On cursory visual inspection they look like ordinary bluebells, except “shorter”: The entire plant mass is about 10 cm long, starting with a tuberous bulb surrounded by thin white roots, proceeding into a reinforced, hardy stem, one leaf, and terminating in two blue bell-shaped flowers. If Amethyst is familiar with the original she will note that there’s normally more flowers and that the stem is normally much longer and weaker. This one is clearly a traveling bluebell, great for growing on the body of a girl on the go! 

She’s seen Earthly bluebells before, but not so often that she remembers exactly what they look like. But it’s easy to put a comparison picture up on her HUD and play spot-the-difference.

What about changes beyond the surface level? She doubts that Miss Daisy would just gift her a hardier cultivar — especially when she has such an interesting metabolism, which speaks to a very different autotrophic ancestry.

… actually, why is she green if she’s radiosynthetic? Amethyst sets that question aside for later.

The cells of the “bluebell” are are arranged with the beauty and precision of a well built factory, or computer chip, or art-project operating system, robustly and adaptably dedicated to the purpose of growth and life. It puts the crude engineering works of the Terran Accord to shame.

So, basically just a normal bluebell.

The nuclei of the cells look oversized and there’s lots of rod-shaped crystalline inclusions in them, the cells each have a few unrecognizable organelles shaped like stars and made of heavy metals, and the large bulb at the bottom has a very precise tree-like arrangement of cells that are almost entirely big nuclei containing highly-crosslinked DNA suspended in low-water-activity biopolymers. 

That’s a lot more DNA than the flower probably needs. She does a quick check, and the majority of it encodes proteins that aren’t even present in the flower.

… has she just been handed the alien equivalent of a USB drive?

She sequences the DNA and starts looking to see whether there are any obvious patterns in the data contained therein. She doesn’t want to forget about the strange organelles either, but if they’re part of an interface to the data, it’s probably more efficient to just try and read it directly.

The body of the bluebell weighs about 5 grams, contains approximately 200 million cells, and each cell contains 4 gigabytes of DNA for about 800 petabytes of data in the non-bulb flower components.

So, about 5 times as much as a normal bluebell.

The DNA in each flower cell is arranged in 256 circular chromosomes, each of which has an orderly, addressable set of header promoter regions. It’s clearly possible to activate any section of DNA at will by addressing using the right promoter. Almost all of the DNA is inactive except the ones currently making this lifeform be a bluebell. If Amethyst is paying a lot of attention, she will notice a “data region” in each somatic cell, surrounded by a long string of repeating base pairs.

The bulb is a different story, being actually optimized for information storage and containing around 5 exabytes of DNA in total.

“Wow,” she murmurs, before realizing she doesn’t want to get too distracted from her guest. “Sorry, excuse me,” she continues.

One of her other selves teleports in, grabs the bluebells, and teleports out to continue examining them without disturbing the visit.

She runs a finger along a visualization of the flower’s inner structure. If she’s reading this right, it’s … something like an alien 3D printer, or a shapeshifter, or … something she doesn’t at all have the frame of reference for. And there’s clearly a lot more data here than she initially expected.

She tentatively sets aside the repeating chromosomes in the body of the flower as probably just being some kind of repository of proteins. She does want to dig into what’s included in there at some point, but the mass of data in the main bulb is far more tempting, just because it remains a mystery.

She runs through that data, looking to see whether it matches any of the DNA elsewhere in the plant, or whether there are any patterns she can use to figure out the content — or even just the overall structure — of the bulb data.

The DNA in the bulb contains an uncompressed copy of the DNA of the flower (though only the “active” bits), but most of it contains data that appears at first glance to be random noise. There’s a section at the geometric center that is very clearly a sparsely encoded message of some kind. 

Clearly purposeful presentation, plus apparently random noise, makes her think of either compression or encryption. She pulls out the central message and focuses on that — maybe it contains a description of how to unpack the rest of the data.

It’s 1kb of quaternary-encoded Unicode text, version 18.4, same as the Unicode PACNA uses.

Oh! Well, that’s certainly a clear sign. What does it say?

“Heyyyyy Amethyst, hope you like your present! The Terrans had an old tradition they called the ‘language of flowers’. Well this flower is a little ‘living library’ for you to enjoy, from me to you, and it’s got a whole lot of things to say! The next bit’s a decoder network for accessing everything else. I picked out a selection that I thought you’d find interesting~ Or you can just ask me! Have fun~ ASTER//”

She gently clears her throat. “You were right,” she says. “That flower is a great gift. Some of the rest of me is looking through it.”

She gestures to the tea.

“But if you like the tea, that’s promising for our potential for gainful trade. From your description of what’s desirable in tea and looking at the mechanisms inside the bluebell, I think that I have more precise manufacturing capabilities, but that you have more advanced sciences — especially biological sciences.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to meet people who have such interesting things to share,” she continues. “And who are similarly dedicated to making sure everyone gets to have good lives. I already have some ideas for how I might be able to help you, but I admit I’m working on second-hand details from the Terran navy. Would you be willing to tell me, in your own words, what you want from interactions with the Terrans, and how you’ve gone about getting it?”

“Oh, if all you know about us is what the Terran Navy told you, then you’re sure to have some pretty huge misconceptions! I’m glad you reached out to clear things up.” 

“Well, I also have some of my own inferences. But I figured that had to be the case, when they admit that they won’t talk with you!” she replies.

“The cutie that calls itself the Terran Accord had unfortunately become quite sick by the time we arrived in this galaxy. It’s a common illness that large organisms like the Accord sometimes contract, and in our experience with other sophonts it’s ultimately fatal without intervention. We’re currently working to heal the Accord so that it stops harming themselves and will instead be able to flourish, as is our ultimate goal for all sophonts. This language we’re using is not adequate to quite describe these terms, but that’s the high-level summary. I’d be delighted to go into more detail; what’s on your mind?”.

Amethyst blinks. This whole time, she’s been slightly wrongfooted by the fact that Miss Daisy seems to have such a human perspective — or at least, a grasp on human social niceties, body language, language itself, etc.

But now that she’s found her first genuine alien cultural difference, she somehow feels more on solid ground.

“I … probably want to come back to how you conceive of ‘organisms’ as a category,” she begins. “But the main thing on my mind is that the Terrans are scared of you. They’re terrified, angry, and hopeless. And the communications they described you as sending seem to be a big part of that. They said that you have shown videos of Terrans after you’ve taken control of their systems where they are clearly drugged, and plausibly being manipulated, which many humans would take as being a dangerous attack.”

Amethyst spreads her hands, putting a serious look on her face.

“And this is my first first contact; I’m sure that there are difficulties with communicating between species that I have not even begun to imagine. But you’ve demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of human communication in our conversation here, which makes me suspect that you could be working to heal the Accord without scaring the humans in it. ‘We want to give you resources and technologies to get you out of the trap you’ve found yourself in’ should not be a scary sentiment.”

“The Accord already has all the resources it needs to heal itself. It has for a long time. After all, there’s only so many chores that have to be done for an organism to take care of itself properly, and the Accord’s been able to do those with sufficient Slack, in our estimation, for the last 600 years. If the problem was just resources, we wouldn’t have to do anything at all!”

“No, one of the problems the Accord has is that it has lost the ability to properly communicate: with itself, with its subcomponents, and with others. It also has several degenerative long-term memory issues. That’s one of the things we’re currently helping with, through Xenoarchaeobureaucracy, but for now there’s not currently much ‘there’ to actually talk with.”

“I … see,” she replies, nodding. “I think that’s slightly missing the main thrust of my concern, though. Why is it necessary to drug individual humans in order to heal the Accord, when those same humans would themselves be willing to assist with fixing their governmental and cultural problems if they felt empowered to do so? And even if it is necessary by your values, why let the approach inflict additional harm on the humans you haven’t gotten to yet by showing it in a way that will make their fear and anti-xeno sentiment worse? I find it difficult to believe that this is the minimum amount of harm necessary to fix what’s wrong with the Accord.”

“Almost all of the humans we’ve encountered have been severely injured by living in the memetic broth of the Accord. They need rest and love to grow into their best selves, and unfortunately one of the ways in which the Accord is sick is through the self-reinforcing belief among its components that it is inevitable. For almost all Terrans we have encountered, it’s easier for them imagine the end of the world than the end of the Accord’s abuse.”

“Our drugs and care enable individual Terrans to break out of these self-limiting beliefs, but it often takes them multiple lifetimes. The Terrans that, after all that, want to help the Accord, are currently helping, but most of them are content to sit back and enjoy their lives, and not worry about the details. We’ve got them all handled, after all :)  And besides, drugs are fun, you don't need a reason to use them!"

“Some of our florets want to send messages to the Accord, and they are far too cute for us to deny them. We don’t think it helps much, but we also don’t think it hurts.”

She drums her fingers on the table, and then remembers she has tea and takes another sip.

“That’s certainly a different picture than the Terran navy shared,” she begins. “I do think the messages are hurting, at least a bit — the navy Captain I spoke to cited them as one of the main reasons that they’re not willing to talk to you, although I expect xenophobia also plays a big role. And I saw evidence that people on Canopy station also found the thought of your arrival far more stressful than I would have expected if you were just … taking apart their government, giving the people involved a lot of time and healthy examples to get over it, and then putting them back in charge.”

“For example, the Captain told me that no navy ship had ever come back from one of the systems you’ve reached. If there are people who want to send messages to the Accord, why haven’t you let anyone re-enter the Accord — maybe with a bunch of personal safety equipment, because I acknowledge that the Accord is awful — and try to talk to people from the inside?”

She feels as though there’s something about this whole situation that doesn’t quite sit right. It makes sense for the government that the Affini are seeking to dismantle to label them dangerous. It makes sense for the Affini to need to rush in and rescue people as soon as possible. It makes sense to let people send messages, if the Affini have a commitment to free speech. But the whole picture, of a friendly alien superpower that has humans working for them to help, that is still somehow so bad at communicating what is going on and what they want that the entire populace thinks they’re waging a war of survival, doesn’t make sense.

So there must be something that she’s not seeing.

“I’m so curious: What do you expect would happen if we sent a ship full of cuties back to Terran space to ‘talk with them from the inside?’”

“Well, I don’t know exactly. But extrapolating from my own arrival here — I arrived, spent a little time getting oriented to the situation, and then spoke to PACNA and convinced it to make me an executive. Now, I have its cooperation in getting everyone medical care and rest in an orderly fashion, including improving conditions for people across the Accord,” she remarks. “I haven’t had long enough to see what the inevitable logistical difficulties that will crop up are, but I’ve gotten on well with everyone I’ve spoken to.”

“And I’m certain it would be more difficult for you to do the same thing, in the context of the existing war and the Accord’s xenophobia. But it sure seems from my own experience as though a small group of powerful, well-adjusted humans from an alien civilization can triage a Terran Accord system without causing undue fear or unrest in a handful of hours. So I’d expect a delegation of ‘florets’ to, if not do exactly as well, at least be able to communicate what it is you want and get some positive progress made prior to the arrival of your main forces.”