"I'm being paid to help you!" Sandalwood responds, because this seems more likely to go over well than trying to put their visitor in a box she clearly doesn't want to occupy.

"My self-tree thinks that having someone designated to make a good first impression with aliens is a good use of resources. Even if helping you doesn't turn out to be important, it's the policy that we will try to be friendly and helpful to aliens. And we think enforcing that policy uniformly is going to be better for us long-term."

"...am I an alien? I guess I'm an alien. I don't really feel like an alien."

"Well, nobody feels like an alien to themselves," she agrees. "To you, we're the aliens."

"It's still weird to be in a normal park talking to a normal person in normal language but also being an alien there."

"Would you like to go somewhere stranger?" she asks. "We could go to the Moon."

"Hmm. The moon doesn't sound very strange, actually..."

She laughs. "Fair enough. How about ... oh! Do you want to go see some of our spaceships?"

This seems like it might result in moving, so she climbs to her feet and then shrinks to match scales with their visitor, walking over to stand nearer.

The doll looks startled at the sudden size change, but recovers her equilibrium quickly.

"I could go see a spaceship. I think spaceships might sound strange. I'm not sure."

"Well, there are plenty of strange places. Maybe you'd like the dragon peaks on Venus," she replies. "But first stop, the Saturn Solar Shipyards!"

There is a gentle flash of light, and then they're standing on the polished black marble floor of a viewing platform. Saturn's rings arch above them, their reflection swimming beneath their feet. The entire sky is a transparent dome, with nothing save a fixity field holding the air back so that there's no obstruction between them and the shipyards.

Above them floats a replica of the USS Enterprise. Around it swarm a variety of smaller support craft, currently busy patching the burns which a Borg cube (visible in the distant background undergoing similar repairs) put in it during the last reenactment.

A moment after they arrive, a man in a Starfleet uniform appears on the other side of the room with a completely different lightshow, and walks around the curve of the horizon.

Teak, perhaps among others, may notice that the doll's soul did not initially come along for the ride—but it heads in the right direction immediately, elongating along the way into a ribbon of undifferentiated soul-substance. It appears to be obeying the speed of light, at least for now.

Meanwhile on Saturn, the doll's body is totally inert, its face frozen into precisely the same expression of cautious interest she was wearing when they left, all points of articulation suddenly loose and unsupported. One eyelid falls shut as it crumples quietly to the floor.

"Oh gods I killed the alien!" she exclaims, turning to regard the slumped body with horror. "Please somebody tell me we got her in the backup system."

Teak -- who has been assigned alien monitoring duties because nobody else who has tried can see her soul -- puts an avatar on the floor a little ways away from Sandalwood.

"So A, yes I did get her in the backup system I think. But I wouldn't rely on it too much, because she's an alien and we still don't understand how she works. B, her soul is on its way here the slow way, and will get here in an hour and a fifth. C, I'm putting a teleport lockout on her so this doesn't happen again, but please try not to do anything else unusual to her," she replies.

Luckily, space is big, and her soul isn't going to pass too near anything important. Teak marks out the predicted flight path and diverts a space station that would otherwise come within a few million miles.

One nice thing about being an upload is that she's long ago become used to running multiple points of view and switching between them. She sits with Sandalwood in the shipyard observatory, talks to the other physicists in their virtualized lab environment, and follows along behind the soul as it makes its journey.

Half way through her flight, she gets an urgent ping and another avatar appears beside her.

"What is that?" Pear asks her. "And more importantly, why can some of my monitoring not see it? I can't manage orbital clearances if I can't automatically monitor all the objects that need orbital clearances."

"Did you hear about the alien? That's her soul," Teak replies, nodding towards the elongated ribbon of soul-stuff. "I'm more surprised that you can see it at all. So far I'm the only one who can. And yes, I know that makes no sense. We're still arguing about it in <virt:fcrt-lab-environment-1>."

She inserts an avatar there, sees that they've gotten into specialized arguments about high-order field harmonics, and drops the perspective.

"So why do you think we can see it if other folks can't?"

Teak shrugs. "No clue. We're all using the same sensors, and nearly the same cognitive architecture. The anomaly stops somewhere in the early parts of the visual cortex."

Pear pulls up a list of cognitive trials, and overrides the blinding. She cross-references everyone who has looked at the alien's soul, and isn't one of them.

"... it looks like you're part of a trial for integrated dynamic spatial senses, yeah?" she asks, after a moment of prodding.

"Yeah, why?" Teak asks. "You know you aren't supposed to look at that without good reason."

"So am I. And nobody who can't see it is so far. It's either that, the improved kidney function trial, or random chance. Let me drop that on the rest of the physicists, see what they make of it."

She re-opens a connection to the lab environment and whistles.

"Hey! I have an experimental result you'll want to see. Look at this."

They conduct a series of experiments, the final results of which are:

• Nobody with a physical brain can see it
• Nobody not in the trial group for the improved spatial senses can see it
• People who receive the same intervention as the improved spatial senses group, but haven't yet adapted to that can't see it either

"... so we'll know more once a few people have had a chance to adapt to the changes," Teak tells Sandalwood. "But yeah, it's pretty wild. I have no idea what's going on. Pear, Elm, Yew, and I are all going to swap off monitoring her in case something else happens."

"I just hope she's okay," Sandalwood replies, wringing her hands. "If she doesn't make it, it will be the first murder in three years and it will be all my fault."

"I'm sure it's fine. Her soul will be here any minute now."

Teak paints a marker in Sandalwood's vision, letting her see a glowing point a few degrees above the local horizon.

"Alright, I can do this," Sandalwood says to herself, nervously smoothing down her dress. The marker grows larger in her vision and Teak starts counting down.