with each other in VR, and find it extremely pleasant / relaxing / bond-strengthening.

Muroti and Avaker started dating very early on in their lives and have been happily together ever since. Penjaga and Zanmi both fell in love with Makoki during the Remembrance Festival of 04, when she was sharing the story of a brave family of Rasikan pre-industrial explorers who kept unusually good journals for their time; the three of them formed a stable triad pretty quickly. Years later, Muroti was looking for people to test a VR game that she'd been working on with Avaker and talked Zanmi (then a close fandom friend) into doing it, who brought her girlfriends along, predicting that they'd both like the couple. Muroti and Makoki both start crushing on each other, with Muroti's humor bringing Makoki out of her shell and Makoki's knowledge of history giving Muroti all sorts of interesting ideas. The two of them started dating after a rather adorable period of ridiculous mutual pining, and over time the others all fell in love with each other too! (Full edge formation order: Muroti/Avaker, Zanmi/Makoki, Penjaga/Makoki, Penjaga/Zanmi, Muroti/Makoki, Zanmi/Avaker, Muroti/Zanmi, Avaker/Penjaga, Avaker/Makoki, Penjaga/Muroti). This kind of relationship merger is common among the Az; stable long-term relationships tend to be groups of 4 to 7 Azurifice all dating each other, with some outliers preferring to stay in pairs or triads and others finding themselves drawn into The Greater Azurifice Polycule (contains around 20% of the species at any given time; every member of the probecule that was once a part of it was a part of it through Zanmi).
 
"Our robotics knowledge requires a lot of manufacturing capabilities and some computing and energy infrastructure you don't have yet, unfortunately! We'll work on adapting them so we have more technology to share and sell! For an example, here's how our basic omnifabs do cutting and metal bonding! [a high level design specification for a set of fancy laser arrays for cutting and fusing that can do extremely precise arbitrary designs at eye-boggling speeds, but requires truly ridiculous amounts of energy to operate]. We have very little experience making several kinds of our modern machines safe for nearby organics, so that'll be something we need to have worked out. It's also worth noting that our automation technology needs a local Azurifice population that we don't yet have; it'll probably take a while before we'll be able to support that many of us on Amenta, and we'll need to negotiate a population control agreement before we instantiate any new people."

Avaker and Muroti have both scored >99% percentile on the Amentan intelligence tests they've taken, but they don't feel like it's necessarily a very fair comparison, given that Azurifice can program in their head and are adept to using this skill to enhance their cognition. They definitely don't think they're "superintelligent" in comparison, though they admit they don't have a hard and fast rule for what that would mean to them.

Azurifice really hope that Amentans will be able to upload and will, once they've bootstrapped their engineering and scientific endeavors planetside, be happy to collaborate with medical and neurological research personnel (greens / oranges / maybe yellows?). They want to warn the Amentans that they were never able to figure it out, though, and don't want to get their hopes up. Biology can be really really frustrating!!!

What was unpleasant about the hormonal cycle? Amentans like theirs when they can have sex and kids about it and don't when they can't.

Can Amentans go in VR? (And pet fuzzy Azurifice there?)

Would the probecule like to consult on a pilot TV episode about their romance intended to be a whole miniseries about Azurifice romance? No big rush, it would be the sort of thing you'd release in spring.

How do they use programming to enhance their cognition?

What foundational research should applicable greens and oranges be picking up in preparation for a more serious uploading push?

The Rasikan hormonal cycle, when active, makes it harder for Rasikan woman to focus on or remember things that aren't related to food acquisition or sex. Sex was not especially pleasant for Rasikan women; they thought of their sex drive as a seasonal second hunger that made their lives more complicated, unpleasant, and difficult. Hormonal contraceptives were one of the earlier popularized medications, thanks to the lucky discovery of an herb with convenient properties when boiled.

In her free time, Avaker is working on a basic VR interface that Amentans can join using their existing computers! It'll probably take her a while to finish. Better VR for Amentans will probably require some technological advances in neuro-interfacing; what do Amentans have in that area already?

Muroti and Penjaga are both very busy right now but would be thrilled to make comments on a script / storyboard and send them back when they have time! They're both really excited about this project.

"We can process raw binary data and manipulate it using programming inside our heads! It's sort of like having an expanded field of vision that you can fill with extra information that you can customize with your head. This makes it easy to more efficiently think about lots of kinds of things, especially math and science-y ones!"

Cryonics and digital neural interfacing! Here's most of what they have on both of those, with some preliminary notes about the obvious differences between Rasikan and Amentan neurology, as understood by Penjaga (the best biologist on the crew; she's done a lot of research on the latest in published Amentan neurology over the last few days).

Amentans do not have much in the way of neuro-interfacing; though they do have helmets you can use to (pretty laboriously) direct a computer in simple operations, they don't have any feedback going the other way.

Scriptwriters will get to work on the TV show! Nerd greens will get to work on neurology and cryonics! How does cryonics feed into uploading?

Mostly it's just that doing neural scans requires preserving a brain in similar ways to how cryonics does. The neurology is more directly related! Cryonics is very important anyways, though.

Muroti looks over red-specific questions that Penjaga has been able to find.

- Did Rasikans have castes? If they did, did they have reds?

- Did Rasikans have a pollution sense? Do you, even if it's vestigial since you're digital?

- If you uploaded a red so it was clean would that make it a person?

Most Rasikans didn't have castes and the ones that did didn't have a caste of sanitation workers. The societies that had castes were out-competed by the ones that didn't, especially during industrialization, and by modern times it wasn't really a thing anywhere.

Rasikans didn't have anything like a pollution sense! They started doing basic sanitation for instinctive and sensory reasons, and later got a lot better at it when they discovered germ theory.

...to be honest, the Azurifice are confused and a bit worried about how some people in clean castes seem to believe that reds aren't people. They're pretty confident that that's not how personhood works. Maybe there's some kind of translation issue going on here? Something to discuss further.

Avaker adds very subtle spyware to the Azurifice-MP3 player available on their portal, looking for passwords / login info for the top 10 and then a random sample of another 10 red communities. She pushes the update and then gets back to work managing industry things.

Reds like space alien music as much as anybody else does. It doesn't take too long before the spyware can follow reds home to their messageboards and chat servers.

Makoki peers through them anxiously, looking especially for mentions of / general attitudes about the Azurifice. 

Oh god they have robots. They DEFINITELY have robots.

Don't panic! They're probably hard to adapt to our setup.

Don't panic but also don't buy a credit, if you know what I mean.

Why couldn't they have PLANETS and NOT robots.

The music is pretty.

yeah, do you think they'll let us have it on in the background while we die? for like a tonal contrast epilogue scene like in Hazard Field.

this is the MEDIA SECTION

Hazard Field is media...

Two hour mute, you have an emergency override but if you abuse it I'm going to your grandma.

They look so cute and fuzzy. Their avatars, I guess they don't really have fur.

At least this way NOBODY gets to pet them.

we had a SIX HOUR LECTURE from the social worker and some extra orange who came by to help her about how we want to make a GOOD IMPRESSION on the aliens, and obvious subtext is obvious, but while they didn't want to come out and say it they do think we're pretty dim so they had to go over the need to make a good impression for SIX HOURS.

my word how did you get to your jobs??

well fortunately it was repetitive enough that we were allowed to rotate out if we could pass the Quizlet.

your social worker gives you quizlets?? what, was it like "which azurifice is your favorite? trick question, I have no opinions on any of them because I focus solely on transporting garbage at all times and am not anywhere near azurifice-related media that could help me form a preference"

you laugh but...

Oh no!!!

Makoki sulk-cuddles with Muroti in VR as she continues to read, occasionally sending her particularly enlightening (or horrifying) bits. She's mostly not crying about it.

She looks for more discussion on robots/automation, both to get a wider picture on how worried about it the reds seem to be and at to find more accounts doing moderation / community management to see if she can find someone who seems like they'd be promising to reach out to.

It CAN'T happen without warning. They might have robots but they don't have robots that already know the passcode to open the incinerator or robots that already know how to make the sticky hatch under junction 4 open up. They need what we know.

Yeah I'm not looking forward to them realizing they need what we know, are you?? It doesn't take that long to tell somebody how to jimmy a sticky hatch!

Why hasn't that hatch been fixed yet anyway

Hatch discussion in #shoptalk.

My three year old just started learning to drive and she's so excited to see the city when she's good enough to take a truck, when she's older...

She might! It can't happen without warning and it can't happen overnight.

But she can get killed in a riot, if one happens.

anon: shasali do we know anything about robot apocalypse yet

shasali_solintel: We don't. I've marked a panic signal as "robots high alert" and downgraded normal-level robot threats to "robots medium alert", so keep your everythings set to beep when there's news. Otherwise assume there is no news.

twiceshy: wouldn't normal robot stuff be even likelier to be a problem if they're working with the azurifice on it

shasali_solintel: We're going to try to distinguish between the kind of thing that could be a false alarm - which normal robot stuff sometimes is - and the kind of thing that definitely means there is a problem right now.

I drew this picture of me hugging Penjaga! [this image has been removed]

Hon, take it off your everything too. You can keep it on paper, wherever you keep stuff you don't want found, but not on here.

I thought here was password protected.

Yeah. But it's also protected by nobody wanting to read about us.

hopelessly-entangled: I want to try reaching out to one of the people I've found online in these red communities. Shasali Solintel.
space-ourselves: Seconding that this seems reasonable. 
light-and-wonder: Alright. Cool if I proofread/backseat a little?
hopelessly-entangled: please do 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: I'm messing a bit with the schedule for publishing our next few uploads, in preparation.
void-your-warranty: Huh, how come?
space-ourselves: ..oh, verification?
hopelessly-entangled: yeah.
life-should-flourish: Clever! 
hopelessly-entangled: Thanks 💙
...
life-should-flourish: ...I wish they hadn't taken down that photo.

Makoki makes an account and attempts to message Shasali privately:

hopelessly-entangled: The next 4 uploads that go up on the Azurifice portal will be all be highly abstract visual art of a Rasikan style not yet shared with Amentans before. <detailed descriptions of the pieces, all of which are primarily red in color, and the checksums of the image files>.

The first upload happens a minute later, followed by the next 3 over the course of several minutes. (They're followed by more images in that style, but with different color compositions, and then more music and written fiction)

shasali_solintel: Who is this?

hopelessly-entangled: This is Makoki, on behalf of the Azurifice probe. We want to help.
hopelessly-entangled: We're sorry for all the panic we caused by showing up.
hopelessly-entangled: We won't blindly cooperate with the clean castes on sanitation automation or anything else that'll get you killed.

shasali_solintel: I have no idea how that website is run or who has access to its content in advance.

hopelessly-entangled: ...nobody who isn't us, but you have no way of verifying that.
hopelessly-entangled: Avaker suggested I answer a series of Amentan questions online such that the 3rd letter in each post spells out your username or some long string of your choice.
hopelessly-entangled: We don't have very many great backchannel communication options, just the anonymized internet access that we recently got setup and an extremely visible comm laser.

shasali_solintel: Not my name. How about "actual radishes incite profound reflection".

There's a short pause as Makoki goes and reply-comments on 38 randomly chosen comments on uploaded Rasikan art, providing additional information. Viewed chronologically, the third letter in each spells out the phrase.

hopelessly-entangled: Check my comment history.

shasali_solintel: What are you going to do instead of support automation with the cleans?

hopelessly-entangled: The current plan we're executing is "Be vague and perhaps misleading about how feasible it would be while we figure out how bad things are and what we can do about it"
hopelessly-entangled: ...It is obvious to us at this point that things are pretty bad; reaching out to you is early stages of figuring out what to do about it.
hopelessly-entangled: Since it seemed pretty clear that we couldn't really, uh, trust clean castes to be involved here.
hopelessly-entangled: If we could actually do uploads and you were ok with it we'd just upload all of you but we cannot do uploads, yet.
hopelessly-entangled: Within like ten years we'll have enough resources to give every red a place to live and also automate the work you're currently doing for clean castes globally.
hopelessly-entangled: But we have no idea how we'd handle the transition there.
hopelessly-entangled: And ten years is a really long time and things are bad now.

shasali_solintel: There's no way we'd get child credits even if you rehomed us somewhere.

hopelessly-entangled: ...You'd probably have to follow international laws about it but when we say "give you a place to live" we mean "megacities floating in the ocean" or something like that. We, uh, are not super enthused about clean castes make governing decisions for reds as a long-term solution, you clearly do it for yourselves better than they can?

shasali_solintel: Population limits are by international agreement.

hopelessly-entangled: We'd hopefully be able to negotiate population increases if we made new habitable areas and homes... 
hopelessly-entangled: ...do you have any ideas?
hopelessly-entangled: For how we could help?

shasali_solintel: That depends a lot on what your options are.
shasali_solintel: You don't have uploading ready to go or planets ready to go, so I assume you have some leverage with the cleans but I have to guess it's not infinite. If you make a new habitable area I think there will be enormous public outcry about polluting it by moving any of us there.

hopelessly-entangled: I think the biggest tech we have ready to go soonish that we haven't, like, been loud about is, uh.
hopelessly-entangled: Extremely efficient power generation.
hopelessly-entangled: Like, efficient enough that you can use energy-intensive farming. 
hopelessly-entangled: Full rollout is likely to substantially increase the carrying capacity of the planet. Maybe not quite double right away but we think do think it'd be more than 20% in a generation if we do an average-or-better job.

shasali_solintel: That will mostly increase the carrying capacity of places that are already settled, none of which I expect to be happy to pension us off and indefinite generations of children.

hopelessly-entangled: ...Noted. We'll keep brainstorming solutions.
hopelessly-entangled: Is there anything you think we should obviously be doing or going out of our way to avoid doing right now?

shasali_solintel: You should err hard on the side of not drawing attention to us. Attention on us is very rarely good compared to being ignored. Check with me and whoever else among reds you're talking to before you take any action that refers to us at all.
shasali_solintel: Also, how did you get into this website?

hopelessly-entangled: Alright. 
hopelessly-entangled: If you have recommendations for other people in your position I should reach out to, more contacts would be useful.
hopelessly-entangled: ...We put some micro-targeted spyware into our music decoder when we realized red communities were all password-protected.
hopelessly-entangled: Avaker is pretty sure nobody down there should be able to detect it.
hopelessly-entangled: ...sorry about the privacy invasion.
hopelessly-entangled: We didn't know how else to reach you without drawing clean attention.

shasali_solintel: None of our security will stand up to cleans who really want to know what we're up to en masse. The passwords are good enough to keep out individuals who feel like barging in. But our email addresses and other basic communications that we use as individuals will work just as well as this as far as it goes.
shasali_solintel: I know a lot of the community organizers in Anitam, but far fewer abroad.

hopelessly-entangled: That makes sense. I wouldn't have known who to email without coming here.
hopelessly-entangled: I'll stick to encrypted email, in the future. Sending you my public key now.
hopelessly-entangled: If you're comfortable reaching out to the community organizers you know, we'd appreciate being put in touch.
hopelessly-entangled: We don't know enough to fix your problems, yet, but
hopelessly-entangled: At the very least, we can hopefully avoid making things worse. 

shasali_solintel: I'm not actually sure how to use a public key.
shasali_solintel: I'll email them and see who's willing to talk to you.

hopelessly-entangled: Oh, right.
hopelessly-entangled: I'll send you a simple encryption program for emailing us privately.
hopelessly-entangled: And that'd be helpful, thanks.
hopelessly-entangled: Good luck with everything. We'll be in touch.

shasali_solintel: Thank you. Let me know if you need anything else from me.

Meanwhile, Penjaga is looking online for green activists / college students angry about the mistreatment of reds. Do they exist? What kinds of things do they say? 

The categories are basically:

- radicals concerned about the treatment of reds, animals, computer programs that aren't even Azurifice, and plants
- people who, whatever their underlying reasoning, mostly advance arguments based on the desirability of preventing moral injury to people who perpetrate harms against reds, given that they look so much like everybody else
- pragmatic types who think the quality of red services is just one of those things you need to do annoying maintenance on, like making sure the reds aren't malnourished or anything
- young people who think very highly of themselves for having given a moment's thought to keeping reds happy, but seem to expect reds to be psychologically bizarre martyrs of some kind

Penjaga sighs, sends Makoki a summary, and joins Zanmi in researching blues.

life-should-flourish: I think at this point our best bet is some unusually pragmatic and professional blue.
light-and-wonder: And what, appeal to our weird alien values?
life-should-flourish: Well, that and giving them shiny new technology.
light-and-wonder: We do have lots of shiny new technology.

 Together, they look through news articles, voting records, speeches, and political analyst comments, searching for blues in high places who seem unusually pragmatic and unflappable.

- Some politicians seem popular in Calado for that sort of reason, but on inspection this is only because they're in awful company.
- Tapa has a very distributed structure and a normal amount of variance; the high end looks good.
- In spite of the recent kerfuffle with the food exports, Governor Avalor is well-respected.
- President Icalena of Cene is pretty reasonable.

light-and-wonder: Okay, I found a few blues who seem pragmatic enough to approach about this.
life-should-flourish: Let's try Avalor first? We're setting up on her land, so we have non-suspicious reasons to talk to her.
space-ourselves: What are we going to say? "Any chance we could bribe you to stop abusing your plumbers?"
light-and-wonder: Gosh, Muroti, I was drafting up a high-level pitch, but actually now I think you should do it.
light-and-wonder: Here, let me put you in touch with her now.
hopelessly-entangled: haha oh no that'd go so poorly...
void-your-warranty: I can attest that Zanmi has been working on a pitch!
void-your-warranty: I know this because she asked me for details on how well our nuclear reactors work.
light-and-wonder: Hey!!!
void-your-warranty: And while I love our dear leader very, very much,
space-ourselves: Babe, how could you slander Zanmi like this? I'm sure she knows nuclear reactors are the hottest shit!
hopelessly-entangled: 🍅
space-ourselves: Absolutely smashing!
life-should-flourish: 🍅
space-ourselves: Magnetic! Attractive! 
void-your-warranty: 🍅
space-ourselves: Electric!
light-and-wonder: 🍅
space-ourselves: *eats the tomatoes*
light-and-wonder: ...look, I just don't find logistics that compelling!
hopelessly-entangled: And there's nothing wrong with that! 💙 
life-should-flourish: Yeah, we have Avaker and Muroti to geek out about it for us.
void-your-warranty: 💙
space-ourselves: 💙
light-and-wonder: Anyways, yes, I asked for details about nuclear reactors so I could make a better pitch to Avalor.
light-and-wonder: I'm going to try and get a private meeting with her now.

(translator's note: the Rasikan fruit historically thrown to express frustration with wordplay doesn't look anything like a tomato, actually, but the usage translates cleanly.)

Zanmi messages Governor Avalor's office, expressing gratitude for the land, an earnest hope that they'll do lots of profitable business together, and requesting a private meeting chat with her about some potentially sensitive matters whenever would be convenient for her.

Is it sensitive enough that the fact of the meeting, its duration, whether anyone else was present, etc., should also be classified?

If that is not too difficult to arrange, that'd definitely be preferable!

Her secretary will know some of those facts but he's very good at obfuscation to other parties. As far as the rest of the world is concerned she can be taking a day off.

What would they like to discuss?

"Firstly, thank you so much for agreeing to meet with us with this level of discretion. It may ultimately prove unnecessary, but I hope you'll forgive our caution.

To be frank, we're rather distressed with how Amentans, collectively, treat reds; it's certainly worse in some places than others and they're grateful that Voa doesn't, say, perform experiments on them, but their rights are woefully inadequate everywhere. We, uh, recognize that pollution and biological contamination is something your people take extremely seriously, and because of that the idea of interacting with or even thinking about reds is extremely stressful and that creates and reinforces incentives that end up in predictable places! 

As I'm sure your analysts have probably predicted by now, we do have more technology than the stuff we've already given out, including some extremely efficient power plants, energy-intensive high-yield farming techniques from our vault era, and better composite materials for building high density housing, and, of course, Azurifice-backed automation. If we went with aggressive timelines, we think we could bootstrap our technology to the point where we could automate red jobs within a local year, at least in Voa, and probably everywhere within 2, and significantly increase your viable population density. We estimate that we could get somewhere around a 30% increase within a generation, and higher afterwards. We very badly want to share these technologies here and would consider it a grave ethical failure on our part if we cannot find some way of doing so! But what's going on with reds is what we'd consider an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and it would be an even more grave ethical failure, by our reckoning, to just naively hand it over, when the obvious outcome of doing so would be that reds are systematically denied child credits, or worse.

Our preferred solution would be some way of setting up an Azurifice-funded and backed independent polity that reds are safely relocated to as we phase in automation for their jobs. We could use their help with several kinds of manual labor that we'd have to give training for anyways, and because we're mechanical, their pollution won't be an issue for us. However, we understand that to achieve this would take a lot of goodwill and cooperation from you and the other leaders of major nations; what can we do to help convince you that this will be worth your time and effort?"

"Hm.

I appreciate your coming to me with this. Founding a new country is - politically complex; a lot of Amenta's stability, insofar as it has any - I don't know how we compare to historical Rasikan geopolitics or any other species out there - is based on long-negotiated policies about defense and rights to various common goods and so on. I don't actually expect you to be attacked on a substantial scale if you carve out a Voa-backed nation in the arctic and fill it with reds, you're too popular, but we did lose the last war we fought and it was over something uncomfortably similar, at least in the public consciousness."

"I was hoping we could frame it as... working to help your people in several different ways at once? Taking over dirty jobs, and also giving reds new jobs and homes so they don't riot? ...One of the things we'll be doing up there is figuring out how to build seasoned arcologies. We have a lot of data on this kind of thing from the vault era and we really think we could figure it out. And once we get it working, we can distribute the technique to everyone in the world. ...It'll be a year before we could really get started, hopefully that'll give us a lot of time to figure out potential hurdles and ensure smooth and safe transitions."

"Did Rasikans have a similar seasonal cycle? Not all Amentan animals do."

"The Rasikans had drugs for managing their reproductive cycles, but needed various artificial climate control features while underground for extended periods of time to avoid developing severe mood disorders. We'll need to talk to your relevant experts to figure out what exactly we'll do and what the most promising research avenues are, but we're optimistic a solution can be found in time. We've done a lot of medical research, as a people."

"I can probably convince the general public to accept that I am exchanging the reds as seasoned arcology research subjects - allowed, of course, the standard two children apiece per Voan custom, as interfering with that would confound seasoning-related results - for your robotic assistance. I am not confident the reds will take it particularly well, and would want a plan for if they do not and you receive somewhat fewer of them than agreed or they aren't as tractable as you might hope - I don't know what your plans for policing in general are."

"If that's politically feasible that would be acceptable to us, as a high level plan. We'd like to take point on communicating and coordinating the plan with Voan reds, when the time comes; we suspect that our lack of a native pollution instinct will make them less afraid of us.

We can build and operate extremely durable mobile platforms and will use those for our policing needs. We are also prepared to build and operate shuttles for transporting reds to us, when we're ready to move to that phase. We're committed to paying as much of the costs and handling as much of the logistics as is at all feasible; we're very invested in making sure we can have a smooth a rollout here as possible, both for its own sake and for the rest of the world to see."

"You directly addressing the reds might or might not work, but I can issue an order that their social workers facilitate it for you."

void-your-warranty: ...social workers?
space-ourselves: Oh babe, haven't you been following Makoki's findings in red communities?
void-your-warranty: I'm barely following anything! All my cycles are going into our bootstrapping efforts.
space-ourselves: I know, I know d:
space-ourselves: Anyways, you're going to hate this.
hopelessly-entangled: So in theory, social workers are oranges in charge of interfacing with reds for the clean castes and making sure their needs are met.
hopelessly-entangled: ...But in general, they aren't any more positively inclined towards reds than any other Amentan is, and they have an absurd amount of power over them.
void-your-warranty: ...Oh no.
space-ourselves: I was skimming red discussion boards earlier, after Makoki first told me about them! Here's the most positive review of a social worker I could find:
space-ourselves: "Ours is kind of okay, mostly because she seems dead inside."
void-your-warranty: Yikes.
space-ourselves: See, it's actually kinda funny, because the reds are used to dealing with dead people, so,
hopelessly-entangled: Muroti!
void-your-warranty: You were right, dear! I absolutely hate this.
life-should-flourish: It's pretty bad! We really do not want to do this through social workers.
light-and-wonder: Yeah, no worries, I'm deflecting on that.
space-ourselves: Honestly, I'm not sure social workers do anything that couldn't be better done through an online form?
hopelessly-entangled: Seconded, though I'm not sure how we'd make it happen?
life-should-flourish: Maybe float the idea to Avalor?
light-and-wonder: Next time we talk, maybe. It'd look suspicious if we did it now.
light-and-wonder: Going to wrap up the current talk now. Last call for agenda items?
hopelessly-entangled: None from me! I'm writing up a summary to send to Kavut; I think he'll be happy about how well this went.
void-your-warranty: (...Wait, who's Kavut?)
hopelessly-entangled: (Respected Voan red community leader. Shasali introduced me to him, he helped us workshop our approach here a bit.)
void-your-warranty: (Oh, cool!)
space-ourselves: Avaker and I finished the informational prepwork for hosting a fission energy science/business conference, so you can offer to host that in Voa as a show of goodwill.
light-and-wonder: Excellent! Thanks.💙 
life-should-flourish: And don't forget to ask about the best way to do a followup is.
light-and-wonder: I won't 💙 

"We'll attempt to reach out on our own first, but if that ends up being necessary, we'll let you know. We're very grateful for your assistance. 

As a way of thanking you for being willing to hear us out and work with us on this issue, Avaker and Muroti have prepared and translated into Voan a batch of introductory material on a kind of advanced power generator that can be built and run with current Amentan technology. If it's alright with you, we'd be happy host a conference here, explain the science, and setup some business deals with your local power companies. We'd be happy to give them legal permission to resell the technology and designs abroad, with 70% of the cut we'd usually take going to either the companies directly or your government, your choice."

"That's very generous. I'll consult some of my staff on what the economically preferable way to distribute it would be. You'll attempt to reach out as in, without the social workers mediating?"

"Yes. It may end up being infeasible, but I find I do my best work when I can speak to people one-on-one, so I'll be trying for that first.

Oh, and before I forget; Avaker wrote a protocol-translation plugin for Amentan email, so she could easily have secure communications with our business partners on the ground. Would you like a copy, in case either of us want to follow up or check in without requiring you to clear your schedule?"

"That does sound more convenient but we have a policy against adding third party software to government employees' work machines."

"That makes sense! I suppose we can be vague via digital communication, and Muroti drew up some prototypes for a hybrid Amentan/Azurifice pocket everything; we could give you one of those just for contacting us, if you like.

I've covered everything on my agenda for this meeting; is there anything you'd like to ask us while we have the privacy? If not, I can let you get back to your day's vacation; have someone on your staff send us an email once they're ready to start discussing the power generation technology distribution plans."

"I can accept a dedicated pocket everything but I'd have to keep it somewhere out of the way for similar reasons - the policy is mostly about espionage. Do you need to know what address to expect the message from?"

"That makes sense! We aren't going to be offended if you keep it in a secure box far away from everything important.

We have really good email filtering! If you let us know the email address we'll see it about 10 minutes sooner." 

Avalor gives the address for an Allocator Mozeen.

"Thanks again for your time! We'll be in touch."

Zanmi disconnects.

Allocator Mozeen emails them a short time afterwards (suggesting that Avalor doesn't take her days very off) about how to decide who to invite to the conference and how to split the resulting revenue.

The Azurifice want to give the majority of the revenue they'd typically collect in this kind of situation to either the Voan governments or the companies facilitating the sale; the exact details of who gets what are up to Voa.

Avaker suggests they invite these greens (physicists who've published papers on radiation and radioactive decay) and these purples (industry experts in mining, steam-turbine-based power plant construction and operation, and hazardous chemical waste transportation and storage). 

Meanwhile, Makoki messages Kavut using their encrypted system with a summary of how the initial talk with Governor Avalor went.

hopelessly-entangled: ...and then Zanmi thanked her for her time.
hopelessly-entangled: We think this seems promising, especially if we handle the transit ourselves. Thoughts?

kavut: If she's willing to route around the social workers that's pretty promising, yeah.

hopelessly-entangled: Yeah I told Zanmi to be diplomatic but also firm about wanting to avoid going through social workers.
hopelessly-entangled: Because that entire system seems like a disaster.
hopelessly-entangled: Muroti wants to suggest phasing out social workers and replacing them with online forms/communication, do you think that'd be popular in your community?

kavut: That'd work for us but I think they want the social workers keeping an eye on us.

hopelessly-entangled: Yeah, we think the biggest barrier would be convincing them and we don't currently have an angle on that. 
hopelessly-entangled: But if we think of one, we'll let you know, and if you think of one feel free to reach out.
hopelessly-entangled: I'll keep you appraised of ongoing developments, and I'd like to do another strategy chat before the next time we talk to Avalor, but that won't be for a couple months.

kavut: Thank you.

hopelessly-entangled: We're glad we can help. Thanks for working with us.
hopelessly-entangled: And good luck out there.

Makoki spends some time snuggling with Penjaga in VR while responding to new or interesting questions and comments received on the Azurifice website.

Muroti enlists Penjaga to help plan a party conference! They find the earliest date that's feasible for everyone they really want to invite and enlist help from Allocator Mozeen to get a venue picked out. Muroti has entirely too many opinions about catering for someone who's never eaten food. Once everything is settled, they announce the conference on their website and send a blurb to science-y news outlets, informing everyone that the Az are excited to share a new (to Amenta) type of power generation technology. Catch the livestream on the Azurifice site!

The livestream is well attended but there's considerable attrition as people check out the nuclear physics to fun alien content ratio and determine it is pretty high.

Excellent! Muroti opens the conference with very high level explanation of how nuclear fusion works ("Fusion power is pretty simple! First you create a tiny artificial sun, then you squeeze it into a donut to keep it from exploding, and finally you use the heat to boil water.") before passing off to Avakar, who has a surprisingly-easy-to-understand explanation of how a fusion reaction produces energy, for the public; she also announces that they will be posting free on their site some more detailed write-ups of nuclear fusion, translated into every major Amentan language. The two of them are ready to field questions from greens in attendance! (The more nitty-gritty "how to build and run nuclear fusion reactor" talk with the Voan energy sector is scheduled for later today).

Some of the greens point out that if you skipped the part where you prevent it from exploding, that would be very bad.

It sure would! She recommends not skipping that.

void-your-warranty: dear

"...in practice, if you don't build any containment system at all, you'll run into problems well before any actual fusion occurs. Fusion takes a lot of energy to start happening; if you tried heating up a plasma to fusion temperatures, without building a sufficient confinement system, it would melt whatever container you were holding it in and dissipate extremely rapidly, which is very bad not because it would cause an explosion, but because it would destroy your expensive equipment."

A green attempts to privately convey that they are mostly worried that it would be possible to use these principles to create a weapon on purpose if someone were so moved.

That basically wouldn't be possible to do in a remotely efficient manner? It's definitely possible to intentionally design a fusion "reactor" such that it would, when turned on and fueled and supplied the enormous amount of energy required to heat up the plasma to fusion-producing temperatures, explode in a horrifying fireball of death, but there really aren't effective military uses for a weapon that costs tens of millions of dollars, can't feasibly be built in less than a season, and cannot feasibly be moved, once built, and you'd be able to tell from the blueprints that it would cause a horrifying explosion. (If you design your own fusion reactors, please send us the blueprints, we can check them for horrifying-explode-ability).

(The Az know but absolutely will not mention that it's possible to make a fusion bomb if you use a fission bomb to kickstart the reaction! This is not the kind of fun science fact they're interested in sharing at this time.)

space-ourselves: I know it's a much weaker offering and also probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it would have been funny if we'd gone with nuclear fission plants instead
life-should-flourish: ...you don't think the radiation would have tripped their pollution response something fierce?
space-ourselves: Oh, no, it definitely would.
space-ourselves: That's, like, most of the draw.
life-should-flourish: ...
light-and-wonder: ...okay, I'll bite. 
light-and-wonder: why, exactly, would it be good for us to be handing out power plants that produce waste byproduct that triggers these people?
hopelessly-entangled: ohhhhhhh.
space-ourselves: :D
light-and-wonder: ???
hopelessly-entangled: If we ran the reactors ourselves, we could employ a ton of reds. 
void-your-warranty: Not just for the reactor itself, but for the associated breeders and maybe even some of the mining operations.
light-and-wonder: ...Huh. Could even set up company towns for them, too, if the facilities were big enough.
hopelessly-entangled: I don't think it'd've worked, though. Clean castes would be too afraid of rioting reds triggering a meltdown.
space-ourselves: Yeah, like I said, other reasons.

The greens remain kind of nervous but will apply themselves to nice safe power generation.

Avaker puts on a much more detailed talk for the Voan power generation industry purples, and any yellows they brought with them, and anyone else who Avalor cleared to be there!

Fusion reactors need be capable of generating extremely powerful and precise magnetic fields, and need tritium as fuel; here are some easy-to-bootstrap ways of mining for tritium and some plans for how to make most of the stuff they need out of existing Amentan industrial processes. Some of the components simply can't be manufactured efficiently by Amentan industry; the Azurifice will produce and sell those at these prices. (Here's why these parts are needed; here's where the designs would have to be changed if they didn't want to rely on them. Notice how this would increase the overall cost about 130% and land used by about 20%, and also be very very slightly less safe!).

She starts and ends the presentation with some really beautiful numbers on how much power these plants will generate and the rate at which she expects Voa can adopt them, how many jobs this will create per reactor (both in construction and maintenance), and a bunch of Azurifice-known energy-intensive ways of increasing agricultural yield (the Haber process, desalinization, etc etc) from back in the vault days. She's incredibly enthusiastic about both the logics and the obvious good this will do!

They already have the Haber process and desalinization but cheaper electricity will certainly not hurt. Can they improve their industry to be able to provide all the components themselves?

Well, these parts they'll be able to make in a year or two, those parts shouldn't take much longer than that but have some dependencies on the first kind, and this set of things they don't actually see an easy way for Amentans to make safely, as key steps in the manufacturing process rely on having an Az who is unusually good at this very specific kind of exception handling (Penjaga and Zanmi are both extremely good at it). Only a few things from that last group are required, though; Az fusion reactors use a lot more of them, but they've adjusted these designs to be feasible for faster widescale deployment. 

(Zanmi adds that they'll be happy to consult with greens on alternate manufacturing paths that could be run entirely by Amentans, but they haven't thought of any work-arounds on their own yet. The ability to use raw data as sensory input is pretty important to keeping this kind of fabricator from exploding!)

They will content themselves with "imports" while they figure it out.

Cool! Any other questions, comments, concerns...

Plenty, but mostly just details!

Avaker will happily and enthusiastically provide details!

space-ourselves: 💙 She's so cute when she gets like this!
light-and-wonder: She really is.💙
void-your-warranty: I am having so much fun
space-ourselves: Loop unbounded*, babe! You've earned this. 
void-your-warranty: 💙💙💙

(*Azurifice expression that approximately means "go nuts")