She is adrift in the vacuum of space. She’s currently orbiting 1) a G-type yellow dwarf star, 2) a planet approximately 200,000 km away. The stars of the milky way burn bright. All around her are powerful radio transmissions, coming from the planet and several O’Neill cylinders orbiting said planet.

The O’Neil cylinders feature prominent branding for the “PACNA Corporation”.

The fixity crystals worked into her armor capture the incoming light, and quickly match the visible stars and pulsars to her existing star charts. It is 2553, and she is just over 150 light years away from Earth.

Amethyst didn't exactly expect to end up back in a world with a ... copy of the same galaxy? There are no other fixity fields in evidence, and no sign of the expected stellar construction near Sol, so it's clearly not her world.

She takes a deep breath, and instructs her fixity crystal to fork her. And then there are two of her, hanging face to face in the void. Unlike her previous forkings, she remains connected to herself. It's just her -- the two of her.

She hangs in space and starts using her magic wardrobe powers to produce more charged fixity crystals. And she starts up an ion drive, and accelerates to intercept one of the cylinders.

They use radio, at least, even if it's encrypted. Once she's put some distance between herselves, she picks a frequency they aren't using, but which is close enough that they probably have compatible receivers set up, and begins calling into the void.

"Hello! I'm Amethyst," she tells all the radio sources in local space. "And it's wonderful to meet you. If you send me a language sample, I should be able to pick up your language pretty quickly."

She stands alone in a cold, featureless room in absolute darkness, wearing a VR headband. Around her she sees a space traffic control office, modelled after the one on Terra, complete with fluorescent lights, 20 other traffic controllers standing at their stations, and a cacophony of alarms and alerts. Her other coworkers are fake, of course, shams to "set the pace" -- there hasn’t been anyone else actually here for the last 3 days, since her last shiftmate was conscripted into the Cosmic Navy. She takes short cat-naps when she can, keeping the airspace around the cylinder barely functional, hoping for a relief that she fears at this pace might be weeks in coming.  

A new alert appears in the center of her field of vision, highlighted in red. It’s marked “accounts payable”.

Someone is trying to freeload, and on a premium band too! 

...It’s too much. Every day, her debt to PACNA increases, because the company scrip she makes from working isn’t enough to cover the “time off task” from the naps she takes. She’s felt recently like the entire world is just going to crush and crush her until there’s nothing left, and now even the ships trying to dock with the Can can’t even have the common decency to pay for their own comms! 

If she responds and can’t get whoever this is to pay for their unbranded act of communication, then she will be responsible for the costs herself. At least her VR headset is indifferent to whether she accepts the “collect call” -- as far as it’s concerned, freeloaders don’t count; the customer reply countdown has not appeared.

She brings up a visual of the mystery ship, currently heading directly for the cylinder. It’s... just a person wearing a spacesuit? It looks like a very fancy spacesuit, almost like a suit of armor out of a fairy tale. She briefly considers ignoring the message. Probably this is just some rich asshole out for a joyride, and they will eventually bother to talk like a sane person.  

...on the other hand, maybe they’re hurt or a kid or something. If they continue on their current trajectory without authorization, eventually the Can’s point defense lasers will fire... 

Wait... She can’t listen to the message on her main screen without it costing her, but she CAN look at the signal preview which displays the waveform of the transmission. Looks like speech! She screenshots it, then imports the image into her old radio-training software, converting the image into a normalized sequence of numbers, eyeballing the frequency, and playing it as audio:

"Hello! I'm Amethyst, and it's wonderful to meet you. If you send me a language sample, I should be able to pick up your language pretty quickly."

...It’s the most beautiful voice she’s ever heard. Even prettier than the voices of the Affini that sometimes make it through all the firewalls. But why is she asking for samples of English when she speaks perfectly clear English already?

She finds, despite herself, that she’s already accepted the collect call. If it’s her fate to be crushed, she’d like to be crushed having heard more of that voice. 

“Hello Amethyst, this the DeBeer’s-class station Canopy, traffic control, brought to you by the PACNA corporation. Would you like try some 'Me-Time' sleep aid pills? Do you require assistance? Also are you aware you’re currently freeloading, are you able to switch over to a regular line?”

She re-orients in space to face the transmitting antenna. With a better view, Cat might notice that her helmet doesn't cover her face, and she has no apparent breathing apparatus.

What is the point of miraculous language learning powers if you end up somewhere that they speak English? she wonders to herself. The content of that response is more concerning than its language, though.

"Oh, English! I hear you, traffic control. I am an explorer from another universe, so I don't have any information on your communication protocols. If you can give me technical specifications, I can switch over to whatever band and encoding is best," she responds. "I can also do a bunch of other communication formats. If you have me on external cameras I could do semaphore?" she adds, under the assumption that there is no conceivable way to be 'freeloading' just by waving her arms any more than she already is just by being in orbit.

?! 

She wonders if she’s finally started hallucinating from the lack of sleep, or is dreaming, but she feels more awake now than she has the entire last year. And besides, when she dreams, the alarms in her VR display seem to change every time she shifts her gaze. These alerts, in contrast, remain completely certain that there’s a woman floating outside the Can, no helmet, with the most beautiful face she’s ever seen to go along with the most beautiful voice she’s ever heard. 

“Don’t worry about the freeloading, I’ll cover the cost. Please hold your current position. What do you mean by ‘explorer from another universe’?"

Amethyst emits a diffuse burst of cold, high-speed noble gas to kill her momentum relative to the station.

"I’m a representative of a group of people from a star just slightly over 150 light years that way,” she says, pointing directly at Sol. She’s going to leave out the ‘magic notebook powered by the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed’ part for now, because something tells her that will be complicated to explain.

“Just before arriving here, I took part in an experimental procedure the end result of which was theoretically transport to another world,” she continues. “I’m fairly sure it worked, because I appear to be in the same galaxy, but about 500 years forward in time, and I don’t see any evidence of my civilization of origin around our star of origin. I hope to be able to do technological and cultural exchange, provide medical assistance, and eventually facilitate bidirectional trade between this world and my world of origin, once we’ve figured out how to make interworld transit repeatable.”

She adopts a small smile, inviting the traffic control operator in on a private joke. “I come in peace,” she adds, betting on a somewhat shared cultural heritage to match the traffic control operator’s apparent English fluency.

It feels just like when she first learned about the Rinans a few years ago, that something great had brushed against her life, filled with limitless potential. She didn’t see the news directly; she heard about it at work, and so for her shift she dreamed about how things might be different, better in another world. She still wonders if they could have been friends with the Rinans instead of what happened. 

And now here is a person from another universe entirely! And Cat's the first person to know! 

It’s altogether too much -- she feels like her heart might burst. She hates that she’s so tired, hates that she’s afraid, hates that she’ll probably mess this up, hates that she reflexively tried to sell sleeping pills to the alien.  

Her VR alarms are all silent. It feels appropriate, like an urgent message to dock someone’s deluxe Pfizer yacht would ruin the sacredness of the moment. The silence gives her time to think:

...What kind of person would volunteer to be flung out of space, without knowing whether she could ever return home? And do it with a smile, unafraid? 

She thinks she herself would, actually. Anything’s got to be better than here, after all.

“That’s... incredible.”

“Were you trying to come aboard?”

There’s something niggling her about the traffic control operator’s voice, but she can’t quite put her finger on it.

“I was,” she confirms. “Because that seemed like the most expeditious way to make contact. But now that I’ve met you, I can stay out here indefinitely if that will make things easier!”

Her other self glances at the speed with which she is putting out fixity crystal.

“It’s going to take me a little more than twelve hours to have fabricated enough infrastructure in this world to provide medical services to all the stations I can see in orbit and the settlement on the planet; I would like to have established friendly relations and obtained docking permissions by the time that happens. But other than that, there’s no rush on my end,” she continues.

“What should I call you?” she asks, genuine curiosity shading her voice. It’s a momentous moment because she’s establishing relations with an alien civilization, but it’s also a momentous moment because she’s talking to her first actual alien. And this time, with the assistance of the Spirit, she doesn’t even have the eventual looming loss of that connection when she forks and inevitably drifts away to make the occasion bittersweet.

“My name is Cat. I’m so glad to meet you. It feels... like something out of an old story. I’m honestly pretty nervous I’m going to screw something up.”

“I don’t understand about the medical assistance? Do you have a hospital or something somewhere? And how would you be able to bill anyone? PACNA owns all the rights to our bodies."

Amethyst blinks.

She was expecting the aliens to have unforeseen objections — that’s more or less implicit in the premise of first contact — but somehow those exact objections still manage to blindside her. Clearly ‘I want to provide medical assistance’ did not come across in the way she meant. She isn’t sure how to respond, so she takes a deep breath, and the words come to her.

“I don’t intend to charge for providing medical services,” she says. Which is true, now. Clearly these people don’t have an understanding of property rights that matches her own, so it seems better to provide services free of charge instead of using her previous basic-income-covers-basic-needs approach.

“I’m not a corporation,” she continues, although she’s not quite sure why she says it. “I’m a person. I don’t heal people as a step in an inscrutable money-making scheme, I heal people because I hate to see other people hurt when there’s something I can do about it. I want everyone to be okay. I want you to be okay, Cat. I want to hold you and shield you from the world; I want to give you time to rest, recharge, and heal from the depredations you’ve suffered.”

She refocuses her eyes, making eye contact through the camera feed.

“And I swear on the stars that I will never extort you, or threaten you, or do anything to you which you do not want. Because that is not who I am. I am Amethyst, and I’m here to help.”

It sounds scary. Sort of like what the Affini broadcasts talk about. But somehow, she can feel a sincere warmth, that everything might be able to be OK, that she could get a chance to rest. 

It’s her face, in the end, that seals the deal. Not really the beauty, instead the way she’s able to just take the void of space, no helmet, like some kind of armored legendary hero. It’s absurd enough while being so obviously real that maybe those other absurd things she’s talking about might really happen.

...if the world was just Amethysts and people like her, helping each other, and no corporations to screw it all up... 

“I think I’d like to help with that...”

In the dark silence of her VR tomb she feels warm, both inside and out. 

The dark silence....wait, why is everything so quiet anyway?! She’s never gone this long without an alarm! She checks the traffic map in a panic: there’s nothing even pending for the next hour! It’s strange, some of the ships have been delayed last minute, but some were rescheduled hours ago before Amethyst appeared, and were just stuck reserving their spots until recently. 

“Are you somehow stopping all the incoming traffic, Amethyst? It doesn’t seem like anyone’s headed our way for the next hour.”

She turns to look at the trajectories of the ships visible from here, and then turns back to Cat’s camera pickup. Apparently she is going to have to give the notebook explanation.

“The explanation is … slightly absurd … but traveling to another world was actually an (expected!) side effect of being empowered by something called the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed,” she explains. “I’m still getting used to some of the other powers it gave me, but one of them is Time Enough for Love: a power which guarantees that I will always find the time to make new connections with people and deepen my existing connections. And apparently that means coincidentally arranging for a break in the space traffic when I want to talk to a traffic control operator.”

She smiles a bit sheepishly. “I know it’s a lot. I had a bit of coming to terms with the existence of powers like that too.”

Time enough for love?! 

She feels giddy from the lack of sleep and knows for sure that she wants to talk to Amethyst in person. She’s beyond the absurd and might as well just go with it. Nothing could keep her here managing traffic, and if she won’t be fired anyway then that’s a nice bonus. 

“I’m vectoring you in to shuttle access port 5, if you’ll come aboard. I think there’s a lot of stuff you need to know about the Terran Accord if your goal is to help everyone.”

She feels bold, like everything can be alright if she believes. 

“And I’d like to learn more about you myself. And nothing will bother us while we’re talking, as long as we call it a date?”

Amethyst accelerates towards the indicated shuttle port.

“It’s not about what we call it,” she replies. “It’s about our intentions. The power is a guarantee that as long as we want to have time to get to know each other, we’ll find that time. But I’m happy to make it a date-date if you are,” she adds, winking.

“Once I land in the shuttle port, how should I find you?” she asks. She lands a bunch of low powered lasers along the surface of the station, and uses their beam deflections to listen to the sounds, in case she can match up Cat’s next transmission with her words.

“I’ll go there and wait for you, it’s not like I have anything more to do here anyway. I’ll stay on the radio.”

If this alien lady has some kind of magic that makes it possible to just talk with her without worrying about anything else, then she is going to roll with it as hard as she can.

“Alright. See you momentarily!” Amethyst replies. When Cat stops looking at the video feed, she switches her armor out for slightly more comfy date-attire: a copy of her normal silvery dress embroidered with Turing machines, with a light purple cardigan overtop that matches the color of the fixity crystal that hovers over her shoulder (and the ones hidden inside her lungs, and in the soles of her shoes — this is still an unknown area).

She keeps her acceleration relatively low, to avoid spooking any of the other ships in the system, and glides smoothly into the shuttle port, dress shoes touching neatly down as she sheds the last of her velocity.

She cycles the airlock in the extremeley-rarely-used bay 5 and lets Amethyst in. There’s no one else around. 

“Woah, you are a LOT taller than you looked on the video. I love your dress. I think I’d like to show you around the station. And maybe take off this headset. Can we really just chat without worrying about the traffic?”

Amethyst smiles at the complement of her dress. “Thank you! I put a lot of work into it,” she remarks. “And I think so? I’m still somewhat new to these powers. But you said there was nothing incoming. If it makes you feel better, I can keep an eye on all the ship traffic and see if anything comes up.”

The readings her forb is showing her about the artificial gravity of the station are fascinating. She wants to figure out how it interacts with her own pet theory of quantum gravity, but Cat deserves her full attention. Luckily, she doesn’t have to choose.

She forks again, the two of her stepping smoothly out of the spot where she stood a moment ago. One of her winks at Cat and then steps away, leaning against the side of the shuttleport and pulling up a window full of charts. The other of her says “I should mention — I can have several bodies. We’re all the same person, our minds synchronized in real time. But I wanted to take a look at how the artificial gravity works, without snubbing you. There’s another of me out in orbit who can watch the ships.”

She feels a kind of safety that she’s never actually felt in her life, when she sees Amethyst casually copy herself to study the AG field. It’s like floating on a warm sea. Whatever happens, this moment of meeting a beautiful girl excited to learn about her world has got to be worth it. The floaty feelings war with a manic, sleep-deprived excitement to show Amethyst everything.

“I’m glad to see that despite how advanced you look, there’s still some surprises I can show you! No one here can just copy themselves like that. Let’s go to the park section, its beautiful.”

...She’s suddenly aware of the VR set digging into her ears. She feels more in-tune with her body, like her subconscious has let her finally feel the aches she’s been accumulating for the last few months. She takes the VR headset off and feels it peel some skin away with it -- blisters where the joint of the plastic has been rubbing the wrong way for months.

“But first, let me drop off this stupid headset in my room.”

“Do you want me to heal that?” she asks, gesturing to the wounds on Cat’s temples. She looks concerned, that Cat would be hurt in this way.

Should she let Amethyst heal her? She’s an alien, right, can she really know how to heal an injury after interacting with her for only a few minutes? No, she already made her choice to just roll with this. If the alien space princess wants to heal her bruise, then that’s an experience she’d like to have. 

“...yeah, please heal me; I’d like to see what it feels like.”

Amethyst runs her fingers along Cat’s temples, sterilizing the wounds, cloning healthy skin over them, and then ensuring that the healthy skin bonds with the underlying tissue by creating extra intercellular medium. She suppresses the pain signals and smooths away the body’s normal inflammatory response, leaving a trailing sensation of coolness following the path of her fingertips.

“The new skin might be a little tender for a while,” she warns. She summons a floating mirror, angled so that Cat can see the healed skin. “Also, you need to eat more. Would you like a smoothie?” she offers, voice tinged with concern. “It’s fine if you don’t — I don’t want to be overbearing. But your body would heal better with more to work with.”