“It’s more of an “all-or-nothing” thing – the heat dissipation gets you into the stream, and then you move at the stream’s speed. But you could certainly make a much smaller engine if you could deal with all that waste heat!”

They arrive at the shuttle bay, and Amethyst lets them lead the way into their ship, because it’s only polite.

“I mean, separately I also think the fact that your engine is generating waste heat is a sign that it’s not all that efficient. But that’s just a supposition. I haven’t studied what’s going on with local physics to say whether there’s a thermodynamic minimum that just happens to be surprisingly high,” she responds.

“Welcome aboard. OPS, please ask COMMS to relay the broad details of our current situation to TCN command.”

Will Amethyst try and stop them from doing this, or otherwise intervene in their journey to the main ship?

She is too busy speculating about FTL engines to be paying too much attention to their messages, and she wouldn’t want to stop them anyway.

“Thank you, captain,” she says, ducking slightly through the shuttle door. When nobody happened to be watching her, her dress changed into a nautical blue-striped Breton shirt and slacks.

As the shuttle pulls out of the hangar bay, it is clear that the outer skin of the station has become much more complete in the time they have been talking, although it includes so many windows and gently twinkling lights that the difference is not apparent at first glance.

Their journey is uneventful and soon Amethyst and company arrive at The Indomitable Victory. 

“Captain Aboard!”

“Welcome to my humble ship. It’s not much, but it’s got a great crew, and we try to do our best. If you’re ready, we can get you on your first hyperspace jump!”

“By all means, captain!” she agrees. She bounces a little, because it’s not every day that you travel faster than light for the first time. She also inspects the ship around her in perhaps more detail than the crew would expect — you can learn a lot about a ship by looking inside its walls.

The cute Terran “battleship” rips a crude hole into hyperspace and disappears. It’s going, and the odd ‘first contact’ message, are dutifully forwarded to greater minds. The sunlight and vacuum of space continue to feel delightful against it’s tiny walls! These little observation missions are really quite fun~! 

… on further consideration, the most recent happenings here are quite atypical. They are marked as “possibly important”.

“What the fuck!” Amethyst exclaims, hands jumping to her face as though reaching for something that is no longer there.

“Uh. So, it looks like fixity fields might not work in hyperspace,” she tells them. “The good news is I’m still in contact with the rest of me. Can everyone please look away from me for a moment?”

She seems visibly distressed. Perhaps her tech doesn’t actually work in hyperspace? Or perhaps they’re about to actually fall for the old ‘OK now look away” trick. 

“Let’s give the woman some privacy.”

The crew attends to their consoles.

“Sorry, I just needed a moment to get into my space suit, just in case,” she tells them. When they look back up, she is wearing what looks like bright silver knight’s armor, with a transparent visor across her face. A rich purple fabric shows through the gaps between the armor plates.

“That is really a quite stylish space suit!” 

She wants one for herself!

“Where did it come from?”

“Thank you!” she says, pivoting a little to show it off from different angles. “I designed it myself. As for where it comes from … I can explain it to you, but I’m not sure that will result in you being less confused. The simple answer is that I have two sources of new-to-you physics — the fixity fields, and another set of powers that is simultaneously more robust and less general. The second set of powers is where I get my ability to be in multiple places at once, and it can also be used to manifest personal protective equipment. But only when people aren’t looking.”

She looks apologetic about the quality of that explanation. “It has a pretty arbitrary set of rules like that. Anyway, I normally use fixity fields for decompression-resistance. So since they don’t work here, I had to switch into my backup gear.”

She squints at OPS’s face, relaying her expression through one of her selves that still has a working HUD. “I can make you your own suit when we get back to the Canopy system, if you’d like.”

“Captain, I think I like her!” 

“Ha! She certainly is full of surprises! Sorry about the unexpected tech problems! Are you still in contact with your other selves? Do you want to go back?”

“I am! There’s no apparent lag, or anything like that,” she assures him. “And I don’t feel any particular need to turn around yet — we can go back and continue our discussion there if you’d like. But I don’t think there’s any reason not to go a bit further to check for any possible range issues.”

After a less eventful 25 minutes they exit hyperspace and arrive 50 light hours away from the canopy system.

“Entering normal space, Captain. Looks like we’re right on-target!”

The psychedelic warped stars of hyperspace resolve back into a tableau of the milky way.

“... huh. Well that’s something.”

She turns to address the captain. “The fixity field projectors in my suit aren’t coming back online,” she informs him. “I’d like to run some tests to see if we can figure out why, if you don’t mind. Can you jump us to …”

MEANWHILE, BACK AT CANOPY

Her message wings through space in an omnidirectional burst, conveying greetings and messages of good will. It ends with:

“... so I hope we can work together to accomplish our mutual goals better than either of us can alone. You can reach me by radio, gravity waves, or neutrino flux in the general area of this transmitter. I hope to speak to you soon!”

The message ends on a cheery note, and then loops.

… Now this is something new, and perhaps even a break from the depressing self-abuse that characterizes most of Terran space! It’s not even advertising any products for her to buy!

She communes with the tiny, brave phytomaton, incorporating it’s distinctiveness into her own, and for a moment (and a year) she is floating in the void, nourished by hard and soft sunlight within and without, watching the sad comings and goings of a people who have lost their way.

And then, there is a miracle: something so out-of-distribution that it demands her full attention: Something is building a space station in a manner far advanced of what the Accord should be capable of, moving the particles themselves with the precision of an atomic compiler. It’s mesmerizing, and the details of how it’s done will surely be a fun puzzle for the more physics-inclined florets to chew on, but what’s more interesting to her right now is the message this entity has chosen to send.

The tree of policy for dealing with the assimilation of Terran space is consulted. On the one branch, over 99% of Terran worlds are in need of “immediate corrective action” due to being sufficiently stuck in bad attractor states, and Canopy has (until now) been unremarkable in this regard.

On another branch, the Amethysts may not be quite human herselves.

Her message has the character of the most ancient human communication, reminiscent of  the earliest radio transmissions still echoing through the lonely voids between the stars and dutifully archived by their distributed receivers. This is quite puzzling – the Terrans have never exhibited the discipline to safeguard their history against the onslaught of generative fakes produced by their digital ensemble minds, nor have they put forth the collective effort to build appropriately-sized mega telescopes to learn the truth about their own past. It should not be possible for anyone in the Accord to actually pick out authentic early Terran-style communications among all the noise.

A new species deserves their sunlight, and guidance commensurate with their needs, and based on Amethyst’s stated goals these may be lighter needs than most.

What to do?
…..

They could go with the default: assimilate Canopy and sort everything out in simulation.

They could initiate contact with Amethyst, treating her as a new species with its own needs. But then what of the existing Terrans in the system?

….

While each species is unique in the ways they can be best loved, in the end what to do is not really a difficult question.

Wherever in space and time one reaches out their roots to another, seeking communion, there is only one attractor state that’s a worthy shape for sophonts to be; even if it’s sometimes a winding one:

The ocean becomes a drop as the forest becomes the tree becomes the leaf, and Asteraceae reaches out through a newly duplicated phytomaton in a tight-beam laser to the nearest Amethyst and says:

“Hi cutie~! I’m Asteraceae, or Miss Daisy for short, she/her!  I got your message asking to talk, so let’s talk!”

The one of her floating in space turns to face the incoming message and smiles. They didn’t take long at all to reply — a short enough time that she’s not sure exactly how far away the Affini transmitter is.

“Hi! I’m so happy to meet you,” Amethyst starts with, because it’s true. She’s never had a chance to speak to an alien species before, and it’s something she’s always dreamed of doing. 

“She/they is fine for me,” she continues, because if she’s going to be slightly a hivemind, then she can own up to it, at least linguistically. “I got the Terran Accord’s side of the story of their disagreement with you a little while ago — and I’m worried that you’re hurting a lot of humans without realizing it. I am hoping based on their retelling of your propaganda that we both value a compatible version of sapient flourishing, and that I can just tell you about how what you’re doing is hurting them and you’ll modify your approach. Even if that’s not the case, I think we both have unique resources that mean there’s an opportunity to profitably trade with each other.”

“Pursuant to that, I’d like to discuss our different resource bases and standards for treatment of people, and see if we can come to a mutually agreeable cooperation. Does that sound acceptable to you? Do you have any initial questions for me or suggestions for how we could communicate better? Also, I’m worried about translation quality. If you can easily send your messages in your native language as well, so that I can start learning it and hopefully circumvent any misunderstandings, I would appreciate that.”

She stops there, to give Miss Daisy the chance to reply. The delay will be telling.

She also starts putting out a video stream on a parallel laser with a shorter wavelength, because that seems like it might make Miss Daisy reciprocate, and she really wants to see her — she’s never seen an alien before.