Wait what was that

Hyperdrives aren't supposed to - 

His ship is not, technically, exploding. Only very small parts of it exploded, as he came out of warp, really quite tiny pieces. But they were very important, small parts, and now the hyperdrive isn't working and the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty has a hell of a lot more momentum than it ought to.

(The ship sends a brief note to his brain what the constellations look like, because they do not look like they are supposed to look like, and he logs that for when there is not an emergency and he is not on fire.)

He does his best with his maneuvering thrusters, but it is not what they are designed for, and using things for the purposes they are not designed for is not what he is designed for, to the extent he is designed. He appears to be headed for a planet! The planet is sending out radio waves! If he crashes into the planet sending out radio waves, it is going to stop doing that! This is very very bad!

(They are not in any standard format, and the ship cheerfully alerts him that he has made first contact with an alien species, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, SHIP.)

Okay is there any way he can crash without - 

Yes! The ship is very sure there is! It involves MORE EXPLOSIONS. Of important bits, even! And also deceleration, caused in large part by explosions!

He does it. 

In the sky above Amenta, astronomers who happen to have their telescopes pointed the right way can see some very pretty fireworks.

Nau's ship breaks. Some parts of it overshoot Amenta; some parts of it undershoot Amenta. The largest bits - including the very-heavily-shielded capsule with the ship's pilot, the computer storing backups of all of his data, and four of his irreplaceably precious replicator-factories - do not.

But they're not going to make a crater when they hit, either.

Or at least only a very small one.

And then there is pain.

The aliens he has made first contact with are going to do their level best to get him patched up without making anything worse. In case it helps they can be in full body hazmat suits! Convenient for interacting with the wreckage too!

At the bottom of the new crater, there appears to be a large, approximately round object (the improvised heat-shields burned off; there are a number of rare metals now in slightly higher concentration in the Amentan atmosphere, as well as the usual carbon). It is... twitching.

(Ceasing to be conscious when you are in pain is a design defect. So is not being able to electronically control your spaceship while you're improvising a new body.)

He sees nothing. For a while.

Then the very helpful aliens see a large metal hatch swing open, and a very approximately Amentoid head peeks out of it.

They are prepared for this! The radio's been going the whole time but one green has a flashlight and can try prime numbers with it!

Right. Communication. He forgot about communication. That was dumb of him, why did he forget about communication. Possibly because of the STARSHIP CRASH.

He's going to start by sending out the default distress signal, which hopefully should have been playing the whole time but apparently wasn't, because he has NO IDEA what went wrong inside the ship's computer but something apparently did, and then to tell the ship's computer, which is broken but probably less so than his brain, to see about decrypting the aliens' communications and playing the Official First Contact communications himself, he's sure they've got that on a chip somewhere. They are probably helpful communications, because these aliens look like hu-

Actually, wait, these aliens look like the Union of Man, only with lower-tech decontamination suits. Shit. They've even got funny-colored hair! Okay cancel the standard data dump, then reboot it except without anything added since recontact and hope like mad they don't share their development-based concerns, because if they do then he doesn't care how low-tech they are, if they've invented radio he's going to lose. Just send out the friendly stuff.

And then, uh... if the ship's sending all that stuff out, well, nice to have a backup? He may as well try to start sending prime numbers himself, since that looks like what they're doing. Right. Sounds good. Let's do it.

The green with the flashlight will carry on flashlighting along, but the other greens, who aren't close enough to be in hazmat suits, are figuring out everything else as fast as they can. How hard is that, exactly?

Not tremendously! They're going to have problems with the weird blip where it paused and then started over from the beginning, and there's a few very important pauses where the ship either pauses, or switches to unintelligible static and those are going to throw them of, but the Standard First-Communication Broadcast was engineered by very intelligent people who spent a very long time thinking about how to do it efficiently, and it has a lot of redundancy.

And he... may as well start... tapping prime numbers on the hull, just for the sake of this one poor green-suited guy and his flashlight?

(His fingers also look somewhat like Amentan fingers, or at least like the fingers of a very artistically cast steel statue of an Amentan.)

Oh good! Data! Presently the flashlight green can put down the flashlight and pick up a whiteboard and their pocket everything and copy out an image of the alien's language for WELCOME! CAN WE HELP YOU?

Oh blast that's a good idea.

He drops back into the ship. (He stares at his replicator-factories. Does he want to use them for this? Desperately, desperately yes; on the other hand, he will probably need them more later, and he has no idea if they even WORK, or if he can use one of them that works to fix the others that don't.)

He finds a particularly melted plastic-ish thing that is still hot, climbs out of his ship very slowly and carefully, and uses it to draw, on melted plastic on the ship's (also very hot) hull, YES.

Then he is just going to say, the very plain and low-context way you use words to very small children still too young for their first implant, "Yes."

(And, at the same time, send the key radio message himself, just in case the ship's wasn't working: "I am a shipwrecked miner requesting assistance and sanctuary under the laws of all nations," add that on loop until someone responds.)

And then say it with words, why not.)

A purple offers him a spare whiteboard.

He will take the spare whiteboard! And write, while he says it, again, "I am a shipwrecked miner requesting assistance and sanctuary!" (He does not actually know if the laws of all nations cover this. New Planet may not know them, depending on just when their branch diverged from the tree of humanity.)

(His computer assumed they were not humans based on their communications patterns and then he SAW them and his computer was clearly broken even before he KNEW it was broken.)

"We will be happy to help you! Would you come this way?" They wave him away from the wreckage.

Okay, the actual answer to that is NO, because when that happens they will steal all his replicator-factories. How does he say NO reasonably - 

"I cannot safely be separated from my ship."

That's... not quite bullshit? He is, in fact, doing a lot of double-checking that nothing on his ship is going to EXPLODE, and also supervising its computer running diagnostics on itself, which might be worse than exploding.

"Oh! Are there things we can bring you? Are there ways we can help the ship work again?"

"Yes. [I recognize myself as owing you a large favor]*!"

He is going to give them a Shopping List! The fact that it is (a) theoretically possible to make, and (b) for some purposes worth making, some of the chemical compounds and metallic alloys on his Shopping List is information that will advance Amenta's science greatly, over the long term! It is a very, very, very long shopping list, with occasional markings for 'speculative/unsure' (for instance, he does not actually know how to make a hyperdrive), and he is delivering it by open radio broadcast. If they actually CAN just fix his ship and he can GO HOME, then this would only be the seventeenth-worst thing that ever happened to him.

(*:Trans: "Thank you.")

"We can try to get those things! It may take some time. Which things do you need soonest? Do you need food? Are you injured in a way we might be able to help with?"

Soonest? Oh, probably more matter for his replicator-factories. That should be fairly easy, all they need is elements in one of these handy-to-break-down-and-recompose forms. After that? "I require some method of getting on to your internet, so I can coordinate more precisely with your people." (Is "internet" translating?)

And he is not injured in any way they can help with. ("Having your body wrecked and needing to build another one using electronic communication with the computer and Sarengha steel" is almost certainly not something they can help with.) Food would technically be good but he has somewhat odd dietary needs, and he won't be able to eat for another day or two. (Don't worry, he doesn't need to eat every day or two.)

(His somewhat odd dietary needs amount to 'sugar-water'.)

They have an Internet! They can get him a spare pocket everything. And have sugar-water on standby whenever he is ready for it. "Can your machine translation let you read our languages?"

"You think you have an internet" is a mutter both low and outside the human auditory range, given when he sees what it looks like. (Whether it is outside the Amentan auditory range is unknown.)

He is absolutely confident that if their machine translation has caught up to his language, his can catch up to theirs. Has it yet?

... Okay this is super embarrassing and he's going to blame the fact that his ship-computer was busy running a diagnostic instead of devoting most of its attention to this.

"My machine translation will be slightly slow." Pause. "Your languages appear to have no connection to any Earthly language, which is what they were trained on. It may take some more minutes."

"Do most all through the galaxy tend to resemble a particular kind?" asks the green. "That's very surprising!"

"... You are not descended from colonists ultimately from [Terra/Earth/Sol III]*?" Well, that's what the computer initially thought, but the computer is so obviously wrong! They have hair on their heads and everything!

(*: Including lots of synonyms just in case they forgot one old name!)

"We are confident we evolved here! We could be wrong but we have a fossil record and resemble other animals here."

"That is the most bizarre thing I've heard." If they and the computer agree, he's probably wrong! "You greatly resemble the juvenile form of my species."

Okay, there we go! He's got onto their so-called-internet. He'll start some scans now and check the results later when he's not talking to someone.

"You can find pictures of juvenile Amentans on the internet if you wish!" (He can. It would be hard not to, without dedicated software add-ons to protect one from an assault of baby pictures from all directions, which he can also find.)

... Okay, why do these people like baby pictures so much. "We also pass through a stage like that, even earlier in our development." 

"That's interesting! We don't look like you later on." There are indeed pictures of old Amentans; they get wrinkly.

They haven't fixed aging yet!!!!!

"We used to do that. We fixed it. We can fix it for you if you want."

For values of 'we' that include 'his entire civilization' and does not include 'one shipwrecked miner.'

"That's amazing! We look forward to it. What other technology do you have that we don't yet?"

He checks his pocket everything. "... Apparently, nine-tenths of my materials list." He pauses. "We can make metal serve as substitutes for flesh. We can make you continue to be alive after your body dies, though that is difficult. We can produce all sorts of things very efficiently." He pauses again. "Obviously, we can travel between star systems at practical speeds."

"We are very excited about that!" they say of the last one.

They'd be stupid not to be.

"We share our technology with underdeveloped civilizations." He pauses. "Unfortunately, I am not a hyperspace engineer. If I could get my ship back home, I expect I could find you one." Another pause. "Or two. Or six. Or thirty." 'Manpower' is not the key resource, for the war effort, but it's still valuable. And they'll be more valuable, after they've been industrialized.

"Yes! We will do our very best to help you and get in contact with your home civilization!"

YES! These are the NICEST ALIENS!

Next step: Reading their internet to determine if they actually are the NICEST ALIENS or if this is just some kind of fraud.

The internet is, apparently, very sincerely excited about the prospect of helping the crashed alien get home to his own civilization which has FTL! This is clearly the best thing that has ever happened to the nicest aliens and they all want to support this project in any way they can! People are talking about how to track-switch into any of the fields it looks like he'll need and posting aliensonas of themselves moved more in his direction cosmetically captioned 'me at age 72'!

The nicest aliens are ADORABLE.

They also seem to have a thing about hair color! He has no idea what the thing is, but his computer says that the word they use for 'grey' also means 'soldier', or something? It seems to be a very close synonym! What's up with that?

"Grey" means the color (all hueless shades lighter than black, including white) and is used as metonymy for the caste, which in most languages also has one or more terms of its own that aren't metonymy and which, depending on the language, may have as etymology "soldier" or "warrior" or "guard" or "runner" or "strength" or "embodied" or "dance".

What's a 'caste'?

A caste is a category of Amentans specialized, through training and hereditary selection, in a category of occupations! Greys do soldiering, policing, and athletics, and also some kinds of gambling, sex work in many countries, dance, and a few cornery occupations shoved in for historical reasons.

Huh! He's somewhat curious what the other castes are! He wonders if it's anything like how his people divide things up, though that's more commonly based on life stage and interests.

There are blues, who do rent-collection on land ownership (looks like others can own land, but collecting rent on it is out of caste income) and governance and judiciary. There are greens, who do academics and the arts. There are yellows, who do clerical and administrative work of all kinds. There are oranges, who do healthcare, childcare, eldercare, social work, sex work wherever it isn't grey, and childhood education. There are purples, who do everything else, including but not limited to farming, shipping, construction, engineering, manufacturing, cleaning, and the service industry.

Okay so his entire planet is purple.

... That's not fair. There's some greys and babysitters and there's some people who design fiction, which would be green. And he... guesses he could fit some people into yellow??? Mostly they automate that. And he supposes that what the League leadership has instead of blues and research-greens might still count as people, but he's honestly a little iffy about it; by the time you get up to that intelligence level you're not... really his kind of person? You're a different kind of person?

... Speaking of which, where's all the smart people on Amenta? There's got to be someone smarter than he is, right? He's really dumb, but a lot of the internet conversations seem to be even dumber. Maybe they just use a different internet?

Most Amentans are also purple. They seem to be actively subsidizing more green than they strictly need, hoping for a big break - like "an alien crash-landed and we have to invent 200 things to get his ship working", so they feel pretty smug about this decision right now.

Internet conversations are in fact often dumb, though some of them might be humor or performance art masquerading as dumbness. If he goes to more filtered green-field fora like Project Quicksort or something, that's where Amenta's best and brightest who are not literally at this moment trying to invent 200 things are hanging out.

... 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.

Of course. What's a replicator-factory?

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!

Then he will provide those, and get set up for his move.

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.)

Tapa is the most populous and largest by land area country in the world. They are big on international cooperation, hold several protectorates, had a fight with Voa over farm territory for independent food security a few seasons back but have resolved it since, kill babies as a population control deterrent as a holdover from when they avoided conquest by the Oahk Empire with this signal, speak Tapap and have a currency called the tap, and operate on a credit system.

Kill babies?

Every nation on Amenta has to abide by population control restrictions and allow international observation to make sure they're doing it. Different countries decide who's allowed to have kids each year differently - there are three major system classifications with lots of little details - and Tapa does a credit system, but, unlike most credit countries, an unauthorized baby is euthanized rather than just confiscated and adopted out.

They can't do that.

No, REALLY. They should STOP. 

When this truck stops he will explain to them that killing babies is wrong!

Since they apparently don't KNOW that, he is going to start looking up all the statistics on how every country on Amenta does things, and then he will SHOW them that their method is WRONG and BAD! What does the control group do?

(To clarify, by 'the control group' he means 'all the other countries that use a child credit system and don't kill babies.)

The other countries take the babies away from the unauthorized parents and allow someone on a waiting list to adopt the baby. They do actually have to do somewhat more of this per capita than Tapa does infanticide; it comes up in internet arguments.

See, those other countries are being much more reasonable. For instance, they are NOT KILLING CHILDREN.

... Okay, wait, wait, let's back up a bit. Why can only some people have children? Is there a competency examination, or something?

Well, a lot more people want to have children than would lead to a sustainable growth rate. They aren't doing things with exams per se in most places, but there are eugenic screens you have to pass or get some kind of exemption for, and in credit countries you need to win an auction, while in two-per countries you just have to stop at two and in permission countries you need to impress a blue.

But they're going to go to space. And have more planets. They don't need a sustainable growth rate, they just need not to LITERALLY STARVE UNTIL THEY GET TO SPACE. Then all growth rates will be sustainable. Because we are not going to run out of planets any time soon. At the least, they could stop killing children!

(Also, 'impress a blue', what.)

They had no immediate prospects of getting to space and did not know how long it was going to take them, so, population controls.

In permissions countries, such as much of the "Oahksphere" (places colonized by Oahk when it was an Empire), blues - usually specialists of some stripe - are in charge of distributing the limited number of child permissions per caste. Some of them just sell the permissions for money, which is more or less equivalent to credits, except that the supply of credits that are specifically on sale for money is smaller and out of reach for poorer families than it is in credit countries, so most people have to arrange in some other way to attract notice, or have their spouse attract notice.

Okay, well, they can stop murdering children over their population controls now that they have immediate prospects for getting to space. Hopefully that will make everyone happy. It's not like anyone WANTS to murder children.

(... But he's going to keep wiki-walking about the Oahksphere until the truck arrives or he gets bored.)

The Oahk Empire was pretty fucked up and the countries it colonized (and the country that is now called the Free State of Oahk) are all kind of fucked up about it. Calado is widely agreed to be the worst, and Yvalta one of the most functional, apparently on the basis of how predictably you can take prosocial actions and have a baby about it. Met does "chain sterilizations", where one possible sentence is having various degrees of relation to you sterilized; nobody else does that one.

Oh no, those places are horrible! Someone competent should try to fix Calado and Met! Sterilization isn't irreversible, but he bets it is on Amenta!

... What are the most functional countries, in the opinion of the internet? (Also, why don't people just leave Calado?)

(Correction: What are the most functional countries in the opinion of the internet, checking in translated-from-Tapap first, and translated-from-whatever-the-most-popular-non-Tapap-language-is second?)

Oh, people can't just leave Calado because nobody is taking immigrants unless they're exchanged for a similar quantity and kind of emigrants. Those are headcount opportunities they could be using to give their citizens babies.

The opinion of the Tapap-speaking Internet is that Tapa's doing great, and that Anitam and Cene and Baravi are all fine too. The opinion of the Voan-speaking Internet is that Voa is doing great and a handful of tiny countries that also guarantee at least one child are distant seconds. The opinion of the Oahkar-speaking Internet is that except for Tuviri, which for all anyone knows might be a paradise, every country has some problems and should stop picking on them.

He's kind of curious why these people's politics is so thoroughly centered around babies. "Having kids" is supposed to be a good experience to have in your life before you move beyond the flesh, not that it's one he ever had, but it sounds like literally every country here's main thing is centered around kids??? He wonders if humans cared that much too, back when they only had one planet.

(Also, what's Tuviri?)

Tuviri is a highly isolationist nation southwest of Voa. They allow observers for things like population control, and there's some trade, but they don't have tourism going in or out and they have a separate internet.

Oh. He appreciates the clarification.

... He thinks everyone needs better immigration policy, and better child policy, and not killing babies, but honestly the discovery that Amenta was a limitless well of terrible things has kind of made him less unhappy about any of the individual terrible things. Maybe this is just what people do when their smart people don't have chips in their heads? Either way, it seems fixable by (a) suggesting that they kill less babies because he can get them INTO SPACE, and (b) getting them into space, so a horde of social workers actually trained for the job can descend on them and sort out all their problems.

Well, that's all in the future. Right now, he's headed to Tapa.

He was already in Tapa, but now here he is in a more convenient part of Tapa. Here's a charger for his pocket everything, here's a lot of questions from green engineers that he can respond to by highlighting books in the huge text dump, would he like to recommend any fiction or other entertaining content for the general public to enjoy and celebrate over?

... Okay, they'll have some problems with some of the non-text-fiction, but here's some of his favorite novels: This one's a military romance set in ancient history about someone fleeing to a higher-tech country to organize the resistance to retake his homeland after an evil empire conquers it and falling in love with a woman who wants to rule his home country, this one is psychological hard science fiction about a space explorer trying to fix his ship before its orbit decays and it crashes into a star while dealing with the psychological problems that made him get into such a dangerous situation in the first place, and this one is a sociological fantasy story about someone randomly given miraculous powers and trying to use them to end poverty and running into lots and lots of difficult complications because ending poverty is hard.

Amentans will gleefully read Space Books. What kinds of problems would they have with the non-text, are they in 3D or out of Amentan hearing range or something?

Out of hearing range, outside the visual spectrum, designed to interface directly with the chip in your head... technology opens up a lot of prospects for new art, but that means the art is locked to the technology. But people still read novels.

Is there any classic human art from before all that?

Oh, sure, lots. Search for negative dates, that'll find them.

Cool! What's the inflection point on the dates for?

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.

Do humans still live on their original world too?

Um. Probably?

...probably?

He's purple.

(Well, no, but it translates so nicely.)

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'.

Oh no! That's terrible, what is the war about and who between?

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?"

"Yes, of course, do you want me to grab the blue for you?"

Oh !@#$ it.

"Yes, thank you."

The green trots off and returns with the blue, who bows politely. "Hello, I'm Kota Untfa. He said you wanted to send a message to the government? What part of the government?"

How do diplomat people talk?

"I would like to prevent a diplomatic problem that might happen when my people learn about you. I don't know enough about your government to know who to talk to. I don't want doing this to cause you diplomatic problems today, so I'm trying to do it quietly."

There. That sounds... kind of the way diplomat people talk?

"Can you tell me what the problem is so I can direct the message?"

... Is anyone else in earshot? Obvious earshot?

"... We have a - sentient rights code - that we expect people to follow. I are worried because Tapa seems very nice, but it does not follow it. I can highlight the relevant section in the data dump, but it is in the data dump, so everyone who heard the broadcast will know when they pay attention."

"Okay, that does sound like something we should know about. Do you have an email? I can tell the people whose department that would be to email you."

"I do. traveler@fourthspire.net."

"They're already giving out fourth spire emails? Mine's second spire..." mutters the blue, writing this down. "All right, you should get an email soon."

He has no idea what any of that means, so he nods. "Good." 

Presently the email app pops up a little badge reading "1".

He clicks on the 1! Does this do things?

It brings him to his inbox, which has an email, subject line "Untfa asked my dept. to get in touch with you..."

Yeah, he's going to go to the email and read the email and see just how bad it is.

This is Tashi Tosuk from International Compliance. I was alerted that you have a heads-up for us about some more international compliance we might be responsible for soon (at least, we all hope it's soon). Is it simple enough to tell me about over email, or should I come by the site in person?

It's good that they already have a department for handling this.

He doesn't say that.

My civilization, Imai*, is part of a larger organization, the League of Meridiana, which I expect Tapa would like to be associated with, because it comes with default-unless-renegotiated free trade, technology sharing and stellar defense treaties. The League has rules for respecting the rights of individuals it expects its members to follow which I included in the datadump. The full text of them is here: [link] and the relevant section is here: [link]. I wanted to sort this out quietly because I'm worried about diplomatic problems when official contact happens, or else someone on Amenta using it to cause trouble for Tapa beforehand.

I'll get right on reading that and seeing where we might not be conforming to our neighbors' requirements! Can you explain why it would lead to other Amentans causing problems for Tapa?

Because people might think aliens were taking sides in Amentan arguments.

I appreciate your discretion in getting in touch with my department, thank you very much.

The specifically pertinent bits are on collective punishment! If he reads back a bit, the treaty is actually three separate ones, for countries affiliated with the League who are not capable of running themselves, countries that are basically culturally identical to the League and want to fully integrate with it, and countries that are fully functional but that want to maintain autonomy while still enjoying trade/mutual defense/tech sharing treaties. Nau helpfully linked to one of the bits in the third, least binding treaty, which (if Tashi Tosuk searches far enough) has a nice preamble explaining that No Really We Understand And Can Try To Negotiate Alternatives That Leave Both Of Us Happy But We Take These Principles Seriously And Are Absolutely Not Going To Back Down, albeit very politely and poetically written.

The pertinent bits define 'collective punishment' as punishing one person for something he did not, in fact, do. There are exceptions for conspiracy and criminal negligence, but 'punishing children for the crimes of their parents' is very explicitly included as forbidden, along with 'punishing parents for the crimes of their children', 'punishing villages for the actions of one member of that village', and 'punishing members of a legal organization for something other members of the organization did,' and all of these behaviors are explicitly banned 'because it is wrong to convict the innocent for crimes of which they are not guilty' and 'because it is wrong to harm people because of things they had no option not to do'.

Does it have a clear definition of a "punishment" as opposed to an undesirable consequence of some other motive? It has to, right, you have to be able to disband organizations if they keep throwing terrorists or something even if you can't pin something on every individual member of the organization and normally disbanding somebody's organization is not something you do when you are being generally friendly with them but come on.

Yes! If Tashi Tosuk reads more of the treaty, Tashi can be reasonably certain that disbanding organizations on suspicion is something they disapprove of but are not going to kick you out over, but that governments judicially causing the death of their own citizens unless it is punishing them for a crime of which they have been convicted is very explicitly forbidden always and everywhere.

Are you aware of any respects in which we don't currently meet these standards besides Tapa's unique population control strategy?

Oh no, could there be other ways? Nau hopes not.

No, that was the only thing I noticed.

Okay, thank you very much for the heads up! There are some preexisting movements to scale down to the system we're using in our protectorates; with this impetus I'd expect those factions to have it all squared away by next spring.

I'm glad to hear it. It's good that won't be around to cause problems.

... Nau is not a COMPLETE idiot. He suspects strongly that they only did that because they didn't want to look bad in front of aliens who could cure death and give them hyperdrives.

Which means he just saved the lives of... how many babies a year? By the average numbers?

Fiftyish.

Wow. Fifty babies.

That's probably more impact than he's had on... anything, by his actions and not just his random coincidences, prior to sending that email.

He thinks he kind of likes it.

Tapa has well over a billion people, and some people every year decide they can probably hide a baby or that it would be worth it just to hear one cry or that the money will materialize or that they will get an abortion NEXT month... NEXT next month...

The policy in Tapai protectorates such as Shi Alassei is basically the standard "take baby, give to would-be adoptive couple on waiting list".

He doesn't approve of any of their population control measures! But population control measures are not explicitly banned as the sort of thing no civilized society could ever do. Imai* can imagine situations where it would implement population controls; it has population controls on forking, if not serious ones. But it would never kill babies unless it was at war and it was an unfortunate side effect of an absolutely necessary military move...

Okay, Imai* has probably killed some babies. But at least it doesn't want to kill babies, and at least he got Tapa to stop.

He is left largely alone apart from intermittent questions from the resident greens about his language, his textbook dump, anything he'd like publicized in cute articles about him personally as an individual, if he has any input on how to transliterate his name, etc.

"Naufragus" will do reasonably well as a usename. It means "shipwrecked." Or Nau for short. He does not want to write personal articles about himself; he is not personally interesting.

He's happy to assist with his textbook dump. He's happy to assist with their language. He hopes their science is progressing rapidly. He scans their news for articles of interest to getting home. He starts doing the bits of repairing his spaceship he can do, and urges them to focus on fixing the hyperdrive, which is so far beyond him he has not the faintest notion of where to start. Do they want him to print any tiny things? He can print tiny things if they want him to.

They could use some printed things for their attempts at re-engineering the hyperdrive, yeah!

Understood. He'll print them. In particular if they want to take a crack at looking at what Imai*'s computer chips looks like, that's the thing he has most experience with, but the replicator-factories can do lots of things as long as the Amentans can keep him supplied with the relevant earths.

The Amentans can produce feedstock for the replicators! May the greens watch them work?

Introvert On: NO ABSOLUTELY NOT MY SHIP IS MY PRIVATE SPACE.

*delete response before sending*

Decent Human Being On: Yes, I'll take one of them out of the ship and run it for a while outside so you can watch it work in better light.

They really appreciate that!!! They're so excited! They have cameras.

Great!

It mostly just looks like a metal box; a large box, but not so massive that Nau (who is a little taller than the average Amentan, and a good deal stronger) can lift without too much difficulty, and pack four of into his ship's protected core. The top has various containers for the feedstock the Amentans provided him; the bottom eventually dings and spits out a tray, on which is their desired printed thing. It isn't mass production, but it doesn't have very many limits on what it produces slowly.

Could they put cameras inside to see what it's doing or would that just wreck them?

... Huh. He has no idea what the answer to that question is. Whenever he'd fixed them, it was 'follow the manual, take out the broken piece, replace it with an identical not-broken piece', he doesn't actually know how they work other than what it says in the manual.

"I think there is a one-in-ten-thousand-chance that would somehow break the replicator-factory, and so I would rather not. If you think it is absolutely necessary I will hazard the experiment, but I expect it would slow us down a good deal if it broke."

They can at least wait till they see if there's documentation on how replicator-factories work and what breaks them in the data dump.

There probably is, somewhere in the data dump. (He has no idea where.)

... He's now back to missing asteroid mining. The people were less nice, but the stakes were so much lower!

(But he keeps that thought to himself.)

They have a LOT of people looking on finding stuff in the data dump and making it more searchable and better translated.

They are going to find a lot of interesting things in it!

For instance, humans... don't seem to want kids that much? Like, there's a lot of fiction with humans going through heroic danger and strife to rescue their children, but nowhere near as much as their is to rescue romantic partners, and only a minority of people recorded in history had more than 2-4 children. Also, especially in the world portrayed in the older fiction, humans seem to be more sexually dimorphic than Amentans, though some of it comes with warnings that it isn't to be taken seriously.

They also do not have a caste system! At all! There are mentions in fiction of people whose parents were plumbers and nobody thinks this was strange!!! And they are all hyposensitive except for a few people who are portrayed as having mental illnesses! Lots of human texts seem to talk about 'social mobility' - like, people whose parents were purple becoming green - as if it is a Very Important Virtue and all societies should be judged based on how much they do it!

They also appear - if the astronomical data is right - to have formerly had even shorter lives than Amentans, before Imai* cracked that. Imai* and those of its confederates who have adopted uploading are now comfortably ahead of Amenta, while other worlds merely have ten to twenty or so Amentan years on them.

Oh, and the League's technology is... kind of horrifying. Amenta has not found any descriptions of how to mass-produce robots yet, but it sure looks like Imai* does not have any manual laborers except hobbyists, and a small but significant minority of its laws appear to be for the purpose of preventing experimenters from accidentally rendering planets uninhabitable.

Wow! Well, they are aliens. But they will take the opportunity to ask Nau as delicately as possible if he can be confident he and his ship are definitely properly clean.

If they define 'properly clean' as meaning 'everything inside it has been heated to above the boiling temperature of water at some point since a biological thing last touched it', everything is properly clean except his brain, which is inside a nigh-impenetrable metal case surrounded by his entire body.

They'll call it good! Trade with a hyposensitive civilization will be complicated but arguably not having a caste system probably means they avoided the Amentan problem of having hereditary pollution. Does Nau know what's up with how humans don't seem to want kids?

... Nau isn't quite sure what they mean. He thinks that most people, if you asked them "do you want, at some point in your life, to have children" would answer "yes, definitely?" "Having kids" rates highly on life-satisfaction surveys? HE doesn't want kids because he doesn't feel he's competent to take care of them he's an extreme outlier in many respects, but he's an extreme outlier in many respects.

Okay, but like... they don't want kids a normal amount. For an Amentan. They weren't actually expecting to be different on this axis, because evolution.

Right, how many kids to Amentans want - 

Ohmy.

... You know that's actually a really good point, Amentans do seem to be better designed for evolution's purposes than humans are. He doesn't know what's up with that.

(quick check)

Birth rate plummeted when good birth control showed up. So. Uh. Huh. Why don't humans want kids a normal amount for an Amentan? Evolution sure dropped the ball there.

It's especially weird because humans have a narrower natural fertility window! They make up for it - or could - by being fertile year-round, but they don't seem to do that at all.

That is bizarre. What is up with humanity. Maybe they can find a book on evolutionary biology anywhere? That might have answers even if Nau doesn't.

They will have a look! So Nau doesn't want kids? What's that like?

It is like his reaction to the prospect of a small sentient entity being almost totally dependent on him being dread. That is what it is like.

Weeeeeird. Does he like other people's babies? There has been some concern that he might be under-babied what with having to stay with his ship and not even seeing babies on the train or whatever.

Not tremendously, no. He's told this often changes when you have your own, for humans.

... Humans do not get under-babied. At least not most humans. This may be another one of these 'alien' things.

Wow. Kind of the final strike against the people who were holding out support for the "humans are actually our species somehow some way" hypothesis.

Nau has heard stories about how bizarre some of the human subspecies out there can be, but he's not betting on it being true any more, no.

Also on closer inspection of medical texts it looks like Amentans are biologically different in a bunch of ways, just mostly not ones you can see superficially.

Yes, his computer was confident Amentans were aliens just about as soon as he landed. He was slow to catch up with it.

How does his computer interface work?

It connects to the chip in his head and then the language runs out of words. It's sort of like having extra limbs, or sort of like having a calculator in your head, but mostly it's like something his machine translator refuses to admit you have concepts for.

Cool. Can he point them at documents on the development of the brain chips? They sound neat and the neurologists in particular don't have that much going on at the moment and feel left out.

Hmm. With some searching, probably?

... Here's some stuff that sounds vaguely like the right sort of thing. Be careful, messing with brains is very dangerous.

They will be super careful. Initial research will probably mostly be on very old people, or people who need a brain computer interface to do basically anything because they're super paralyzed or something.

Good. And once you get in touch with the League, they have lots of bored scientists and entrepreneurs, but he understands you might not want to wait that long.

... If that's going to take a while, though, uh... do you want some automatic factories? Nau doesn't think he can mass-produce you robots yet, but he does think he might be able to adapt some of his mining technology to build you some self-running factories. Not a lot, though, since he needs to use the replicator-factories to make their processing systems.

That sounds awesome! Anything to free up more of the economy to throw more effort at getting into SPAAAAAACE.

Great! Can he ask for some help from some people who know what kind of factories he can do? There's charts for the basic version HERE and HERE and HERE - it's mostly metal controlled by computer systems, he thinks he's got ninety percent of it in his mining drones but there's another ten percent he'll need to implement from descriptions there, they're relying on some alloys you can't make with your tech base but he can produce small amounts to get started and then maybe they can snowball this and then they can have lots more metal.

Sounds good to them! They can send him purple engineers to get that prioritized and logistics'd.

Great. With luck there shouldn't be any problems.

Purple engineers appear! They are a little nervous but mostly excited. Seems like the bottleneck is metallurgical and they should catch up there first thing; the metallurgist introduces herself as Piki Tai.

Hello, Piki. The main issue is that the cynodes I'm producing to manage the factories work by directly manipulating Sarengha steel via electrical charges, then that serves as a sort of improvised 'body' to work as the manipulators of the factory, and you don't have Sarengha steel other than what I brought or what my replicator-factories can print...

So maybe they should make a little bit and have the little bit controlling some articulated arms of conventional materials?

That sounds extremely logical! Nau will see if he has any preexisting sources on how to do this... oh, yes, of course, the first place to check is that his old limbs used to work that way. Speaking of which he would like to send a message requesting electrically-insulated work clothes in his size while he works on this, and then he can see if there's anything on the mechanical-engineering side of modern artificial limbs that he can copy...

Oh sure, Piki can take some measurements while they're talking and send it off to a place that does resistor-outfits, that's where she gets all her clothes because she's too short for off the rack. And she knows a little bit about artificial limbs and can refer him to an industry contact!

Excellent, that's very helpful! Now, time to see how to make use of some of Amenta's engineering, since they're going to be manufacturing most of his parts...

Piki's very knowledgeable in her field, though her field is pretty narrow; she's actually here half as a networking contact because in her capacity as a metallurgy expert she talks to people in all kinds of industries.

How sensible. (Amenta is usually sensible; he expected more difficulties on first landing on an alien world.)

Eventually Piki bounces off to try some stuff in her testing ground with a person who does construction equipment.

She doesn't come back.

How odd. He should inform the regular greens that she's very helpful, and ask when she'll be back.

(By this point Nau has quietly worked vaguely purple highlights into his upper body, which was otherwise largely matte grey. If he's going to be mistaken for something, he knows what it ought to be.)

"- oh, I'm so sorry," says the green, eyes going very wide. "Piki - Piki Tai, right? She - I'm sorry, she died. We didn't realize that you'd been friendly to the point where you'd want to be told..."

"Excuse me." His voice is dead level. "Why how explain."

"There was an incident - at her factory, it -

- burned down."

That was a PAUSE. A very DRAMATIC PAUSE.

"Really."

(Nau is rather taller than an Amentan and often casually demonstrates super-strength by lifting heavy things, purely because it is convenient. And an alien with terrifying powers. And also ANGRY. He is not deliberately attempting to make an intimidation roll, he has not in fact considered the possibility, but some people might consider it anyway.)

"Why, exactly, did it burn down?"

The green takes a couple of steps back. "What I heard was that it was - a riot - she knew it was risky -"

He is not HERE to intimidate greens. He is here to ASK WHAT IS GOING ON. That is ALL. He does not understand why this green is reacting this way but he also does not really care.

"Who was rioting, why was it risky."

"There's some - elements who don't want there to be more automation, and the security for the factory was as tight as we know how to make it but there's still some leaks. - here is safer, it's far away from everything."

"Please explain to me any possible motive for wanting LESS automation, and everything about the groups that possess these motives. Use very small words."

The green slows down a lot, possibly to think of small words. "Some jobs... would stop being jobs... if robots could do more things. Jobs are important for... money, and child credits, that you buy with money. Anyone who thinks they could not get a new job that still existed if there were robots, might try to stop robots from happening."

"That is absurd. None of your castes are going to be annihilated so long as purples run shops and yellows program computers, and interstellar trade is about to usher you into limitless wealth, including sufficient planets to make child credits unnecessary. You are all going to be immortal. It is extremely stupid to kill people, when you are all going to be immortal. Please tell me a more plausible story."

"- it wasn't purples! Purples have more sense!" blurts the green.

"You have six castes. Purples have more sense. Yellows are programmers. Greens are scientists. Blues administer. Oranges look after children, robots cannot possibly render completely obsolete looking after children. Do you mean to tell me that grays have somehow decided that they are obsolete? I assure you our starships have captains! Or is that not physical enough?"

"Seven," squeaks the green.

"Seven castes. Really. Do explain."

"Reds - it's on the internet, you have the internet -"

"I have the internet. It somehow failed to mention an entire caste. I suppose I need to look harder."

What does the internet say about reds.

Apparently reds are a small caste, comparable in population to blues, which handle unclean work such as anything involving sewage, garbage, dead bodies, or each other.

Nau sees.

... Well. So. The Amentan governments are planning on cutting all red child credits as soon as they can automate the work. And leave them all to starve, no doubt. He will investigate this further before he officially announces that all Amentans are free, as a fundamental right possessed by any and all sentients, to go to any world that will take them, and half of Imai*'s colonies will take anyone, just in case there's an actual reason for this other than short-sighted greed and an unwillingness to let anyone change castes. (Then he can start pursuing justice against the stupid, stupid murderers, having robbed them of any moral high ground they might possess.)

(He will also quietly have his replicator-factories start producing some situationally useful mining equipment, since his real factories aren't doing anything yet.)

Reds are understood to be intrinsically polluted. If a red has to do some plumbing in an apartment, it's typical for the occupant to be out of the place for the following six hours so the place can be deep-cleaned to a ludicrous margin of error and then aired out; if a red has a traffic accident and is thrown from their vehicle into a pedestrian street it's typical to close off the block and rush everybody within ten yards into the nearest public emergency shower.

It is fair to assume that reds leaving Amenta to set foot on any other planet in any but the most tightly controlled of fashions would not be lightly tolerated by the other Amentans.

A-ha.

Well.

That makes his job more difficult, doesn't it.

He does not want to burn this entire planet to the ground. He does not want to wipe out ninety percent of the population, fill the streets with blood, wash his hands in blue-stained gore. There are a great many Amentans who are really very nice, and who have done nothing at all to deserve any of this. In fact what he would like would be for a professional diplomat, one of the Elders who has gotten so good at conversation that its voice is a type III infohazard, to show up and recite a single poem and then watch all clean Amentans spontaneously weep tears of sorrow that they ever did such a thing wrong, as to care about caste.

But he does want to fantasize about killing them all, just so long as it's only fantasy.

He does not think he can take over the planet with his available resources, not if he wants it intact. He does think he can design a radio transmission for broadcast that will convey the actual history to the next ship that crashes, assuming that ever comes, but although that might ensure the Amentans can't murder him to keep their shameful little secret and then run off with the hyperdrive, it doesn't solve the real problem. Indeed, driving them to kill him would create a worse problem, because then they might think that he'd been lying about the Unity of Man being the Unity of Man, and then there would not be any more Amentans, even though they are, in many respects, The Best Aliens and adorable, because the Unity of Man does not play by any friendly rules.

Let's start with the baseline possibility: If he forgets he ever heard about this, what exactly is going to happen to the reds? Are they going to starve, when robots show up?

There is not exactly a publicized plan about for the eventuality but it doesn't look like there's a lot of qualms going around about killing them quicker than that.

If he explains, very firmly to the greens in charge of studying him, that the League of Meridiana will not accept mass murder of reds, how exactly does the internet suggest the Amentans would react to this?

(He is not doing this yet, to be clear. He is just sitting quietly and thinking and looking stuff up on the internet and letting his machines whir.)

Amenta's internet does not have a Hypothetical Situation Answers Generator but after absorbing enough of the general culture he can guess that they might just cut all their child credits instead.

... And not, say, declare war on the aliens? He's a little worried about that possibility, what with being THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF A TRAINED DIPLOMAT.

Amenta likes aliens and wants to be friends! This does not get less true when the aliens have overwhelming technological and strategic advantages!

Huh. Wow.

(The Traveler will admit that he is the sort of person who considers destroying planets in fits of rage for literally negative strategic benefit, which is one of the MANY, MANY, MANY reasons he did not consider a diplomatic job for one second.)

... Still, he has a hook for talking to these people.

He's going to send a message to Tashi Tosuk.

 I know about Piki Tai's death and the reds. We have a problem. 

Would you like to see the security details for your site? It's much better-protected since it didn't need to be in any specific location or have access to any particular facilities, I'm very confident you're safe.

I appreciate that, but you don't understand the nature of the problem.

The three things wrong are that you told me nothing and I started a project that got attacked by terrorists and then someone died just before we could implement immortality, that I could not plan for this even though I strongly suspect you knew it would happen because you didn't tell me that it was a risk that people working on automation might get killed by reds, and the biggest one, which is that the League of Meridiana is going to panic when they learn about reds.

They are not going to learn about them in the context of a friend of theirs being murdered.

They are going to learn about them in the context of 'so, there are these people being bullied by their government'.

They are not going to think of the situation as more complicated than that.

If you try to do anything final about the reds, they will know that, and then they will not give you spaceships, because they would react about the same way that they wish they had reacted to the Unity of Man when it appeared - quarantining it to its home planets before it could accumulate any resources, because they made the opposite mistake before and they don't want to make it again.

They will not particularly care that the reds engaged in terrorism, and insofar as they do, they will solve it by putting you and them on different planets, assuming there are any of them left.

We need to find a reasonable solution that doesn't kill the reds and doesn't make the League want to leave you trapped on Amenta forever and get everyone on board before the diplomats show up to start negotiating.

And I need your help cooperating because I don't understand Amentans and will botch everything if I try to do anything on my own but I need you to be willing to talk to me about this.

(That series of messages involved a rapidly-improvised Amentan style guide and the computer's careful assistance with phrasing, and took about half an hour of preparation work before he felt ready to say anything to anyone.)

I'm so sorry, I should have realized that it would be a particular shock when you're from a much more advanced society. I don't expect it to be much consolation but Tai did know the risks and chose to work on the project.

What sorts of solutions to the red situation would work? It's politically realistic to pension them off with no child credits, but some of our analysts think that risks more violence from them.

I understand that, but though it helps - this is still a shock. I was thinking of Amenta as safe, so if I'm somewhat - overly emotional - my apologies for that.

(There, that will help explain why he's prepared to tolerate them. And it's even true - he doesn't know what would have happened if that green hadn't been so unreasonable, and gotten all his emotional energy redirected at the people lying to him. Not that he wouldn't kill the murderers himself, if they got away, but he can still see the horror of all of this, not just his own corner.)

The essential question is how we can get them contained without wiping them out, but I don't understand pollution well enough to understand how containment would have to work.

They just need to be prevented from directly touching anything we can't wash before we touch it. If they no longer provide essential services we can move them somewhere more out of the way where they have fewer opportunities to commit crimes, though my assistant's telling me it would be logistically nightmarish to sterilize them all first - not that many doctors learn to perform those surgeries - and enforcing population controls isn't easy and would get harder if they were all penned up together somewhere en masse.

Ugh. He knows where he wants to steer the Amentans, he just isn't sure how to get them there. Why couldn't someone COMPETENT have landed.

And they're prepared to do whatever terrorism they need to do to make sure they still control essential services. A difficult problem.

A few more questions, then, so I understand the situation better.

First: What do the researchers think the timeline on hyperdrive looks like? How long do we have to solve this problem?

Second: I assume you don't have any way to fix the hereditary pollution, or you already would have done it.

Third: Are there any - I don't know, red community leaders, you can talk to, who might be able to enforce a deal on their own people? I don't like the idea of letting anyone get away with this, but it's easier to get surrenders if you can talk to the enemy commanders.

Fourth: What power to coordinate on implementing any solution we find can Amenta manage? How well coordinated is the planet?

(He stops typing, looks at what he's written with distaste, edits it, sends it.)

1. They're hoping five years, but that sort of estimate is much more often too optimistic than too pessimistic.

2. That's right, all the methods that would do it would also kill the red.

3. I've called in the head of the red social work department and he says those exist but aren't particularly trustworthy.

4. Tapa's a well respected country; if we do something, and it works, and we explain why it's necessary to placate our neighbors, we can expect pretty good uptake. But we don't have the power to unilaterally enforce anything and even if we had enough of a coalition to do that we don't realistically project enough power at enough granularity to prevent every individual town from defecting.

Five years is too optimistic. Five Amentan years. He was hoping an Amentan season. Well. That will make some things easier.

I can fix hereditary pollution but I can't get the reds behind me and I don't have the budget and I have no idea how you can get the political will.

But the technology, I can do.

How would you do it?

When you came here, you wanted to make sure I didn't bring any pollution with me. I thought you meant germs not the broader sense, and I told you - twice, you asked again, later, more anxiously - that anything that came with me had been heated in the impact to the boiling temperature of water. That my initial body had been broken and shattered when I landed, making me improvise one out of my reserves of Sarengha steel. That this is not the body I was born with; that the only thing that was left of me was my brain, which is in a near-hermetically sealed container that does not interact with my body except via transmitting electrical impulses to the chip in my head.

You said that was acceptable.

Rule of thumb: I can print four cynodes - brain-interface-computers - every ten minutes. I need designs for how to adapt it to Amentan biology; once I get a working design, I can convert about two hundred thousand Amentans a year if I have the Sarengha steel, which is less difficult to develop than cynodes. Sterilization is a side effect, but Imai* doesn't worry about that, because we can synthesize new copies of anyone's genome any time we want, and we use artificial wombs anyway. It also provides excellent life extension, since your only risk is brain damage.

Small problem: The first people we test it on, it might not work; it's only been done for humans, before. I expect the first test subjects might die.

Large problem: We would be giving terrorists immortality before we give it to old, dying people. I have no idea how to possibly spin this, other than to try to get Amentan technology to the point where it doesn't need me to print the cynodes and make enough for everyone before we get help from the League.

Only upside: It could theoretically solve both problems and I don't have any better ideas yet.

Nau is so glad they can't see what his face looks like right now.

More than three times that many Amentans are born every year; that pace can't keep up with our old and dying even if we make it understood that the reds are test subjects to make it palatable that they go first.

(Nau is so glad they can't see what his face looks like right now.)

Then our new problem is: How do we get Amenta to the point where it can mass-produce the cynodes? Or else: How do we find a better solution?

It trades off to some extent against the hyperdrive, since both would require engineers and similar, but I'm getting the sense it might be better to have the reds' pollution all safely boxed up in bodies like yours before we go to meet them, is that right?

The price of that is that delays in meeting them are delays in them giving you all this technology we're reinventing, but yes; I don't know what they'd do, I might be worrying about nothing, but it's a risk that I would guess you don't want to take. The Unity of Man made everyone jumpy.

(Jumpy his ass, the Unity of Man kills stars for short-term military advantage. But there's 'jumpy' and there's 'desperate', and nobody wants to look desperate.)

That is unfortunate. I was hoping for a lower overlap there between cyberneticists, biologists and computer programmers on the one hand, and materials scientists and physicists on the other. But if resources are a constraint, it might be worth expanding resources first anyway, so we have more to devote to the projects.

I'm sure everyone is going as fast as they can. We've been hoping for something like this to happen for a long time.

Then why do you still have reds. The further back in your history you killed them, the better it would be for you when someone ethical caught up to you! It can't be a conscience matter, your conscience has a red-shaped hole!

And I am happy to help.

For, you know, certain limited values of 'happy'.

Would you like to be getting more systematic reports of everyone's progress?

I would appreciate it. It would help me to understand the situation better, since most of what I can do to help I don't know is needed.

I'll get something written up for you within the next couple of hours.

Fascinating. Nau will do his best with this improved knowledge to make sure that the project goes well, and that they aren't killing too many reds in the process.

So, well by his standards. Which are, so far as he is presently concerned, the ones that matter.

He does, of course, fret about the political problem. The people talking to him seem to have glided right past it. How are they going to get reds to go along with this? How are they going to get everyone else to go along with this? He doesn't know, and he wishes he did.

... He starts keeping an encrypted journal, and broadcasting it home (at, tragically, not FTL speeds) disguised as perfectly ordinary static. If this does go horribly wrong, he wants Imai* to eventually know what he was trying to do, whether or not he succeeded.

Nobody spontaneously brings up with him their twelve-point plan for getting reds to cooperate.

Then his priority is to try and calculate how he can find any reds to talk to. Do they have forums, websites, blogs? Do they talk about aliens, on these forums, websites or blogs?

They have forums, websites, and blogs.

They are mostly password-protected, clean roleplayers, or presented as belonging to clean people till somebody outs them and they go dark.

Password-protected, you say. "My shipboard computer has more processing power than your civilization and isn't very busy," is the sort of thing NAU says. He thinks he will see just what internet security looks like in Amenta.

Internet security looks like: the forum website already knows what email addresses are supposed to be logging in to the site, so the "create account" page errors out and notes his attempt when he tries it.

Heh. Well, then, was the website programmed by someone with proper security mindset? Was it, indeed, intended to defend against hostile actors with vast quantities of processing power and a spare hour with nothing better to do? Nau will check!

It IP blocks him. If he gets a new IP address and tries to find the login information of an existing account, it tells him to email his organizer to have them authorize the new device.

!@#$. Okay, so much for his superior technology.

... Can he try to track down one of the people who is red but formerly passed as clean and whose internet identity showed common sense, reason, and a willingness to engage in positive-sum trade, and who hasn't been murdered? Like, and get a current email address for such a person, or something?

Ones whose blogs are still up: yes!

One who have public facing email addresses that aren't things like "gofuckyourself@firstspire.com"? No!

He's sure he has SOME textual analysis software SOMEWHERE, and if he doesn't, he can train his machine-learning systems on Amentan books until they can reliably recognize text written by the same author in different styles, and then see if the Amentan internet thinks the authors of these still-up blogs have written anything else that they posted to the internet.

That works way better. Lots of those reds have new blogs on different platforms now.

Excellent. In that case, Nau is going to find an unusually reasonable red blogger, and send the following private message:

Hello. I'm Nau. I'm the alien who crash-landed recently, and I'm looking for intelligent, reasonable people to consult with about how to get your species into space without it first carrying out a quiet mass murder. I'm prepared to confirm my identity via computationally-intensive math or highlighting unrevealed text from the publicly-revealed corpus - if you name a subject for the next thing for scientists to be very excited about, I can get you an alien publication on the topic. I located you as a possible candidate to speak to based on the sensible things you said on your old blog about $subject, since I want a consultant outside the Tapai government to help me with what is currently our most pressing issue.

He'll then send out that message until someone responds reasonably quickly, varying $subject as necessary by what they blog about. Doesn't matter if it's a troll response, just as long as they're willing to let him keep talking.

well isn't that something

But he doesn't WANT them deleted overnight! They were saying useful things! Why do his actions turn out this way?

I don't suppose we can skip straight to you giving me an absurd arbitrary task to perform that I couldn't accomplish if I wasn't telling the truth?

nope

Understandable, if unfortunate. How about some alien novel recommendations? I have excellent taste in fiction.

sure, sounds like a laugh

Great! He highlights three novels nobody's seen yet, one of which is about high-stakes international diplomacy, one of which is an epic tournament in a board game unfamiliar to Amentans but with rules explained on-page, one of which is about someone on an alien world trying to figure out what's killing settlers.

The love interest in the second has red hair. The third gets into it because his father's the undertaker. The international diplomacy is about sanctions on a country that attempted to stop people from emigrating.

If he doesn't hear back in the next three hours, he'll send the simple, quiet message:

Do you think you'll want your own planet, long-term?

wouldn't that be something, planets too cheap to meter

It's a very big galaxy.

I don't have a ton of spare time to read

Do you want the relevant page numbers or are you just screwing with me? Because if the latter, I'd appreciate JUST BEING GIVEN AN ARBITRARY IMPOSSIBLE TASK ALREADY. Or blocked.

next time they have you on camera do the South Mountain Sign gesture for "fish"

I didn't write that blog, I think you have the wrong person

... What's the South Mountain Sign gesture for 'fish'? Is it absurdly embarrassing in non-South Mountain Sign?

The South Mountain Sign gesture for "fish" is apparently using three fingers to draw imaginary lines on the side of your neck, like gills. Not something you'd do by accident but not terribly out of place.

Fair enough! Then he can pretend to scratch his neck later.

Acceptable. Hope you like the books.

I actually found someone else. His arbitrary test was to make the South Mountain Sign gesture for "fish" the next time I'm on camera. If you want in then you can message me. I enjoy your blog.

glad you like it

Well, it's not as though he WANTS to be on camera, but he can protest it slightly less in the near-future. Maybe schedule another demo where people can get whatever footage they somehow missed getting of his replicator-factories earlier?

Sure! The Amentan appetite for video of the alien is bottomless.

The alien wants as little video of him as possible, because time he is on camera is time he can screw up disastrously more easily, and also because people. But he'll do it, since he (ugh) needs to.

okay either you're the alien or you can give him instructions

what's up

I want robots and no dead reds, and if your planet behaved slightly more like mine this would not be a difficult request. I have a not-horribly-doomed plan but the government of Tapa doesn't have a plan to implement it that they're willing to share with me, so I thought I would talk to the actual people who want to not all die and see if I could bring some of them in on it. Congratulations on on being the first one to return my calls.

("Behaved slightly more like mine" comes from editing out "was sane" and replacing it with something more tactful, in the event that the Tapai government ends up succeeding on spying on one of them.)

We'd heard you seemed kind of hypo, yeah

What's your not horribly doomed plan?

Ever wanted to be an invincible immortal cyborg? It comes with every part of your body except your brain being replaced with living metal! Perks include better senses, the ability to hear radio waves (you can turn this off if you want), being bulletproof, the ability to survive reentry temperatures, pain that increases logarithmically instead of linearly, and not getting killed by your own government!

Seems like it might make it hard to have babies?

Yeah, that's why we invented artificial wombs and the ability to synthesize arbitrary cells first. My species does still exist.

But we wouldn't be able to get pregnant, or nurse them? Would living metal feel right to a baby?

WHAT IS WITH THIS SPECIES.

Unfortunately, Version 0.1 will not have these features! It just comes with nigh-immortality. I can reshape my body at will, though, so you can upgrade as soon as we invent Amentan versions of those.

What about our children who are children now? What about people who are pregnant now?

Tapa is not close to being able to do this for everyone. People who are pregnant can have their children; children can grow up to the point where it's definitely safe for their age, and I can make sure we have artificial womb technology before we're ready to roll it out for everyone. (It's much simpler technology.)

There's no way they're going to let us have artificial wombs.

... Why not?

Why would they?

... Because each child credit for a child-born-from-red-parents-but-technically-not-red-in-a-herediary-pollution-sense-due-to-being-born-via-artificial-womb is one fewer child credit for a red child they need to assign?

In this scenario why do they need to assign any child credits to us at all?

They don't cut off all your child credits because you'd riot until they killed you all and they don't kill you all because my people are less inclined to give super-advanced technology and free planets to people who do that sort of thing, and also because I want them to be working on immortality ahead of robots and have some ability to get what I want.

If they make us immortal they don't need new ones to do the work. And they don't have to give us children on any particular schedule. They could be planning to tell us that we can always have children in a few decades.

On the one hand, that's a very good point. On the other hand, I expect a population boom among the clean castes because I can give them better farming technology (and because, long term, planets) and they'll need more reds to keep up with the rising population?

(He deletes the question mark, replaces it with a period, then sends it.)

If we're cyborgs, we probably can work longer hours.

If you're cyborgs, you're clean.

But still red.

WHY IS THIS PLANET SO UNBELIEVABLY STUPID.

So, point A, once we redevelop FTL you can go start your own planet if you want and do whatever you like. I grant that in the near term that is not tempting, so... I need to get you a way to become not-red once you become cyborgs? Is that about the shape of it? Any chance the blues would listen if I suggested that 'people who are clean shouldn't do red jobs' or are they just going to say that changing castes isn't a thing?

(While he has this conversation, he's going to search the internet for 'changing caste' and 'caste is stupid' and 'get rid of caste' and synonyms and see if there's anyone quiet and sane who might be able to help him with any of this and is unlikely to tell anyone.)

Changing castes isn't a thing at all. I've never met a blue, I don't know much about how they decide things.

Understood. Thank you. So your main worry is that they'll still treat you the way they do now even once you're clean cyborgs, in particular, not letting you have any more children than the absolute minimum necessary - which you expect will be about zero. What other problems do you have that make the cyborg plan not work. I want to know everything I can before I either junk the plan and look for a better one or start trying to fix it.

Our brains would still be there, right? I don't know if you were talking to theologians or just blues but I'm not actually sure we'd be considered clean then. Any more than wearing plastic makes us clean.

Just blues.

Actually, just a blue, but he suspects that blue was talking to other blues.

And... I thought they were killing you because they were trying to stop you from polluting things. You mean that even if your brain was the only thing that they could even claim was slightly polluted, they'd be trying to get rid of that? Even though it couldn't touch anything except via metal?

I don't know. I don't understand theology, it's not really covered in red schools. I just sort of get the impression that cleans think the march of progress isn't over till nothing's polluted anymore, anywhere.

Well, they can all go set themselves on fire, then. And they WILL, in twenty years or whenglitchingever the League of Meridiana lands on this planet feet first.

... Best aliens. Stay calm, Nau*. 

If we can get them not to kill you and you not to die fighting them, I'm not going to call that 'good enough', but I'm going to call it 'better than nothing'.

And I'd kind of like to, also, make your society a thousand times as rich. Just, you know. While I'm here. If I can do that without getting you all killed.

Are there any other high-level red priorities other than 'not dying' and 'not having all your child credits canceled' that you think someone with magic alien powers but no ground-level observational skills can solve for you?

You're magic?

Sorry, no, I was speaking too metaphorically. I'm not magic. I just have absurdly powerful technology.

Can cyborgs survive without air and stuff like that?

Technically, no. Practically, yes. I need to breathe, oh, once every few hours?

Would Amentan cyborgs season?

Depends on how far along we get the technology. I don't know of any conceptual reason for it to be impossible but I don't know how to implement it yet.

I mean, if we didn't, we could go live on a moon.

Ah. Things an alien wouldn't think of. Thank you, that's very helpful, do you have any more of those?

Moons? One of them doesn't have much on it right now.

No, things an alien wouldn't think of.

I'm not sure. You're the only alien I've ever met. I don't know if putting us on a moon would even work very well. It would be expensive and wouldn't work well for anyone who was too young to turn into a cyborg.

I'm sorry, I had completely misunderstood the direction of your arguments, due to being an alien. I had thought of 'an inability to replicate seasoning' as a problem, not as a possible gain? I don't know which it is or what the constraints are on moon colonies.

If we go somewhere without seasons, we get stuck in spring. If we don't season at all, because we're cyborgs, that might be okay.

Ah.

I do not know what would happen. Humans do not have a mating season, and although I am sure we have analogous problems, I do not know how we solved them.

I'm just a news blogger in my spare time, I don't know how to make plans like this really.

And I'm a mining engineer.

I don't suppose you know any competent experts who have the required skills to plan to save a civilization and don't want to wipe out your entire caste?

Not really but I could forward you to an actual community leader.

I'd appreciate it.

It'll take me a bit.

Understandable. But the limiting factor on what I can do for you is my ability to see the world through your eyes, not my ability to manufacture alien wonders. Anything that helps me know more, I need.

And if his hopeful-new-ally is going off to find him a contact, probably his next step is to double-check that caste mobility (or "reform", or, heck, "abolition") really isn't a thing. Using the power of the internet!

It super is not a thing people do in real life, except for one buried remark in the history of Ereith about how they fixed their caste balance when the settlers were too grey, not enough red, and generally skewed.

People do talk about caste reform, though. Respectable positions include dual-casteing more occupations, loosening up caste limitations for mixed kids, or increasing the out of caste income cap. Edgier opinions include only requiring credit money, specifically, to be earned in-caste, or outright allowing caste swaps the way immigration allows national swaps. Radical opinions include caste abolition... though even those people don't seem to have reds in mind.

!@#$. He can't convince them to abolish their caste system (he isn't superintelligent) and he can't even convince them to loosen it (he isn't intelligent). So... what can he do?

Well, he can try to brute force it with science.

In that case, it's probably time to go back to his blue and green handlers! Specifically, he's first go send the Him-Studying Greens corpus links to books on mechanization of farming, genetic engineering of crops, and high-tech fertilizers (in the hopes that more population growth will make Amentans generally happier), and then *sigh* check in with Tashi Tosuk. Have any crises come up before he does that that he needs to know about?

No crises have come up, Tosuk assures him. No other secret projects have been disrupted, the ag scientists are very happy about having stuff to do that's involved in the excitement, and also there's a TV show in the works adapting one of Nau's fiction recommendations, if that's the sort of thing that interests him.

... He's going to keep a loose eye on the TV show production, just to see how horrible it will be, but he really doesn't think he has time to be a cultural consultant. Maybe he can recommend them a few supporting books for context in case they wildly misinterpret something? Recommending books is not all that hard, not when he's spent most of his life reading. And if there are any other bored scientists he might be able to point at something useful?

And, uh. 

Is it worth getting me in touch with a theologian? I don't think I understand pollution well enough to know what problems my attempted solutions to the red problem might cause, and I'd like to learn enough to head the problems off as far in advance as I can.

I can have you sent a theologian! Are you interested in anything else about the field or just pollution theology?

I expect I should learn more about the field as a whole, but right now my primary interest is pollution theology, since that's important to the only potential crisis currently on my desk.

All right, you should have a theologian in the pack of greens orbiting you by this time tomorrow.

Excellent, thank you.

Well, while there's still some today left, does the pack of greens need anything?

The pack of greens tell him that the xenobiologists would like some highlights so they can learn about alien animals and plants and stuff.

(There aren't any alien a-)

Right. Sure. He can track down a few books on... vaguely related topics?

(He has no very good idea, but he has seen animals at some point and he has a search function!)

The xenobiologists appreciate this!

Great! He'll continue trying to answer questions for greens and solve metallurgical problems until someone gets back to him on a more urgent topic.

(And sleep. He should spend a few minutes on that, at some point.)