And what, exactly, is on this video stream? Is Amethyst comfy and also how cute / human is she presenting? What is she wearing?

She is a tall, apparently human woman.  She lacks the impossible perfection that would put her in the uncanny valley, but she also lacks any blemishes or other signs of a rough life. She is the picture of health, with hazel eyes that occasionally sparkle green in the light, and long mid-back length brown hair.

She is wearing an elegantly draped white dress covered in intricate, moving silver embroidery. Close examination will reveal that the dress does not quite follow the expected laws of physics, instead moving in whatever way would be most convenient for her. The embroidery depicts a turing machine in the middle of a proof search.

Then she will receive a video similar to those shown to the larger Terran Accord, of a 7-foot tall woman composed of shifting vines, surrounding some hidden central point near her center of mass. Her face is living bark, and her eyes are shifting, softly glowing metal that looks like it has been crudely forged with a blacksmith’s hammer. Somehow, she seems to Amethyst’s intuition to feel entirely human. It’s not an uncanny valley thing: her movements and general appearance combine to catapult her completely across from “just a plant” to “nightmare beast” and all the way to “pretty hot, actually” with the precision of an adversarially selected visual input designed to fool a classifier network. She is covered with hundreds of flowers, some of which are clearly alien in origin, petals surrounding sharp thorns instead of stamen. The majority of flowers covering her body look like regular daisies, though. There’s an indistinct yellow, blue, and green blurred background behind her.

Huh! That only took a few milliseconds to get a reply. She capitalizes on the enormous number of photons passing through the surface of the fixity field around the station, and focuses a virtual telescope at approximately the right distance and bearing.

Also: Wow! Alien!

She will see an approximately cherry-tomato-sized probe, almost entirely black and with almost no infrared or visible light emission, a few millilightseconds away from her station. Other than the video signal it’s currently sending to her, it looks like any other space debris. 

Now that she knows what they look like, she drops a bit of code into the system to automatically comb through the incoming light to find any more. It gets a few thousand hits at various distances, but who knows whether those are just random space rocks left over from a collision a few million years ago.

Her dress is sure to be a big hit among the more fashion-inclined florets! 

More attention settles onto the conversation – given the video it’s likely to be a true first contact with a new lifeform! 

“What a delight~! It seems clear you are not part of the Terran Accord; I’m sure we have lots to talk about. I can share some of our language over video but I’m afraid that it’s best appreciated fully through a more... intimate connection. What did you have in mind for how we could meet~?”

The thing that strikes her about the response is how … human Miss Daisy seems. She mentally revises her estimation of how much experience the Affini have dealing with other species up, which has worrying implications given how strange their choice of propaganda is. Maybe the captain was relaying a slanted or very early version?

“Yes, I’m not a member of the Terran Accord. I’m a representative of a civilization which has managed to avoid agreeing on a collective name for nearly three years now, but which I call the Fixipelago,” she replies.

“You’re welcome to come to my station to talk, or give me coordinates for a rendezvous. I’m afraid I haven’t quite figured out FTL travel yet — the relevant mechanism doesn’t exist in my native universe — so it might be a little while before I can make it out of the general vicinity of the planet.”

This is technically true — she’s not at all satisfied with her prototypes, both of which have exploded — but she expects to get it in another 20 minutes or so.

“Alternatively, if your probe has good enough sensors and high enough bandwidth, I can send a richer data stream — would visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and graviceptive data be sufficient?”

Some day she’s going to meet aliens who are graviceptive, and it’s going to be so cool.

“We don’t have to meet in person, though. I wasn’t expecting your language to require it,” she concludes.

“Well far be it from me to pass up an opportunity to visit your station. If you will do your best to ensure that I can leave if I desire, including preventing your Terran friends and that cutie PACNA from causing problems if necessary, I’d be delighted! We can send over a small shuttle immediately. As for my end, I want to make it clear that we originally intended to arrive in this system in ~substantial~ numbers shortly, as part of our ongoing project to help the Terrans. The welfare of the Terrans in the Canopy system is of great priority to us, and while it seems that you’re already making some progress on that front, the Terrans of the Accord often need very specialized care to recover from their frankly awful living conditions. I’m reluctant to adjust our current plans, since delays will ultimately cause more needless suffering. But since this is also a concern for you, I’m optimistic we can come to some kind of ~arrangement~. What do you think?”

Amethyst nods.

“Certainly you’ll be free to leave; I believe it’s the right of every sapient being to leave, I consider you to be part of that category, and I expect to be able to facilitate it,” she begins. “And PACNA has recognized me as an authority, so it shouldn’t interfere, even elsewhere, I don’t think.”

“As for changing plans — I expect that my presence here means you can best expend effort elsewhere just as a matter of resource allocation, but of course I want to make sure that my arrival here is overall positive for the people here. I haven’t run into any issues with helping them so far, but right now I’m just providing better living conditions, removing stressors from their environments, providing medical care, and letting them rest. If there are other things you would suggest, I’d be happy to hear them.”

She pauses for a moment, thinking about what to say next.

“I am a little worried about how applicable your advice will be, given what I’ve learned so far about how you’ve been treating the people you help; but of course I will be happy to adopt advice that doesn’t seem likely to be detrimental in the long run.”

“Fantastic!” 

Her face seems to form a delighted, almost predatory smile. 

“I can be over in a small shuttle in about 15 minutes, unless that’s too soon~?”

Amethyst smiles back, with a genuine, non-predatory smile of her own.

“No, 15 minutes is plenty of time! I look forward to seeing you then. Do you need any environmental accommodations? Right now the environmental controller defaults to 1G, and a human-standard 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere.”

“I’m quite well adapted to the environments the Terrans like; I will see ya shortly~!”

At this point, the Affini have been speculatively sending some vessels, interconnected by wormholes, to almost enter the Canopy System, and then turn back while still in hyperspace at the last moment, in advance of the main fleet. It’s a relatively simple matter for Aster to transmit her distinctiveness to the nearest such scout and direct it to enter normal space. By the time it arrives, her core lives. 

The cells around the nacient core are a stripped-down Terran-specific “Genesis Tree” variety, containing a library of all Earth-derived life so far identified in compressed, de-duplicated DNA, almost all coiled together and inactive. It wouldn’t do to try and be everything at once after all! The Genesis Tree cells are bathed in the targeted light from the ship, instructing photosensitive ribosomes to output the proteins that will penetrate the inner walls of the nucleus, unfurl a few select bits of the vast library, and cause these particular cells to become the preferred lifeforms that constitute the entity known as Miss Daisy. In an accelerated dance, her eponymous daisy flowers along with some bluebells and other more alien flowers differentiate and open their petals to the world. 

She stretches her vines together into her current favored shape and feels the air with flowers that are now all of borrowed, old, new, and blue at once, having been based on Earth bluebells and recently grown to perfection. 

Perfect for meeting a new species that styles itself in the old human tradition. 

There’s something so liberating about flinging your soul across the void and finding yourself again – you could wake up anywhere – and more literally in Daisy’s case than most. Perhaps she would find herself where she meant to go, or perhaps she might find herself inside some other world and a new adventure, constructed by a friend or someone testing out a new way of being. She long ago made her mind a sort of “free access” work of art, available for use in suitable dramatic projects. A sort of permanent trade: she gave up the certainty of where she might end up next for the possibility of vast surprise forevermore. By convention, transitions like the one she’s just done are an ideal time to wake up somewhere new.

She communes with the ship, makes it her outer skin, and feels the starlight; it seems that this one has been played straight; she’s where she expected in the Canopy system.

“~I’m here!~ Permission to come aboard?” she says while maneuvering her outer body closer to what is clearly a docking port on Amethyst’s station.

Amethyst instantiates a fork near her — she needs to ramp up over time anyway, and it’s just as fast as teleporting — and waves.

“Hello! Yes, permission granted,” she responds. “Would you like any refreshments while we talk? Carbohydrates, electromagnetic radiation, ionizing radiation, tea, …?”

She is incredibly beautiful in person. Her voice carries subtle changes in tone that the audio codec she was using fails to capture in all their nuance. Her scent is delicate, yet easy to notice when one pays attention. She smells like wind off a mountain, and like an old oak desk.

Amethyst re-configures a general purpose room near Miss Daisy’s selected docking bay as a meeting room and has a brief debate between herselves about whether it would be impolite to look at her visitor’s cellular biology.

“~Ohhhhh~ You certainly know how to make a first impression~ I love your dress! And I’d be delighted to sample some water infused with 0.2% w/v Uranium-235-nitrate, if you are able to make the pure stuff. It’s so rare to see a species that can get it right but I think ~you’re~ up to the challenge~ And I have of course brought a present for you as well~”

Hmm. Amethyst guesses that she probably doesn’t want pure H2O, so she uses normal spring water as a base, and then synthesizes some Uranium nitrate and sets out a tea platter in the meeting room. She selects peppermint for herself, because while exotic radioactive compounds won’t hurt her, not when she has the fixity crystal’s environmental settings turned up as high as they go for a meeting with an alien, she doesn’t like the taste.

“I think I should be able to manage,” she agrees. “Please, come this way.”

She guides her down the hallway towards the meeting room.

“I must admit — I am most curious about what you’ve selected as a present.”

The trace phosphates and calcium in the spring water make a precipitate with the uranium salts, causing an equilibrium of insoluble uranium phosphate and dissolved hydrated ions, and make a turbid yellow-green solution with chalky suspended particles. 

She mentally pokes at the tea as it settles into equilibrium. Is a colloidal suspension acceptable? It’s certainly more analogous to her own herbal tea, which also features suspended solid particulates.

Amethyst moves and talks in a way that is almost unique amongst the Terrans – it’s most similar to the more prosperous of the so-called “lost” colonies on the fringes of the Accord, but has a greater weight to it, in addition to being profoundly beautiful. Actually, the human parts of her find it to be literally the MOST beautiful voice she’s ever heard, in a manner that would be genuinely hard for even herself to emulate.

“I got you these flowers~” Cells around the base of one of her bluebells undergo programmed cell death, separating a prepared rooty stub from the whole, and she gently pulls a few flowers away from herself and offers them to Amethyst. 

“I got you some old fashioned Earth bluebells, with a few improvements I think you’ll enjoy! They will be happy in a PACNA “My Plant” soil enclosure, though they have some special features I’d be happy to get into later.” 

She temporarily disconnects a thin vine’s circulation from the whole, and inserts it into the cup that Amethyst has offered her. Ions rush into specialized cells, and acid begins to break down and solubilize the larger particulates, and the resulting filtered solution enters an extremely convoluted, high-surface-area tube of twisting cytoplasmic pathways studded with ion channels that, after many iterations, separate the uranium by isotope, and incorporate the most energy-rich ones ones into her radio organelles.

What’s the ratio of U-235 to other isotopes that she gets in her tea? 

“Thank you,” she says. “And do let me know whether you want any changes made to the tea; I don’t have much experience making heavy-element infusions because I don’t like the taste myself.”

As it happens, Uranium 235 is the only isotope of Uranium present in her tea — although trace amounts of it have already broken down into various decay products. Amethyst may have very little experience interacting with aliens, but providing isotopically pure samples of various elements is well within her wheelhouse.

It is, within the limits of her rather sensitive ability to measure, completely pure Uranium-235! What a wonder, to find such a civilized treat in the backwaters of Terran space! Being able to produce it, on such short notice, on such a small station not obviously specialized for radioisotope separation, puts Amethyst in the top 1% of technologically inclined species the Affini have thus encountered. 

“As you might expect, us Affini have an extensive and perhaps overly-elaborate art dedicated to the preparation and consumption of mineralized water. Your attempt is simply outstanding! It’s the freshest ‘tea’ I’ve ever had this side of the Real! I know several of my friends that wouldn’t change a thing about it – they like their tea to have a little sediment in it. I’m personally a bit of a basic girl in my tastes – I prefer pure water and as pure U-235 as possible. I know it’s a ‘first bloom’ kinda drink but I never really cultivated a more sophisticated palate – I just love the simple, crystal clarity of a basic tea with only two ingredients and four atoms!”

This is so much fun! She’s getting to discuss molecular xenogastronomy with an actual alien! Amethyst smiles widely and takes a sip of her own tea, enjoying the gentle swirl of flavor across her tongue.

“You must have the most interesting metabolism! To be able to refine radioactive minerals biologically, I mean,” she comments. “But if pure is more to your tastes …”

She sets another cup on the meeting room table. This one is made of glass, to prevent mineral leaching, and for the briefest moment contains only H₂O and U²³⁵O₂(NO₃)₂, before the Uranium starts decaying, the Nitrogen starts escaping to do its own thing, and the atmospheric gasses in the station start mixing with the surface layer.

Amethyst carefully takes the offered bluebells and smells them, trusting in her preparations to filter anything other than normal scents out, before setting them in a conjured pot with PACNA-standard potting soil. Even if it’s rude to look at your guest’s cellular biochemistry without permission, looking at a present is perfectly polite. She examines the bluebells. How have they been altered from the ones typically found on Earth?