“I had this explained to me once, and while I’m by no means an expert I think I know the basics. The way I understand it, is that before the corporations, everything bottomed out in basic human activity, so that the prices of everything ultimately were such that it was always possible to afford enough to eat through your wages. But after the corporations, that stopped being true – PACNA can buy things from FRIGOMEK to make more space stations, or it can just make them itself, and there’s no reasons for humans to be involved in the process at all. So the central economic question of the modern age is: what stops the corporations from just doing their own thing, and driving up the price of food to the point where everyone starves?”

“And the answer is ‘the Status Quo’. The corporations are used to paying people to do jobs and selling them food at a price they can afford, and that’s as much a part of them as making the most money possible. So they just continue right on doing that, whether they have a person leading the helm or not.” 

Amethyst pinches the bridge of her nose.

“I legitimately do not understand why nobody has staged an armed rebellion yet. That is my single biggest question about this entire system,” she laments.

“Okay. So the corporations could make more profit by underpaying people — because you have no concept of illegal wages — but they don’t, because they are not actually trying to profit, they’re just doing things that sound like they used to be necessary to profiting. Is that a fair restatement?”

She toys with the idea of giving PACNA shares to every human, making them all shareholders who would profit. But these humans clearly do not have a healthy relationship with the entire concept of economics, so that’s probably not the best way to do right by them.

“Well, practically, everything is made by the corporations, and so it’s impossible to use weapons or spaceships against the corporations because they would just turn them off. I’ve heard of some worlds where people tried to take over a station and make it ‘theirs’, but in that case the corpo would just shut down the life support. 

To address your other statement, the fact that the corporations are not actually trying to profit, and are ‘just doing things that sound like they used to be necessary for profiting’, is as good a description as any for the Status Quo, the core of the economy that ensures that everyone in the Accord stays alive. 

That’s why one of the TCN’s most important jobs is to stop people rebelling against the corpos or developing non-corpo technology, because otherwise that might disrupt the Status Quo, and that might lead to the corpos deciding they don’t need any people at all.”

He hopes that this frank description is the right path to take here, and also that he had paid much more careful attention to Economics 101 in the TCN academy. 

Okay, so this entire farce is going to come tumbling down as soon as people are immortal. That’s better than the people involved being entirely blind to the situation they’re in at least.

She reviews her list of remaining open questions.

“If I asked you to make an order-of-magnitude guess at how many spheres with a radius of 50 kilometers it would take to enclose the entire human population, what would your answer be?” she asks.

Probably she can scale up to a convenient size like that, and then produce automated FTL shuttles to emplace them across human space.

“Do you mean how many spheres it would take to pack everyone in, or how many you’d have to draw to cover all the people in the Accord today?”

“The latter. How many you’d have to draw to cover the map of where everyone lives, without requiring them to move,” she clarifies.

“Well, there’s around 400 worlds in the Accord, each with around 1-2 planets and an assortment of stations. Assuming each world is around earth-sized and you want to cover the whole surface, you’d need around…. well your spheres are about 100 square miles, and the earth is 200 million square miles, so that’s 2 million per planet, and 400 of those makes 800 million, maybe quadruple it for all the stations, for an upper bound of say 1600 million spheres and a lower bound of 100 million spheres, depending on how much planet coverage you want?”

Humans definitely don’t live uniformly distributed over the entire surface of a planet, so that seems likely to be an upper bound, but Captain Androse has a better idea of what the situation looks like here than she does, so she’ll take his number as a good estimate to do rough planning with for now.

“Alright, so that’s going to be around seven months total …” she muses. “Not ideal, but I can work with that.”

She sorts through her mental stack of questions.

“What are the logistical limitations of faster than light travel?” she asks next.

It’s time to see if he can navigate this conversation to try and better understand what sort of Amethyst he’s dealing with. What would separate an Affini ‘plant’ from all the other possible Amethysts? 

He could bring up the notion of checking in w/ his superiors at the TCN… But it’s dangerous to give up the game at this juncture in the case where that provokes an extreme response. 

He could ask: “Why do you want to know these things?” but there’s not enough indirection; he needs something an Affini agent will lie differently about. 

Ultimately, what matters is what she asks him to do; If there’s going to be a difference, that’s where it can’t be hidden….

Why did she ask about the spheres? The Affini certainly already know the answers to the basics Amethyst’s been asking. Why does she offhandedly mention acts of rebellion against the corporations? He reviews his current theories: 

- Naive
- Suborning PACNA
- Affini plot
- Interview
- Sincere

In the first and fourth cases, she's loyal to the status quo. In the second case she may or may not be, and in the third case she's not.

Why might she have asked the sphere question under each interpretation?

Naive: She is really into the roleplay, and her 'other universe technology' has something to do with spheres. She is also maybe playing at being a revolutionary, since she keeps casually mentioning overthrowing things?

Suborning PACNA: She has some kind of device or approach which is range-limited which she intends to use to do something to people living in the accord (or the other corpos)

Affini plant: It’s all a warm-up to convince him to do something that will compromise the Accord, or to stall for time. 

Interview: This is a 'how many piano tuners in Chicago'-style question, to check that he's capable of thinking through Fermi problems.

Sincere: Again, as in Naive, something about her technology has to do with spheres, and now she’s wondering about FTL and how it would interact with her technology. 

If he asks about the spheres, then that is likely to at least uncover more of the “backstory”, and give her more rope to hang herself with in the future. 

“The worlds of the Accord are linked together by hyperspace pathways, which can be crossed with varying amounts of travel time. I know the corporations have some system of small wormholes that they use to send messages quickly, but being a post-Status Quo technology, it’s not something we’ve ever had any success using ourselves.”

“I am curious about the ‘sphere’ question? Why 50km?”

“Oh, good question! So the fixity field projectors that I mentioned to you have a spherical range. And they can have any radius, but the city on the planet down below is about 50km across, so I thought that might be a convenient size to mass-produce in order to cover population centers,” she explains.

“But the way you spoke about the average planet, I’m guessing that going with planet-sized ones might be more efficient, and that the planet below us is just a statistical outlier with an unusually low, dense population. In either case, it’s important to know for planning because it impacts how far up I’m going to have to scale my manufacturing in order to get medical coverage across the entire Accord.”

Alright, looks like he’s got the initiative in the conversation. He can probably ask some questions himself. And the backstory is that she’s got some kind of medical technology that she wants to cover entire planets with. Is this how the Affini take over a star system? First by suborning the local corpo, then covering the entire planet all at once in a “fixity field”? The question that truly matters here is how concerned she is with the Affini. Does she even know that this system will likely be invaded in the next few days? Does she not care, because she herself is the tip of the spear? 

“It would seem to me that it doesn’t much matter what sort of medical care anyone would receive, if their entire system is invaded by the Affini. What’s your plan for when they come knocking on your doorstep?” 

So here’s the tipping point. She’s been calling fixity fields medical technology — and they are! It’s their most important use. But it is a bit misleading about their capabilities.

“I’m not totally sure, since I’ve been thinking about this situation for less than 45 attention-minutes,” she begins. “But I strongly suspect that I can defend against the Affini. At the very least, I’ll be able to put up a better fight than I think you have been able to so far.”

And, unlike your incompetent organization, I am fully prepared to actually negotiate with people and see if we can find an alternative which is not that, she thinks.

She needs to come clean about fixity fields’ full capabilities sooner or later anyway.

“As for why I think that — I’ve been referring to fixity fields as medical technology, because that is legitimately their most important purpose in my home civilization. But in the same way that painkillers are poisons and scalpels are knives, fixity fields can be astonishingly dangerous if used in the right way. The fundamental thing they do is control the position and velocity of particles within their range. In full generality.”

She leans back, and gives the captain a moment to come to terms with that.

The different scenarios he’s been evaluating reorient in his mind. This “fixity” tech is the clearly important part of the story, and the only two relevant questions are:

1. Is it actually able to stand against the Affini? 

2. Will Amethyst use it to defend the Accord?

Whether “fixity fields” are something she found or built, or PACNA finally getting its act together now that it realizes that it’s about to lose all of its territory, is ultimately less important than whether the tech will actually be helpful. 

“I see. So the medical tech and the tech you’d use to fight the Affini are in fact one-and-the-same. And you will likely get a chance to use both aspects, if you intend to stay in this system for much longer – our intelligence indicates that this system is likely to be invaded in about 3 days.”

Said “intelligence” mostly being the spreading communication blackout proceeding regularly through the fringes of Terran Space.  

What will her response be? Does she seem to know about the impending invasion? 

“Oh! Well, I guess we’ll know how well I can hold up against them sooner rather than later. To be clear: I’m not committed to staying here. I would be perfectly willing to pack up the entire local human population and leave, if that looked prudent,” she replies. “But three days is a lot of time. I can have a lot built out by then. How precise is that estimate? Can you give me a 95% confidence interval?”

She takes a moment to check in on her other selves, remembering their estimated timelines of her various projects.

“This was supposed to be the last supply run to this area. If the Affini follow their usual script, then I’d give a 95% confidence interval for them arriving here in force 75 to 120 hours from now. However, I bet they have some kind of advance monitoring force, and this is an unusual situation, so that might affect their schedule.” 

… 

She nods. If the aliens are listening, she wants to talk to them. She puts her first-contact package (a digital message that assumes no shared languages, and works up from arithmetic to game theory which she already had prepared, just in case) on an unused part of the local radio spectrum, alongside a short English-language message explaining that she’s from another universe, she wants to promote sapient flourishing, and she would love to talk to them about how best to do that.

“That makes sense,” she tells Androse. “How does my presence here change your mission? Actually, before that, I think I’m still missing a good deal of background on the limitations and logistics of FTL travel, which seems important to understanding under what circumstances they might arrive. Could you go over that?”

“If you can really beat the Affini, then that’s by far the most important thing; and even if you can’t, as a PACNA executive you can procure resources for the war effort from other PACNA systems that aren’t on the front line, if you’re willing to help.”

Should he offer to escort her somewhere safer? If she’s an Affini collaborator, then it’s dangerous to arrange for a meeting with the higher ups…. What’s the deal with claiming to not have jump capabilities? 

“I think OPS would be better equipped to discuss the finer details of FTL, but the basics are that many star systems are connected by natural hyperspace corridors that allow for extremely fast travel between connected regions. These connections are sometimes very strange: places that are very far apart in realspace can sometimes be very close together in hyperspace, and vice versa. For example, no one’s ever found an efficient route to get to Alpha Centauri, while the furthest colony from earth is 1,200 lightyears away and only a 3 day trip. We’re currently a week out from Earth, with most of that time taken up traveling in realspace to shift between different corridors. Corridors have different ‘sizes’, with some of them able to support a warship and some others only being a few microns wide.”

“That’s fascinating!” she exclaims. “It’s not exactly the most urgent thing, but I think I can probably help with realspace transit times once I’ve got the infrastructure built out. My teleportation is instantaneous, but it requires a contiguous fixity field between the terminals.”

She should also look into whether she can project a fixity field through hyperspace, because that sounds useful.

“I should clarify: I am totally willing to use PACNA to improve people’s quality of life, and provide defensive support, including evacuations. And I can probably get you much nicer designs for a lot of things, because frankly PACNA has absurdly stupid space-station design, and I bet that extends to other things. But I am not, as a policy, willing to give people offensive weapons without first attempting diplomacy.”

A plan forms: he can advise Amethyst to evacuate the entirety of the Canopy system, both as a humanitarian mission, and to judge the power of her “fixity” technology. They should be able to target another PCANA system as a destination; it’s not like PACNA has been all that useful to the war effort anyway, at least without Amethyst. It doesn’t seem like it would compromise the Accord in any way beyond what she could already do on her own, and helping Amethyst with the evacuation should be extremely informative. 

“If you believe that you can evacuate this system, I think that’s a high priority, and I can ask TCN high command to provide some cargo vessels to help transport people. We couldn’t evacuate before, because PACNA wouldn’t have allowed it, but that shouldn’t be a problem for you. We can go to a nearby PACNA system; my crew can help navigate there. And in any case, it will keep you safe from still being here when the Affini show up.” 

“Oh, you shouldn’t worry about my safety,” she tells him. Actually, has he noticed that she has been in multiple places at once? She assumed that talking to him from Canopy and then meeting him here, without an intervening shuttle, made that obvious. But perhaps he just assumes she teleported. It’s not like the edges of the fixity field she’s built out are obvious.

“I can have multiple bodies working at once. As long as at least one of them survives, I’ll be fine. So even if we do evacuate, I intend to leave one of me behind to talk.”

Actually, now that she has gravity control, there’s also no reason not to do this. The one of her on Canopy forks, and she sends her new body out into space, and then accelerates away from the plane of the solar system as hard as she can. Gravity control means she can pull a few thousand gs. She won’t get anywhere on an interstellar scale any time soon, but she’ll be far out of any area-of-attack.

His curiosity is burning! And in any case more information about Amethyst’s capabilities is always useful, and seems to be on offer. He wonders what it would like to run an entire bridge, all by himself. 

“I’ve never heard of someone with multiple bodies; I’d be very interested to see it in action! What’s the experience like? Do you see out of each pair of eyes at once? And what happens across interstellar distances?”

“If you choose to leave part of yourself behind, I’d worry less about the Affini killing you, and more about the Affini using it to turn you into one of their pets. They seem to be quite good at it, if the propaganda videos featuring former captains are an accurate representation.”

It occurs to him that Amethyst might neither be human nor Affini, but instead some kind of other alien entirely. Or perhaps some kind of avatar of PACNA itself, finally created to tackle the Affini threat and get back to business as usual. If she says can maintain coherence over interstellar distances, then that’s indicative of something like the corpos’ micro-wormhole communication methods, and some small evidence for the newly-created “avatar” theory. 

She grins. Having multiple bodies is still new and amazing.

“It’s pretty cool! It’s … hmm, it’s a bit hard to describe. It’s a bit like multitasking, and a bit like having forks and telepathy, and a bit like each one of me remembers whatever the others of me are doing right now in the same way I remember what I was doing a few minutes ago. Have you ever lost track of what you were doing, and looked down and been like ‘why am I holding a mug’? It’s a bit like that, only without the losing track. I’m here talking to you, and I’m trying to build a FTL engine, and I’m talking to PACNA, and I’m supervising the construction of the station, and I’m thinking about the situation with the Affini.”

“Anyway, the same thing that lets me be in multiple places also makes me immune to mind control. And, unfortunately, unlike my technology, I can’t share it. So I think I will be perfectly safe talking to the Affini. But I’m certainly not going to be stupid about it. I’ll use a fixity field to prevent any of their drugs from touching me, and other basic precautions, just in case.”

“If one of you stays here, and another leaves the system, do you think that will be a problem?” 

“I don’t anticipate a problem. I haven’t exactly had a chance to test it, but I feel confident that I’ll be okay. If you’re worried, we’ll have some suggestive evidence soon. One of me is currently accelerating out of the system on a random vector as a precautionary measure, and I’m going to hit 10% of light-speed in about 15 minutes. So I’ll start seeing noticeable time dilation relatively quickly. If I don’t have problems with lightspeed lag and time dilation differences, I don’t see why an interstellar separation would be different,” she reassures him.

Then she realizes she has a perfect chance to get a peek at hyperspace.

“If you can make a quick FTL hop in your ship, though, we could test it right now? Could you take me on a jump out to the Oort cloud and back, or are there no hyperspace corridors near the planet?” she asks.