This post has the following content warnings:
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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 -
We landed on a new world. It made more sense to start dating things from when we landed instead of from... whatever system we used before that? (checks) Birth of someone famous.
And it's not in his onboard database of facts the way the birth-of-someone-famous fact was?
It's a long way away, his onboard database of facts is kind of ancient, and, uh. This may make Amenta think worse of humans, but we haven't completely abolished wars yet. We don't have them often, his own civilization is really very enthusiastic about preventing them if at all possible, but last he heard Earth was in a war zone, and humanity has developed a lot of really scary weapons, and any description of the current habitation status of planets in a war zone should be met with 'probably'.
Noting that he does not follow the news and they should not trust him? And should override everything he says if they meet one of his blues People With Any Knowledge Of The Political Situation? He thinks the Unity of Man and, uh, whoever their latest victim is? The Unity are kind of into... wiping out anything that has DNA not on their approved list... or has cyborg implants... or suggests that the Unity of Man might be bad... the League spends a lot of time trying to figure out whether 'stopping them' is more important than 'not starting a war with them'.
And then he'll highlight the very old page on the Unity of Man for them.
Gosh. They will do some background reading on that. Sounds like bad news for non-humans like the Amentans.
The encyclopedia has a detailed history of the Unity of Man! They apparently started off as a pan-religious movement trying to unify two warring worlds which had been settled in the same system, under the philosophy of "we're all humans, can't we get along?" In the process, the founding texts of the ideology very, very carefully defined what "human" meant, and a few generations later it started treating anything outside of that carefully-defined target as "not human, therefore a competitor for resources with humanity." One or two genocides later, a few schisms in which the more radical side wiped out the lesser, and they were well on their way to being the nastiest Great Power in the galaxy, greatly aided by their home system sitting on a hyperspace chokepoint, everything beyond which they cheerfully monopolized for colonization and resource-collection, wiping out a few alien species of algae as they went. The list of who has sanctions against them will do reasonably well for a list of known galactic powers, though it is, of course, well out of date.
Meanwhile, Nau would like to know who's in on the Project To Get Into Space. Is it just Tapa, or is everywhere in the world contributing?
Tapa is big on hosting international conferences and has gleefully booted some arts conventions and other things of lesser importance to free up venues for SCIENCE ABOUT SPACE. They have invited top greens from all over the world to come and put their heads together on everything.
Wonderful, he's very pleased to hear it. He hopes the arts conventions won't be too disappointed.
... Hmm. He'd like to quietly find a way to send a message to the Tapa researchers studying him without loudly broadcasting it to the entire world that's studying him. Do internet searches give him any information?
The arts conventions mostly had insurance. The insurance companies aren't thrilled but so it goes with being an insurance company.
The internet thinks that if you are trying to privately message an individual you email them or use a mutual message application of some kind. His pocket everything appears to come pre-loaded with email (though he doesn't have an account yet) and a chat app called Ping! which doesn't have any contacts yet, and another chat app called Radius which will let him talk to all the pocket everythings within a set number of yards, more or less as though he'd spoken aloud.
So it goes.
... Okay, so, how can he get an email account? And the email of someone who can get in touch with the Tapans? (Uh, Tapai?) That looks like the next priority.
Well, there are plenty of Tapai around investigating bits of his ship and generally hanging out to wait on him and setting up the tent over his whole situation in Field 2: The Fieldening. The email app offers him a menu of popular email providers and the option to write in his own.
Right, yes, the whole question is if he can do what he wants to do without getting ANNOUNCEMENT: ALIEN THINKS TAPA MURDERS KIDS all over the news, since he's afraid that his words are under public scrutiny and that would just tick off the people who he wants to be friendly with him. He would like to just start yelling at them about that, but he has heard of subtlety. It features in many of his favorite novels!
... Actually, just what does the scene outside his ship look like? Lots of people running around and setting up the tent, are there any greens he can talk to quietly who he can be confident are definitely Tapai and not part of the international support staff? The confusion might be an opportunity.
(But also, like, he's going to try to get himself a free traveler@whatever account just in case it fails. Any provider, which one doesn't really matter.)
Now he is traveler@fourthspire.net.
People outside his ship:
- purples, setting up tents, both his and other tents for staging other things
- greens, speaking Tapap, about him and his ship and the data dump
- a blue, over there looking important
- some greys, maintaining a perimeter
- one orange, hanging out outdoors while one of the auxiliary tents goes up
- more purples, driving supplies of various kinds to the site so they can keep building their little tent village
On the one hand, screw blues. On the other hand... no, no, there is no other hand. He's going to eavesdrop on the greens and snag one of them who doesn't have a noticeable-even-to-him foreign accent when they leave the group.
"- oh, what can I do for you?" says this green, adjusting his ponytail self-consciously.
"Is there any way for me to get a quiet message to the government of Tapa without sending it to the entire world?"