It appears in the sky with a burst of energy as it drops out of warp. A ship, right overhead and large enough to be visible to the naked eye for much of the population of Amenta.
A video message in a oddly trivial to translate language is broadcast across the globe. The speaker appears to be a young girl with golden hair sitting on a silver chair at the center of what appears to be the command room of the ship.
"Hi! I'm Captain Sierra of Starship Keetim - flagship of the Amalien Expanse. We come with hope for the flourishing of all sentient life, and with a promise to do all we can to help, empower, and advance everyone."
The message is accompanied by detailed instructions specifications for a variety of medical advances that have been found to generalize across most life, including penicillin, broad spectrum antiviral medicines, and omnivalent vaccines.
No that's just what they look like! They do have terraforming! They'll get back to them about teaching them to get to other planets.
If there's enough planetwide coordination, can a group (or two) of Amentas be put together to meet with them? And in the meantime, are there any active disasters or conflicts where people involved would like help?
There is actually at this moment a territory conflict over a farm province that the most populous countries in the world are fighting over pursuant to an issue with food exports. If space food is edible and they happen to have some that would be awesome. Tapa (the injured party wrt the food exports; third-party countries confirm) is happy to put together an international group and will even throw in a Voan green they have under arrest in Tapa if that will make it more suitably international (she didn't do anything, just in the wrong place at the wrong time and they were holding her in anticipation of a prisoner exchange).
He is mostly managing to not focus on the fact that this is his FIRST MISSION and he is so excited and scared and Captain Sierra is looking at him oh he should say things.
"Um. Scans don't show any signs of the use of weapons that could get past our shields. Overall tech-no-logical develop-ment is consis-tent with this as well."
Isha goes over what's in the video, just in case.
"So, we've come here cause Tapa offered to put together a bunch of Amentans to talk to us and we wanted to make sure that was okay with you and you felt included if the person they say they captured was there for you. Also to check if you needed any help and say hi since you didn't see our message."
Not exactly the most impressive adaptation to unexpected circumstances but at least no one's asked them to intercede on their behalf in the war. Yet.
"We'll have the green act as a representative then, and clear things with you later if relevant."
"Additionally, we'd like to give you a communicator beacon you can use to signal us for help if needed. It might be detectable by Tapa, so please don't use it unless it's an emergency."
Okay. They are sending a Tapai blue and a green, the Voan green, and additional greens from Cene, Anitam, Yvalta, Litholee, and Celenta, to represent the most populous countries (Yvalta's not but it is the most presentable example of an Oahksphere country, and Litholee isn't either but it can represent the other 'lees and their cultural sphere, and also these were the greens they happened to have ready to go on short notice who are relevant to this).
"I'm Pan Pahatun! These are Chi Katme, astronomer and speculative xenologer, from Tapa; Ilun Moka from Anitam, biochemist; Vatri of House Ndakar in Yvalta, physicist; Nidace Sotra from Cene, geologist; Lanut Kei from Celenta, ecologist; Yonde be-Balar de-Zuvad of Voa, metrologist; and Spree Achan of Litholee, linguist. If there's any other specialties we should be recruiting for, please let me know; this was a cross-section of areas of interest among greens fluent in Tapap so we could all communicate and representing a spread of nations."
Captain Sierra knows* who he is and is introducing him to aliens!!
Lucien graduated top of his class in Operations and so he has the sort of elite training needed to not eep aloud and hide behind his datapad.
*He has been an officer on the bridge with her for about a month now, and yet.
It's nice that she doesn't have to speed up to match walking speed with taller aliens.
"It's really impress-ive! Logistical ability is a place where Amaliens have had to do a lot of improvement over the past century. It's cool how Amenta has managed to do great at that on such a large scale!"
"Yes, that's when we had our first first contact. It's been a busy time since then and we've grown a bunch to meet new challenges and make our way in the galaxy. As I'm sure you will too!"
She'll have to talk to them about the war at some point but it's compli-cated and she wants to get the hang of talk-ing to them before then.
"Vulcans, who were part of a group called the United Federation of Planets we've had a really complicated relationship with - though we're currently on better terms than we were for a while."
They arrive at the conference room. Which is nice since she'd really rather not dive into this topic right away.
"Would you all be okay with a biological scan so we can make sure dinner is safe for everyone? The cooks are making a really delicious meal that's broadly consumable by humanoid species but the added precaution would catch any exceptions."
A junior doctor would like to scan all of them with this device he has, if that's okay. That way they can also check for any rare allergies that someone in the group might have.
He will also inform them that unless they request otherwise they'll keep the scans on file but only for use in medical emergencies, and even then only with their express consent.
"Never so much as today. One learns about all the countries that exist on Amenta in school, you see, and then one goes there and there's a certain excitement to seeing things in real life, participating in their culture, but they're still about what one expects. Where are you from?"
"After I turned five I went to a little academy in Shapto, barely a university, more on a tutoring model, with students on the buddy system and bopping around between various experts and specialists. Full Cenemi language immersion three days of the week and Oahkar on the classroom model as an elective, lots of history and political science, debate, rhetoric, social deduction games."
"Is it green for some other reason or just cause that's how you are?"
"Oh, actually making it so you get energy from it is harder. Also I think that wouldn't be nearly nuff, less you had way way way more hair."
"Vesti-gial genetic information that somehow causes a spe-cif-ic attractor across plan-ets to ev-olve humanoids that sorta look like you, I think!"
"Cause I need to sound em out sometimes. Most species don't once they're big, but Amaliensdon't change sizes like that."
"Amentan hair comes in most colors, and most of us are green, except Pahatun, he's blue. That's metonymy for the most common natural hair color of our caste but some greens have other natural hair colors and then dye it for signaling reasons," says Chi Katme.
"I do," volunteers Yonde. "It comes in almost yellow - you could call it spring green but people can't confidently tell, so I dye it to be clear."
"Amaliens don't... get bigger, but you also don't get fluent in languages you speak?" asks Spree in fascination.
"Mostly you just gotta filter out mel-anin and clean out dead cells that get all scrunched up and make it sorta white after that. Is hard to do without break the hair. Could do it with a really small syr-inge I bet, or maybe a ball with lots of teeny tiny pokey bits."
"Like. How sometimes people use 'um' or 'like' how I did just now when they're thinking. And then sometimes lots of people don't do that and an amalien would sound things out instead but they also don't do that."
"So some words are 'vocal-ized pauses', that you can say in plays when you are pausing to think. 'Um' is one, 'hm' is one, sometimes 'so' or 'like' are them to. Amaliens use sound-ing out compl-icated words to auto-matically add vocalized pauses when talking about more compl-icated things. Does that make sense?"
"I have a colleague who's studied filler words as one of her special interests, she'd love a corpus to examine if you have one to offer. Though possibly of more linguistic interest is how you're all speaking Tapap so quickly, I was anticipating computer translations but it appears to be coming from your own mouths!"
"The making the language seem like the hear-ers is actually really cool! So, it turns out that for most species the bit of the brain that understands the con-tent of a speech and the bit of the brain that tells the speak-er what langue it's in are sorta separate. So if you add the right under-lying pho-netic signatures from their native language to audio then their brain automat-ically sorta infers that the language is the native one, even if it's not! That means you can make aud-io that sounds like the na-tive languages of mult-iple different speakers - though it can be harder for lots of speak-ers. If you look at lips or listen really close-ley and just pay attention to the sounds and not to the con-tent then you can notice difference. The brain also some-times hal-lu-cinates an accent to con-vey the inf-or-mation that the speaker is not speaking na-tiv-ley in your language."
"Act-ually doing the trans-lation is much harder, without enough info. Some people use brain wave scanning but we use a sentient-language that people's brains learn really easily instead. The phonetic signat-ure thing does the rest of the work to make list-en-ers think it's their language, so long as we have a little samp-le of their language first to der-ive it from."
"I think it works by skipping past the translating bit of a brain right to the 'facts about how the lang-uage works' and 'what that means' bits of the brain sorta, but I don't know how. My idea is that it's a localized ideo-graphicly stable form of anti-entropy but it's hard to test that."
Amentans live very densely, but would like more room to spread out! At the moment there's some tightness in the food supply due to a problem with unverifiable exports from a major producer (Voa) but that's not a typical problem, normally they have their population controlled to the point that nobody needs to go hungry.
"A bad actor in Voa decided to contaminate unspecified food production bottlenecks," Pahatun explains. "Any given product from Voa is almost certainly fine, but we can't tell, and neither can the Voans - or if they can they're keeping it quiet. There isn't a current limiting factor - if we suddenly discovered a lost colony of Amentans living in an undersea city and their undersea city was then destroyed, there would be space and food for millions of refugees, though there'd be arguing about who had to take them. But right now we're aiming for a low, sustainable growth rate, rather than pushing to the point where a natural disaster or some such problem could push carrying capacity to the breaking point."
"I think most projections suggest that food would be the first thing to be a problem, though some extractive industries would also wind up with issues - we do have some asteroid mining but it's not cost-effective yet, it's purely R&D budget at this point.
"I'm not sure your scientists and medical personnel will be able to help; it's not a conventional microbe or chemical, it's just polluted."
Sierra thinks she should probably focus on one thing at a time, and helping more people live there seems like a thing Pahatun is more excited about. She can figure out what pollution is later.
"We can definitely help with the asteroid mining, and help with food replicators that can do fairly efficient food crea-tion from raw materials, I think. We don't have them set-up ourselves because we don't need to eat enough for it to be worth it. And our cooks are great, though I'm told there's some really neat food you can make with the repli-cators."
After dinner winds down, Captain Sierra stands up at her seat.
"I'd like to thank everyone for coming. It's meetings like this that really em-body the goals of the Amalien Expanse and the progress we hope to encourage, between all species."
The lights dim as she's saying this.
"A few times today questions about Amalien history and experience with other cultures and warp have come up - sensitive topics I'd hope to save for when we had a better understanding of each other to help us communicate about a delicate situation. However, I think this was an error - and onee I apologize for. Being evasive is not a good way to open dip-lomacy. Amaliens are still new to this, and this is in fact the first major first contact we've had since the end of a dark period in our history - one we are still learning how to address and communicate about."
"In the interest of transparency, I'd like to talk to you now about the Federation, the history of the Amalien Expanse, and the Prime War."
A globe appears in the center of the room, hovering over the table.
"Amaliens, about a quarter of one of your centuries ago, were not very ad-vanced - we didn't have a very clear gov-erment or eveen mass pro-duction. We knew things, but didn't really use them. We don't repro-duce, we don't age, need little, are coop-eratively in-clined, and are really really hard to hurt. But, somee of us still re-searched science things for fun, and Vira - " she gestures towards her " - was attempted to test a theory she had, using a cobbled to-gether craft she had built up all the parts to make. Her idea was that if she was right, it would go fas-ter then light, us-ing something called a warp drive."
The hologram zooms in on vira traveling in a ship - details of the ship are blurred and impossible to make out.
"It worked, and a scouting alien ship - detecting this - made first contact with Vira. They welcomed us to the greater universe, and opened dialogue about our interest in joining the United Federation of Planets. They also gave us access to much of their technology, so that we might improve ourselves and ally with others who had reached a similar stage of development."
The holograms zooms out, to reveal the many systems of the Federation.
"During this time, their were some difficulties between us and Federation, but we were optimistic and hopeful about eventually joining."
The hologram zooms in, to a ship passing by a remnant of a shattered planet.
"A small Federation vessel, ferrying a few Amaliens to a meeting with the Federation about our application to join, discovered the Ranthir. The Ranthir had segregated themselves by sex into two separate hemispheres of their home planet. Less than a decade of your time prior, a rogue black hole had passed nearby, tearing their planet in two, flinging the members of the two sexes apart. They were facing extinct-ion, with space flight nowhere near fast enough to connect the two groups."
A hologram illustrates this process, before returning to the prior view of the remnant.
"The Federation's Prime Directive forbade inter-ference in pre-warp cultures, opt-ing instead for a policy of letting civilizat-ions develop on their own, for good or bad, on their own. Thus, the Federation re-fused to do anything."
The hologram zooms in on the ship, displaying the faces of a few Amaliens next to it.
"The amaliens on the ship decided this wasn't okay. They mut-ineed, taking over and making contact. Handing the Ranthir plans from Fed-eration archives on how to construct warp cap-able ships, and offering their help in building them. The Feder-ation came to try to stop this. Ama-liens came too, to defend the Ranthir."
The hologram illustrates the battle - it's clear their are federation and Ranthir casualties. Eventually, a single lone amalien is flung by an explosion into the rogue black hole.
"Everyone lost some-one. We tried, after that, to make peace with the Fed-eration. They wanted that too."
A recording of talks are shown. Both sides appear tense.
"It didn't work."
The hologram zooms in towards a ship, labeled as belonging to a Ranthir criminal syndicate.
"Us-ing warp, some Ranthir's be-came pirates, and stole more Fed-eration technology. A pol-itical faction within the Fed-eration, previously not the most powerful one, be-came pop-ular enough to force a cond-ition of peace that the Ranthir, who they said weren't 'mature' enough as a civ-ilization, would have to give up warp. The Ranthir didn't want to and we told them we would help protect them."
The recordings talk show people becoming annoyed, and then go dark.
"War broke out."
A montage of images - showing battles, broken ships, explosions.
"We advanced ourselves, built ind-ustries, and attempted to make allies along the way, finding people who were left behind by the Federation, and finding new species as well - many of whom were will-ing to risk joining the war to rec-ieve warp from us. We did not make it a cond-ition to help us in the war, but many did."
Different species and groups are shown. A species with dolphin heads, a species of humanoids with four ears, a cybernetically upgraded person, Moira, and a species that look like unusually fit humans.
"The war was bad, and accidents and attempts to gain adv-antages on both sides meant a lot of people died."
A planet is consumed by metal in a timelapse, a ship crashes at warp into a space station, bombings occur on primitive planets.
"Even-tually, we were able to comp-romise. To prevent more blood-shed and to avoid the risk of even great-er disasters. Systems we gave warp too were allowed to keep it, and even join the Federation. How-ever, we promised to never again give out warp, or any related tech-nology. We are allowed to help, this was some-thing we could not com-promise on, but we are not allowed to help in that way. Not again."
The holograms fades. A moment later the lights come back on in the room.
"You are the first major civ-ilization we've made contact with since then, and we're still figur-ing out how to talk about this with new people."
"If any of you have questions I'll do my best to answer them now."
"We can provide any technologies that are unconnected to warp, and in many cases we can even find ways to replicate technolo-gies that involve some warp similar principles with non-warp methods."
"Food replicators are one thing - they need raw material or energy but that's all. We can teach very fast travel that's still much slower than light. We can share lots of medical advancements. We can share holograms and scanners and some advanced computing. We can share how to make robots that can do manual labor and things. We can share some cheap clean power source things. I think we can share some terraforming things. Lots more I think, we have a doc we can send over of things we know we can share - though it might not yet be complete."
"We can also intervene personally I'm things like natural disasters and stuff."
"All right. Of those I think we can get the most mileage out of terraforming - there are a couple potentially usable planets and moons here in our system - and robots, which among other things would free up more of the workforce to attend to settling - for example - Katme." He nods at Chi Katme when he says this.
"Hm... has carbon di-oxide and frozen water round poles. 'nuff ice to make an atmo-sphere if it was heated up. We can do that from the ship in bout a month I think? Also tractor in some ast-eroids with more water if we need to. Might need to get some things from Refuge, but not much... No magnet-o-sphere but we can solve that with ... science I maybe can't talk 'bout but will let us re-heat the core. Plop down some very fast growing al-ge that use-s water and carbon di-oxide to make ox-ygen with lim-ited population gen-etics to keep it from be-ing in-vasive and it should work out fast. Could add an in-dustrial replicator maybe but those are hard and not sure if we can give you all the tech for those - but can have one if there are elements missing? Could be completely habit-able in may-be two of their years, and could have it liv-able within very big flimsy domes with oxy-gen converters in may-be a quarter of one?"
"Prolly you should move people off? If you want us to move sooner asteroids to crash into there for having more things there, should prolly do that first. Maybe also put them in places you're okay about not sett-ling at first, so volcanoes can calm down."
"I was more thinking about how easy it is for you to move plants and people and machines you need there. Also would be good to know whether you can con-struct a large dome to put people in with glass panels or something - doesn't need to be super duper strong. And won't be needed once the at-mosphere is better in two years."
"We can absolutely have the stations evacuated. We won't want to settle the equator or the poles any time soon, as they're not seasonable. We know how to build arcologies; the ones on the moons are larger than ones on Katme because the transportation logistics are much easier on the moon, but, again, with the prospect of a truly habitable Katme we can redirect a lot of the economy toward this."
"K! Domes are only so the oxygen gen-erated my the oxygen con-verters we put there doesn't escape too fast. But the at-mosphere will be a sim-ilar density outside, just less oxygen, so it shouldn't matter too much if there are leaks. Temperature and stuff should be reas-onable I think."
"We can also help with some transport but might be better for you to learn how to so you can do it yourselves. Can help teach some-things if you want."
"You can make sails that catch sunlight is one way to help with that once you're out of the at-mosphere. It's slow but cheap."
"For getting to space you can use really big explosios to blow things into space!! Prolly you'll want to use cold start fusion bombs to avoid side effects and things. You can blow whole cities up there if you try hard at it!"
As the evening winds down, a few of the guests are invited to stay overnight for meetings the next day.
And Moira leaves with the departing diplomats, to investigate the front of the Tapa-Voa war.