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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 -
... But they all *talk* like smart people, over on Project Quicksort, or at least like people who seem to think they're extremely smart, at least. And then they keep saying stupid things, maybe he should explain -
NO. BAD ALIEN. He is NOT going to get into internet arguments; he does this way too often and he always loses and feels bad. He is going to see about trying to FIX HIS REPLICATORS. He's been refraining from poking them because he honestly doesn't want them to be broken - they may not be able to build him an entire new spaceship, let alone its hyperdrive, but when it comes to fancy electronics they can manage quite well.
(But he'll set up something to sample the aliens' news feed and send him occasional high-profile articles; these aliens are very charming, but he still hasn't gotten over the memory of seeing Union faces in those suits.)
The news articles are mostly about him and his ship and the prospects for getting into SPAAAAACE. Ones that are not are about an earthquake off the coast of Baravi, a scandal about somebody with side babies in the provincial government of Kapton, and teasers for the spring sequel to a popular series of movies.
All these make sense! He appreciates their space-related priorities as clearly showing a good deal of wisdom and common sense! HE wouldn't want to be living on a sphere of rock that random space-related debris might impact at sufficient velocities to wipe out all life on it! He just OBSERVED that this was a likely possibility, and observing that did not make him want to be space less, rather than more!
(He's just going to dismiss 'side babies' as either an incomprehensible alien thing. He is sure it has no relevance.)
Okay, he's got one of his replicator-factories working, and he thinks he can have it print parts to get the rest working eventually. Anything else the NICEST ALIENS in charge of talking to him want to talk to him about?
Is there faster than light communication they can set up to call his home society over? How's the state of the art on terraforming? Why hasn't anyone said hi before?
No, The only thing they've found that can break the lightspeed barrier is a hyperdrive. It is cheaper to move less mass, but by the time you've got enough mass for a hyperdrive and protection from random hydrogen atoms that might hit it while it's going in to and coming out of hyperspace, you've got a ship.
The state of the art on terraforming is very good. His civilization has been terraforming planets for a very long time, though it may take a bit to learn how to Amentaform them, since humans and Amentans are different species that only coincidentally look exactly the same.
Amenta appear to be... really far away from everywhere else, by the stars. He thinks his hyperdrive's malfunction was tied to it going way further than it should've, for some reason. He's got no idea why. Yes, this does mean that the region of space around Amenta is totally empty to the best of his knowledge.
Do Amentans and humans really look EXACTLY the same? That's so weird. What do other aliens look like? Also are the hazmat suits likely to be important, how big of a deal is crosscontamination between species in general?
They don't look exactly the same, they just look more similar than baseline humans do to conversion cyborgs like him.
Amentans are the first aliens the League has ever met! The League has encountered germs and fungus of non-terrestrial origins before, but that is as far as it goes. It has heard stories about stories about stories of aliens, but when it investigated before they were just humans who'd gone in for genetic modification.
Crosscontamination might be an issue with baseline humans? He has no idea; he's not a biologist. But he isn't going to have any problems with germs, and he doesn't think he would have brought with him. It's not like his body is made of meat.
What cyborging has he got going on? Not being made of meat sounds great, is it hard to invent that line of tech (for a new species)? The Amentans will de-suit.
Well, normally he has a custom-designed body, but it broke when his spaceship crashed. This one is made of Sarengha steel, with a cynode his brain can interface with so that the flowing metal automatically conforms to his self-image of his own body. Sarangha steel is very handy stuff and he can get them a textbook on how to manufacture it but he doesn't know what the textbook will be assuming they already know or what translation errors there will be.
And his brain is still mostly organic, since that's something you have to be very careful with replacing, because they don't know quite how consciousness works and they don't want to kill you in the process of upgrading you. Very old people don't have organic brains and they can be a little weird, though they're still mostly whoever they were before.
Humanity only invented it once but humanity is happy to share, that is how they fix death. He has no idea how hard it would be to adapt what they did to Amentans. (The Amentans should probably know that he looked up their castes and he would be purple, by their standards. This is why he cannot explain everything, because he is not green. He apologizes for not being green, since it would be very useful under the circumstances.)
The Amentans should feel free to de-suit.
It's okay that he is a purple alien, he's still very cool and from SPACE and knows a lot of stuff they don't.
That's nice of them! He'll send them the textbook, he (thinks?) it was in the standard data dump, but he can highlight it here.
(It will not be a tremendously useful textbook, because it is written for people of a different species several standard deviations of IQ above the Amentan average, with multiple extra senses and a chip in their heads that can look up anything on the internet instantly and do advanced mathematics. But it is still much better than NO textbook.)
(Also, he's going to double-check that that data dump went through: HERE, HAVE ALL THE KNOWLEDGE OF AN EXTREMELY ADVANCED CIVILIZATION THAT IS NOT SUPER RECENT. HOPEFULLY YOU CAN SORT SOME OF IT OUT.)
They are working on that!
Since he is a robot he probably doesn't need very much to be comfortable, and he said he can't be separated from his ship, but they reiterate that they would like to help him out in any way they can shorter-term than the hyperdrive reinvention thing. For example they could put up a tent over his ship, before it rains.
Oh. A tent would be very helpful. He would actually be willing to have the ship moved somewhere more convenient, if they want; he just needs to go with it, and he wants to make sure it isn't damaged since a lot of its contents are literally irreplaceable.
(Also, he is not a robot, he is a cyborg. There are differences.)
... Also, where is he? He did not exactly pay much attention to where his ship crashed, other than that he was aiming at 'land, but low casualties.'
He's in western Tapa! They can load him and his ship up on a big truck and get him somewhere more convenient. The ship is probably pretty durable and will be fine to pick up with a normal crane, right?
aaaaaaaaah
THAT WOULD BE A BAD IDEA. THERE ARE UNSECURED OBJECTS IN THE SHIP. He will go SECURE them, and then he would kind of like to see what the crane looks like and how it is doing on precision. The ship is durable, but not all of its contents are, especially not after the very bad day it had.
They're glad they asked! Here is how their cranes work but they can get something more sensitive if that is called for, the sort of thing you use to haul big physics experiment stuff around.
That would be better; he does not know that it is completely necessary, but he thinks taking chances with replicator-factories is always a bad idea.
It's a thing you use to print objects. He has some desktop ones; they can print small things if you have the materials. (Not all things, but a lot of things.) He's currently trying to see if his functional one can print the things it needs to print to fix his broken ones or not, and then probably print things to help fix his computer. Are there any small things they need printed, for afterwards?
Well, apparently this entire shopping list of hyperdrive parts, but presumably that's complicated somehow.
... Yyyyeah, that's why he said "not all things." It can do these things on the list, but slowly, and he wants a lot of stuff if he's fixing his ship, but those things are just impossible. He's not sure why. He can highlight the textbooks that talk about hyperdrives, but honestly he doesn't understand half of it. He hopes their smart people are really, really smart.
They can't really compare since they haven't met very many humans but they will certainly give it their all. Textbook highlights are appreciated!
The Amentans wait for his all-clear on the securing of objects inside the ship and then gently heave it onto a truck and drive it to a more conveniently securable and accessible field. (It is still a field, they aren't going to haul the entire ship into a city.)
Great! He'll make sure nothing breaks and look up Tapa on the internet while he's doing that.
(He kind of wishes he could get a headchip-pocket everything converter, but he isn't - let's add two more to the chorus - a programmer or a nanocircuitry engineer.)