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Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
Okay, that was a way for his plan to fail he hadn't thought of.
I have no doubt but that you are capable of doing it with proper training. I'll admit I'm not convinced I can persuade Tapa's leadership of this. Hopefully I can at least convince them that no one else will want the job.
In retrospect, yes, I should. My plan had been to drop a manual on you, since it is a mature enough technology that technicians don't actually need to do things unless there's an emergency and I know of no emergencies within my lifetime. But since I want to convince them it is extremely difficult, yes, I absolutely should train you.
I've tried looking at some of the nonfiction you've been putting out and it seems kind of hard to read, honestly.
Maybe, but the newer translation when they pushed the 0.7 revision didn't seem much easier.
That is very strange. Possibly it is assuming a different knowledge base, or possibly it is just a human-Amentan species difference.
It is odd. Some of the books are going to be written for people with chips - he certainly picked up a wider range of fiction tastes after he had his, it made it much easier to keep track of all the character names and automatically do probability updates - but not all of them, and surely basic manuals would be written for comprehensibility, especially anything Imai* chose as part of their first-contact dump.
The studies say that reds are the stupidest caste. I don't think I'm stupid as reds go, but maybe the greens are having an easier time.
I'm disinclined to trust studies coming to that conclusion, myself, but I'll admit it's possible the scientists they assigned to work with me might have been well above the Amentan average.
Actually, he... should probably take an Amentan IQ test at some point? He doesn't actually know what the Amentan average is.
They probably are, they could get the best for a project about aliens.
He can find IQ tests online!
I should look into this problem, I hadn't noticed it before. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Then he'll want to take one after this conversation.
Hey... are you cheating?And then there's a link.
Cheating on an online IQ test is pretty silly - our results aren't validated for your resume! But if you're not cheating, you might need one of the tests with a higher ceiling. Here's one we like almost as much as ours:
O-kay then, he'll take the higher-ceilinged one? This is kind of a bizarre experience. Maybe he'll try it once in normal mode and once, like, with his chip disconnected? He bets he'll do really badly the second time, but it's probably worth testing how much it does...
The higher-ceiling test doesn't accuse him of cheating but it does remind him that no calculators are permitted because it is not a calculator use test.
With his chip off he gets a result of 98th percentile for the population average. There are further breakdowns by caste - he'd only be 85th percentile if he were green.
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Okay, no, this is not reasonable or plausible, but HE NEEDS TO DEAL.
Okay. His next step, to be done until he is finished or someone interrupts him, is to look at the simplest possible manual he has for Developing Civilizations Who Need Help Building Fusion Reactors, translate it into Tapap, and then modify it, both to make it more legible and to emphasize the HORRIFYING DANGERS. (The latter will not take much modification.) This should not be noticeable until Imai* shows up because Imai* does not put instructions for building nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs in its Gifts To Developing Civilizations because of some earth history nonsense about nigh-total annihilation or something, but that will be helpful for him, right now, because they have no other textbooks on nuclear fusion to compare it to. If they ask for more later he will say "yes, sure" and send them something technical nigh-unreadable that coincidentally also contains lots of terrifying warnings about HORRIFYING DANGERS.
This is a good plan and he is happy with it. Does anything interrupt him before he is finished designing them nuclear reactors? If he needs a break he can start building the most idiot-proof, easy-to-supply, cheap-to-manufacture artificial-womb-plus-gene-sampler-devices Amenta has ever seen, which will also be the ONLY artificial-womb-plus-gene-sampler-devices Amenta has ever seen, which will make his job easier.
He is not interrupted! Greens watch him curiously but do not bother him; they have plenty to chew on.
Great! Then he's going to want to make some announcements for the blue and a subset of the greens monitoring him, it's about a new kind of ridiculously good power plant they might want to build lots of with some potentially important political implications.
