Well, if she's asking.

"Mostly the ports are standardized since we copied the Federation's standards and then help other members of the Amalien Alliance with the tech, but you have to account for how for a lot of the planets of the Amalien Alliance they've only been at this level of tech for a few decades or less, so they are going to make mistakes and the planets and prior-to-contact tech bases are all really different so the sorts of mistakes they make are all going to be different in distinct ways and so our system has to accommodate that well, while still being able to take advantage of how everything is sorta standardized. And also the Federation has updated their standards some since we copied them, even though they didn't really need to, so we need to be com-pa-tible with their new systems too!"

"Oh, uh. Sorry, I got quite into this project and can be a little bit much about it."

"Oh, it's interesting, all the facts I learn have so many implications. I admit I'm a little puzzled how pipe engineering leads to a captaincy."

"Oh, it was a project I did when I was at a school for Officers. It was neat enough that I when I graduated I got to be Chief Operations Officer under Captain Freet, then under President Sierra, then a bit as a Senior Envoy, and now this."

"What's a President?"

"Oh, elected head of government. We started having one after meeting the Federation and deciding we needed someone to make legible de-cisions and they had a president so we copied that. In our case the elections aren't very meaningful - Sierra gets all the votes."

"Uh, technically she's only president of my nation, other places that are part of the Amalien Alliance have their own setup. In practice she's also in-charge of the alliance as much as that means anything."

"She gets all the votes?"

"Basi-cally? There might be a couple of exceptions but out of the hundred thousand or so Amaliens I'd expect less than ten to have voted for someone else the last time we did an election?"

"My species is unusually unified cause we're all very old, mutually trusting, have similar values, and are not very interested in personal power. A lot of why we ended up at the center of a big alliance is our ability to coordinate with each other - if there's one of us around than they can represent our collective values pretty well."

"I guess that's... convenient..."

"Mhm. Except for how it worries a lot of people when they first encounter us."

"Worries them how?"

"Oh, the most common way a leader gets unanimously elected is by having rigged elections."

"Oh, I must not have been clear - I can see why the unanimous election would be worrying, but not why it would be worrying for each of you to be a good representative of your shared values."

"Oh. That worries people less often. Though it's vaguely similar to how the Borg work and that can be disconcerting for some."

"I suppose I can see that. Why are you so similar, I assume you don't do it the way they do."

"They're a hivemind - a bunch of bodies but no individuality. Amaliens have similar values and high levels of trust but that's it."

"Yes, but why?"

"I think the similarities are just coincidental? The Borg's version is from their collective being like a particularly sophisticated virus that attempts to maximize how much it spreads by parasitizing hosts. It's not a perfect metaphor - the collective is fairly intelligent. The amaliens get our variant from our personalities and society."

"I think there's been some worry about people becoming more similar to the Borg in order to fight the Borg, but that's mostly been about cyber-netic upgrades and not tending towards increased coordination."

"What I'm trying to ask is why the amaliens have such similar personalities to begin with."

"Oh. I don't know. Though uh, for what it's worth we do have a lot of variance, just not with how we think about big ethical questions. Could just be a function of how long we've had to come to a consensus on things but I dunno if that feels right to me."

"Huh. I'd be curious to meet some more of you."

"You definitely will! There's over a thousand of us at the station at any given time."

"Do I get a tour?"

"Sure, if you'd like. It's a large station with a bunch going on - I think you'll like it."

She watches the rest of the docking process and waits to be conducted wherever she is meant to go.

Docking over, Isabella and the others are scanned thoroughly to determine they are definitely not Borg.

From there Isabella can have a tour! The station is really quite large. There are multiple mess halls, over a dozen different laboratories, a cargo bay where they construct ships, classrooms and auditoriums for the small university that resides there, combat training rooms, two restaurants, a bar, garden, and residential areas. Isabella gets an entire diplomatic suite to herself, complete with two bathrooms, a small kitchen, a dining room/living room, and a guest room/study. Her bed is angel sized.

A third of the station has an aesthetic that blends low tech village with the more high tech aesthetic of the rest of the station. Lucien explains that this section is typically referred to as Keetim (as distinct from the overall station, which is locally referred to as "the station") and that it's only open during the day and is itself sentient.