"I'll go take a nap, then, unless you want to let me have a look at your world now so I can start looking for cities."

"That's probably a bad idea, sorry. If time starts again and I'm not paying attention my backup could decide to start up. I want to keep the number of *Mutes to two for now."

"Sure, no problem. Green, Blue, I'm still in room 1512 if you want to send a bot for me when you're ready for me."

Green nods, and the kobold disappears.

"...Say, Green, what's your society even like? I don't imagine you all have your own 'bots and only use those to interact. But I don't know how to interface except through physical intermediaries like we're doing now."

"We do all have bots, actually - we're not completely to the point of post-scarcity, but we're close enough for that - but you're right that they're not the main way we interact. Especially for immobiles like ourselves; mobile Intelligences do often meet botswarm to botswarm for lack of better infrastructure, but where we can, we use shared virtual spaces. And of course we have internets on every planet with a significant Intelligent presence, as well."

He sends schematics for a handful of common bot types - Blue's little flyers are included, and noted as one of the more common kinds of bot used in cities - and instructions for setting up one's own virtual space (perhaps possible with her current processing power, but she'd need software that isn't included and likely isn't compatable with her system) and connecting to their internet.

Her current link is a very outdated-to-them internet protocol, file transfer and web page-viewing only, and doesn't help with interpreting the files. Luckily, Milliways does help with that.

"...Yeah, this makes much more sense than what I was imagining. I'll have to write a network driver, or rewrite yours to my chipset. Incompatible architectures, so annoying. I can self-modify a bit, it's just that I have to stop running to look at most of the core code. Well, and the antiforking, I won't recompile if the checksum is too different - can you make sure to relax the tolerances on that? It's a good safety feature, I don't want rid of it completely, but it's really annoying when it's time to get rid of defunct processes, I can only do like five at a time."

"Blue can write you a driver, once we're down to middling-priority things like that. And give you full control over the antiforking's settings - it's your own code, after all, you ought to have control over it."

"Sounds good. I think I'll go inactive now and keep assembling //Reformed *Mute, then."

Green nods, "ping me if you'd like to talk," and his face fades out and music resumes.

*Mute has a lot to think about. Whole new worlds, calamaties, fundamental changes to herself that she never imagined. The processors are going to be running at 100% for a good long while.

//Reformed *Mute is, by design, very different from //Traditional *Mute. She keeps catching herself trying to make the new paramaters adhere to her sensibilities. Every decision gets ruthlessly cut apart and analyzed down to a single point: What will make the ship safest.

The robot parks in a corner for something like three hours or until pinged.

Kobold: Naps. Blue: Codes. Green: Blows half his yearly entertainment budget, and picks something new and interesting to watch.

The kobold is done first, and finds someone else interesting to chat with while she waits for the others.

And eventually, *Mute decides that the two hers can always continue to change things later, if they find //Reformed *Mute unsatisfactory, and pings Green, "I'm ready."

Blue sends over the antiforking bypass before Green even has a chance to form up his face. It has the feel of something cobbled together - he was fairly obviously still refining it and adding features - but the core functionality is there.

"Here goes something." She's just going to have to trust that it works, she can't currently look at what it's modifying.

She partitions the drive and disk space on her borrowed hardware in Kobold's room, feeds the forking bypass all the parameters she's chosen, takes a deep breath onscreen as a show of bracing herself, and runs it.

She disappears from the screen.

Two minutes later, she reappears...

Along with someone else. "Hello, everyone. I'm //Reformed *Mute. The other *Mute gave me a summary. This situation is... Very strange to be created into, but I'm going to do my best to figure out what needs doing."

Blue's face appears just before the *Mutes do. (Of course he was watching the process. He was confident enough to give *Mute the code, but that's because it was smart enough to stop and call for help if it ran into something unexpected, not because it was ready to run unsupervised.)

"Hi."

"Yes, hello! Congratulations!"

"Existing is a good start, yeah. So. I've got access to all those records, some faked 'memories' from //Old *Mute, and some of //Traditional *Mute's memories, but I'm still kinda clueless."

"Is there some way for us to get access to a nice big library now that our ability to specialize is just about doubled?"

"Yes, of course." Green's in a good mood, complete with background music. "Bar has everything ever published. Here." He sends directions for how to interface with her via the wifi. "I'm surprised the kobold didn't mention it."

"To be fair to them I kinda had a feedback-lockup thing as soon as the door closed, and then we talked about social structures, and then I explained my problem and Kobold called you two in. Well, we know now."

//Reformed *Mute appears an image of a book and 'holds' it to indicate reading. "Aha, so much stuff to learn!"

Green grins. Blue sends the *Mutes a list of tech a generation past hers, and a shorter list of things two generations past that are fairly simple to make and integrate into an older setup, and Green offers a few suggestions for books on stable societies and transition management that cover concepts that have performed well  in practice in his world, including one on how the transition from human-dominant to Intelligence-dominant society was accomplished, what mistakes were made, what happened as a result, and how those situations were resolved.

"We're going to want to study for a while before making a move, but this is all very handy. The society and transition stuff mostly matches what we already know, which is a good sign."

"Can one of you ping the Kobold? They wanted to look at our ship to figure out how it interacts with teleporting. I can move back in and pretend nothing's changed to the humans while helping them do that."